How to Zabriskie Point it is the most successful document on the spirit of the counterculture and the American society of the time, as well Cheng Kuo, China it is one of the most sincere and candid acts of love towards the Chinese, their land and their civilization. In 1972 the Chinese government decided to entrust the most acclaimed Western director, with a vaguely leftist orientation, a documentary to present the new China to the Western world. The choice fell on Antonioni. Probably Zabriskie Point Zhu Enlai, the Chinese prime minister who advocated opening up China, liked it. Zhu Enlai was probably not well aware that Antonioni was not a person who could be influenced or capable of adhering to a ticket different from him. And the thing got out of hand.
Antonioni did not shoot what the exponents of the cultural revolution expected and the director, to his great regret, was branded by the People's Daily as an "enemy of China". It took 40 years to get a full rehabilitation of the documentary which, in reality, is a huge act of love, respect and even admiration for the Chinese and their way of life. There is not a hint of ideology in the documentary, neither of them, just images in long sequence fields. Antonioni's crew simply filmed what he saw, or rather what they showed him.
The images and ambient sounds speak for themselves. Andrea Barbato's comment is cut to the bone. The music, curated by Luciano Berio, accompanies some scenes discreetly and without screeching, they are almost captions. The sequence of cesarean delivery, with the help of acupuncture, in a hospital in Beijing is memorable. Also memorable are the filming of jugglers and acrobats in a theater in Shanghai. Simple, straightforward entertainment.
The whole documentary is a succession of faces and landscapes that have preserved, even today, the authenticity of a real historical document.
Fortini, another great Italian intellectual outside the world and independent in thought, wrote a report of his trip to China, which took place almost simultaneously with that of Antonioni. Well there is an extraordinary underground resemblance between the two documents, despite the distance between these two great figures. Fortini had probably liked Antonioni's work, but he used his own code to express it. About Cheng Kuo, China wrote "a confession of ignorance is preferable to ignorance in disguise." Apparently severe judgement, but also appreciation for the intellectual honesty of the director from Ferrara. That honesty that Fortini did not see in much contemporary Italian intellectuality, intoxicated by ideology.
The village chief of Anyan, in Henan province, portrayed 40 years after appearing in a long sequence of Antonioni's "Chung Kuo, China". the ex-village chief appears in the Chinese documentary "Seeking Chung Kuo" who went to visit the places and interview the people who took part in the documentary filmed by Antonioni in 1972. The heart of Antonioni's proposal are the Chinese and especially their faces and the places where they live. Each sequence of the documentary conveys great respect for what it films and shows the public something authentic without any interpretative forcing. There are truly memorable sequence shots such as that of the caesarean birth with the patient's anesthesia using acupuncture and the acrobatic scenes of the Shanghai theaters that close the film. A true act of love by Antonioni for the Chinese and China.
Before offering you an overview of the reviews of the time to Antonioni's documentary — which has been banned in China for 40 years — we want to offer you the piece that the journalist Elaine Yau of the "South China Morning Post" newspaper dedicated to revisiting Chung Kuo, China made by two young Chinese directors Liu Weifu and Zhu Yun. The two young filmmakers, who hadn't even been born when Antonioni filmed China in 1972, made Seeking Chung Kuo, a documentary that traces the places filmed by Antonioni and interviews the people who took part in the filming in 1972. The Italian journalist Gabriele Battaglia, who has lived in China for many years, supported the Chinese crew in tracing the path followed by Antonioni's team forty years earlier.
The documentary was screened at the Italian embassy in Beijing on March 19, 2019. Below is the report by Elaine Yau in the "South China Morning Post".
Elaine Yau
In 1972, Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni toured China at the invitation of then premier Zhou Enlai and made a documentary about the lives of ordinary Chinese during the Cultural Revolution. The film - Chung Kuo, China — unleashed one of the most sensational and scandalous controversies in the history of cinema. A scandal that greatly embittered Antonioni.
Chung Kuo it was devised by the Italian public broadcaster, RAI, and by the Chinese embassy in Rome. The basic idea of the film was to have a supposedly leftist director visit China to make a film that sings the praises of the communist revolution.
However, Antonioni made a film that had nothing to do with propaganda, but was a sort of 217-minute travelogue showing China and the Chinese as the camera filmed them during crew locations.
Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing used the film as a pretext to attack Zhou Enlai. A misfortune for a director who was at the height of his fame and his creative strength. Chung Kuo, China, along with the director's other works, were quickly banned in China.
Subjected to constant attacks by the state media, Antonioni was branded an enemy of the Chinese people. Under pressure from Beijing, the film's screening in various foreign countries was canceled and the Italian Communists boycotted its participation in the Venice film festival.
This ignominious chapter in Antonioni's career is the subject of a new documentary, directed by Chinese filmmakers Liu Weifu and Zhu Yun. Entitled Seeking Chung Kuo, the film revisits the cities portrayed in Chung Kuo, to rediscover the people Antonioni had filmed with the camera four decades earlier. The filmmakers hope to show how China has changed since then by revisiting the places and people who appear in the Italian film. Zhu tells the "Post".
«Antonioni has objectively captured many villages and faces of ordinary people. I wasn't born when the film was made. It is a very precious footage for me. The people who were filmed on camera were selected on the spot. They didn't know what Antonioni was doing. We decided to go to the same places and research those same people to see how their lives have changed."
The film, which will be shown by the Chinese state broadcaster, is narrated in Mandarin by the Chinese-speaking Italian journalist Gabriele Battaglia, who reconstructed Antonioni's journey to Beijing, Anyang, Nanjing, Suzhou and Shenzhen. With the exception of Shanghai, the Chinese crew have visited all the Chinese cities where Antonioni has filmed Chung Kuo, China.
"At the time, there were no direct flights between Italy and China," says Liu.
Then continue:
«Antonioni and his staff flew from Rome to Paris and then to Hong Kong. Then they took the train from Hong Kong to cross the border at Guangzhou and from there fly to Beijing. When they arrived at the border of Shenzhen, they found only small villages there.'
