Red Sorghum Essay

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Red Wine as A Unifying Force
In Zhang Yimou’s film, Red Sorghum, special wine and the fields of red sorghum in which it is produced, play a major part in the story. At the start of the film, a group of workers carry one of the main characters, Jiu’er, through a massive field of red sorghum. The group ends up deciding to stay at their destination and produce wine from the fields around them. The red wine may seem like just another plot point, but if you look deeper than that, the wine is also an influential unifying force. Throughout the film, the red wine helps bring together the main characters in several different ways. The wine unifies Jiu’er and the workers when they produce it, share it, and when they pray to the Wine God.
After receiving ownership of her late husband’s distillery, Grandma convinces the workers who carried her there to stay and produce the wine. Running a distillery takes a lot of work and multiple workers. The film showed us several scenes of all the workers doing hard manual labor to make the wine. This is a perfect example of the wine as a unifying force. None of them could have made the wine on their own. Jiu’er and the workers also did not know each other very well when they started their trip to the distillery. Instead of leaving and …show more content…

Millions of people come together to pray every day. Religion unites these millions of people under common beliefs. This is also shown in Red Sorghum. The wine inspired their common belief in the Wine God. This lead to the workers praying to an icon of the Wine God before leaving for battle against the Japanese. While doing so, they chanted that if you drank their wine, you would not bow to the emperor. That ritual helped them prepare themselves for battle and unite to fight a common enemy. This is another great example of the wine further uniting the group under a set of common beliefs and bringing them closer

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