China
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Release Date: 1972 (Italy)
Outline: The documentary about the real life style during the culture revolution in China
The great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni was at the height of his fame and his creative powers when he came to China in 1972 to document the revolution. The documentary was proposed by Italian officials in 1971, shortly after Italy (and Canada) established diplomatic relations with Communist China for the first time. The idea was approved by Beijing, and Mr. Antonioni spent five weeks filming in 1972, shooting 80 hours of footage of a country that was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and that foreigners rarely visited.
When he completed his cinematic portrait of workers and farmers in China's cities and villages a few months later, he could never have guessed that it would be 32 years before the documentary would be shown freely to a Chinese audience.
Chung Kuo bears all the marks of Mr. Antonioni's distinctively oblique style, the same enigmatic approach that caused such controversy in the cinema world when L'Avventura was released in 1960. The film contains not a single interview and not a single sentence of political analysis. The filmmaker deliberately rejected the conventions of script or story.
The film succeeds as an artistic work and as a portrait of ordinary life in an isolated country. With his customary detached tone and extremely long takes, the camera gazes at the Chinese people, their faces and movements. Long scenes pass without a word beyond the hubbub of background conversation and the sound of bicycle bells and street noise.
