Chung Kuo, Cina is an italian documentary on China directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (1912 – 2007) and released in 1972.
A person practicing Taijiquan on a bicycle (05:35 minutes of Chung Kuo, Cina Episode 1)
There are several Taijiquan training scenes in this 1972 documentary:
- 05:35 minutes of Episode 1
- 07:45 minutes of Episode 1
- 34:00 minutes of Episode 3
- Chung Kuo, Cina Episode 1
- Chung Kuo, Cina Episode 2
- Chung Kuo, Cina Episode 3 Part 01
- Chung Kuo, Cina Episode 3 Part 02
…I don’t believe that a documentary would have been closer to reality if it had lacked “organized” scenes. The singing children in the houses, and all the rest of the “representation” are obviously images that the Chinese wished to provide, but are not images forced upon the reality of the country…
Everything I did in China was done in complete accord with the people who were there to accompany me. Usually there were eight of them. In Nanking there fourteen. Thus I never did anything that wasn’t allowed and I never shot anything without their being present.
On Chung Kuo Cina (Chung Kuo Cina, ed. Lorenzo Cuccu, 1974; Film Quarterly, Suimmer 1975)
In 1972, at the height of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government invited Antonioni, accompanied by his hosts, to spend eight weeks touring Beojing, Nanjing, Suzhou, Shanghai and the province of Hunan. The result was an almost four-hour documentary, but just one year later the Chinese violently and persistently condemned Antonioni and his film. Paying attention to what the glimpsed and sensed and the emotions that this aroused in him, Antonioni produced a documentary, moving and tender, of the director himself looking at the country, rather than a sterile work on “the achievements of the new China”.
The Hong Kong Arts Centre
