



Unlike written production, which was plentiful, only a few French ctional lms about the Cultural Revolution were produced between 1966 and 1976. Nevertheless, it was the object of contradictory discourse in two lms which reveal the cultural cleavages in 1960s and 1970s French society. Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and René Viénet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (La Dialectique peut-elle casser les briques?, 1973) confront Maoist and anti- Maoist perspectives, as seen from France. Simon Leys’s seminal book Chinese Shadows and its problematization of the achievements of the Cultural Revolution serve here as a point of departure for an analysis of the various debates of this period. This article will also take into consideration a few contemporary Chinese lms that form a sort of counterpoint to the French ction lms of the 1960s and 1970s. Wang Bing’s The Ditch (Jiabiangou, 2010), for instance, unveils the consequences of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960).




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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
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Cinéma & Cie
Kristian Feigelson
2018/03/01
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Chinese Fictions in France and Shadows in China
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Chinese Fictions in France and Shadows in China1
Kristian Feigelson, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 /
IRCAV
Abstract

    Unlike written production, which was plentiful, only a few French fictional
    films about the Cultural Revolution were produced between 1966 and 1976.
    Nevertheless, it was the object of contradictory discourse in two films which
    reveal the cultural cleavages in 1960s and 1970s French society. Jean-Luc
    Godard’s La Chinoise (1967) and René Viénet’s Can Dialectics Break Bricks?
    (La Dialectique peut-elle casser les briques?, 1973) confront Maoist and anti-
    Maoist perspectives, as seen from France. Simon Leys’s seminal book Chinese
    Shadows and its problematization of the achievements of the Cultural Revolution
    serve here as a point of departure for an analysis of the various debates of this
    period. This article will also take into consideration a few contemporary Chinese
    films that form a sort of counterpoint to the French fiction films of the 1960s
    and 1970s. Wang Bing’s The Ditch (Jiabiangou, 2010), for instance, unveils the
    consequences of the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Great Leap Forward
    (1958-1960).

   In what terms can we consider the role of the fiction that addressed the Chinese
Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s? This revolution was visible early on in
Chinese propaganda films and news reports that were widely screened abroad.
Yet in France, it remained relatively unseen in the cinema, albeit frequently
covered in the context of the May 1968 events. From the start of the Revolution
in Beijing 1966, the French Broadcasting and Television Office (ORTF) devoted
several reports and critical commentaries to the Cultural Revolution, underlining
its violent nature.2 Rarely filmed as fiction, it was the subject of two contradictory
films, which are today considered masterpieces: La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard,
1967) and Can Dialectics Break Bricks? (La Dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?,
René Viénet, 1973). Both films are particularly striking in their revelation of
cultural divisions in French society in the 1960s and 1970s.3 Apart from a few

1
  The author wishes to thank Precious Brown for her translation; Flora Lichaa of the National
Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) for her filmography; Bruno Philip,
Beijing correspondent for Le Monde from 2004 to 2010, for his critical review; and, René Viénet
for his comments.
2
  See various reports broadcast since August 1966 viewable at the French National Audiovisual
Institute (Ina). The French media often experienced difficulty in dealing with the complexity of
Asia. This was especially evident when the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh in 1975. See in
this regard Cambodge, le génocide effacé, ed. by Pierre Bayard and Soko Phay-Vakalis (Paris: Cecile
Defaut, 2013), which examines misinformation about the reality of Cambodia in the media, like
that of Patrice de Beer, correspondent for Le Monde who, from April 1975, viewed these events
through a Maoist lense.
3
   Julian Bourg, ‘Tempered nostalgia in recent French films on the 68 years’, in The Long 1968:

                                                    Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVIII, no. 30, Spring 2018
                                       Kristian Feigelson


other purely militant or conjunctural films, such as the comical Chinese in Paris
(Les Chinois à Paris, Jean Yanne, 1974), in an essentially fictional fashion, these
politically-oriented films with burlesque accents juxtapose French Maoist and
anti-Maoist perspectives, without ever really showing the abundant images that
were seen in the media. La Chinoise is a fiction film produced by a well-known
director at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, and Can Dialectics Break
Bricks? is a politically engaged sinologist’s remake of Tu Guangqi’s kung fu film
The Crush (Tangshou taiquan dao, 1972).
   In contemporary China, a few isolated films have recently reconsidered the
Cultural Revolution in the ‘chiaroscuro’ perspective that sinologist Simon Leys’s
seminal work Chinese Shadows described at the time4. These rare fiction films
and documentaries, which will be discussed in the final part of this article, which
were either not screened or seen only by small audiences in China, critically
retrace this past, honouring those who were forgotten by Chinese history.


