Film Screening & Conversation: Raise the Red Lantern

Northern China, 1920s. A nineteen-year-old university student, Songlian, decides to marry into a wealthy household and becomes Mr Chen’s fourth mistress. From that moment on, the Chen mansion becomes the total world of meaning for her life. Centred on the lantern, the household’s customs govern everyone within it. Those who obey are granted lantern lights; those who resist are punished by having their lanterns sealed. Facing the obedience and punishment enforced through the lanterns, the young Songlian is gradually consumed by the mansion, until she herself becomes a sacrifice of the customs.

Every shot is framed by a strict sense of order; only sound and human desire break the confinement between scenes. Raise the Red Lantern works as a metaphor, showing how normativity in traditional China was practised in everyday life. Customs—rituals and mores—do not require a detailed code, nor a visible ruler, yet they are fully capable of imposing an unspeakable violence. The Chen mansion, like Poe’s House of Usher, destroys the reason of everyone who lives inside it. “Chinese legal tradition” is not only about exotic Eastern wisdom; it also consists of these banal yet resilient customs, which give weight to Lu Xun’s chilling warning:?“Until I began to see words between the lines, the whole book being filled with the two words—‘Eat people.’”(A Madman's Diary, 1918)

This mansion is precisely what countless revolutions and modernisation projects over the past 150 years in China have sought to destroy, and yet it continues haunting modern China. It is the matrix of modern China, its id and its nightmare. In a sense, one task for contemporary Chinese legal historians just resides here: to uncover the arcana imperii hidden within this mansion.