Washing the Sand has not received much critical attention. Its very beginning can be considered a sort of manifesto—a statement on the visual/exhibitionist nature of the film.
WAVES WASHING THE SANDLang tao sha
Over the years spent watching and researching Chinese cinema, I have seen many films I loved but only few films really surprised me as much as Lang tao sha 浪淘沙 (Waves Washing the Sand). Wu Yonggang, who is also the director of the much more famous and very much acclaimed (inside and outside <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"> China </st1:place> </st1:country-region> ) silent film Shennü 神女(Goddess, 1934) produced this film in 1936. Contrary to Goddess, Waves Washing the Sand has not received much critical attention. Its very beginning can be considered a sort of manifesto — a statement on the visual/exhibitionist nature of the film.
- The first scene of the film is a close-up of the sand on a beach. The credit titles appear and disappear, washed away by the waves that rhythmically follow each other, wetting the sand while their sound is gradually blended with the music.
- Second scene: long shot of the beach.
- Third scene: another close-up of some abandoned human bones; among them, we can see two hands cuffed with handcuffs.
The film begins mysteriously. Not only are words not spoken, people are also absent. The spectator is immediately asked to formulate hypotheses, to wonder what these images mean, to interpret, to decode. A possible hint to look for non-obvious meanings might be the title itself, which echoes the Chinese four-character expression "tao sha jian jin" 淘沙揀金 (to wash the sand for gold—search for the very best). On this deserted island, could someone have looked for a better chance in life? The hostile environment and the uncanny image of human bones become associated with the idea of searching for something and being washed away.
The film's initial stress on empty spaces and natural sounds (rather than its human protagonists, their actions, their dialogues) is at odds with the mainstream narrative cinema of the time in which one of the three following openings was generally used to help the spectator enter the cinematic illusion smoothly and be involved in the film narrative: (1) the immediate appearance of human characters, (2) a brief panoramic overview on the story location which then narrows down to the place where the human protagonists are to be found, (3) a short text which introduces/explains the story. On the contrary, in Waves Washing the Sand, the opening scene neither introduces the story nor locates its characters; the film does not ease the viewer's involvement into a clear narrative, but rather calls for the viewer's imaginative collaboration.
After the credits, the film develops a very simple plot. The story is based on the tragic fate of a sailor who in a fit of rage kills his wife's lover and has to escape from the police inspector who looks into the matter. This event takes place in the first 10 minutes of the movie, and with a series of short scenes we are informed of what happens during the next months (or years?): the sailor keeps on escaping, although persecuted by the inspector and his own guilty conscience.
Then, the second event takes place. The fugitive and the pursuer are on the same ship; the former is nearly captured by the latter when a fatal wreck suddenly changes their destiny. The two main characters wake up on a deserted island, alive but condemned to a sure death, as it appears evident that no water or food can be found. The plot is clearly at its end, but the film's visual narration has actually just started. In the open air prison where both the guard and the detained are bound to die, the narrative burden is not on dialogues, but mostly on visual elements such as the camera's position and the frame's composition.
For instance, many shots stress the contrast created by the image of the two main characters' standing shapes and the stillness of the horizontal, calm, white, dead environment.
The only other presence on the island is a cask of water brought to the beach by the sea waves after the wreck. The cask is the only source of life shared by the two men in this new situation, which forces them to develop a necessary, though, in the ultimate analysis, fragile and vain sense of solidarity. Time passes and the sound of the waves wetting the sand is almost always present to remind them and the audience of the inevitability of their fate. They are sitting now beside the cask. They talk about their past and they experience human solidarity and sympathy.
The third and last event of the film then occurs: a ship or a mirage of it calls them back to their social roles of prey and predator. The police officer trusts he will soon be back to his previous life and decides to handcuff his (now ex-) friend. He waits for the rescuers' arrival, dreaming of the prize he will get because of his bravery.