La Chinoise

   In Paris, five students, Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky), Guillaume (Jean-Pierre
Léaud), Henri (Michel Semeniako), Yvonne (Juliet Berto), and Kirilov (Lex de
Brujin) move into one of their parents’ flats to form a revolutionary cell, Aden-
Arabie, a tribute to Paul Nizan, revisiting the ideological speech broadcast
by Radio Peking.5 One day, while studying Marxism-Leninism and learning
Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book by heart, they plan to assassinate the Soviet
Minister of Culture who is visiting Paris. The band disperses when vacation
starts.6
   Forming something of a political trilogy with his two previous films, Made in
USA (1966) and Two or Three Things I Know about Her (Deux ou trois choses que
je sais d’elle, 1967), La Chinoise alternates between still shots, longer animated
sequences, and short lectures filmed behind closed doors in rooms lined with
copies of the Little Red Book. How can imported revolutionary methods applied
to French society help combat revisionism and capitalism and spark a permanent
revolution, with the Vietnam War and the United States, the Sino-Soviet dispute,
and the Cultural Revolution as a background, and China appearing as a radical
and new communist alternative to the bureaucratic Soviet Union, supported


Revision and New Perspectives, ed. by Daniel J. Sherman, Ruud van Dijk, Jasmine Alinder and
Alinder Aneesh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 327-355; Sebastien Layerle,
Caméras en lutte en mai 68: ‘Par ailleurs le cinéma est une arme…’ (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2008).
4
  See Simon Leys, Chinese Shadows (New York: Viking Press, 1977).
5
  Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (Paris: Rieder, 1931).
6
  See Alain Jouffroy’s presentation of the film’s storyboard in L’Avant-scène Cinéma, 114 (1971),
and Alain Bergala, Godard au travail: Les années 60 (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 2006), pp. 342–362.
See also Richard Brody, Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (London:
Faber and Faber, 2008), pp. 296–317.

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blindly by a hegemonic French Communist Party? The camera also serves to
re-evaluate the Vertovian theories of the Kino-Eye in a mise-en-scène that serve
the word in an anti-spectacle film.7 In grotesque fashion, the film provides a
counterpoint to an official Chinese comedy of that time, Wang Ping’s The East
is Red (Dongfang hong, 1965). Chinese vestimentary codes are respected from
the cap to the mandarin collar jacket, and morning exercise is punctuated by
slogans and clichés with different rough sound recordings, usually over a red
background. One instance is the recurring slogan: ‘The imperialists are still
alive. They continue to reign arbitrariness in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
In the West, they still oppress the masses’. Outside of these quotes from the
Little Red Book, the script is peppered with references to Louis Althusser and
Jacques Lacan who were already deemed to be the new theoretical, leftist version
of Mao, but probably unreadable to a majority of Chinese viewers. Plastic and
didactic elements coexist in the film, contrasting a (rather caricatured) French
generational phenomenon of young Maoists to Mao’s Chinese Red Guards
(1966-1976), challenging hierarchy and the sudden return of 17 million Zhiquings
(educated, urban youths) to the countryside in 1968 and 1969. Dotted with
public trials, this campaign allowed for the purging and complete reorganization
of the Chinese Communist Party in order to institute Mao’s weakened power
more durably. In fact, Godard’s film, confined to a bourgeois Parisian flat, is far
from this context — one that was unfamiliar to him.8 Only one of his actresses
was of peasant origin (Juliet Berto) in this predominantly student-intellectual
environment. Yet, for Parisian critics the caricatural film was ahead of its time,
if not daring.
   How then should this film be interpreted with respect to both Godard’s
filmography and the political context of an already turbulent era in France? La
Chinoise in particular allowed Godard to take a more radical stance towards the
cinema, both politically and artistically. Aiming to break with commercial cinema,
this film followed the fashion of the time. The cinema had become an instrument
or a revolutionary tool using Maoist ideas to connect theory and practice. It was
a question of adapting these ideas to the cinema, as he had tried to do in other
films such as My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, 1962), where prostitution echoes the
consumer society, or in Week-end (1967). Undoubtedly, La Chinoise marked a
new militant turn in Godard’s work. The Joy of Learning (Le Gai Savoir, 1968),
which was not released, focused on the Third World and the Cultural Revolution
in factories. A Film Like Any Other (Un film comme les autres, 1968) was shot
in factories in Flins, with workers and Maoist students. This anti-film period
differs sharply from the first narratives of the French New Wave. Championing
Bertolt Brecht’s theatre, the quasi-filmed Eastern stage of La Chinoise features all


