Documentary Films 2008

On March 14th, we are studying the film Chung Kuo by Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni.  To assist you in your study …

 Here is a translation of the script of the Antonioni film.    The voice on the film is that of the film director himself.     

[translation of film narration below courtesy of Barbara Ugazzi - with thanks]

First Part

Tien An Men square. Beijing. May.
We are starting here our short trip in contemporary China, taking with us our film cameras. 

The song you just heard goes “I love Tien An Men square”. Every child in every school in China sings this song.
For the Chinese this enormous silent, open area is the center of the world.
“The Gate of Heavenly Peace” is the heart of Beijing. Beijing is the political and revolutionary center of China. And China is CHUNG KUO “the country in the center” The ancient core of civilization. This is the square of parades, speeches, marches.
The People’s Republic was proclaimed here and here the waves of Red Guards marched toward the Cultural Revolution.
We preferred to come here during an ordinary day when Chinese come and wait long lines to take pictures. They are the main characters of these filmed notes.
We don’t want to explain China, but to observe this various repertoire of faces, gestures, habits.  Coming from Europe we thought we had to climb mountains and cross deserts, but many areas in China are still not accessible and forbidden.
Even if Chinese opened some doors, even if they play a political “ping-pong”, our guides, polite but firm, lead us only in limited areas.
The pictures of the Fathers of Marxism overlook the square. Marx and Engels.
Tien An Men is a huge area covering 400,000 square meters. It’s the meeting points of tree-lined avenues and winds that cross Beijing.
Even if the square is solemn, imperial it didn’t exist during the great dynasties. It was built later out of political necessity, to satisfy the people’s need to demonstrate en mass.
There are also Stalin and Lenin, of course.

The driver stops suddenly and tells us we cannot turn in this street.
We ask an explanation by gesturing, because the interpreter is not with us right now.
Then, as you see, we turn any way.
Later we understood the reason of that prohibition. This is the entrance of a park. And in the park there is the house of the leader of China. Mao Tsetung.

The city has austere habits. It wakes up early. Beijing and China work very hard.
The Cultural Revolution unsettled the production systems: It gave priority to the political loyalty more than to skills. Now efficiency looks again as a goal to reach, but without making the work inhuman.
Beijing’s people look poor but not miserable. No luxury, but no hunger either. What we noticed more was the quality of life, so different than ours.
Apparently there is no panic and no rush.

At dawn, in the shade of the ancient Tartar walls, there are not only those who are heading to work. This is a form of gymnastic but also a dance and a ceremony. It trains the body but also strengthens the spirit. They move in rhythm like following a music that nobody can hear. It‘s a tradition so ancient that the new leaders wanted to forbid, as a residue of old time, like a superstition.

Also the day in school starts, almost always, with running and outside exercising.

One day they take us to the Beijing clinic of obstetrician.
It is a quiet and clean hospital, run by very young women-doctors. The patient is a worker at the factory of electrical valves. She is 35 years old and is about to give birth to her first baby.

She needs a Cesarian section and the anesthesia will be given by acupuncture. This practice is poor, easy, doesn’t need expensive and complicated instruments. It bounds patient and doctor in a relationship more human and straightforward. It can be learnt and used by anybody, even in the most isolated countryside and by those “Medici Scalzi (barefoot doctors), doctors with no license, who are the skeleton of the health system in the agricultural China.
Today, while the western science is doubtful, three fourths of the surgeries in China use anesthesia with the use of these long and thin needles, which reach the nerves removing  sensitivity to the pain.  Even these medical techniques, China seems to want to prove that big obstacles can be removed using easy methods and ancient teachings.

“ Is this your first child?”
“Yes”
“Do you hope it’s a boy or a girl?”
The kindergarten for the children of the 6,400 workers at the cotton factory in a neighborhood outside Beijing. Every big factory allows an area reserved for schooling the children of the female workers. They get used to the collective society they will join when grown up.

