The White-Haired Girl
The folklore of the white-haired girl is believed to have spread widely in the areas occupied by the Communist Party of Northern China since the late 1930s.
Many years later, a literary work was created in the liberated area controlled by the Chinese Communist Party in the late 1940s.
Along with Red Detachment of Women, the ballet is regarded as one of the classics of revolutionary China, and its music is familiar to almost everyone who grew up during the 1960s.
It is one of the Eight Model Operas approved by Jiang Qing during the Cultural Revolution.The White-Haired Girl also intentionally showed the political meaning by creating a figure of diligent and beautiful country woman who was under the oppression of the evil landowner.
As it aroused an emotion against the "old ruling class", it satisfied "moral ideas of the left-wing literary and artistic intelligence, the popular social and cultural values of rural and urban audiences".
The film presented "the traditional Chinese agricultural lifecycle", where the poor lived in poverty no matter how hard they tried.
Due to lack of sunlight and little salt intake, her skin and hair gradually turned white causing local villagers to mistakenly perceive her as a powerful white-haired goddess.
His performance in The White Haired Girl gained the Special Recognition Award in 6th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.
After Xier was taken away by the landlord, Dachun joined the Communists's Eighth Route Army and fought in the Anti-Japanese War.
The peasant girl Xi'er from a village in Yanggezhuang, Hebei province is waiting for her father Yang Bailao to return home to celebrate the Spring Festival together.
Xi'er's father secretly returns home at dusk, with no gift other than a red ribbon to tie to his daughter's hair for the festivity of the holiday.
The landlord catches wind of his return and will not let them have a peaceful and happy Spring Festival, and the debt collector comes for the high rent which Yang has been unable to pay.
The landlord mother falls and crawls on the floor attempting to flee while Xi'er continues to whip her with her utmost strength.
Xi'er escapes to the mountains, and in the following years, she lives in a cave, gathers offerings for food from a nearby temple.
In 1944, under the direction of President Zhou Yang, some artists of The Lu Xun Academy of Art in Yan 'an produced an opera, "The White Haired Girl", based on the folk tales and legends of the "white-haired immortal" in 1940.
The "White-haired goddess" is a peasant woman who lost her family lived in the wild like animals, who was then found by The Eighth Route Army and sent to the village.
In order to meet the needs of " national salvation to prevail over cultural enlightenment", the play has been continuously adapted into different versions.
In July 1947, Ding Yi, another opera co-author, made many changes and deletions to the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei version, mainly to cut pregnant Xi Er's hard life after escaping to the cave.
At the same year, famous Japanese ballet dancer Mikiko Matsuyama and her husband Masao Shimizu came to China.
The movie abandoned some dance moves and songs, but it is more direct to show the story and theme, That make it easier for people to understand the theme, Through the tragic experiences of Yang Bailao and Xi'er's, father and daughter, this paper deeply reveals the sharp contradiction between the landlords and the peasants, angrily accuses the evils of the landlord class, warmly praises the Communist Party and the new society, vividly illustrates the theme of "the old society forces people into ghosts, and the new society turns ghosts into people", and points out the only way for the peasants to turn over and liberate.
In the context of Mao-era cinema, the film was part of a genre of redemptive melodramas which encouraged the audiences to "speak bitterness".
[2]: 183 Film versions of The White-Haired Girl used ghost story and horror movie aesthetics to move their audiences.
[2]: 183 The original hybrid, western-style geju opera was created by collaboration of composer Ma Ke and others in Yan'an's Lu Xun Art Academy in 1945.
In the original opera of 1945, Xi'er was caught by the local population, who believed she was a ghost and had power to inflict harm on people.
Communists felt it was necessary to eradicate the superstition that was still deeply rooted in the minds of local populaces, so this barbaric act was accurately reflected in the opera, with Wang Dachun eventually stopping the mob after recognizing Xi'er, leading to the final happy ending.
After the communist victory in China, this scene was deleted in later adaptations for fear of encouraging superstition and presenting a negative image of the working-class people.
Bohnenkamp, Max L. Turning Ghosts into People: "The White-Haired Girl", Revolutionary Folklorism and the Politics of Aesthetics in Modern China, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2014.
Wu Hanyue, "An Analysis of the Creation Background of the Opera The White-Haired Girl", Song of Yellow River, China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House, December 2020, p173.
Yin Jiangyan, " Study on the value of Ideological and Political Education in literary and artistic works ——Red classic opera " the white-haired girl" as the center", Hunan University of Science and Technology, China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House, June 2018.
Wang Bin and Shui Hua, "The White Haired Girl" Changchun Film Studio, 1950 新浪娱乐.