7
 See Jean-Pierre Esquenazi, Godard et la société des années 1960 (Paris: A. Colin, 2004).
8
  Regarding these misunderstandings and Godard’s position during May 68, see Vincent Lowy,
‘Rive droite /rive gauche: face à la Nouvelle Vague’, in Chris Marker: Pionnier et novateur, ed. by
Kristian Feigelson (Condé: Corlet, 2017), pp 54-63.

                                                                                                85
                                       Kristian Feigelson


the clichés of French Orientalism, chanting a new relationship between content
and form. Faithful to the maxims of the Cultural Revolution, the film, in most
caricatural fashion, proclaims the crisis of world imperialism, the need to fight
from the factory to the countryside, as the cinema — on a steady diet of Maoist
slogans — had to be opened up in order to connect theory and practice.9 The
film takes the form of a ciné-tract that is centred on the cult of Mao and supposed
to synthesize these ideas, but paradoxically confined in a Parisian flat. Like the
post-1968 slogans, this cinema appears as a graffitied if not elliptical form. Since
then, as Godard adds, ‘realism is not how real things are, but how things really
are’.10 Godard seeks a more radical questioning of the procedures in force in the
cinema, although the real China seems but a pretext to support these efforts.
Similarly, Far from Vietnam (Loin du Vietnam, Chris Marker, 1967) on which
Godard collaborated, synthesized a collective process that was already underway
in La Chinoise. Be that as it may, if the Vietnam War, both near and far from
Paris, recalls ‘the Chinese strategy of encircling places of power’,11 it also played
a more important role than China in catalyzing and unifying a generation. Half a
Life (Mourir à 30 ans, Romain Goupil, 1982) an autobiographical documentary,
later showed the impact of this war among the young generations between 1965
and 1975.12
   The 1960s and 1970s also coincided with a major attempt to erase any notion
of the author in favour of a collective and revolutionary practice. The problem
is equivalent to that of the writer facing his reader: how can the spectator be
placed at the centre of a collective interrogation? As La Chinoise illustrates,
film for Godard represented a specific mode of course, which he continued
between 1969 and 1972 in a series of other films such as Wind from the East (Vent
d’Est), Pravda, Vladimir and Rosa (Vladimir et Rosa), within the Dziga Vertov
collective (1968-1972) that he had founded with Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-
Henri Roger.13 Apart from its obvious failure, La Chinoise marked the beginning
of a rupture and Maoist radicalization for Godard, which culminated in Wind
from the East in 1970. Godard claimed to make films differently, seeking also
to rebuild the filmmaker’s social function within the Dziga Vertov collective.
The Cultural Revolution was no longer perceived as an event that had been
lived or as an event to live; it was already mythologized, allowing Godard to

9
   See Alain Jouffroy, ‘Le guerillo et le savant’, Le Fait public, 2 (1969) <http://derives.tv/le-
guerillero-et-le-savant> [accessed 11 February 2018].
10
   Ibidem.
11
    Jalabert Laurent, ‘Aux origines de la génération 1968: les étudiants français et la guerre du
Vietnam’, Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire 55.1 (1997), 69–81.
12
    Romain Goupil, Interviews with Bernard Lefort (Paris: Punctum, 2005). Later, a handful of
fictional films gave an idea of what the uprising was actually like, such as Regular Lovers (Les
Amants réguliers, Philippe Garrel 2005), Something in the Air (Après Mai, Olivier Assayas, 2012).
13
    Later, Jean-Henri Roger founded another group, Cinelutte (1973-1976), and taught at the
University Paris 8. See David Faroult and Gérard Leblanc, Mai 68 ou le cinéma en suspens
(Tarascon: Syllepses, 1998); Voyages en utopie Jean-Luc Godard, 1946-2006, ed. by Nicole Brenez
(Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2006).