They are so gracious; you can forget the songs they are singing are all with political content. The most popular says, “The navigation is upon the wheeler, the revolution upon the Chairman Mao”.
A house in the same factory. Husband and wife are talking about the fresh vegetable they just bought at the market. They both work at the cotton factory. The apartment is simple, unpretentious, similar to all the others around. By law the rent cannot be more of 5% of the salary.
“I still don’t have grandchildren” tells the woman.
To build the socialist society, every family must be not too numerous. The factories are always almost similar to independent villages where the workers live and work. The salaries are low. There are little differences in levels of salaries from the top to the bottom and even the number of levels is reducing.
The working hours are not rigid because there is always an abundance of work power.
The management of the factory is collective in the 3 to 1 formula: the vortex includes technicians, workers and soldiers.
These are residues of the Cultural Revolution that the daily needs change continuously.
The Chinese discuss with passion but may become repetitive and boring.
At the end of a shift, in a courtyard outside a cotton factory; the workers in a circle; talking. Today they discuss the merits of an art show, a relative new topic, a sign of a cultural opening.  A manager compliments the authors because they follow the direction of Mao and offer art and literature at the service of the workers, farmers and soldiers.

“We have to spin and weave for the revolution,” everybody else says. It is not a real discussion, but a collection of commitments and proposals.
“We have to improve the quality, put it as our first priority”
“Spin one meter more of good quality fabric and we contribute to the world revolution”.
We went visiting the Great Wall during a very windy day.
The Chinese call it the “long wall of 10,000 Li”.
The Great Wall is said to be 5,000 Kilometers. It was built by thousand of slaves, 25 centuries ago to defend the Empire from barbarians. It reminds of the words of a worker in a Bertolt Brecht poem: “Thebes of the 7 doors, who built it? The books mention Kings’ names but were the kings pulling those heavy rocks?”
They say the Great Wall is the only monument, human made, that can be seen from the moon, but the astronauts have never mentioned it.
It was an embankment, a barrier against the Mongols. The guard towers are placed at a voice distance between each other. It is a real monument celebrating inutility of the military art. 
Somebody called it the longest cemetery of the world, because the bodies, still alive, of the workers, which dared to rebel to that slave work, were used as cement for the stones. But the Wall stopped even the wind coming from the steppe and improved the agriculture.
Moreover, moving whole families of soldiers in far countries, favored the expanding of the Chinese culture. A war monument became an involuntary way to civilization.

Strange stone animals watch over a street across a tree valley, not far from Beijing.
It is the sacred street, the street of the souls. It is the street taken by the dead Emperors on their way to the burial place. Every image is repeated twice. The female is seated, the male is standing. There are lions, unicorns, camels, elephants, chimeras, horses.
Today the meaning of each sculpture is in part unknown. The animals separated the good from the evil, wished rest to the dead, offered themselves to serve the Emperor in the kingdom of the Dead.

13 out of 16 Emperors Ming rest in this valley, under big mausoleums.
Crowds of Chinese, for whom the word “Empire” has no meaning, came to visit.
In these vast parks, one upon a time, nobody could enter and also the Emperors had to dismount the horse. The visit to the tombs is a festive time; it is not for respect or solemnity. After all, entering the mausoleum is useless; they are big volts and cavities that keep rectangular graves plastered in gray; all the same. It is better to visit the close museum. There are many treasures, but what strikes more is this kind of political Nativity.

“Here” –says the guide – “is represented the history of the workers during the Ming dynasty. The owner wants the rent in spite of the drought and the poor harvest. One family, who cannot pay, is kicked out of the village. The farmers become nomads and beggars, they die of hunger or are forced to sell their own children. This is the life under the feudal Emperors. For this reason, crowds of workers rebelled. The fight spread everywhere in the year 1582.”

“This” – the guide concludes – “is the correctness of what our leader Chairman Mao taught us.”
Heaven doesn’t provide rich harvest anymore and the farmers are not kicked out from the fields; at the contrary, the students from every school, for one month every year, very disciplined, go to work in the collective farms.

We are going to visit the collective farm “China Albania”. 40 square Kilometers, 3,000 hectares of cultivated fields, 28,000 inhabitants.

In this valley, they say, before the farm, there were a swing of drought and floods. Now there are kilometers of channels, stocks farmer and fish preserves. There is one hospital, 6 clinics, 36 health centers. 5 middle school and 19 elementary with a total of 8,000 students.

