Title: Navigating Gender, Ethnicity, and Space: Five Golden Flowers as a Socialist Road Movie
Lecturer: Ling Zhang (Professor of Cinema Studies at State University of New York Purchase College)
Chairperson: LUO Gang (Professor, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 3 pm, October 23rd, 2019 (Wednesday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
Two years after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957), an emblem of the postwar American Beat generation and counterculture movements foreshadowing later American road movies, a Chinese film about a road journey and persistent quest, Five Golden Flowers (1959, dir. Wang Jiayi), achieved extreme popularity in China and reached broad audience in more than 40 countries. Unlike its exemplary American and European counterparts (such as Easy Rider [1969, Dennis Hopper] and Pierrot le fou [1965, Jean-Luc Godard], Flowers does not involve itself with modern transportation facilities and vehicles; the voyage in the film is experienced through boat, carriage, horse-riding, and walking, with the characters navigating through the ethnically diverse frontier region of Yunnan Province.
In Five Golden Flowers, a young man of the ethnic Bai group, Apeng, sets out on a trip in search for his beloved Jinhua (literally, “Golden Flower”), whom he met and fell in love with at a traditional Bai festival the year before. However, “Jinhua” is such a common name for local women, Apeng encounters four different Jinhuas (all socialist model workers of different vocations, including a sea manure collector, a herder, a steel worker and a tractor driver), experiences misunderstandings and frustrations, before a much delayed reunion with the “real” Jinhua, the vice chief of the Cangshan commune. In terms of a generic frame, Flowers can be considered as a combination of romantic comedy, musical, and road film, flamboyantly showcasing ethnic minority culture, enchanting song and dance, as well as picturesque Yunnan landscape as audiovisual attractions, with a nuanced touch of socialist utopianism and internationalist imagination.
By situating Five Golden Flowers as a socialist road film in the Cold War period and global context, I explore the possibility to push further the thematic and stylistic definitions and complexities of the “road movie” delineated by pioneering English scholarship (such as works by Corrigan, Cohan and Hark, Laderman, Orgeron, among others). In comparison to masculine tensions and crises, escapist fantasy, rebellious desires and the thrill of speed that epitomize many American road movies, Flowers highlights strong female characters (Jinhuas) as significant part of workforce fully committed to socialist economic progress and nation building. Reading this film through the fresh lens of the road movie genre will raise the following questions: How to negotiate with the gender discourse represented here, which has different features from the conservative and consumerist gender hierarchy in mid-twentieth century American culture and most American road movies? Moreover, in terms of the compelling ethnicity issues in this film, can we further complicate the critique of “internal-colonialism” and “self-Orientalism,” to discuss its relation to a journey of discovery and revelation, as well as the consolidation or dissolution of a multi-ethnic national identity, which are usually pivotal concerns in archetypal road movies? Finally, how do cinematic techniques (such as the still novel film color technology in China), generic convergence and self-reflexivity contribute to the film as a spectacle of spatial mobility, magnificent landscapes and socialist optimism, with an aspiration of international recognition?
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Ling Zhang is an Professor of Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase College. She holds an ACLS (American Council of Learned Society) post-doc fellowship and will be a visiting scholar at Columbia University for the academic year of 2019-2020, while completing her book manuscript, Sounding Screen Ambiance: Acoustic Culture and Transmediality in 1920s-1940s Chinese Cinema. She received her PhD from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and specializes in film sound, Chinese-language cinema and opera, documentary, as well as film and urbanism. Zhang has published in The Global Road Movie (2018), Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Republican China (2018), Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Film Quarterly, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Asian Cinema, among others.