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                       Chinese Fictions in France and Shadows in China


rebuild this posture around a film in the making. In some ways, this is true of
La Chinoise, as evidenced by its discontinuous soundtrack. The New Wave had
already been buried for several years, and for Godard, the Cultural Revolution
was synonymous with a new revolution of the image, which banked on scandal,
espousing the political situation. He had already done something similar in The
Little Soldier (Le Petit soldat, 1963), which was censored during the Algerian
War, and Pierrot le fou (1965), which was prohibited to people under the age
of 18. The stinging competition of the cinema market, fuelled by the rise of
television, forced Godard into the cultivated posture as a cursed artist, doomed
to constantly revive himself on the social scene in order to continue to exist and
produce.
   When La Chinoise was released, the French press (Le Nouvel Observateur,
Combat, Cahiers du cinéma, Le Monde…) responded favourably to the film. To
critics, Godard was almost prophetic in his retrospective re-reading of a history
in the making.14 Together with the rather hostile right-wing press, the Chinese
Embassy in Paris, in utter disbelief at the excessive calls to violence, reacted
negatively to the film. In retrospect, this film — if not the international context
and lack of knowledge of China in France at the time — can be read as dithering
and unfinished, halfway between propaganda and parody. Screened only in Paris
at the time, the film sold some 100,000 tickets upon its release — actually a good
outcome for an auteur film in a very competitive market — it was undermined
by the release of films like Don’t Look Now... We’re Being Shot At! (La Grande
vadrouille, Gérard Oury, 1966), emblematic of a popular success with more than
17 million tickets as well as several reruns.
   However, should Godard’s convictions or positions with regard to the
Cultural Revolution be measured retrospectively more as anti-Americanism than
an affiliation with Maoism, within the climate of the era and his public sympathy
during the Langlois Affair at the French Cinémathèque and the French Cinema’s
States-General in May 1968? For Antoine de Baecque, the filmmaker was still
more determined by economic conditions than by any precise ideology, passing
from one fascination to another.15


Can Dialectics Break Bricks?

  A member of the Situationist International who had studied Chinese at the
National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, René Viénet was
one of the first in France to condemn Chinese communism, observing that


14
   See for example Jean de Baroncelli, ‘La Chinoise de Jean-Luc Godard: un film qui “eclipse” tous
les autres, Le Monde, 6 September 1967, p. 16.
15
   Antoine de Baecque, Godard (Paris: Grasset, 2010), p. 351. See also Raphaël Jaudon, ‘Une
politique sans théorie? Marxisme et émancipation dans le cinéma politique du Groupe Dziga
Vertov’ (unpublished Master’s thesis, Université Lyon 2, 2013).

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                                        Kristian Feigelson


‘official Chinese newspapers themselves did not give an account of the Cultural
Revolution that was as watered down as the one proposed by sinologists and
Western journalists’.16 As early as October 1967, spurred by Viénet, Guy
Debord published a brochure, The Explosion Point of Ideology in China, as
a counterpoint to the discourse of Western intellectuals and Maoist splinter
groups of the time.17 In February 1971, Viénet left the Situationist International,
but maintained friendly ties with Debord. In 1973, inspired by Debord’s The
Society of the Spectacle,18 he produced a few films with détourned soundtracks:
the aforementioned Can Dialectics Break Bricks?, a pastiche of the Cultural
Revolution based on a martial arts film, Girls of Kamare (Les Filles de Ka-ma-ré,
1974), which applied the same process to a pornographic film, and Peking Duck
Soup (Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires, 1977), featuring the
Maoist propaganda rituals and delusional cult of Mao. These films can probably
be best considered as an indirect response to both the first aphorisms of Godard’s
La Chinoise and the place of China on the French far left’s cultural scene in the
Mao-Stalinist era.
   In Can Dialectics Break Bricks? the relationship between cinema and politics
was also of interest but in a diametrically opposed way than in Godard’s La
Chinoise. Using images from a pre-existing film (The Crush), Can Dialectics
Break Bricks? seems more akin to a form of Pop Art, a nod to Andy Warhol
and his ironic, colourful portrait of Mao (1973) splashed on posters all over the
world. The film enjoyed the great popularity of Hong Kong films distributed
in France at the time. The Crush told the struggle of young Koreans against
the Japanese imperialists, the revolt of kung fu fighters against supporters of
kendo. Viénet détourns this original narrative to show the spontaneous revolt
of the masses against the bureaucracy which seized the revolution to oppress
the masses. The sinologist revisits Cultural Revolution thematics, détourning
them from their contexts — just like Godard’s La Chinoise — knowingly and
ironically from beginning to end, ‘in a region occupied by bureaucrats, logicians
will avenge the Commies and the Bonnot band’ (as one of the characters states
in the movie).
   Can Dialectics Break Bricks? proposes new montages between soundtrack
and image, prefiguring commentary on the image. In détourning a popular
Hong Kong karate film, Viénet also parodies Maoist logorrhea. The shifts
between soundtrack and image create comical situations. The subtitles are
false translations of dialogue where a lovers’ exchange becomes a critical