The illusion of the rescue vanishes and the handcuffs have no other result than binding even more strongly the two men's destiny. They lie next to the empty cask, their shapes no longer contrast the flat, deserted, dead environment; the sound of the waves is the only rhythmical change in the stillness of the scene. The last shot is the same close-up of the beginning: two hand bones tied by handcuffs and softly washed by the sea waves.
From my brief description it appears that Waves Washing the Sand has many powerful images, but I have found that it is its use of sound (as something that includes and goes beyond dialogues/monologues/or voice over) that enhances its visual strength. The film images heavily rely on the sound narrative to expand and explain their meaning. Sounds create connections and are often at the basis of the editing process. For instance, the passage from the murder scene to the sailor's escape is created by the tick-tock of the clock (visually present in the murder scene), which continues to tick in the mind of the sailor. This ticking takes us back to the murder scene where the police officer has arrived, is combined with the obsessive repetition of his own thoughts (wo <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"> yao </st1:place> </st1:city>huiqu 我要回去, I want to go back), and finally is substituted by the sound of the policeman's steps. Later in the film, it is the persistent sound of the waves that expands the frame, connects scenes, and adds meaning by expressing a suffocating sense of imminent tragedy. In sum, sound—as a non-verbal external element that helps images to convey their meanings—enhances the film's visual quality.
In Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi 中國電影發展史 (History of the development of Chinese cinema), Cheng Jihua has a very negative critique of Waves Washing the Sand and explains that he believes Wu produced Goddess with the Communist Party's help, but made Waves Washing the Sand when he had abandoned leftist filmmaking. After quoting Wu Yonggang's own words describing his film as a metaphor of humanity's failure to achieve solidarity and friendship in a society that creates hostility and suspicion, Cheng concludes,
According to the content of the film and to what the director himself affirms about it, it is not difficult to understand that what the film promotes is an absurd and reactionary thought where human society's class struggle and national fight are wrongly transformed in "killing one another" in order to "survive." The film therefore completely denies the social roots and basic principles of the class struggle and the national fight for liberation.
Why did Cheng Jihua dismiss the film as reactionary? Why did he attack Wu Yonggang whose Goddess he praises in another section of the book? I believe that the fact that Waves Washing the Sand is (or was perceived as) a reactionary film from the standpoint of communist ideology is not the only reason for Cheng's negative commentary. Cheng's critique might reflect his suspicion toward a highly visual film, which could not be read but only seen. If one is to accept the idea—and I do—that the Communist Party was a "party of the word" (as Apter and Saich define it) and since Cheng was a "man of the party," it makes sense that he considered the visuality of Waves Washing the Sand as (ideologically) unacceptable.
Note
In fact, the film has almost been forgotten; I would say that even in the P.R.C. very few people have ever seen Waves Washing the Sand.
Wu apparently rejoined the party line when a few years later he left Lianhua Film Company and moved to Xinhua Film Company.
Cheng Jihua 程季華. Zhongguo dianying fazhan shi 中國電影發展史 (History of the development of Chinese cinema). 2 Vols. <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"> Beijing </st1:place> </st1:city> : Zhongguo dianying chubanshe中國電影出版社, 1963, pp. 460-61.
According to Apter and Saich's analysis of the Yan'an period, the revolutionary discourse that create the chosen community of the Yan'anites was based on the logocentric focus (as opposed to the econo-centric focus of the Deng era) of the Communist Party as a party of intellectuals and, therefore, a "party of the word." Focusing on how revolutionary concepts were transformed into precepts, they describe how "through verbal and semantic transgressions, all conventional boundaries--family, clan, class, and religion--were ruptured and replaced with Communist alternatives" and how "lexicality both defines the field of force discursively and establishes a cosmocratic center to be filled by the one [i.e. the Communist Party and Mao Zedong] with the best claim of occupancy" (Apter, David, and Tony Saich. Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on"> Cambridge </st1:city> <st1:state w:st="on"> Mass. </st1:state> </st1:place> : Harvard Univerty Press, 1994, p. 298).
Paola Voci
University of Otago, Dunedin - New Zealand
