Outside/Inside: China Through Different Decades and Different Frames

Join us for two nights of film viewing showcasing documentaries about China through the lens of European and Chinese directors — with stories spanning the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s. Discussants are U-M Postdoctoral Fellows Gavin Healy and Yukun Zeng. Followed by Q&A. Light refreshments will be served.

Wednesday, April 10

Sunday in Peking ‘Dimanche à Pekin’
Director: Chris Marker
1956, 18.5 minutes
French avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker takes the viewer on a journey through Peking — its traditions, history, and banalities of everyday life.

Chung Kuo, Cina
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
1972, first 32 minutes
Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni was invited to China in 1972, where he produced a film presenting his impressions of a five-week tour of cities, historical sites, and monuments of socialist construction. Later denounced by the Chinese government as an “anti-China clown” who employed “despicable tricks” to defame the Chinese people, the following decades have come to see a reassessment of Antonioni and his film.

How Yukong Moved the Mountains
Director: Joris Ivens
1974 (The Ball), 17.5 minutes
A supporter and documentarian of Chinese socialism since the 1930s, Joris Ivens returned to China in the last days of the Cultural Revolution to produce a multi-part chronicle of ordinary people and their place in the Chinese revolution.

Thursday, April 11

A Young Patriot
Director: Haibin Du
2015, 1 hour 45 minutes
A Chinese documentary that explores China's youths born after 1990 through 19-year-old "patriotic exhibitionist" Zhao as he begins to question nationalism and is challenged by Western influences.

The China Ongoing Perspectives (CHOP) film series is sponsored by the U-M Library and the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies.