A Film Canon

 

 

The Good Earth reduces Pearl S. Buck's iconic novel to two fundamentally different Chinese landscapes, separated by the early seeds of revolution. The first is feudal, as expressed in an extreme deep-focus aesthetic, which ensures that the social, economic and religious parameters of the community in question are always omnipresent, whichever happens to be most foregrounded; or, alternatively, that these parameters effectively constitute the 'earth', enabling a series of tableaux, montage sequences and poetic interludes that are the centrepiece of the film, and recall Soviet collectivisation epics in their implication that the physical universe is at its most precious on the verge of industrialisation, or, at least, the twilight of feudalism. By contrast, the second landscape is communal, if not yet fully Communist, as expressed through the spectacular, culminative locust plague, whose most crucial impact is to replace these parameters with a reification of the space that they bracket, such that its most tangible medium - wind - becomes something fully visible, as all sectors of the community fight gusts of locusts with walls of fire, smoke and water. Yet the downside of this communal action is the disruption of any sense of the 'earth' as a coherent entity, as its various elements are turned against each other, and the open, classical perspectives of the first act are replaced with a chaotic mass of darkness and light. This may explain Franklin's unwillingness to even articulate Communism as a real possibility (as opposed to Buck, who identifies it with the protagonist's youngest son), although this may also be attributable to the identification of revolution with famine and, in turn, the analogy between famine and Great Depression, as evinced in such familiar motifs as rural-urban migration, the desperate quest for work, the recourse to begging, and imminent starvation.