Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2014

Italian neorealist films have had a strong impact on Chinese cinema since the founding of the PRC in 1949. Chinese directors of the 1980s and 1990s have looked at the works of Italian neorealist directors with renewed interest and Jia Zhangke’s early films have come to epitomize the lasting imprint of Italian Neorealism in China. This article investigates the influence of Italian neorealist tradition (and beyond) on Chinese film-makers whose careers started after the turn of the century and whose works share a concern for the interplay of individuals and their surroundings. The essay also argues that space has a hermeneutic role for understanding the influence of Neorealism on certain recent Chinese narrative and documentary films. In line with the perception of an increasingly fragmented society, the impact of Italian directors on contemporary Chinese film-makers such as Liu Shu, Li Ruijun and Wang Bing emerges as an on-going process of re-appropriation rather than the lasting imprint of master teaching. While textual or stylistic references may not always be immediately apparent, the influence of Italian directors on contemporary Chinese film-making becomes clearer after some close analyses of certain Chinese films in conjunction with an examination of the directors’ own observations.

In 1972, during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Michelangelo Antonioni was invited by Chinese government to document the New China. After three weeks of filming, Antonioni edited the footage into a three and a half hour documentary entitled Chung Kuo/China (1972). However, this film was banned in 1974 by the Chinese government, and Antonioni became target of a massive criticism campaign in China. Only as late as 2004 was the ban lifted and the documentary finally shown at Beijing Film Academy. This article is conceived as a measured methodological intervention into China’s reception of Antonioni’s Chung Kuo. I examine the social and historical contexts of China’s reception of the film, attempting to reveal the complex motivations behind China’s reactions in different periods. The first section analyses the international tensions that China was facing in 1970s. The second section describes the domestic social and political environment in which the criticism against Antonioni was initiated. The third section addresses Chinese audiences’ responses to Chung Kuo after the Cultural Revolution, while the fourth section outlines a series of Chinese multi-media artworks inspired by Chung Kuo.

This article compares the representation of China in two Italian films shot in country, namely Chung Kuo – China (Antonioni, 1972) and La stella che non c’è/The Missing Star (Amelio, 2006). In the intervening 30-odd years changes have occurred to the Italian perception of China. Specifically, this perception appears to have shifted from a widespread fascination for Maoism, to a negativity linked to the ongoing economic changes caused by globalization that saw a redistribution of wealth and power, and in which Italy and China appeared to symbolize the two extremes on the scale of a reversed power relationship. The two films are analysed on the basis of three assumptions. The first being that until the nineteenth century the encounter between the West and China was mainly one sided, with Italy being the first western culture to approach China. The second that Italian directors were among the first westerners to make full length films in the People’s Republic of China. The third that film-makers are intellectuals influenced by the historical period in which they film. This analysis will revolve on a historical contextualization, a discussion of meaningful film sequences, and the implications emerging from a comparison of the two films.

Discussions on Chinese identity in cinema have been usually undertaken by considering Chinese-language films directed by Chinese directors. However, the increasing relevance of transnational practices displacing the signs of Chineseness beyond the nation state has challenged previous theoretical paradigms. Pushing this argument a little further, how can we address Chineseness in non-Chinese films dealing with Chinese-related topics and characters? Two Italian films represent an interesting case in point. Io sono Li/Shun Li and the Poet (2011) by Andrea Segre narrates the friendship between a Chinese bartender and a local fisherman within the close environment of the Venetian Lagoon. L’arrivo di Wang/The Arrival of Wang (2011) by Antonio and Marco Manetti, is a sci-fi movie about an Italian Chinese-language interpreter who is assigned an urgent job: translating a mysterious Chinese-speaking ‘subject’ who turns out to be an extraterrestrial alien. By conducting close-readings of the two films, the article attempts to address multiple questions: what kind of Chineseness is articulated in these films? How is Chinese identity negotiated in the creative process? Is this Chineseness only an other-ized construct, or can it critically provide a relevant description of Chinese identity?