16
   Simon Leys, Essais sur la Chine (Paris: R. Laffont, 1998). On the meeting between the Belgian
Catholic sinologist and the French situationist, see Laurent Six, ‘Aux origines d’Ombres chinoises:
une mission de six mois au service de l’ambassade de Belgique en République populaire de Chine’,
Textyles, 34 (2008) <http://journals.openedition.org/textyles/1572> [accessed 5 May 2017].
17
   Guy Debord, ‘The Explosion Point of Ideology in China’, Internationale Situationniste, 11
(1967), 499–508.
18
   Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle, trans. by Fredy Perlman and John Supak (Detroit: Black
& Red, 1970).

88
                         Chinese Fictions in France and Shadows in China


consideration of decadent Trotskyism, or, in silent scenes, a denunciation of
capitalist exploitation. The movie’s opening titles read:

      The first entirely détourned film in the history of cinema, a toast to the exploited
      for the extermination of the exploiters, an epitaph for friends [les copains]
      where all films can be détourned, duds [les navets] as well as Pasolinis, Vardas,
      Godards, Bergmans, but also Spaghetti Westerns and commercial films, at the
      cinema where the producer is alienated and has no control over his life. This
      will change but not by voting for the common program or by joining the PSU...!

   The traditional Chinese imagery on screen distorts Maoist thought, and is
as much a criticism of the despotic communist universe as it is of capitalist
domination (‘Speak no more of class struggles, or I’ll send you my sociologists,
my psychiatrist, or even a structuralist’), for ‘while we may well be the dominant
class, we are often in the shit’. The film’s dialectical mode works in an often
rudimentary opposition of good and bad. It remains, nevertheless, true to the
narrative structure of popular kung fu films, attacking all forms of alienation
in an anarchist vein. Having targeted the permanently criticized bureaucrats,
Viénet turns to the accomplices of intellectual alienation in France — ‘those
idiots who observe and see nothing’, as one character puts it in the movie —
revisiting, in this way, the failure of the world’s revolutionary movements. In
highlighting the archaisms of allegedly revolutionary discourse, Can Dialectics
Break Bricks? plays with words and becomes a counterpoint to Godard’s
La Chinoise, which by 1973, already appeared aged and fairly conformist.
However, for Viénet, an informed sinologist breaking with the decaying
situationist movement, filming Politics contributed to the creation of new
political alternatives. It was a question of breaking with the dominant order in
light of his knowledge of the Cultural Revolution’s devastating effects in order
to criticize militant and media blindness in France.
   Charting the limits of the Cultural Revolution in a polemical, pamphleteer
fashion, Viénet’s film remained confined to intellectual circles. Yet in 1973, the
revolutionary process itself was winded and most militant groups had dissolved.
The same year, Libération was launched by Serge July, a former Maoist, as a
morning and daily newspaper supported by Jean-Paul Sartre. A political page
had turned in France, restoring conservative power and strengthening the
Gaullist state institutions that had been disparaged and weakened since May
1968. Charles De Gaulle left office in 1969, and Georges Pompidou died in 1974.
In France, the controversial publication in 1974 of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago (1973) put Soviet (rather than Chinese) totalitarianism in the
spotlight. In 1975, André Glucksmann’s La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes
[The Cook and the Man-Eater] was published.19 Glucksmann defected from the