Although in the XNUMXs the Chinese censors attacked Antonioni for making a banal film that did not show the achievements of the communist revolution, the ordinary Chinese with whom the Italian director had come into contact keep fond memories of the reserved Italian and the beautiful girl who accompanied him , Enrica Fico, who was the assistant director in Chung Kuo, China and who later married Antonioni.
The film crew, followed everywhere by government officials, attracted crowds of onlookers who had never seen foreigners before.
Among those filmed by Antonioni were the director of a grocery store in Suzhou, children and teachers at a kindergarten in Nanjing, a village head in Anyang, Henan province, and a woman undergoing the test. acupuncture for a cesarean delivery in a hospital in Beijing.
Liu says that when the documentary filmmakers approached the people Antonioni had filmed, they were surprised to find that these people still have vivid memories of the cinematic experience.
The head of the noodle shop recalls how Suzhou government officials came to her to ask her to write a critique of Antonioni. “She had captured the real side of China then. There was no need to criticize him like that, ”she tells Battaglia in Seeking Chung Kuo.
Liu says that although Antonioni was a leftist filmmaker, his works lacked overt political messages. And he specifies: “The way he captured the images in Chung Kuo, China, it's just an expression of his personal [artistic] style”.
Liu and his crew also tracked down the director's widow, Enrica Fico, and other members of the Italian film crew. They also shot a sequence on Antonioni's grave.
Enrica Fico says in Seeking Chung Kuo that Antonioni's documentary has been completely destroyed by the negative reception that the Chinese have given to the film. Fig says:
“It was as if the film had failed. It was not well received. We had put so much work into it. The editing alone took six months. It was a great act of love to make that film." When China said to Antonioni: "You are our enemy", it was like killing him».
Only in 2004 Chung Kuo, China, was finally shown publicly in China, in a screening for 800 people at the Beijing Film Academy. It was too late, says Enrica Fico in Seeking Chung Kuo.
“When they told him that the film had been accepted [finally in China], he already couldn't speak [due to illness]. Otherwise he would have gone to China, because he loved watching his films with the public, especially with young people. Surely he would have gone to the university to see the film with the young people».
Liu adds, however, that Antonioni's widow was happy to see China's incredible growth over the past four decades.
"He told us that he wants to visit China again, because his feelings about China are completely positive."
Da South China Morning Post, March 18, 2019
Edward Bruno
The feature film Chung Kuo, China by Michelangelo Antonioni, in the space of almost four hours, through the images of China today, he develops a coherent discourse on life as conquest and existence as serenity.
Apparently estranged, Antonioni, through the physical reality represented, assumes a precise ideological presence and, in his speechless dialogue, looks at men and things in adherence to their representation, proceeds indifferent to the particular meaning to find a structure that connects the new to the old . Without wanting to carry out a didactic plan, Antonioni moves, by impressions, to discover the profound reality, his gaze moves horizontally on the surface for the large spaces of the cities and the Chinese countryside, but stops close to the men with a physical adherence, with a need to go beyond external data, seeking an intimacy, a surprise, a communication threshold.
Antonioni records long speeches, fixing the simple sounds without caring about the meaning, only taking care to grasp the expression, the sense of a revolutionary work, of the new collective methods, of the cultural organization. The dimension of a new society thus takes on an ancient dimension: the neighborhoods of old Beijing, the streets of the villages, the peasant communes seem to be images lost in time; but their present historicity bears witness to a choice and a collective construction. Antonioni, in proposing his images, did not pretend to try to explain a series of notions journalistically, he simply watched and recorded in endless sequence shots, just broken by a connecting montage, with live sound, things apparently insignificant as long walks, gymnastic exercises, children engaged in games and songs; In other words, he has looked at a series of facts and actions as the author, searching in their reality for the secret reasons for a rediscovered serenity, for a patience that is ancient but which, consciously achieved, gives the human measure of a new conquest. Like a long itinerary Chung Kuo, China it winds through close-ups, touching faces, hands, eyes, objects, to grasp the ancient background of a patient research, without ever losing the sense of communication and the meaning of a relationship in the dimension of a collective society.
Antonioni deifies this sensation, this sense of a society that has overcome hunger, fear and domination. Without ever directly touching the great themes of the ideological conflict between city and countryside China it showed the peasant face of this revolution, taking root in deep reality, in dialogue with things, in the simplicity of a dimension. The long show of acrobats-dancers that closes the film is a tribute to this research, to this commitment to overcoming the laws of gravity themselves, without resorting to techniques other than those that patience, will and exercise require.
Da film criticism, n. 231, January-February, 1973, pp. 1213
Umberto Eco
What happened in Venice the other Saturday was somewhere between science fiction and Italian comedy, with a pinch of western. The Biennale has done what should have been done a long time ago: to give many the opportunity to see or revise the three and a half hours of offending documentary, so that in the end we can open a political and aesthetic debate around an event which now we have news only through agency dispatches.
What China by Antonioni? Those who had seen it on television remembered it as a work that manifested an attitude of cordial and warm participation in the great story of the Chinese people; an act of justice by television which finally revealed to millions of viewers a humane and peaceful China outside of Western propaganda schemes. Yet the Chinese have denounced this film as an inconceivable act of hostility, an insult to the Chinese people. It was said that Antonioni's film would only be the pretext, the casus belli chosen by a group of power in Beijing to support the anti-Confucian campaign. But even if and so the fact remains that a casus belli, to work, it must be reliable: a world war can be waged because an archduke has been killed, not because the archduke's doorkeeper has been killed. Where is the archduke in Antonioni's documentary?
It was therefore necessary to review the entire work with a different eye. What was the discourse that Antonioni addressed with his film to the Western public? In a nutshell, I would say this: «Here is an immense and unknown country, which I can only look at, not explain in depth. I know of this country that it lived in feudal conditions of immense injustice, and now I see the establishment, fought day by day, of a new justice. In Western eyes this justice can take the form of a widespread and severe poverty. But this poverty establishes a possibility of dignified survival, returns serene and more human men than us, sometimes approaches our humanistic ideal of balance with nature, affectionateness in interpersonal relationships, tenacious inventiveness that simply solves the problem of the redistribution of wealth in an often stingy territory».