Of course we will see poorer farms, later in our trip. We would be naïve to think to have discovered the ‘Heaven of the farmers.’  Also here, the daily life in the fields is hard.

The cover market of Sit-An, in a central street in the Capitol, is like a farmer fair, moved in the city, where the animals arrive still alive.

We hid the camera behinds columns of oranges, fruits, cans of tea.

The prices are low and there are a lot of products for everybody.

Besides the kindness and the keen mind, the Chinese have also one other virtue, ‘gluttony.’  The table is rich and imaginative, every province is proud of their own thousands various specialties. But the most important fact, at least for a foreign, is that the huge agricultural inland allows all Chinese to overcome the Asian tragedy of malnutrition, even if not everywhere there is the abundance like in this market.

“In this city the Great Khan has his own big palace” Marco Polo was wrote.

(Translators note: Marco Polo translated the word Khan with the Italian word Cane which means Dog. The translation of  “Grande Cane” is therefore Big Dog).

We went there one Sunday to visit the walls, the stairs, the roofs, the gardens described in “Il Milione” (The Million).   Since some decades ago, no European was allowed to enter in here, and very little Chinese were. Closed during the Cultural Revolution, the City of the Emperors has been reopened recently. And we came here to watch Chinese visitors more than to look for reminiscences of extinct dynasties.

The rooms and the pavilions keep the names celebrating the religious and ethic magnificence according to which the Emperors judged themselves:  The Supreme Harmony, the Celestial Purity, the Terrestrial Tranquility, the Nutriment for the Spirit.
But the truth of the history that unwound inside these bastions is really different. These courts were cruel and greedy, dominated by customs sumptuous as inhuman.

The rooms and the palaces were the itinerary toward a beyond-reach power. Visitors and dignitaries went from one pavilion to the other; trough endless wait, they neared the Emperor’s room. Often they died or gave up their proposals, before finishing the entire itinerary.
The Chinese today have a peaceful relationship with their past. They feel the greatness like a reflex on the present, and, without rush or anxiety, they visit this “City not-more-Forbidden”.

Beijing is a city still ancient, with low-rise buildings, narrow little streets, districts enclosed in one other.
This old lady walks with difficulty. She has mutilated feet. When she was young a very tight bandage prevent them from growing: bound feet.  An Emperor, who had a mistress with large hips and little feet, started the cruel fashion. His devoted dignitaries believed that the largeness of the hip, symbol of feminine beauty, was related to the smallness of the feet. And they imposed that custom.  If this woman has these feet, it means she was young at the time of the last dynasty.

The street of the antique shops is called Liuli-chang. It hides shops full of precious objects that belong to the government and that the government sells at a fair price. The streets are narrow, almost always controlled by a district responsible, which maintain the order and forbid the entry to foreigners.

The roofs of the houses rise behind the walls; on the streets, no windows are visible.
All life unwinds inside the courtyards. The courtyard is like a tiny common square to play and work, and grow that little private vegetable garden permitted by the laws.

There is also a new Beijing, a growing Beijing. Even if the urbanization is discouraged, the natural expansion is unstoppable. Outside the walls that bordered the old Mongol and Tartar city, new neighborhoods are borne.

The Beijing of trade and shopping is found mainly in this area. This is called Wang Fu Jin.
To surprise it in its daily reality, we had to hide the cameras.

Austere city, capital also of the Revolution, Beijing allows little color. The customs are frugal. We feel contaminated… Contaminated by forgotten virtues, like modesty, unpretentiousness, spirit if sacrifice. 
The other street here is called Fong Cheng. It is like this every day, at any time. A thick human wall through which was hard to move with a camera.

Beijing has hundreds of temples and pagodas, but for us maybe the most beautiful, the most mysterious of all, is this one: the Tien Ta, the temple of Heaven. Here the emperors came to honor the heaven deities, ask for copious rain and rich harvests.
Today the carriages pulled by elephants, processions of dignitaries, human sacrificies, are only a tale of the past and Tien Ta is a public park, crowded with happy visitors.

