Footbinding: Search for the Three Inch Golden Lotus

Film Review / Revue de FilmFootbinding: Search for the Three Inch Golden Lotus. Directed and produced by Yue-Qing Yang. 47:45 minutes. 2004. ©EastWest Film Enterprise. Moving Images Distribution, 402 West Fender Street, Ste 606, Vancouver, BC V6B 1T6, telephone: (604) 684-3014 or (800) 684-3014, url: www.movingimages.caFootbinding was practised in China for centuries until it was finally discontinued in the first half of the 20th century. In China today there still survive dwindling numbers of elderly women who had their feet bound. This permanent bodily transformation, a physical compression and containment of the feet of small girls, fascinates people for different reasons. Some marvel at the artistry of the tiny foot and the extreme efforts to achieve this particular beauty ideal, while others struggle to understand how and why a society could permanently hobble girls' and women's ability to stand on firm feet, to walk briskly, to run or to jump. Born and raised in China, Canadian filmmaker, Yue-Qing Yang returns to China to understand both the how and the why of footbinding. She finds this is a subject that few in China want to discuss.Yang draws upon her own family resources and in so doing reveals some of the dynamics of Chinese families. She has two mothers because, when she was born in China, her birth mother wanted to have another child, a boy. She thus gave Yang to her sister to raise as a daughter. Only later did Yang discover that the mother who raised her was biologically her aunt. Both Yang's mothers and her sister are a tremendous help to her in making the film. They are loyal and supportive, but also dubious that Yang's desire to make a film about footbound women and to show the naked foot unbound is a good thing politically or culturally. Conflicted by their desire to help her-which they certainly do, their ambivalence is very moving. We see incredible tenderness and warmth in these relations, giving us a sense of the strong but unspoken love that ties these women together. This film reveals various sides of Chinese family relationships linking women: mother, aunt, and sisters. Surely footbinding is a subject that requires women's participation and voices.The story takes the form of a personal quest to learn what it meant to Chinese women to have bound feet and why they did it. Yang is troubled by the thought that she might have been bound as a child if she had been born a generation earlier. She wants to understand what the women of her family, her mother and aunt, and Chinese women more generally, went through as children to make their feet small, and why binding was deemed necessary. She looks far and wide to find and interview surviving elderly women who had feet that were close to the ideal small foot, called the three-inch golden lotus. Yang's narration throughout this journey is soft-spoken, calm, understated and emotionally compelling.Yang's quest takes her back home to China where the state and the culture both exert pressures to deny this shameful past. People are reluctant to talk about a custom that once embarrassed China before other cultures, even though the custom was firmly opposed and suppressed by the Communist government, as well as the Nationalist government before it. This denial is, then, more a question of national pride, and a concern with the face of traditional Chinese culture. It reflects a fear that foreigners might ridicule traditional Chinese culture. The Communist state taught people to see foreigners as colonialists or antagonists looking for ways to deride Chinese culture. This makes it difficult for Yang and her crew to film this sensitive topic, particularly when she leaves her circle of kinswomen. Yang shows several women turn away and refuse to be filmed or interviewed in the presence of a foreign film crew (despite the fact that Yang is Chinese). It would have been interesting to have a glimpse of her camera crew to see what it was that made people nervous. …

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