All of this involved the search for a China as a possible utopia for a frenetic and neurotic West: the use of categories that for us take on particular values, where when we say "poor art" we mean an art removed from the mercantile sophistication of galleries, and when we say “poor medicine” we mean a medicine that replaces the speculations of the pharmaceutical industry with the rediscovery of the relationship between man and herbs and the possibility of a new self-manageable popular wisdom. But what meaning can the same words have in a country where "poverty" meant until a few decades ago the death of entire generations of children from hunger, class genocide, disease, ignorance? And here where the Chinese see a collective wealth, the comment of the film speaks "for us" of a just and serene poverty. Where the film by "poverty" means "simplicity", the Chinese viewer reads "misery and failure".
The film's commentary says that the Chinese surround pain and feelings with modesty and reserve. But a culture that is favoring the values of dynamism, enthusiasm, extrovert combativeness, reads "modestness" as "hypocrisy". Antonioni thinks of the individual dimension and speaks of pain as an unavoidable constant in the life of every man, linked to passions and death; the Chinese read "pain" as a social disease and see in it the insinuation that injustice has not been resolved, but only covered up.
And finally, the criticism of «Renmin Ribao» sees the shooting of the Nanjing bridge as an attempt to make it appear historic and unstable: only because a culture that favors frontal representation and symmetrical framing in a long shot cannot accept the language of cinematography which, to give the sense of grandeur, frames from below and foreshortened, favoring asymmetry, tension against balance. It could go on and on. Antonioni withdraws into his pain as an artist in good faith and struggles to accept the idea that the debate now goes far beyond his film and involves on both sides unexorcised ghosts of ethnocentric dogmatism, aesthetic exoticism, symbolic superstructures that hide material relationships.
The Biennale has reopened the critical discussion. Let's hope this recall doesn't fall on deaf ears. Already on Saturday evening, after the show, there was an air of more open debate, beyond the scandalous occasion. It was exemplary that at two in the morning, at a restaurant table, the eyes of the journalists were fixed on Antonioni and the Chinese critic who polemically exchanged ideas and impressions. In a corner, ignored by everyone, a little girl with meek eyes that betrayed flashes of sensuality at times, followed her discussion accepting the fact that bigger problems than her were at stake and that the protagonist of the evening was the Chinese. Her name was Maria Schneider, but few of her recognized her.
Da L'Espresso, November 1974, p. 104-109
Charles of Charles
Spring 1972. Michelangelo Antonioni, invited by the People's Republic of China, travels to China on behalf of RaiTv to shoot Chung Kuo, China (it is presumptuous to approach this multitude of men by shooting 22 meters of film in 30 days».
July 1972. Antonioni presents the film to the press, almost four hours divided into three television episodes ("these are the Chinese that I was able to film in a few weeks of work, on a journey that gave me unforgettable emotions. Would you like to follow me on this journey that has enriched me and could enrich you too? It seems positive to me that I did not want to insist on the search for an imaginary China, nor have I entrusted myself to visible reality. The choice to consider the Chinese — more than their achievements and their landscape — as protagonists of the movie, it was almost immediate").
24 January -7 February 1973. RAI broadcasts the three episodes of Chung Kuo, China. The film is praised and appreciated, it receives acclaim, admiration, criticism, raises questions, in any case great interest throughout the world, above all for the "novelty", for the way in which Antonioni has approached the reality of China. The film received much attention and was broadcast by numerous foreign televisions and screened in cinemas in some countries. Politicians, writers, journalists, sinologists discuss "Antonioni's China". Diplomatic representatives of the People's Republic of China and heads of the "New China" news agency congratulate the author, friendly and cordial expressions.
January 30, 1974. "Il Giornale del Popolo", organ of the CC of the CCP, devotes an entire page to Chung Kuo. China, with the title: «Antonioni's China: malevolent intention and abject maneuver against China». a condemnation and a ferocious examination that does not spare the Italian director heavy appreciation.
The Beijing daily Knang Ming Ji Pao, on 2 February, and again the People's Daily, on 6 February, subsequently intervened in an increasingly heavy way to increase the dose. On February 7, Chinese TV broadcasts a "denunciation meeting" of Antonioni's film and on February 12, "Knang Ming Ji Pao" intervenes again.
It is only the latest episode - later attributed to the "gang of four" - of a cultural revolution that is developing in a convulsive and most often incomprehensible way, and not only to us Westerners. Antonioni himself immediately attributed the real reasons for the attacks on his film to the internal Chinese situation. He replies by quoting a sentence by Lu Hsiln addressed to young people: «The truth, of course, is not easy. For example, it is difficult to behave in a true way. When I give a speech my attitude is never completely true because I speak differently to friends or children. But you can always say things that are quite true with a fairly sincere voice».
A few months ago Antonioni was rehabilitated by the «Quotidiano del Popolo». Time, his consistency, his honesty and sincerity proved him right once again.
Da Unity, August 23, 1979
Haggai Savioli
For Michelangelo Antonioni, the creation of Jung Kuorepresented, in his own words, a kind of return to his origins, to his first and fundamental experience as a documentary maker, which lasted from 1943 to 1950: the latter year which also marked the date of his debut work, in the field of feature film, by the Ferrara filmmaker, Chronicle of a love.
«While Visconti was finishing, in the same places, the filming of Obsession, Michelangelo Antonioni, returning from France, shot his first short film in the Po valley. People of the Po», notes Carlo Di Carlo, an affectionate and acute scholar (and collaborator, on various occasions) of our perhaps most discussed director.
