Raise the Red Lantern

Raise the Red Lantern is a film depicting life in a polygamous household in Pre-Modern China. The film, released in 1991, takes place in China in the 1920s during the Warlord Era. The movie tells the story of a young Chinese woman who marries a wealthy man and becomes one of his concubines. The film depicts the struggles the concubines, or mistress, face in competing for attention and affection from their master. The film also portrays the conflicts between the mistresses and their maids, and the strict rules that they must follow. Raise the Red Lantern is a somber film that illustrates the roles that women play and the conflicts they face living in a polygamous household in China. The film is told from the point-of-view of Songlian, a nineteen-year-old university student who is forced to drop out after her father dies and leaves the family bankrupt. Songlian reluctantly decides to marry into the wealthy Chen…

sets, and the placements of the characters in the shots. However, Zhang does not utilize these stylistic choices to the same degree in each film he makes. Upon viewing Raise the Red Lantern and The House of Flying Daggers a viewer might not be able to recognize Zhang as the director of both because the tone of the films are rather different and thus require a different saturation of the techniques listed previously. However, if you view Hero along with the other two films you are able to…

The film Raise the Red Lantern (Da hong denglong gaogao gua) is a film directed by Zhang Yimou in 1991. The film starring actress Gong Li, is an adaption by Ni Zhen of the novel, ‘Wives and Concubines’ by author Su Tong. The film set in the 1920s China during the Warlord Era. This film accounts the tale of a young, teenage woman named Songlian, who becomes one of the concubine of a wealthy man during this era. This narrative is based on a society years before the Chinese Civil War, it is shot in…

Director Zhang’s film Raise the Red Lantern focuses on women in a big mansion and shows the conflicts between wives. During the 1920s, Confucian ethical values were widely circulating in the society and had an impact on women’s life (He, 2013). This paper argues how the Confucian ethical value “male dominance” had an influence on women’s independence regarding making choices about their marriages and work as well as having the ability to think and act independently. Since the mansion, which is…

Aris Folley Professor Schweizer Non-West. Literature 2 November 2014 Raise the Red Lantern: Comparison Paper of Literary to Film Despite the novella’s publish in 1990, one of Su Tong’s most notable literary oeuvres, as critics would acclaim, Wives and Concubines, speaks volumes to a socialist reality in its cinematic representation of 1920s China. Abandoning the country’s heavily political influenced rule of creative expression, Tong stripped his work of traditional Chinese custom, seeking to…

In ancient China, woman’s status was always a social issue. Woman could’t get the equal rights as man and was always restrained by unequal social norms. The film describes the life of master and his four wives. The main scenery of this film is master’s house, and in this house, four wives live with different life. The film Raise the Red Lantern talks about how women were treated unequally and how the social atmosphere influenced woman’s thoughts and behaviors. The most impressive thing in this…

Malherbe et al (2000) find that despite the variety of women and their differences, they are all oppressed with a ‘monotonous similarity ‘(Malherbe et al, 2000:1). This essay will address this similarity as shown by the treatment of the four mistresses in “Raise the Red Lanterns” and that of the women living in Western ‘democratic’ societies today. Women in both situations are oppressed and do not have equal opportunities to their male counterparts. The four concubines in this movie are brought…

A woman’s role presented in “As I Lay Dying,” and Raise the Red Lantern is associated with having children. In these two stories, women are used to have babies, and once they complete that task they are forgotten about. A woman’s personality, and wellbeing is unimportant to the men, therefore leaving it up to the women on whether or not they want to please the man, or choose to do what makes them happy. In “As I Lay Dying,” Dewey Dell, a seventeen-year-old girl, was faced with the challenge of…

A films classification as a specific genre is dependent whether it is able to meet the expectations in which the audience expects. According to Ed Sikov’s Film Studies: An Introduction, “[g]enres rely on repetition and variation [of conventions] rather than uniqueness--familiar, recognizable conventions rather than raw, pure inventions” (143). There are numerous genres and subgenres in which films are able to be classified as depending on their elements. Both Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern…

aise the Red Lantern (1991) by Yimou Zhang and The Wedding Banquet (1993) by Ang Lee specifically demonstrate perceptions of gender identity through a Chinese narrative. Zhang’s film examines the persecution of women and its harming affects. While Lee successfully creates an accepting story of homosexual characters Yet, he progresses in his portray of women. This paper will examine the issues of gender identity (specifically female identity ) in both films and argue that film can be used as a…