Analysing Chinese Movie Hong Gao Liang by Using Andrew Higson’s Model of Cinema in Terms of the Nation

Although it seems that globalization has made it possible for people to enjoy cinema worldwide and the world’s cinemas are dominated by Hollywood, the study of national cinema still receive great number of devotion. In order to academically explore national cinema in the form of a case study, the model which was chosen to help to approach the case study is Andrew Higson’s model of cinema in terms of the nation (1989). The chosen case is a Chinese film called Red Sorghum (Hong Gao Liang), which was made in 1987 and directed by Zhang Yimou, who has been acclaimed as the most inspired and outstanding filmmaker in the Fifth Generation of Chinese film makers. In this model there are four main approaches put forward by Higson to establish the concept of national cinema, which are approach in economic terms, text-based approach, consumption-based approach as well as criticism-led approach. To go on for the case of Red Sorghum, I choose to mainly look at the economic term and the text-based approach, while attention will specifically be put on the latter one. As a result, the aim of this essay is to analyse that to a large extent has Higson’s model informed the film in terms of economic and text-based approach to define national cinema.

Red Sorghum, whose cast including famous Chinese actress Gong Li and actor Jiang Wen, is the first Chinese film which has won considerable numbers of awards including the Golden Bear Award at the 38th Berlin International Film Festival in 1988. With the distinctive elements of traditional Chinese culture such as music and colour involved ingeniously, Red Sorghum not only attained fame and success inside China but also became one of the medium through which western world reach to Chinese culture. It was adapted from the Novel Red Sorghum Clan (1986) written by Mo Yan, the winner of Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. The producer of the film was Xi’an Film Studio, a domestic film company in China which was owned by the state. At that time the film industry in China was managed and controlled by the Ministry of Culture of the state, in addition, as Zhang (2004) mentioned, during the 1980s in China, there was a reform of the film industry, Chinese film producers had to consider about the box-office success before putting into practice, instead of receiving a flat fee of RMB 700,000 per title from China Film Corporation without thinking of the box-office takings as it was before the reform, however, the role of the state in determining the parameters and possibilities of a national cinema was still stable in China. Though under the economy pressure, Red Sorghum finally proved a box-office success in China.

The success in domestic box-office of Red Sorghum under stress in the Chinese state-run film industry to a great degree attributes to text itself of the film. Apart from comparing and contrasting one cinema to another to create difference in various scopes, in the opinion of Higson,