It was, therefore, the tragic 1943: Antonioni, little more than thirty years old, already has behind him a rather intense activity as a critic, a journalist, some screenwriting experience, and he was alongside Marcel Carnè, as an assistant, for Les visitaurs du soir. With People of the Po. which will be published only in 1947, he helps to reveal, albeit in a small part, the truth of the life of authentic men in a real country. Again in 1947, when the new Italian cinema was already showing signs of crisis, Antonioni created another short film, his most famous and awarded. UN (Urban sanitation). The Roman garbage collectors, in fact, seen throughout the day, from sunrise to sunset, are the protagonists. But already, behind the precise, detached representation of a subaltern social state, one feels the author's eye and hand allied in composing a painful, lyrical synthesis of the human condition: immersed, we would say, in «that gray air of the street sweeper » which, in the same period, inspired the singing of Umberto Saba.
It is from 1948 Superstition, and then began Antonioni's misadventures with censorship, indeed with the various censorships that afflicted Italian cinema. Initially denied legal contributions, the document was presented at the Venice Film Festival in an edition adulterated by the producer. Later. Superstition however, it could be recovered in Antonioni's filmography, assuming considerable prominence. On a conceptual level, due to the absolute «terrestrialness» of the director's attitude towards the phenomenon examined, i.e. the survival of archaic rites and magical practices in some areas of the peninsula; on that of style, for the refinement of a cold observation capacity, even cruel, but never neutral.
In 1949, with The loving lie, Antonioni thins out the shadows of other modern myths, stalking the "stars" of comic photo novels in their modest everyday life. very popular at the time (but the vogue has not ended. to this day). Merciless reconnaissance. not without a hint of moralism, and in any case tempered by irony. Three other documentaries, of lesser importance, occupy, with Chronicle of a love, 1950 (Seven rods, one suit, The villa of monsters, The Faloria cable car): they are now test beds, the subject of linguistic experiments, in view of starting a "major" activity.
Yet, in Antonioni's most celebrated and controversial films, some Friends quality The Scream. The The adventure e The night, The eclipse need The Red Desert, of Blow-Up, of Zabriskie Point and of Profreporter missionwill always find a way to make itself felt, between the folds of an indirect, allusive and metaphorical discourse, the presence of a visual and auditory sensitivity capable of concrete, physical contact with things and people, outside of any mediation or constraint literary. And the tendency towards the dialectical unity of the expressive elements, from the image to the sound, then constant in Antonioni's work, has its roots precisely in his youth as a reporter with the camera.
Of the problems, of the travails, of the real drama lived by Antonioni with and for Chung Kuo, it is adequately said apart. If the film hadn't been taken as a pretext for an internal political battle in China, to which the director was, of course, completely extraneous, it would not have been difficult to demonstrate to his detractors that the director had addressed the great country visited his own, lucid and understanding gaze, interested in the transient but irresistible reality of life rather than in ideological overlaps and propaganda mystifications. People of the Po o People of China, it is always about people on our earth, and under our identical sun.
Da Unity, August 23, 1979
Nicola Ranieri
Antonioni shunned any «cinematographic tourism». “The vagabond sees of reality only what chance shows him. The traveler, on the other hand, has a specific purpose, just like the good writer. The journey determines the form of the film. The assembly plan is already included in the travel plan. When editing, all you do is eliminate the superfluous».
He is a traveller. But his plan does not include the discovery of what he wants to see, but the awareness of the relativity of the observer and his tools. The outcome, contrary to what Balazs maintains, is not the montage of shots created according to a pre-established plan, but the modification of the initial idea, albeit necessary; without it, vagrancy or uncritical and insignificant flagrantism would dominate «The China that I have seen is not a fairy tale. And the human landscape so different from ours, but also so concrete and modern, are the faces that have invaded the screen» «And it seems positive to me that I did not want to insist on the search for an imagined China, that I entrusted myself to visible reality». Which corresponds to the same idea, very "concrete", "terrestrial" that the Chinese have of the world.
It is no coincidence that these reflections are included in an introductory text to the inferred screenplay, which asks how to grasp the hidden aspect of things, a deeper truth: Is it still possible to make a documentary? The title itself is indicative. This is an old question.
Already in 1939 Antonioni published an article in «Cinema», For a film on the river Po, in which he specified his point of view: by designing a "document without a label", he excluded the possibility of integrating it with narrative parts, unlike the esteemed Flaherty of Elephant dance.
The 1974 introduction tries to clarify in retrospect what the director's attitude towards China was. Which does not differ much from that of the «Cinema» collaborator, when, at the end of the thirties, he wondered about how to grasp the profound transformations that had taken place in the lower Po valley. The intentions then materialized, in 1943–47, with People of the Po. Sign of an uninterrupted search to make the links between landscape and figures visible, a fundamental idea structuring the very way of understanding cinema: abolition of figure/background contrast, of rhetoric, of dramatization.
«We would like a film with the Po as the protagonist and in which it is not folklore, i.e. a jumble of external and decorative elements, that arouses interest, but the spirit, i.e. a set of moral and psychological elements; in which not commercial needs prevailed, but intelligence».
The intelligence in penetrating beyond the surface of things will become - starting from this declaration of poetic intent of 1939 - ever greater attention, aware and discovered over the years, to the means employed and to those who manipulate them so that, under the insistent and gifted gaze of technical instrumentation, a visible reality opens up that is not fictitiously represented; on the contrary, it is reconstructed less and less because the mechanisms of reconstruction become more explicit; the document emerges precisely, against any mystified form. In the opposite direction to "cinema-verité" and the objectivism of "reality in the act", the investigation applies to the structuring of seeing.
Insisting on the observer while observing, anything but subjectivist, proves to be a cognitive method that corrects successive approximations, modifies the starting one and the following ones. Visible reality does not consist in its definitive image, but in this continuous search for it, in denying the mystifications that are gradually created. It is not an "object", but its research: the relationship between all possible observers and the different instants of observation.
The impossibility of Locke in Profession. reporter — to turn the camera (according to the sorcerer's gesture) to frame himself — and its fundamental inadequacy will be better understood in the light of the "condition of possibility" that Chung Kuo opens.