19
     André Glucksmann, La Cuisinière et le mangeur d’hommes (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

                                                                                       89
                                      Kristian Feigelson


French Communist Party and joined the Maoist movement and the Proletarian
Left in 1968-1969. After reading Solzhenitsyn, he opened the debate on the
post-left and the responsibilities of Marxism in his essay on the State and
concentration camps. A number of French intellectuals (Cornélius Castoriadis,
Michel Foucault, and Claude Lefort, to name only a few) had already relayed
such ideas after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but little attention was paid
to them.20 Jean Pasqualini’s Prisoner of Mao was translated in French in 1975,
describing the author’s own seven-year experience of forced labour, after having
been accused of being a counter-revolutionary during the Hundred Flowers
Campaign.21
   Upon its release, Can Dialectics Break Bricks? was regarded as being rather
non-conformist. It was screened in a handful of art house cinemas in the Latin
Quarter, and it did not enjoy the publicity and aura of a confirmed director
that La Chinoise had a few years prior. In the shadow of Guy Debord, Viénet
was largely unknown, despite his academic reputation in Chinese studies. His
film allowed him to make a radical critique of the society of spectacle using
the very tools of spectacle; it presents a few commonalities with La Chinoise.
In both films, almost messianic visuals illustrate the mythical idea of saving
a people from alienation, using the fashionable concept of ‘contradictions’
(those of capitalism and those of Chinese communism) dialectically.
Viénet’s film resonates quotes and slogans led astray, most likely those of an
educational cinema that complied with Maoist precepts of the time. Amidst
sabres and karate, anathema transform into an oratorical sparring match,
merrily refuting falsehood with truth in opposition to Chinese realities, with
no real interest in a chronological history of current events in mainland
China. In both films, the traditional film narrative is disrupted in favour
of supposedly more innovative forms, so as to present ever abstract theses.
First and foremost, both films were primarily intended for a small, informed
French audience and they remained exterior to any historical treatment.
Through essentially political questions, these films raise issues of political
representation in a reified society of spectacle. Further, in both cases the
commentary carries more weight than the images. In Can Dialectics Break
Bricks?, this questioning paradoxically comes from Hong Kong, from a
China that was simultaneously urban, rural and Communist. Although
the images were détourned and parodied, like Godard, Viénet sought to
challenge the spectator. His comments distanced the ideas of Mao, the heir
of Confucianism, and condemn domineering capitalism. Viénet depicts a set


20
   See Florence Grandsenne, ‘Les intellectuels français face aux crises du communisme en Europe
du Centre-Est (1956-1981)’, Labyrinthe, 7 (2000); Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since
1945 (London: Penguin Press, 2005); Jeannine Verdès Ledoux, Au service du Parti: Le parti
communiste, les intellectuels et la culture (1944-1956) (Paris: Fayard, 1983).
21
    Jean Pasqualini, Rudolph Chelminski, Prisoner of Mao (New York: Coward, McCann &
Geoghegan, 1973).

90
                       Chinese Fictions in France and Shadows in China


of opposites such as text/image or criticism/self-criticism, unveiling these
‘contradictions’ in the Maoist sense of the term. This inversion of principles
updates the ideological mechanisms of a totalitarian system of thought.


A Posteriori Chinese Views

   Broadly, Chinese cinema has ignored the Cultural Revolution or continued
to censor this period partially, without consistently providing historical or
visual documentation. Chinese television avoids addressing this censored topic,
contributing to a general amnesia. There are far more literary productions on
the question of the Cultural Revolution. The majority of related film production
constitutes a few independent documentaries, featuring filmed testimonies. On
the other hand, some critical documentaries have been broadcast on Hong Kong
channels. As early as 1993, post-Maoist films participated in the implementation
of a specific — but also very fragmentary — audio-visual writing, which could
allow for an in-depth overhaul of the past and its many gaps. This marginal
cinema nevertheless maintains a sensitive relationship with written history and the
testimonies of Chinese totalitarianism. They provide a counterpoint to the ever-
dominant national narrative.22 Aside from a very partial, fictional reconstruction
of these events, only about a dozen attempts at the margins of documentary
production have been made: a fairly weak corpus of films considering that China
produces nearly 500 films a year. Where fiction film fails, these few documentary
films strive to act as a counter-memory to official speeches in China yesterday
and today, to illustrate the abuses committed. Finally, in Europe, although there
are many archival images, precious few documentary filmmakers have treated
this chapter of world history. Philip Short, the BBC’s Beijing correspondent, who
also wrote biographies of Mao and of Pol Pot, contributed by way of a four-
part documentary Mao, une histoire chinoise (2006) co-authored and directed by
Adrien Maben for Arte.23
   A few Sixth-Generation film directors including Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai
and Wang Bing have produced Chinese fiction films on the topic. These directors
offer a critical vision of China, which differs in any case from those given by


