The film:
About the Film
The White-Haired Girl 白毛女 (1950) is a seminal work of New China cinema. A musical film adapted from a stage production, which in turn is said to have been adapted from a popular folk legend, The White-Haired Girl is an ideologically-freighted story of liberation and rejuvenation. A fresh young country girl is subjected to inhuman suffering by a despicable landlord before being rescued when the communist Eighth-Route Army liberates her village and sees justice done. Xi’er’s new lease on life became symbolic of the rebirth of China, whose modern history was divided into two distinct periods by the slogan: “The old society forced humans to become ghosts / The new society turns ghosts into humans.”
As a film, The White-Haired Girl combines recognizable conventions from musical, pastoral, romance, family melodrama, horror, and other genres with distinctive tropes popularized by the Chinese Communist Party’s cultural bureaucracy, such as the courtroom drama of aggrieved commoners “speaking bitterness” (su ku 訴苦) before the People and its Party representatives. Released during the nationwide Land Reform Campaign, which caused the deaths of millions of landholders, the film has had political and artistic influence far beyond its initial release and is now widely considered to be the first of China’s “Red Classics.”
Bai mao nü 白毛女
“Based on a work created collectively by the members of the Yan’an Lu Xun Academy of Literature and Art 延安魯迅文藝學院 and written down by He Jingzhi 賀敬之and Ding Yi 丁毅”
Adapted for the screen by Shui Hua 水華, Wang Bin 王濱 and Yang Runshen 楊潤身
Directed by Wang Bin 王濱 and Shui Hua 水華
Director of photography: Wu Weiyun 吳蔚雲
Music by Qu Wei 瞿維, Zhang Lu 張魯 and Ma Ke 馬可
Cinematography by Qian Jiang 錢江
Song lyrics by He Jingzhi 賀敬之 and Zhang Songru 張松如
Songs performed by Wang Kun 王崑, Meng Yu 孟于, Zhang Ping 張平 and Li Yaodong 李耀東
Music performed by the Changchun Film Studio Orchestra, conducted by Yin Shengshan 尹升山 and Li Bingshen 李秉申
Starring Tian Hua 田華 as Xi’er, Li Baiwan 李百萬 as Dachun, and Chen Qiang 陳強 as Huang Shiren, and Zhao Lu 趙路 as Old Zhao
Studio: Changchun Film Studio 長春電影製片廠
Year of release: 1950
Running time: 106 minutes
Subtitles translated by Pete Nestor and Thomas Moran
Subtitles created by Tamar Hanstke
Learn more:
Read Pete Nestor and Thomas Moran’s translation of the film script of The White-Haired Girl (1950) at the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture Resource Center.
Learn about two pro-Communist films made in 1949, Wanderings of Three-Hairs the Orphan (1949) and Crows and Sparrows (1949).
Watch other musical films on the “Sounds of Early Chinese Cinema” YouTube playlist.
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