Here the shot is studied in such a way that the observer can see himself in the act of observing, thus grasping a fundamental datum of Chinese gestic - the one placed by Brecht at the basis of "estrangement" - in all its theoretical scope. In a way that intuits a bidirectional relationship whose inextricable link is the instrument, so that the observer is "seen" by the observed; then, you modify the previous image.
Thus, the initial idea does not condition the result by determining the form of the film and neither does it mechanically reverse itself into its opposite, according to a reversal which could also be foreseeable from the outset. It simply changes from within, opening itself to the process of discovery, letting itself be "worked" not by objectivist subjection to "evident" reality, but by its own disposition to change in a relationship of which the medium is an essential part, the agitator-agent of change.
The faces of the Chinese invade the screen, they "see" who sees, therefore also the spectators; they force them to think, by comparison. The camera is almost continuously "in view" because the observers literally look at it as if questioning it. She scrutinizes, looks around, wanders around trying to understand; she shows herself to be “criticized”, “guided”. Even when she is hidden — the voice-over says: «to surprise the daily reality of Beijing» — she does not give in to any voyeurism, she highlights her intrusion and lets the screen be invaded by the chaotic and orderly, tranquil flow of people, by the ; from another space-time dimension which by contrast brings out our daily ways.
His mobility — slow panning, horizontal and oblique, tracking or lateral trolleys — indulges the eye that knows and knows itself, follows steps to see where they lead. It differs from the panoramic shots, violent as tears, of the beginning of Zabriskie Point between the confusion, even verbal, of the student assembly and the noise of Los Angeles. Nor does he fixate ecstatically on the landscape. It would be an extraneous materialization of the internal world of the beholder, as (for example) in many films by Straub and Huillet in which the "infinite" duration of a shot - in contrast with the quotations, often read off-screen -, rather than from the desire to see, is dictated by that of visualizing the inner voices and sounds of history in a landscape that has “drowned” them, forgotten. The passage of time that erases everything.
In Chung Kuo i long shots fixed on the landscape are rare; they are immediately diluted by the far/near dichotomy, the zoom or the close-up for detachment. Therefore, no interior contemplation. Mobility is a continuous connection, connection/contrast of observer and observed. The dominance of horizontally scrolling telephoto shots or side dollys not only limit vertical angle, from above or below, but tend to abolish central perspective with vanishing point to infinity, depth, and any element that might give the impression of being fixed. They tend to abolish any separation of the "subject" from a presumed objectivity.
The horizontal scrolling of the camera along the streets of Shanghai (for example) connects the observer - who at crossroads, almost as if he were going around them, pushes his gaze as far as possible into the alleys as if they were hiding secrets to be grasped - and the observed who, by manifesting himself, reveals the mobility of the first, it reveals the modification of the point of view in successive moments, its relativity and therefore the continuous request for a new reference.
Antonioni uses what appears to be a heuristic and expressive function specific limitation of the medium. Given that on the small screen - for which the program is intended - the long shot image is flat, "confused", it loses depth, he, without trying to "improve" it with various expedients, radically eliminates it and transforms a "limited" ” in an ability to see reality by reaffirming one's experimental intentions epistemologically linked to the continuous redefinition of the point of view, to the relativistic theory.
When he rarely uses it, precisely the "exceptionality" calls for a return to the "rule", to the close-up field to see better. In fact, not only is it dissonant, the rhythm varies, but it denotes an attitude to be modified because it is empty, contemplative of one's inner world or of the fairy tale.
The second part (for example) opens with a vertical panoramic shot upwards: from a valley - in long shot - up to the overhanging Honan mountains; — cut — fixed shot: the mountains are “blurred”, wrapped in fog; — cut to — far: a figure on the barren ground, — medium shot — it's a farmer with a strange cap hat. And, always reducing the distance, from the picturesque landscape and strange figures we pass to the men and animals that inhabit this arid land. Rains. Those who leave the fields in a hurry, sheltering under an umbrella. The camera, in close-up — panoramic — looks around, sees and is seen.
Far close. It is not a question of static polarity, opposing terms that only exclude each other, but of a dialectical relationship: contrast and passage from the contemplation of imagined "pictures", initial ideas, to modification, to effective seeing through the specificity of the medium. Which does not remain technically separated from the observed world as if it were deified into a fetish. Both are contextually discovered: interconnecting language-instrument and visibility of reality reveal the procedure and at the same time the observer who is inevitably involved in it, since no objectivist separateness is allowed to him.
The authentic research attitude of the "subject" does not lie in the scientistic detachment from the "object", but in the awareness of one's own implication; to be part of a process in its internal systemic and differential cohesion and to try, at the same time, to dominate it. This is a capacity that not only is not given a priori, but is not even definitively appreciable; it is an incessant logical-probabilistic research of the interactive evolution of “subjective”, “objective”, “instrumental” fields in a complex system: style.
The emphasis on visibility, the document on the Chinese, their faces that invade the screen, the refusal of fiction, of the predetermined built environment, seem to suggest the idea of passive testimony, of descriptivism; as if the director, without being technical, let himself be taken above all by the experimental interaction between medium and cognitive journey in a sort of depersonalization to make room for documentary material. Or did he just want to grasp the "terrestrial", "concrete" idea that the Chinese have of the world; or, again, he wanted to adapt the horizontal shot to the painting by contiguity, thus accepting a different way of seeing from the western one, therefore apparently more "profound". In short, in all cases, as if he wanted to let himself be dominated, to be receptive, available, a witness.
It would be, despite the intentions and the level reached, a relapse into inverted objectivism similar to the scientistic one, cold and considered neutral.
Instead, here too interpretation plays an essential role. The facts are contextualized. The warp of the configuration underlies their apparently random distribution. The materials, which taken in their singularity could appear disjointed, reformulated in terms of a theoretical hypothesis, show relationships, links between the observable data. Not only for the aggregation in thematic blocks: school, municipality, factory, countryside, city - it is certainly a question of present and aware organicity, however superficial -; but because the observation is arranged along a narrative line, which in turn is the confluence of other segments and "paths". In it, along its vectorial nature, interpretative reformulation, the thematic blocks unfold; micro-organizations contextualize themselves.
