Truth in Chinese Cinema?
JONATHAN LANDRETHIn 1997, as James Cameron’s Titanic sank box office records around the world—including in China—Sally Berger, assistant film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, worked to bring New York moviegoers a raft of Chinese movies they’d never heard of.The fourteen films in the...
“Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” Hits the Road
JONATHAN LANDRETHDebut filmmaker Alison Klayman has been on a global tour with her documentary—Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry—a film about one of China’s most provocative artists and activists, which this week, was named one of fifteen films put on a short list to be considered for a...
Chinese Movie Mogul Promises New Party Leaders Will...
JONATHAN LANDRETHA wise old cartoon turtle in Kung Fu Panda advises Po, the portly black and white star of the 2004 DreamWorks Animation blockbuster film, not to fret about honing his fighting skills, but rather to focus on the moment and do his best.“Yesterday is history, tomorrow’...
Review: “The Revolutionary”
JEFFREY WASSERSTROMThe Revolutionary, a new documentary that has begun showing on university campuses and at cultural centers, looks at the life of Sidney Rittenberg, a ninety-year-old man who has had an extraordinary variety of experiences. Born into a well-to-do South Carolina family in 1921, he...
Being Bingbing
RIAN DUNDONFan Bingbing has been in the spotlight since she was sixteen. Today, she is one of the most well-known actresses in China. Initially celebrated as a teenager for her roles in the TV dramas that play to captive audiences across China’s provinces, she has since reinvented herself...
China Through An Independent Lens
LA FRANCES HUIChinese documentaries have gained global attention in the past decade or so, thanks partly to the creative originality of young filmmakers and partly to a rapidly changing China that fascinates viewers from around the world. Wang Bing’s nine-hour epic West of the Tracks (2003...
Art, Politics and Commerce in Chinese Cinema
STANLEY ROSENArt, politics, and commerce are intertwined everywhere, but in China the interplay is explicit, intimate, and elemental, and nowhere more so than in the film industry. Understanding this interplay in the era of market reform and globalization is essential to understanding...
Unjust Desserts
JONATHAN D. SPENCECan there be any justice in today’s China? It is the deepest question that the film director Zhang Yimou has asked so far. His best-known earlier films, sexually supercharged, suffused with violence or the threat of it, always found some politically neutral ground by pretending...