Reviews & Ratings for
Chung Kuo - Cina More at IMDbPro »

11 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Appearances certainly are deceptive, 14 March 2007

Author: webbertiger from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

For some reason, it's not easy to get sufficient information of this movie from this website. This movie has never been popular. Not many people have watched it. To make the situation worse, the limited available information is not even accurate enough. So I will try to share more background story of this movie when I make my comments.

Being invited by the Chinese government, Antonioni spent eight weeks in China to make this documentary. Eight weeks are very short for making a movie. Antonioni said that he "can't offer more but only show a picture of China." After this movie was completed, however, the Chinese government harshly condemned this film as well as Antonioni. In consequence, this film has never been publicly released in China. This consequence also affected Antonioni, which made this movie would never become one of his favorites, and this movie was not available for most audiences all over the world, including the United States.

Generally speaking, this is a very interesting movie, even though the pace is a little bit slow sometimes. The version I watched includes three parts. The first and second parts each last one hour and twenty minutes, and the third part lasts almost one hour. So the total length is more than three hours, and you may want to give some patience if you like finishing it at one time. It was said the original version even lasted for four hours.

As a documentary, this film was composed of many "snatches", which could be either prepared or unprepared. Prepared snatches were what the Chinese government wanted to display to Antonioni, such as the well-trained children in a primary school singing political songs, or the Yangtze River Bridge in Nanking as an achievement of architecture. Unprepared snatches were those freely filmed by Antonioni. Intentionally or not, these two types of snatches were interwoven in the film and created a special style that's quite different from other documentaries. It were the unprepared snatches that irritated the Chinese government.

It's definitely not about acrobat, although acrobat was also filmed. It is about the Chinese society, especially the lives of regular people who were living in the cities or rural areas during the early 1970's in China.

For those who are interested in Chinese modern history, they do not want to miss the history of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, launched by Mao Tse-tung. Nowadays, it may not be too hard to collect stories that happened during that era from novels or other materials that you can get from a library or online. However, I've scarcely seen a movie like this showing the *real* lives of those people. That is not a story. Instead, that is a page of life, recorded in a film by a great film maker. There were so few movies available to let you know this, which was another reason that made this movie very special.

Among the three parts of this film, the first part focused on Beijing. It's quite different from today's Beijing. Antonioni and his crew were shown a primary school where kids were playing, a hospital where a woman was giving a cesarean birth, and some factories and workers. The kids at the primary school were singing political songs and dancing with similar music that were taught to acclaim the leadership of Mao Tse-tung and the communist party. Even though the prepared snatches were not natural (it's ridiculous for those cute children to sing these songs), I would say they also made this film very valuable as they were first-hand materials collected from that society.

The second part was about Hunan Province and two cities: Suzhou and Nanking. In Hunan, villagers were shy but they also showed great curiosity, since they had rarely seen a foreigner. You can tell that plot was not prepared by the government. Suzhou was considered as "the Venice of China." Antonioni said it was a "very beautiful city with traditional culture." In Nanking, people were not so shy, but they were a lot busier than those in Hunan villages. Antonioni only gave less than one minute to the bridge above Yangtze River that the government was proud of; he used most time to show how people carried heavy stuff, walked in the street, and made a living.

The third part showed Shanghai, the biggest industrial city in China. There the European-style buildings that had used to be business centers were used as government offices. He was shown a steel-making factory. He also filmed some restaurants, where people were enjoying noodles. He said, "We don't feel happy when we hear Chinese always say they invented spaghetti."

The narration ended with an old Chinese saying, "Appearances certainly are deceptive." It's profound and very interesting.

6 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
A Nutshell Review: Cina, 21 June 2008

Author: DICK STEEL from Singapore

It was very strange indeed when the Chinese government of the time banned this film and called it anti-Chinese propaganda. Surely, the communist government then had watched Zabriskie Point and perhaps agreed that its ending of blowing up consumerism literally in your face, warranted the commissioning of Michelangelo Antonioni to shoot a documentary about China, and probably expected some beholden, pro-communist doctrine look at the state of things in the country, where the positives exalted and the negatives swept under the carpet.

Alas Cina in my opinion stayed quite objective, and doesn't offer any judgmental criticism through its eye in the camera lenses, either for or against policies that unfolded in front of them. For the period of time that Antonioni and his crew were the host of the Communist Part in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, what we got instead was an extremely fascinating look at the facets of live within the iron curtain, from major sights and recognizable attractions, to the lesser seen mundane activities of the everyday lives of the average joe.

A magnum of a movie unfolding itself in 3 parts, we begin this rare look of a journey into China during its Revolution, and if pictures can tell a thousand words, what more moving images? Starting off at a defining location in Tiananmen Square, there are some subtle differences at the Square then, and now. The theme song for the documentary happened to be "I Love Tiananmen Square" which schoolchildren sing with gusto, and we see later how the little tykes get indoctrinated quite innocently through propaganda infused into song and dance that they participate enthusiastically. Besides this recognizable landmark, it became like a journey through time as we also get to look at The Forbidden City, as well as The Great Wall in its pre-restored state of today, sans millions of tourists too, and witness broken, unmended sections that riddled the monument which was referred to as not one built by an Emperor, but one built by slaves.

It's a rare treat indeed because the filmmakers dare to push the boundaries of permission granted to them, where on occasions even after explicitly being told "No" to filming a particular moment or location, the camera still rolls anyway, and we're told and get to see just exactly what was forbidden, which I think in today's context, is nothing to get riled up with. We get an observation of a slice of everyday life, where the camera lingers on to provide strange yet intriguing images such as a typical work day in a factory, women with bound feet, and amazing sights and sounds such as a man riding a bicycle and practicing Qigong simultaneously! We also get explained certain policies of the communists at the time, which seem quite unbelievable that home rentals are capped at 5% of whatever your monthly salary is, or how workers work with a general lack of anxiety and urgency.

In true Antonioni fashion, we get to see luxurious shots of vast landscapes in the country as they make way to the rural areas, such as the Honan Province and the Yellow River, in a balance with city landscape shots in Shanghai and Suzhou. It's this fine balance of the rural and the urban, of Chinese people living and working in both contexts in the country, that I thought makes this documentary quite a winner.

But what was truly fascinating, were the carefully prepared episodes that pepper the documentary. One unforgettable episode that you must see for yourself, is something of a celebration of Chinese traditional medicine vis-a-vis modern Western medicine. I just cannot imagine how acupuncture is used as an anesthesia for a Cesarean section, as we see incredibly long needles poked into a woman to numb her womb and nerves, as doctors both work on getting her newborn out, while talking, and feeding(!) her at the same time! It's so unsettling at I was tempted to look away when the scalpel cuts through flesh, yet on the other hand, just refused to blink with wide-eyed amazement at how this feat was performed, and wondered if it's still being performed until this day! Something else I found peculiar, was how the last act rattled on like an acrobatics variety show. Granted that for an audience of the time, they might have found it to be an experience watching it, but somehow, I thought it was a sense of deja vu, whether or not having to watch that particular segment on some other variety show on television (could be this one, I'm not too sure), but the stunts performed were found to be quite familiar. I believe some would have made their way as a standard export items for travelling Chinese acrobats to arm themselves with in their travels overseas, and I'm fairly certain some I've seen in Chinatown some years back. But anyway, it's still quite something Cina as a documentary film was one which was draped with fascination for both filmmakers as well as an audience, rather than championing anti-whatever sentiments from either side of the world. Not having seen many movies, either features, shorts or documentaries made during the Cultural Revolution era or about that era in question (propaganda included), I think this Antonioni film has more than made its mark as a definitive documentary that anyone curious about the life of the time, would find it a gem to sit through.

14 out of 22 people found the following review useful:
Interesting because it is an Antonioni film, 25 October 2000

Author: medmai from Mnch, Germ

This documentary film was made by Antonioni during a Stay of five weeks in China invited by the Chinese government. In the soon 70' there was scarcely any information of China, so this was the oportunity to take a look to this country. Antonioni as the narrator says it at the beginning: "We have just wanted to get a picture of China, we can't offer more". The film shows a lot of faces and tries to show the custom, gestures of the Chinese. It is apparently rather neutral politically, but some clues show that Antonioni felt the repression existing in China. But it is also very interesting as an Antonioni film: it was made between "Zabriskie Point" and "The passenger", his final and definitive masterpiece. In those years, Antonioni changed some of his opinions about cinema and these aspects are very interesting to see in Chung Kuo.

3 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
The true situation then in China., 15 January 2006

Author: suede_filmstar from China

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

As a Chinese,I want to say Antonioni told us the very true situation in the early 70s during the ridiculous culture revolution.Mao Zedong ruined China.he repressed his people poisoning people's minds.Mao himself lived as an emperor,and we got what's seen in the movie.People were naive back then.They wore the same clothes(that's unbearable).They don't have enough meat to eat.THere was a scene in the film,that's the crew went to shoot an working class family's everyday life in Beijing,the family had hair-tail fish for the lunch,I think that's prepared by the red government to show Chinese people have enough food to eat.The truth is when they came to Lin Xian in Henan Province,striking poverty existed.They were encouraged to give birth to a lot of babes.Today,there are too few resource for so many population.China is still weak due to Mao's stupid policies!!!There still poverty is everywhere. SIGH!I just hope dictators would never and ever exist in China!!! About the ending ,I am confused .why acrobatic show was offered with such a long take.?That was stupid?

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