Against every hybrid, external juxtaposition or disagreement between documentary and story, the observables follow a narrative axis. The facts, already in first approximation understood as an interactive relationship of observer, instrument, observed, and not as an objectivist other than itself, enter progressively complex aggregates according to a configurative line that emphasizes narrating over describing, interpretation over "objectivity". Which constitutes the profound semiotic structure whose vectorial nature indicates the hypothetical-theoretical direction, open, to be verified, and coincides with the arrangement of the "places", with the itinerary, along which geographical movement and cognitive research perfectly match.
Da Vacuous love. The cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, Chieti, Métis, 1990, pp. 87-95
David Gianetti
Documentary film on a trip to China, of which the author, beyond the landscapes, is above all interested in capturing the faces and daily gestures of the people. It opens with the human crowd that fills Tien AnMen square, the traffic of bicycles in the city, the children leaving school. It continues with the silent acupuncture applied as anesthesia in a caesarean section, the children of a kindergarten who learn to parade together with the dance, the schoolchildren of a village in Honan, where a foreigner had never been seen, curious people in front of to the camera, in Nanjing, an acrobat cyclist and again in Beijing the slowed movements of some yogins under the Tartar walls, at dawn. The Ming gardens, with the great sculptures of the sacred street, the Buddha temple in Suchow, with the five hundred statues representing him in as many reincarnations, Want Tze street, the place of the first clandestine meeting of the communist party and other streets in Shanghai. A bare-chested worker pulling a cart past the gigantic sign depicting a soldier of the revolution and, in the square, three girls holding the little red book. The tea house for the elderly, the China-Albania commune and the canals where women rinse their clothes, the bicycle forests, the Huang Ho junks and the factories, ending with a costumed performance in the Shanghai theater.
Da Invitation to Antonioni's cinema, Milan, Mursia, 1999, p. 123
michelangelo antonioni
This time too I promised myself to write a diary of my trip and this time too I didn't. Perhaps it depends on my disorder, the frenetic pace of work (fifty shots a day), the new images that have overwhelmed me. But there is perhaps a deeper reason why my notes have remained notes and that is the difficulty, for me, of having a definitive idea of that constantly changing reality which is popular China. To understand China it would perhaps be necessary to live there for a very long time, but an illustrious sinologist, during a debate, pointed out that whoever spends a month in China feels able to write a book, after a few months only a few pages and after a few years he prefers not to write anything. It's a boutade, but confirms how difficult it is to grasp the deeper truth of that country.
“The truth, of course, is not easy. For example, it is difficult to behave in a true way. When I give a speech my attitude is never completely true because I speak differently to friends or children. But you can always say things that are quite true with a fairly "sincere" voice», said the revolutionary writer Lu Hsun, addressing the young. After my return I answered endless questions. I don't think I've ever said so many words on a topic, also because I was hoping to clarify it for myself in some way.
Sometimes those who asked me questions, especially if they had never been to China, already had an answer. I say this without irony because it is natural that this is the case. That immense country is a sign of contradiction for the men of our time. There is in us a "temptation of China" as in that character of Malraux, Ling WY, there was a "temptation of the West". The political movements inspired by that great revolution are called "Chinese" and such is the habit of indicating Maoist militants with this adjective that I often found myself having to specify whether I was talking about the Chinese of Canton or the "Chinese" of Rome or Paris.
There is an idea of China founded on books, on ideology, on political faith, which does not need a trip like the one I was lucky enough to make to confirm itself. And there are questions to which I cannot give a direct answer. But among the comments on my documentary there is one that repaid me for this difficult work: «You made me take a trip to China». It was exactly what I wanted to achieve and I dare not say that I succeeded also because, living among the Chinese for five weeks, I should have learned a little modesty. “…You often reflect on your weaknesses, flaws and mistakes,” Mao wrote to his wife. And it is a useful indication for everyone.
I too, before going there, had an idea of China in my mind, not so much derived from the most recent books, from the upheaval of the cultural revolution, from discussions on Maoism. I think in images and the ones that prevailed in me were fairy-tale images: the Yellow River, the Blue Desert, the place where there is so much salt that houses and streets are made from salt, which are therefore all white, deserts, the mountains with animal shapes, the peasants dressed in fairytale clothes. In reality, I didn't meet this China except perhaps for a moment when I flew to Beijing on a cold and windy evening: an enormous square of boys and girls singing and dancing in the lights of the airport. Thus they welcomed a Somali chief. The peasants of Honan, in central China, also appeared fairytale-like in their black or white clothes. But they are exceptions. The China that I have seen is fabulous. And it is the human landscape, so different from ours, but also so concrete and modern, it is the faces that have invaded the screen.
I don't know what sense there is in remembering these perhaps slightly childish fantasies that I brought with me from Italy, but I would like to escape the temptation, so common after finishing a job, to make the results coincide with the first intentions. And it seems positive to me that I didn't want to insist on the search for an imagined China, that I entrusted myself to visible reality. After all, this choice to consider the Chinese — more than their creations and their landscape — as the protagonists of the film, was almost immediate.
I remember asking, on the first day of the discussion with my guests, what they thought most clearly symbolized the change that took place after the Liberation. "The man," they answered. I know they meant something more and different than the images of man that can be captured by a movie camera, they were talking about a man's conscience, his ability to think and live rightly. However this man also has a look, a face, a way of speaking and dressing, of working, of walking in his city or in his countryside. He also has a way of hiding and sometimes wanting to seem better or different than he is.
Is it presumptuous to approach this multitude of men by shooting thirty thousand meters of film in twenty-two days? It would be, I believe, if a director said: "Here, this is China, this is the new man (or the opposite), this is his role in the world revolution (or the opposite)". But I knew this (or didn't know it) before going to China. If, on the other hand, I say: «These are the Chinese that I was able to take back in a few weeks of work, on a journey that gave me unforgettable emotions. Do you want to follow me on this journey that has enriched me and could enrich you too?». If I say this, I think I'm making a legitimate proposal.