It is built all in wood, every pieces embedded with each other, without a single needle.

In Beijing, they told us there are more than one million of bicycles.

This is the theater Chan Gan where the Chinese go sometime at the end of the day.
There is a marionettes show tonight.  The announcer presents an opera piece.

              End of first part

Second part

From Beijing we travel south for two days by train and arrived in the Nan Che (sic) province, “ south of the river”. The Yellow river, in the middle of China.

This is Liu Shan district.
The Chinese don’t hide farmers’ poverty of this province. Lo Nan is the province where the first Chinese states were born 25 centuries ago. It is the capitol of wheat and corn. The China’s granary.  Above all, Lo Nan is the region where, for the first time in 1958, the cooperatives became popular collective farm. Every farm is divided in brigades of production and every brigade is divided in teams. Every worker has an annual money salary and a share of cereals enough to sustain his own needs. Even the children.
To the elders, who cannot work anymore, they give the house, the food, the clothes, the medical assistance and money for the burial ceremony.

The proud of this province is the “Red Flag Channel”. It is been dig by hand for 1,500 kilometers and takes the waters of the Cian Gu River up to this side of the mountains.
Long time ago, the inhabitants tell, the water here was rarer than the oil.
It took 10 years to 30,000 men, who are considered the Lin Shen heroes, to work through granite; they moved 17 millions square meters of rocks, built dams, tanks, water mains, everything with simple tools. Lin Shen is popular today in China as the first social mountain.

The house and the work tools are the only personal property. Everything else belongs to the Government.

We asked to visit one of the villages in the Taz Tei Tuan district. 1.628 people.
The courtyard is a common square; the toilets, the tools’ barn, the corn storehouse, the mill, the tailor shop face the courtyard. In the courtyard there is also the revolutionary committee’s headquarter that leads the village’s brigade.
A meeting is scheduled for today. 9 members of the committee meet after work around cups of tea.
The president’s name is Mai Inn Tzi. He is 34 year old. He attended middle school and he is a farmer. They read some quotations from the Mao’s Little Red Book and, from these, they start a discussion.
It is May, the harvesting is near and they should think about the autumn sowing.
But the others say that only if they do their ideological job well first, can they do their other work.
And from the ideology they switch back to talk about nature, the grass mowing, the choice of the seeds.
At the end of the meeting the president and the vice president leave to visit a family in the village.

This is the village’s school.

From the day of Mao’s Revolution, the population doubled. Only a few move to the city and those few are designated by a committee formed of the whole village.
They arrive in a house where the family is waiting; today there is no real problem to discuss, but if it were necessary the committee would have the full decisional power. They say they can even grant divorce, but the chances are rare since in the country husband and wife rarely separate. Today, they talk about the harvest and the sowing, about buying a new tractor, about barley and beans.

The bedroom. During winter, fire is light in these holes, the bricks are worm up and they keep the heat for all night.

The feelings and pain of people are almost invisible in China, surrounded by modesty and reserve. We asked to watch a funeral but they answered that mourning must be kept private.
China is a country with no graveyards. The government recommends cremation, but in the country they still bury the dead.  Everybody can ask to be buried where he wants. And usually they are allowed.

Traveling thorough another part of the Lin Shien district, we notice a strange crowd and we became curious. We want to stop, but our guides pretend not to hear us.

Then we get out of the car and start filming.
They say, “ If you really want to film, you can do it, but we are sorry”. We filmed anyway, as you can see.

This is a rare site you see.  A rare free market where the farmers sell or exchange their own personal products; the harvest of a small garden, a pig, a straw hat, the blade of a hoe.  This is the only gap in the strict collectivism of all territory and the authority barely tolerates it, but, they told us, it is only a marginal cheap economy.

Now we arrive at the mountain and, without notice, enter a village.
It looks abandon, deserted.

The first thing that we notice is a poster. When they translate it, we are surprised.
It is written in a perfect Chinese. It complains against a border violation of Indian army in Chinese territory.   (note: India and China had fought a border war in 1962)

The village’s president, with reluctance, allows us to enter the village.

Now is leading us – preoccupied. 

