Dissonance Rising: Subversive Sound in Zhang Yimou’s Raise The Red Lantern

1991), set in 1920s China, tells the story of Songlian, an educated nineteen year old woman who after the death of her father has little choice but to marry a wealthy man from a distant province. Songlian becomes the fourth wife in the Chen household, where she soon learns to compete for her Master's attention in order to maintain her comfort and stature. Rivalry between the mistresses is compounded by an established household ritual: the Master orders a red lantern be placed outside the house of the wife with whom he wishes to spend the night. Songlian, like the other female characters, becomes a player in a repressive, inescapable system maintained through custom, obedience, and punishment. As such, Michel Foucault's theories of power relations within disciplinary structures, set forth in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975/1995), have an uncanny resonance in this film, emerging both thematically and cinematographically. ‘Locked in a gold cage I pine away, ’ recites the Master's young son, ‘Let me return to the forest / To sing my carefree songs. ’ The verses speak poignantly of the women's situation in the film, for the Chen estate is indeed an exquisite cage, imprisoning the bodies and spirits of those within. But the poem hints, too, at the very means of subversion rising from this compound: song – or, more generally, sound. Among other questions, I'd like to explore the many ways in which sound emerges as a dissonant and even dissident force in this world where optical forces conspire only to surveil, order, and confine the bodies within their gaze. The opening scene in Raise the Red Lantern, in which Songlian arrives at the Chen household, immediately establishes the motifs of confinement and surveillance that will be developed and sustained in various ways throughout the film. This scene will set the stage for a discussion of th