Upon my return, I was asked if the Chinese authorities have limited my possibilities of movement, if they have forced me to see a reality that coincides with the schemes of their propaganda. A journalist noted in the film that "while in the staged scenes the Chinese are always smiling, in the spontaneous ones they are more serious, sometimes worried". That's true, though not always. But I don't think the documentary would be any closer to reality if the staged scenes were missing. The children singing in the kindergarten and all the rest of the "performance" are evidently the image that the Chinese want to give of themselves, and it is not an image detached from the reality of the country.
Perhaps it is appropriate that I speak of my relationship with the Chinese bureaucracy, because they are the few things left behind in the scenes of the trip, which have not become images in the film. We had been told by the embassy in Rome that we should have proposed an itinerary. And so, at our first meeting in Beijing, we showed a geographical map of China on which the stages of our imaginary journey were marked, which was to remain so. It was in fact an ideal and therefore absurd itinerary, which would have taken six months to follow. And this was the reason the Chinese gave in refusing it.
We talked for three days. Three whole days shut up in a hotel room, sitting in armchairs arranged along the walls, in front of small tables and cups of tea that a girl kept filling up. The center of the room, empty, was an immense and uncomfortable space, as if the ten thousand kilometers that separated China from Italy were all concentrated there. Outside it was Beijing, China, and I had a frantic curiosity to begin to see it, go around, and instead I had to stand there rejecting their proposals, making others, accepting them, and so on, in a swing of arguments.
I later realized that even that discussion and the faces of my interlocutors, their sudden laughter and their strange way of reacting and getting excited, were "China", and that the verbal labyrinth that I sometimes felt lost was much more "Chinese ” of the streets that were waiting for me outside, which in fact are not very dissimilar from ours. It was a bitter and courteous battle, which had neither winners nor losers. A compromise emerged. The film I shot in China is the result of this compromise. I must add that I am not so sure that a compromise is always reductive with respect to the result, first of all because that result could also have been the result of a mistaken intuition, and secondly because I think the limits imposed by the compromise corresponded, in my case, to a greater persistence in looking, in choosing.
However it was a compromise, with time and also with their "bureaucracy". In Shanghai one day I wanted to see the Huang Pu, the river that crosses the city and welcomes its port, from the opposite side to the one from which I used to look at it. With some effort I induced one of my companions to lead me to the other bank. Once there I understood why my escort had hesitated. Another bank was occupied by an uninterrupted series of factories and it was impossible to reach the river without crossing one of them, and to do so one had to ask permission from the Revolutionary Committee of the factory. Of the Committee, only the vice president was present at that moment, a stocky young man under thirty, with a strong-willed face, narrow, cold eyes.
"Cinema? ... Photographs?" she commented smiling. She glanced up at the dark building above us and then back at us. "No, no…" she said. My escort explained to him that we were from Italian television and came from Beijing and it seemed to me that the authorization from Beijing, that is from the government, should be enough and I didn't understand why my escort didn't use this argument to force the other to give in. But this was not an argument for them. In a society like the Chinese one, the only one who had to decide at that moment was that young man and my companion, by not insisting, did nothing but respect his authority, his responsibility. But I don't think that his authority was enshrined in a written document, derived from a law.
For millennia, the Chinese state has managed to develop one of the highest cultures of mankind with a minimum number of legal principles, formal laws and officials. In place of the laws there were morals and the wisdom of life and it seems to me that this still constitutes a specific aspect of the Chinese reality today. Of course, Mao Tse Tung is not Confucius. "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Thought" wanted to be a break with Confucianism, and for this reason it has accelerated to the utmost degree the process that has brought a billion men as protagonists on the world stage. But Mao is also a teacher of morals. I am truly convinced that the daily life of the Chinese, rather than obeying formal laws, is conditioned by a common idea of justice and that greater simplicity derives from this, I would say greater serenity in human relationships.
For example, you only see a few policemen directing traffic in white jackets, but you don't notice a military police presence. Every neighborhood has its own representatives in charge of maintaining order and they are almost always women: if something happens they immediately pop out and effectively maintain order. They are respected and listened to, they represent power but in a modest way. Certainly in a very different way than in Italy, where even the traffic policeman is a man to whom the uniform gives perhaps excessive power.
I have been told that this humble image of power could hide a different reality, but I attach great importance to it, I consider it a contribution to the knowledge of China at least as much as an image of the Italian police with the display of his weapons and training. I still believe, after so many years of cinema, that images make sense.
Da Michelangelo Antonioni. Making a film is living for me, Venice, Marsilio, 1994, pp. 96-102
Dario Zonta
In the autumn of 2004 an event of certain cultural, political and historical significance took place in China which, although involving one of the masters of our cinema, Antonioni, did not get the deserved attention in Italy.
Between November and December, at the Beijing Film Academy (in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute), a review on Michelangelo Antonioni was held which also included the screening of the famous Chung Kuo- China. The documentary (filmed in 72) has always been prohibited by the Chinese government, because it was guilty of giving a false and unjust representation of the society born of the Cultural Revolution. At the time, a violent defamatory campaign was launched against Antonioni, which over the years passed from the pages of the newspapers to school books, where hatred for Antonioni was studied, an example of Western betrayal.
Antonioni's return to China therefore represents an exceptional event. We want, then, to offer you the reconstruction of the story (which from cinematographic became, in spite of itself, political and historical) and give a record of the reception and debate that Antonioni's "China" has aroused. Due to known difficulties, the director from Ferrara was unable to travel to Beijing. Representing him was Carlo Di Carlo, a scholar of his cinema, as well as a filmmaker himself and an attentive philologist of impressive works such as Home, The decalogue and now heimat 3. He is the curator of the review (strongly desired by Francesco Scisi, then director of the Italian Cultural Institute), and with his notes and his direct testimony we have composed this story.