The facades of the small houses are full of imaginative graffiti. They say, for example, “The rays of the red sun shine bright for one thousand autumns”, or “ We must fight egoism, criticize revisionism”, and more “ We respectfully wish Chairman Mao a never ending life”.

This Chinese here have never seen a westerner.

Now they are starting to come over, surprised, fearsome, curious. They can’t resist turning one more time and looking back.

We keep filming them, but soon we notice how we foreigners are so different to them.

On the other side of the camera we are, for them, unknown objects and maybe, for them, we are even ridiculous.

It is hard for our European pride that a quarter of the world population considers us so foreign to strike fear in them. Our eyes are round; our hair, curly; our noses long and bony; the skin, faded; the gesture, extravagant; the clothes, clumsy. They are afraid, but polite. They are worried to offend us even running away and because of this, they are hesitant; they face the camera as long as they can, often petrified and motionless.

And so, for all the time of our invasion in this mountain village, we are looking at a show of astonished faces, but we never feel hostility in their expressions.

The village president would like to show everything in order and at the same time explain to his people who we are and what we want.

At all time we spend here, he nods to the elders and to the women, especially the one poorly dressed, to hide.

We went more south in the Yan Tze Kiang River’s valley, the big river that flows through the center of China and that fertilizes it. This collective farm is in the suburbs of Tsu Chong City.
The collective farm’s experiment, through enthusiasms and disappointments, goes on. And these agricultural cells are still the main structure of the rural Chinese economy.
China lives on Rivers and Channels. The first forms of state centralization or collectivism in China began from the necessity to build and maintain this web of channels and sluices, very precious but also vulnerable. The historians of China foresaw the imminent fall of a dynasty when the Emperors neglected the waterways.

We arrived in Su Zhou almost by chance and we discovered a very beautiful city; run by a web of channels, not very different from what it should have been at the time of its origins.
Su Zhou, of course, reminds us of Venice. It has an ancient history. It was the residence of warrior kings. For almost 1,000 years, its silks are the most precious of all China.
When Marco Polo arrived here, was impressed by the quality of civilization of its inhabitants, who already were been using the paper money, weaved brocade, devoted themselves to literature and medicine and had “6,000 stone bridges, so tall that under each one of them a galley, or even two galleys together, could sail.”
Today it is a city of trade, factories, hard working life.

Like in all Chinese cities, women and elders volunteer to regulate the traffic and to maintain the order.

This is the best restaurant of the city.
For little cents of Yuan you can eat noodles and flat loaf. Real spaghetti and fettuccine in soy sauce. It’s not easy to accept the idea that Chinese invented everything, even the fettuccine!

But Su Zhou is popular, above all, for its gardens.
The rich mandarins, the court officers, wanted them to be built to spend the last years of rest and pension. They are mazes of stones, waters, channels, water lilies, little temples.
They still are reminders of secluded and aristocratic life, intellectual discussions, longing of nature. Every window, every rock has a meaning; even the names of these gardens.
They are called “the harmony garden” or “ the political garden of the simple man”.

It is not easy in China to enter a Buddhist temple. Almost always the temples are closed, forbidden and often deconsecrated and transformed in factories.

It’s difficult to understand also if the religious feeling has really disappeared in this country where history and philosophy have been for many centuries conditioned by Buddha or Confucius’s ideology and teaching, and where the Emperor’s power was mixed up with the divine. But today, this temple “the western garden” in Su Zhou, is visited like a museum of the past, maintained like a curiosity.

500 statues; all representing Buddha face in as many fantastic and symbolic incarnations.
The many faces of the same deity, alive in every moment of life.  A particular cult of past time personalities.

One time Nanking was a corrupt capital, the residency of the sumptuous court of Ming. Today is an industrial city, an economic center that lived in prima persona the stories of the civil war and of the communist revolution.
This old neighborhood in the middle of the most ancient Nanking, one time was the hideout of thieves and prostitutes.

The neighborhood has its own clean and efficient outpatient department. Only that every patient has been cured with needles and medicinal herbs, simple supports of no-expensive medicine practice.

