The Long Bow Film Trilogy—A Review Article

These three excellent documentaries have received both high honors from the film world and an appreciative welcome from Asia scholars eager to make use of them in the classroom. Students and non-China specialists seeing them for the first time generally praise them for “humanizing” life in rural China, for providing an “intimate” look at “real” Chinese people as they are but rarely glimpsed in the West. When students have first been primed with readings from William Hinton's two classic prose documentaries of life in Long Bow Village (Fanshen [1968] and Shenfan [1984]), the films may be especially rewarding. They put faces to a few familiar names and give us images—of donkeycarts rattling over the tired earth, of bundled babies in bare adobe courtyards—that validate the village Hinton's books have already brought to life in our minds. But for viewers who have not done any background reading on Long Bow's special history under Communist land-reform and collectivization policies or on the village's past complex patterns of religious conflict and gender politics, these films will stand on their own. They succeed well in their “intimate" and “humanizing” endeavor not because we already know something about Long Bow villagers and what they have been through but because the filmmakers have skillfully kept narration to a minimum, allowing village people themselves to do most of the communicating. In their words, their gestures, their laughter, and their eyes, we recognize again and again that familiar, perhaps uniquely human, emotion—ambivalence.