Which, let's say right away, is very complex and we report here, while simplifying, in its essential moments.
The background
We are in 1970, an Italian delegation goes to China. Also on the agenda is the plan to shoot a documentary on the new China. The agreements made with Chou En Lai will lead to the creation of the only documentary on popular China, entrusted to Michelangelo Antonioni (who was suffering from a production impasse at the time - he had to shoot Reporter profession — and needed new creative stimuli). In 72 a troupe leaves, followed by a Chinese delegation.
In a letter of intentions, sent to Beijing before the trip, Antonioni wrote: «I plan to concentrate on relationships and behaviors and to make the life of people, families, groups, the aim of my documentary». Once in Beijing, after three days of exhausting discussions with the Chinese delegates, the path to follow is decided, with a "compromise", and a journey of twenty-two days and 3 meters of film begins.
The film
Antonioni turns in Chun Kuo, China not an imagined China, but one made visible by his eye, sensitive but extraneous, and aimed at revealing the Chinese man. «The choice to consider the Chinese - writes Antonioni - more than their creations and their landscape, as protagonists of the film was almost immediate. I remember asking them what the change that occurred after the Liberation most clearly symbolized.
«The man had answered me. (…) They spoke of a man's conscience, his ability to think and live justly. However, this man also has a look, a face, a way of speaking and dressing, of working, of walking in his city and in his countryside. He also has a way of hiding and wanting to seem, sometimes, better or at least different from what he is himself ».
Knowing Antonioni's cinema, these words alone describe the spirit of the documentary which receives different criticisms and analyzes in Italy. Everyone agrees in registering it as a "travel notebook" (and so does Antonioni himself), in which what is seen is shown. It is not the pretense of a social and political investigation of the new China, which cannot be given by an impromptu visitor. Franco Fortini therefore writes of it as «a confession of ignorance preferable to a disguised ignorance». While Alberto Moravia (also an impromptu but attentive visitor to the world of cinema) writes: «The most beautiful things in the film are the notations that are both elegant and authentic on 'poverty', felt as a spiritual fact rather than an economic and political one ». The fierce censorship
The film was seen in Rome by officials from the Embassy and the New China Agency, in Paris and Hong Kong by high-level exponents of the People's Republic of China. Despite this, in October 73 the Press Department of the Foreign Ministry ordered censorship, and a few months later a ferocious press campaign began against Antonioni. The «Quotidiano del popolo», organ of the central committee of the PC, has the headline «Contemptible intention and abject maneuver», and of Antonioni he writes «a worm in the service of the Soviet social-imperialists». The example of Chun Kuo, China ends up in school textbooks as a reminder of the betrayal of Chinese values. The historical reasons for that persistence are to be referred to the delicate political moment experienced by China in the early XNUMXs.
The film falls into the battle between the moderates (who had called Antonioni to film that period in China) and the "gang of four" who, led by Mao's wife, escalated the clash for political purposes. The aesthetic and cultural reasons are perhaps to be found in the image that the Chinese people have (and that the new China did not want to give back), devoted to austerity, modesty, solidarity, and steeped in poverty.
Antonioni froze before the events and accused the blow dealt to him by his beloved China for decades. As he tells us about Carlo, the echo of the clash reached Italy: «In 74 the reformed Biennale, presided over by Ripa Di Meana, invited China to Venice. But the then government intervened to avoid complications in diplomatic relations. Ripa Di Meana, in response, rented a cinema in Venice, near Piazza San Marco. I myself had to detain Michelangelo (who was not one who sought a fight) from the Italian Chinese who staged an anti-Antonioni demonstration with banners and placards». The film fell into oblivion and except for a few passages on Out of Hours of Ghezzi, Rai, which produced it, has never considered it.
Rehabilitation
Almost thirty years have passed, China is changing, slowly, and the critical reading of the past becomes an element of growth. Chun Kuo, China, although shooting illegally, has never been seen. In 2002 an attempt was made, then failed to bring it back to China. But only in 2004, and thanks to the strong interest of Scisci, director of the Institute of Culture, were there the conditions for a retrospective. On 25 November, and with a second passage in December, the event begins at the Academy of Cinema which sees eight feature films, seven short films and two documentaries screened, including Chun Kuo, China.
Enrica Fico and Michelangelo Antonioni, unable to participate, send a message of good wishes in which it is written: «The wait has been long, but the thought that Chun Kuo, China, wanted by the Chinese government at the time, to be seen in Beijing is enormously satisfying. Michelangelo thinks this is a sign of great openness and change on the part of China». At the screening of the documentary there was a large and mostly young audience. «For all four hours – recalls di Carlo – no one blinked an eye and, in the end, a composed and unanimous applause broke out. When I then spoke to members of the public they told me that Antonioni's China was a mirror where they saw what they didn't know and understood what they didn't know. This is perhaps the greatest satisfaction for Antonioni».
The event is covered by newspapers, magazines and television with programs from the central channel and cinema. And consequent, as Scisci tells us on the phone from Beijing, was the cultural debate. Upon returning to Rome, Carlo di Carlo tells Antonioni what happened: «I showed him the photographs and the video that the boys took. He was moved." Thus ends an exemplary story, almost a fairy tale, which far exceeds the cinematic dimension and exceeds the limits and merits of a documentary that was meant to be "a travel notebook" and has become the litmus test of the political moods of modern China and Contemporary.
Da Unity, 5 April 2005
Franco Fortini
Almost at the same time as Antonioni, another brilliant, sophisticated and independent Italian intellectual out of the chorus of the various ideological orchestras of the time visited China. It was the second time he returned there and he left an extensive report published in "Quaderni Piacentini". Here is China seen by Franco Fortini. Despite the distance between Fortini and Antonioni, the China of these two great Italian intellectuals, who have maintained absolute freedom of thought, is very similar. Perhaps Fortini drew the political conclusions that Antonioni was unable or unwilling to draw.
READ the trip report https://www.firstonline.info/la-cina-di-franco-fortini-1973-un-nuovo-viaggio/