22
   Amongst others, these films include 1966, My Time in the Red Guards (1966, Wo de hongweibing
shidai, Wu Wenguang, 1993); Hu Jie’s films, Though I Am Gone (Wo sui si qu, 2006), Searching
for Lin Zhao’s Soul (Xunzhao Lin Zhao de linghun, 2006), and Mother Wang Peiying (Wo de
muqin Wang Peiying, 2011); the archival footage film, Storm under the Sun (Hong ri fengbao, Peng
Xiaolian and S. Louisa Wei, 2009); the docu-fiction Mr Zhang Believes (Chi, Qiu Jiongjiong, 2015);
To Justify Bu Qinfu (Huan Bu Qinfu yi meili, Wang Yunlong and Han Yi, 2011); Xu Xin’s films,
Pathway (Daolu, 2011), My Cultural Revolution (Wo de wenge biannianshi, 2014) and Summary of
Crimes (Zuixing zhaiyao, 2014); and Farewell, Beijing (Zaijian Beijing, Zhang Tianhui, 2009).
23
   See René Viénet, ‘Arrêts sur images’, Le Figaro, 7 September 2006 <http://www.lefigaro.fr/
debats/2006/09/07/01005-20060907ARTWWW90420-mao_arrets_sur_images.php> [accessed
11 March 2018].

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the Maoist propaganda and the few (and often romanticized) historical re-
enactments.24 Many Sixth-Generation films that have been censored in China
such as Wang’s 11 Flowers (Wo 11, 2011) and Red Amnesia (Chuangru zhe,
2014), have reappeared in international festivals. More recently, Zhang Yimou’s
film, Coming Home (Guilai, 2014), follows the itinerary of a father returning
from a labour camp at the end of the Cultural Revolution, confronted by his
amnesiac family. This film was expected to represent China at the Oscars, but it
did not. These films had little distribution in China, if any at all.
   On another note, Wang’s The Ditch (Jiabiangou, Wang Bing, 2010), was
chosen to be the film sorpresa in the 2010 Venice Film Festival. at the Venice Film
Festival. Though the film is structured around a true filmic writing, it remains
marginal on the audio-visual landscape of Chinese fictional cinema, both in
terms of the point of view of its content and its form. Realized with an economy
of means and filmed most often with direct sound and all the vagaries of a pale
light behind closed doors, Wang’s cinema is difficult to understand. The image
here serves as a ‘chiaroscuro’ mode of observation. It is a question of filming
everything before all traces disappear or are erased.
   Wang had already filmed Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (He Fengming, 2007)
in mostly static shots with minimalist montage. This three-hour long film is the
account of a former journalist and survivor of the re-education camps. Wang’s
cinema is symptomatic of a story written from the bottom up. In symbolic fashion,
he summons all those who were excluded, every victim of the Maoist experience,
and films them, providing them, at last, an opportunity to speak. Fengming: A
Chinese Memoir is a documentary that anticipates the subsequent writing of
Wang’s only fiction The Ditch, itself at the crossroads of documentary. Wang
travelled all over China to record these testimonies, in search of survivors and
families of the victims of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
He met Fengming whose husband died of hunger at the Jiabiangou camp on the
edge of Mongolia. Prior to filming The Ditch, Wang filmed Fengming’s account
from narrated stories and tight frames. She evokes the advent of the communist
regime in 1949, the anti-rightist campaigns, and her confinement in a labour re-
education camp before her rehabilitation in 1978, after the Cultural Revolution.
   In this way, The Ditch revisits, in a fictitious fashion, the effects of the Maoist
repressive system. The challenge is to reconstruct the traces of a visual history in a
society that has become amnesic about these issues, without reducing this period
to the camps. Wang was inspired by a collection of short stories, chronicling the
internment and the tragic destinies of those accused of rightism and betrayal of
the Communist Party and sent to re-education camps during the Great Leap
Forward, between 1950 and 1960. The Ditch is adapted from the 2003 novel
Farewell to Jiabiangou (Gaobie Jiabiangou, Yang Xianhui) which counts roughly


24
   Luisa Prudentino and Kuo-Quiquemelle, ‘Du cinéma réaliste au cinéma de propagande dans
la Chine maoïste’, in Une histoire mondiale des cinémas de propagande, ed. by Jean-Pierre Bertin-
Maghit (Paris: Nouveau monde, 2008), pp. 661–680.