This article characterizes the Italian Western as an innate hybrid genre that has to be seen as constituted by decentralized modes of production, mobility of film-makers and fluid exhibition networks. Italian Westerns travel across national boundaries, working as a junction in a global network of cultural exchange. Against this theoretical backdrop of transnationalism, several key films are discussed, each starring an Asian protagonist or antagonist. As only two of the films in question figure as Italian Asian co-productions, the representation of ‘eastern’ identity through ‘western’ images is of particular interest. The article poses the question if there is a merging of the national and the generic or simply an incorporation of the Other’s discourse at work: How are ‘eastern’ genres like the Japanese sword film and the Hong Kong martial arts movie fused with the Italian Western? To answer this question, the article draws on textual analysis that never loses sight of overdetermining contextual factors. Thus, the films are seen to reflect their transnational modes of production, being just as hybrid as the global imaginary giving rise to them. Competing subject positions come into view, showing that the texts and their discourses of ‘Asianness’ are deeply open to ambivalence.

This article seeks to stimulate critical attention to dubbed films as translations, which have been traditionally neglected in Chinese cinema studies and in cinema studies generally. It takes as a case study the dubbing into Mandarin Chinese of Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (De Sica, 1948), the first film from Western Europe to be imported into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). After detailing the early history of translated films in the PRC, especially the process and technique of dubbing, the article examines the work of censorship in selecting foreign films for import and translation and analyses contemporary audience reception of dubbed films as well as efforts by official propaganda to shape that reception. Finally, in an extension of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature into the field of film, I consider dubbed cinema as a minor cinema that, in the movement from one language to another, creates a space for alternative enunciations that fosters the formation of a transnational sensibility

Solo andata/One Way: A Tuareg Journey, directed by Fabio Caramaschi (2010) Edited by Silvia Caracciolo, Produced by Facion Film with contributions from the Fondo Regionale per l’audiovisivo, Friuli Venezia Giulia.

Il limite/Sea Boundary (2012) by Rossella Schillaci, Italy, HDCAM, Duration: 55’

Landscape and Memory in Post-Fascist Italian Film: Cinema Year Zero, Giuliana Minghelli (2013) London and New York: Routledge Advances in Film Studies, 251 pp., ISBN: 13 978-0-415-66108-9, h/bk, $125

Cinema e Risorgimento. Visioni e re-visioni. Da La presa di Roma a Noi credevamo, Fulvio Orsitto (ed.) (2012) Manziana, Rome: Vecchiarelli Editore, 361 pp., ISBN: 978-88-8247-314-3, p/bk, €30.00

Crossmedia Innovations: Texts, Markets, Institutions, Indrek Ibrus and Carlos A. Scolari (eds) (2012) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 320 pp., ISBN: 9783631622285, p/bk, £22.40/$36.95

Ercole, il Divo – Dall’ antica Grecia al cinema italiano degli anni Sessanta, Maria Elena D’Amelio (2012) Serravalle, Repubblica di San Marino: AIEP Editore, 194 pp., p/bk, €20.00

Cinema e scritture femminili: Letterate italiane fra la pagina e lo schermo, Lucia Cardone and Sara Filipelli (eds) (2011) Rome: Iacobelli, 236 pp., ISBN: 978-88-6252-163-5, p/bk, €14.90

Visions of Struggle in Women’s Filmmaking in the Mediterranean, Flavia Laviosa (ed.) (Foreword by Laura Mulvey) (2010) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 256 pp., ISBN: 978-0-230-61736-0, p/bk, $95.00; ebook, ISBN: 978-0-230-10520-1

I nostri eroi. La funzione bardica della televisione, Giovanni Bechelloni (2010) Napoli: Liguori Editore, 179 pp., ISBN: 9788820748920, p/bk, €16.50

70th Venice International Film Festival: Italian Cinema Expanded, Venice, 28 August–7 September 2013

A report of the Historicanti performance Contadini si nasce, briganti si muore, ma i poveri restano in viaggio/You can be born a peasant, die as a robber, but the poor remain on the road

Giovanni Princigalli

GiuseppPPe Ferlito