These are medicinal plants; they cure flu, cough, fever, skin diseases, malaria, high blood pressure, liver’s diseases.
Little monuments remain undamaged in Nanking; some gardens, some restored pagodas.
The southern dynasties’ buildings, the monasteries fall to ruin.

The monument that Nanking is proudest is new and made of steel. It’s the bridge over the Yan Tze Chiang River. It’s 6,000 kilometers long; 50,000 workers spent 8 years to build it. The bridge is an imposing work, which joins the river’s banks, bringing together the two halves of China since then separated.

On the main square, dedicated to Nanking people, we film the labor, the daily work.

Maybe what Nanking is proudest are the schools. Every neighborhood has a Nursery, managed by the revolutionary committee.
China is a country of young people. Half of the population is less then 20 year old, but the children are the main characters. They educate them, since the first years of life, to live in community. They are quiet, obedient; rarely have tantrums.

In the classrooms, since early childhood, at the bottom of teaching are Mao’s philosophy, his language, his work’s example.
“I am a golden sunflower,” a song says. And then “The flower turns following the red sun of the Revolution”.

End of second part 

Third part

Ten million inhabitants, the second city in the world, Shanghai calls to mind – murders, drugs, corruption. But if Beijing is the capitol of the revolution’s purity, Shanghai is the most evident example of fight and transformation. In only one generation’s time span, Shanghai changed deeply its face. The residences of the western economic empires, that here had their franchises and headquarters, are today public offices. The former slaves evolved to an immense working class that became key players during this half of the century Chinese revolutions.

In this house, 108 Wang Tze Street, the history of the Communist China started.

July first 1921 a spy, maybe sent by the French police, entered through this back door, cross this courtyard, walked this hall. He ended in a bare and empty room. The men that were assembled here just run away. Those men were 12. And that day, in that room, they opened the first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party. Everything is left like it was. The table, the teapot, the porcelain cups. To end the interrupted meeting they had to hide in a boat and sail until a far away lake. Only Mao, of those 12 men, endured the storm of the history. The others died or are remembered as traitors.

In this working neighborhood of Shanghai is preserved a strange relic of the past; like a horror museum of the colonial years. These are the mud and hay huts where millions of people lived until about 25 years ago. During the Japanese war, the people drank raining water collected in holes caused by bombing.

Close to the ancient garden belonged to the Mandarin Yu, in the middle of a small lake, in the old center of Shanghai (where few decades ago nobody could enter without risking his own life), there is an elegant pavilion.

It is a teahouse reserved to the elders, the government’s retired workers and their families. It’s a strange atmosphere, nostalgic, but happy; made of memories of the past and loyalty to the present.

The Shanghai immense industrial suburb wasn’t born recently. In a way, the city has been industrialized for decades. Its products are shipped all over China, but the factories are often little more than big artisan-shed, built in a hurry. Even this oil-refinery, the major in the city, is a poor factory, made of almost scrapping materials.

The river crossing Shanghai is the Huang Po River. It’s filled with junks and big mercantile ships that come from every side of the world. The traffic in this immense river port is even bigger toward the inner part of China, along the cities reached by waterways, than toward the outside countries.

Shanghai works and produces for China.
Once upon a time, when on this bank of the river there was only a poor fisherman village, it was exactly the opposite. Shanghai was founded in the last century as city of the foreign capital.

This is a Chinese war ship. We filmed it furtively, against a prohibition, but we believe we violate no military secret.

Farther on, the river became larger and it’s no rare to see buffalos grazing along the banks. The Huang Po River doesn’t flow directly into the sea, as it looks like, but into another river, the immense Yan Tze Kiang, large as an ocean. A different color line is the boundary between the two rivers, which then, continue together into the faraway sea.

There are many factories along the banks; the workers work 8 daily hours. Factory’s trucks and bus provide their transportation.

China is opening their boundaries but for the most part it’s still an unknown world.

We were merely able to cast only a glance.
There is a saying of the ancient China “ You can draw a Tiger’s fur, but not its bones. You can draw a Man’s face, but not his heart.”

        The End

The RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) thanks the Government of the People’s Republic of China for the hospitality and the friendly assistance that made possible the making of this documentary.