In the late 1930s, a soldier from the Red Army base goes to collect folk songs and adapt them into revolutionary ballads. Normally, this would be the blueprint for a typical socialist celebration of revolutionary transformation. But in Yellow Earth, the soldier's mission is shown to fail, and the peasant farmers continue to suffer. When it debuted at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 1985, Yellow Earth was recognized for marking not only disillusion with socialism but also the end of the socialist realist cinema. For, in addition to its outrageous plot, the spare and empty landscapes that dominate both the film and the human beings who toil amid them are far removed from the glossy imagery of socialist realism. This unique artistic vision owes as much to cinematographer Zhang Yimou (who went on to direct films like Red Sorghum and Not One Less) as it does to director Chen Kaige (Farewell, My Concubine).-Chris Berry