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nineteen testimonies. This novel was published the same year in France under
the title Le Chant des martyrs: Dans les camps de la mort de la Chine de Mao [The
Song of Martyrs: In the Death Camps of Mao’s China].25 The filmmaker revisits
the evocative power of speech to stage a taboo story in China, visually examined
from the perspective of the victims. This period is as little discussed as that of
the Cultural Revolution. However, it makes it possible to better understand
this historical continuity by producing an anti-hero cinema at the antipodes of
Chinese film propaganda of the time. The film is based on a series of questions
about this tragedy in a perspective that limits the use of archival images based on
testimonies collected from the deportees, their families and the guards.26
   Focusing on the victims, this film, shot in the Gobi Desert in extreme climatic
and material conditions, fictitiously depicts hidden memories. The film is
about the Hundred Flowers campaign, which began in 1957, and anticipates
the Chinese Cultural Revolution ten years later. It also openly criticizes the
blockages of the State-Party. This campaign against the right-wing movement
also targeted those who dared to criticize Mao openly. The Great Leap Forward
(1958-1960) implied forced industrialization with famines of great magnitude in
the countryside where nearly 40 million people perished. During the Great Leap
Forward, the camps — which did not necessarily refer to any criminal status —
were based on the idea of a new re-education through work that corresponded
to a political and social program that ensured the ‘success’ of communism. The
Cultural Revolution trivialized the Leninist notion of ‘class enemy’ through re-
education.27 To measure further the gap between the written word and the images
of the time, it would probably be necessary to consider the Cultural Revolution
within the context of terror in China, beyond its ideological legacy. The film also
deals with conflicts between the living and the dead behind closed doors, in a
prisonlike environment, for instance, when a woman fights camp bureaucracy in
order to give her husband a decent burial.
   Can this inhuman reality become human? Echoing Simone de Beauvoir’s
slightly unorthodox position: ‘In China, man is tearing himself away from
his immanence in order to understand what is human’.28 Wang Bing’s cinema
mirrors the madness of a system and its discontinuity in history, from the Great
Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution. In ‘Til Madness Do Us Part (Feng’ai,
2013), he uses raw images, describing the universe of the excluded through their
daily lives in a psychiatric hospital in Yunnan. It is his way of restoring not only
an individuality that was denied by the system, but also a humanity beyond the
prison for individuals with no future. A few decades later, these Chinese films

25
   See Caroline Renard, Isabelle Anselme and François Amy de la Bretèque, Wang Bing, un cinéaste
en Chine aujourd’hui (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2014).
26
   See Jean-Michel Frodon, ‘Dans l’enfer du goulag chinois’, Slate FR, 8 March 2012 <http://www.
slate.fr/story/51101/fengming-fosse-goulag-chinois-cinema> [accessed 11 March 2018].
27
   See Patrick Cotelette, ‘Wang Bing, Le Fossé et Fengming. Chronique d’une femme chinoise’,
Lectures, 7 January 2013 <http://lectures.revues.org/10303> [accessed 11 March 2018].
28
   Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Témoin à charge’, Les Temps modernes, 127–128 (1956), 297–319.

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                                  Kristian Feigelson


give perspective to the initial remarks on the present and future of the Cultural
Revolution in Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and René Viénet’s Can Dialectics
Break Bricks?. As a counterpoint, these posterior Chinese views establish an
inverted model of French fiction films in the 1960s and 1970s, avoiding the
central question of politics so as to decipher a utopia based on a devastating
ideology,29 by retrospectively revisiting its consequences through an anonymous
social history. Through their intersecting viewpoints, these recent Chinese films
provide a means to challenge certain intangible assumptions about political
history in a yet closed China, as well as to measure the effects or impacts of the
Cultural Revolution that are known today.




 Wang Bing, Alors, la Chine? Entretien avec Emmanuel Burdeau et Eugenio Renzi (Paris:
29

Les Prairies ordinaires, 2014).
94
