SHOWBIZ> Movies
![]() |
The Final Cut
By Mu Qian (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-27 09:08
Latest News:Image is everything
It's 1972 and a man rides his bicycle down a Beijing street, takes his hands off the handlebars and starts practicing tai chi. In another scene, on another day, in a Henan province village, a group of primary school students read their textbooks out loud, with blank expressions, as if they do not understand the characters. To most Chinese people today the images seem innocent enough, but when the late Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) released his documentary film Chung Kuo (China) these and similar scenes caused an intense political reaction. According to an editorial in the People's Daily in 1974, Antonioni had a hidden agenda when he filmed people sitting in teahouses, an old woman's bound feet, or people blowing their noses and going to the latrine. "This 3.5-hour-long film does not reflect new things, the new spirit and face of our great Motherland, but lumps together a large number of viciously distorted shots to attack Chinese leaders, smear socialist New China, slander China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and insult the Chinese people. Any Chinese person with national pride cannot but be greatly angered by seeing this film," says the editorial, titled A Vicious Motive, Despicable Tricks - A Criticism of M. Antonioni's Anti-China Film, China. To a new generation of Chinese these criticisms seem excessive. "When I watched the film, I didn't feel the shots were meant to damage China's image," says Ning Biaoxue, a magazine editor from Guangzhou, who was born in 1980. "To me that was the reality of China at that time. I think the film even beautified China to some degree as many scenes were shot by arrangement with the Chinese government - but that was also a reality." Ning is interested in foreign documentary films about China because of the different perspectives they offer. He cites Dutch director Joris Ivens' How Yukong Moved the Mountain, as another example. |
主站蜘蛛池模板: 阳江市| 巫山县| 洛宁县| 平安县| 玉门市| 土默特右旗| 微山县| 南投市| 孟连| 荔浦县| 通州市| 陆丰市| 高雄县| 承德市| 台北县| 明溪县| 乾安县| 竹山县| 皮山县| 天峻县| 丽江市| 石嘴山市| 灯塔市| 固安县| 探索| 日土县| 邵阳县| 文成县| 阿尔山市| 大港区| 六盘水市| 南充市| 青阳县| 鄂伦春自治旗| 宁津县| 宝应县| 台中市| 中江县| 镇赉县| 鹤山市| 巴林右旗|