Film Studies Clip Analysis: Red Sorghum

Red Sorghum The clip under discussion comes early (starting approximately ten minutes after the beginning) in Zhang Yimou's film "Red Sorghum." Jiu-er (played by Gong Li) is being carried across a sorghum field in an enclosed sedan chair, as part of her wedding party. The wedding, as it is established in the preceding scenes of the film, is essentially a financial transaction: Jiu-er has had her marriage arranged by her parents to a much older distillery owner, Li Datou, who is a leper.

As a result Jiu-er is being taken as a bride formally, as part of what the narrator describes in voiceover as "the custom of the time…the bride had to be aggrieved." As a result, the party of shirtless bare-headed men carrying the sedan-chair engages in ritualized hazing of the bride -- bouncing the sedan chair, telling her that her groom Li Datou is "purulent and putrid from head to toes" and warning her not to let him touch her -- while at the same time observing a highly formal difference in status.

Jiu-er is sealed within the sedan chair and cannot see any of the men who are carrying it or calling out raucously to her: they are, after all, employees of Li Datou and must observe a kind of respect toward their employer's wife-to-be, while also engaging in this ritualized offensive banter. The social distinction is established by the difference between the interior and the exterior of the sedan chair -- a distinction that becomes crucial when we arrive at the clip under discussion.

At this point in the film, the sedan-chair bearers are suddenly confronted by a loud aggressive voice as they cross Li Datou's sorghum field. It is a bandit, who identifies himself as "sharp-shooter Sanpao," bearing a large handgun (that resembles a blunderbuss) and wearing a hood seemingly made from a grain sack. He orders the men to drop the sedan-chair and hand over their money, and also to remove their belts, then to squat on the ground facing away from him.

Then he slowly approaches and opens the sedan-chair's tent-flap door, to reveal Jiu-er -- now wearing a red silk veil as well. The bandit Sanpao, not removing his rough cloth hood, pulls the silk veil from Jiu-er's face, then reaches down to grab and fondle her foot. She smiles, but he points the gun at her and demands she move into the sorghum field.

She manages a brief significant glance of eye contact with "famous sedan carrier Yu" (the narrator has aready told us "later he became my grandfather" so to some extent the potential meaning in the relationship was established in voiceover) and then follows the bandits instructions. Once she steps into the sorghum field, and the bandit moves to follow, the sedan bearers leap up and jump on the bandit from behind, beating him to death.

Removal of his hood (which is heard, but not seen as the camera focuses on Jiu-er) reveals that he is in fact not Sanpao, but an impersonator. Meanwhile Jiu-er's connection with Yu is continued as she returns to the sedan, seals herself inside it, but allows her foot to be outside the curtain. This means Yu can place his What is interesting about the sequence is the way that Zhang uses repetition of visual motifs to establish meaning in this sequence.

The sedan-chair itself, the hood worn by the bandit, and the veil worn by Jiu-er when the bandit opens the sedan are all different forms of concealment, but they inform and relate to each other visually. Jiu-er's bridal veil and her sedan chair are both made out of bright red silk, and so therefore seem to indicate that they serve the same function: to mark her with distinction but also to protect her from the sight of other men.

Meanwhile Jiu-er's bridal veil -- which comes as the biggest visual surprise in the sequence, as interior sedan-chair shots have not shown her wearing it, and we must assume she put it on during the long sequence where the bandit threatens the chair-bearers and Zhang does not cut away to the interior -- seems like a precise parallel to the bandit's hood: when he opens the chair, the audience sees two faceless people facing each other.

Of course, in both cases, the head covering is a marker of social status: the bridal veil marks Jiu-er as a woman, and as the bride of a wealthy man, while the bandit's hood is an indicator of his outsider status (and also the fact that he is only posing as the notorious Sanpao). The similar parallelism occurs with Jiu-er's feet.

Before ripping the veil from her face, the bandit pauses to grope her feet: presumably he is investigating to see if she has undergone traditional foot-binding, which would explain her traveling in a sedan-chair. This, too, would be a marker of social status. It is also a somewhat eroticized gesture, like the ripping of the veil from her face.