![]() There was a deep-rooted tradition of adapting theater to the screen-the very first Chinese movie ever made, The Battle of Mount Dingjun (1905), is an example of that. To understand this, you have to go back to what the movies meant to Chinese people at that time. Watching De Sica’s movies helped me see the relationship between cinema and reality in a whole new light. Instead, you feel like you’re part of an experience. But in Bicycle Thieves, you don’t feel like you’re being controlled. Cinema can so easily become an overpowering, coercive medium, with the director positioning himself as a god, leading the audience to predetermined conclusions. I even wrote in my notebook at the time about how De Sica used changes in the weather, and the turning of day into night, as a kind of organizing principle, to give the audience a tactile feeling of being in that place with those characters. But I was particularly struck by how extraordinary it was just on a visual level. We were mainly looking at Bicycle Thieves as a model of leftist social criticism. Years later, I saw it again in college, in a class where we were learning about film theory and world cinema history. That kind of poverty was familiar to me there was nothing about it that needed to be explained. Even though the foreigners had bigger noses than we did, the film looked like it might as well have been shot in my hometown. ![]() What it showed us of life in postwar Italy seemed so similar to what we were going through on the other side of the world. Bicycle Thieves was one of the movies I saw, and it left a deep impression on me. There were three cinemas near where I lived in Fenyang, and my mother had worked at one of them, so the employees there would let me in. The Cultural Revolution had just ended, and the government was digging up a lot of old movies from before the Revolution to show the public. The first time I saw Bicycle Thieves was in the late seventies, when I was around ten years old. ![]() One particular scene taught him about the power of movies to capture the joyĪnd pain of everyday life amid seismic change. Where he shared with us some reflections on one of his favorite films, Vittorio InĪnticipation of the Stateside release of his latest, Ash Is Purest White, Jia paid a visit to the Criterion office, Their cameras on some of the most urgent social issues of the day. That can be felt in at least two generations of directors who have turned Stands as the nation’s leading art-house auteur, with an international influence Small-town malaise, and economic degradation made him a controversial figure,Īnd his early work was banned by the authorities. Jia’s raw, groundbreaking depiction of petty crime, Chinese film history is rooted in genres found in classicalĪnd fantasy, and the industry’s reliance on artifice was only heightened by theĬultural Revolution, a period when filmmaking was viewed as a tool Was rebelling against decades of tradition that had drawn a hard line betweenĬinema and reality.
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