oxhide

“Oxhide,” Liu Jiayin’s 2005 film, part of the “Viewing China” film series, a hybrid of narrative and documentary about family relationships that live in the family’s claustrophobic fifty-square-meter apartment, in Mandarin with English subtitles, co-sponsored with the National Gallery of Art.

But put aside two broadswords and two spears for our own use, two oxhide shields nearby when we go into action.

The old nurse answered him: “I would not be so quick to accuse her, child. He sat and drank here while he had a mind to; food he no longer hungered for, he said— for she did ask him. When he thought of sleeping, she ordered them to make a bed. Poor soul! Poor gentleman! So humble and so miserable, he would accept no bed with rugs to lie on, but slept on sheepskins and a raw oxhide in the entry way. We covered him ourselves.”

Outside in the entry way he made his bed—raw oxhide spread on level ground, and heaped up fleeces, left from sheep the Akhaians killed.

The oxhide pad he took outdoors.