1950电影《白毛女》笔记
- Screenplay by Yan’an Lu Xun academy of Literature and Art 延安鲁迅艺术文学院; directed by Shui Hua 水华 and Wang Bin 王滨;
- This is one the most well-known Red Classics 红色经典of Chinese Cinema. The libretto White Haired Girl (1947) won the Stalin Peace Prize for Literature and Art in 1951.
- Its genesis is a folklore about the spirit of those who died of hunger haunting the living. Mao’s cultural workers developed that story into a propaganda film about the communist-led land reform in rural area, known also as Fan Shen. Here is an excerpt from Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William Hinton. “Every revolution creates new words. The Chinese Revolution created a whole new vocabulary. A most important word in this vocabulary was fanshen. Literally, it means ‘to turn the body,’ or ‘to turn over.’ To China’s hundreds of millions of landless and land-poor peasants it meant to stand up, to throw off the landlord yoke, to gain land, stock, implements, and houses. But it meant much more than this. It meant to throw off superstition and study science, to abolish ‘word blindness’ and learn to read, to cease considering women as chattels and establish equality between the sexes, to do away with appointed village magistrates and replace them with elected councils. It meant to enter a new world.”
- To the extent the story is part of the myth of communism, I quote Roland Barthes here, “Myth is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way it utters this message”, and also George Soral, the author of Reflections on Violence, “The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense.”
- In the report of Hinton as a journalist, he compared the land reform led by the communist to American Civil War, “This new Draft Agrarian Law was destined to play as important a role in China’s Civil War of 1956-50 as the Emancipation Proclamation played in the American Civil War of 1861-65. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation confiscated without compensation $3 billion worth of property in slaves; put an end to the possibility of a compromise between the industrial North and the slave-holding South in the military contest then raging; made the slave system itself, rather than regional autonomy, the nub of the conflict; declared the way for the recruitment of hundreds of thousands of emancipated black men into the Union Army; and spread the war into every corner of Confederate territory with devastating effect. Mao’s Draft Agrarian Law confiscated without compensation $20 billion worth of property in land; put an end to all possible compromise between the Communist Party and the Guomingdang; made countrywide overthrow of the landlords and compradors.”
- It is in this historical and social context that White Haired Girl is situated, just like Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (悲惨世界) must be understood in the context of the French Revolution. The film and ballet all end with the execution of the landlord Huang. The bloodshed and horror in the artistic representation of reality, therefore, must be appreciated as expressions of morality, as Mark Twain did. “There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we should but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor terror, the momentary terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? What is swift death by lightning compared with slow death by fire at stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by the brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver and mourn over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by the cold and real Terror—that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
- Lastly, the story is set in what appears to be a “sacrificial crisis” that recurs throughout the world across time periods in similar circumstances. “Harvests are bad, the cows give birth to dead calves; no one is in good terms with anyone else. It is as if a spell had been cast on the village. Clearly, it is the cripple who is the cause. He arrived one fine morning, no one knew from where, and made himself at home. He even took the liberty of marrying the most obvious heiress in the village and had two children by her. All sorts of things seemed to take place in their house. The stranger was suspected of having killed his wife’s former husband, a sort of local potentate, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances and was rather too quickly replaced by the newcomer. One day the fellows in the village had had enough; they took their pitchforks and forced the disturbing character to clear out.” In the particular sociopolitical circumstances in China, the victim of scapegoating happened to be a social group referred to as “e ba” despotic landlords 恶霸地主, about two million of whom were wiped out to liberate the poor peasants.