Black Mountain

Set around the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, the tale opens with a twilight shot of the haggard temple. Built by a foreign monk--who was ultimately burned alive inside by the villagers for having brought bad luck--it now serves as an inn for travelers. It is run by a young woman (Ailiya) who has only her vicious dog Luo to protect her. When six hungry peasant porters, all brothers, arrive, the woman feeds them and carves the black calluses off their feet with a knife as they gnaw their meat. When the brothers try to rape her, she calls to Luo.

There are bandits in the hills, and, when the men wage a victorious assault the following day, they return to the inn claiming ownership of the entire mountain. Elder Brother (Zhao Xiaorui) is wounded and remains behind as the rest set off to work in the morning. Once alone, he ties up the dog and rapes the woman. After the rape, the woman cleans clothes against a stone, repeatedly, pounding her wood stick against the rock. When Elder Brother throws off his own rags and orders her to wash them, Luo attacks. Without looking up at their desperate battle in the water, she continues to pound away rhythmically. He gradually dominates her by force, keeps the others away, and earns Luo's obedience. The woman responds by seducing Sixth Brother (Xie Yuan), the youngest and weakest, who has charmed her with the gift of a mirror.

One day, Sixth Brother returns from work alone and tells how he escaped abduction by the Japanese, who are building a road through the mountains. This adds both a military and economic dimension, because a road would ruin the men's livelihood.

When Elder Brother returns from gathering food, he finds Sixth Brother and the woman entangled, beats them mercilessly, and turns the place into a prison for Sixth Brother. The woman tries to stab Elder Brother but hesitates. As she is beaten, Sixth Brother angrily breaks his way out with an ax.

Their fight is interrupted by the return of the four other brothers, bearing news that their village has been sacked, their wives and children slain, and the Japanese are on the way to the temple. The defenders are no match for the enemy guns, and four brothers and the woman die in the shooting. When Sixth Brother tells Elder Brother of the woman's fate, they run to their deaths in the now-flaming temple. The film ends with the burning edifice at night on the mountainside.

Though there are no explicit shots of nudity, 1990's BLACK MOUNTAIN was banned by Chinese censors, allegedly for sexual content, and kept from release for three years.

Director Zhou Xiaomen, one of the younger of the so-called "Fifth Generation" of talented Chinese filmmakers who flourished in the late 1980s, repeatedly expresses a correlation between the natural and human orders with stunning visual juxtapositions. Images of fire dominate during moments of danger, and strong winds sweep the mountain during sexual encounters. Ambient sounds fill the audio track--fires crackling, tools pounding, winds blowing, people singing, water flowing, all reinforced intermittently by drums and simple instruments.

The archetypal characters are never even granted names--the woman is unknown and the brothers go only by order of hierarchy. There is simplicity and dramatic perfection to the relationships among the characters.

The fierce eroticism and brutishness captured in BLACK MOUNTAIN reveal the base-level complexities of power which traverse the realms of individual, gender, race, and nation. The Other, be it Woman, Japanese, or Brother, represents a challenge to be resolved, ultimately by conquest, fire, and even death.

Zhou's later ERMO (1994) also depicts an independent peasant woman in a changing China, and was less-vexing to Beijing bureaucrats. Portraying universal constants of human experience with a visceral, cinematic purity, BLACK MOUNTAIN is his harsh masterwork. (Violence, adult situations, sexual situations.) leave a comment