Chung Kuo, China (1972)
By 1970, Michelangelo Antonioni had re-written the rules of cinema. Abandoning the linearity of narrative film, the gentle Italian maverick captured the mood of a battered continent and printed it on film, creating open-ended visions of glamorous existential despair. His ground-breaking 1960 arthouse drama L’Avventura hit Cannes with the force of a tidal wave, drawing screams of hatred and shouts of rapturous praise in equal measure. His next three films delved into the ghostly void at the heart of Italian society: the emptiness of free-market capitalism, the vapidity of high society, the terror of the atomic threat and the first stirrings of industrial malaise. Antonioni then went abroad, bringing his cynical eye to Swinging Sixties London and the radical California campus culture, crafting two classics of world cinema: Blow-Up and Zabriskie Point. Despite the odd critical drubbing, Antonioni had become a globally recognised cinematic poet: the official expert on the Western World’s silent post-war despair.
It was at this peak of success that Chairman Mao came into Antonioni’s life. The communist dictator’s government established contact with the master of ennui in the early 70s, inviting him to create a documentary on life in the People’s Republic of China. The Cultural Revolution had been launched in 1966 and was still in full swing, drawing international attention to Chinese society and bringing Maoism to its absolute peak of global popularity. The revolution’s atrocities were largely hidden from western audiences, allowing Maoist thought to become trendy among European intellectuals (Foucault, Sartre) and the Little Red Book to become a countercultural accessory. The director of L’Avventura travelled to China three months after Nixon’s visit, and he brought a camera with him. Mao’s government likely hoped that Antonioni’s trip would transform the Italian into a passionate supporter of Chinese communism. They would have had better luck with Jean-Luc Godard.
Antonioni made Chung Kuo: a work of anti-propaganda. It doesn’t have a narrative or an ideological perspective, refusing to discuss Maoist politics or provide a historical context for China’s development. The project’s neutral approach is spelled out within the first ten minutes by a handy line of narration: “We're not pretending to understand China. All we hope for is to present a large collection of faces, gestures, customs.” The vast majority of Chung Kuo’s 200-minute length is dedicated to ordinary street scenes, strenuously avoiding spectacle, festivities and fireworks. Antonioni laboriously documents everyday Chinese street life, following the paths of long roads, visiting factories, peering into apartment blocks, passing through schoolyards and looking over marketplaces. Chung Kuo moves southwards, starting in Beijing, passing through endless countryside, stopping in Nanjing, following the path cut by the Yangtze river and ending in the port of Shanghai. Actor Giuseppe Rinaldi provides the sparse narration, commenting directly on the sights and sounds captured by Antonioni’s 16mm camera.
Rinaldi’s narration describes the ways in which Maoism has affected daily Chinese life, but it offers no political opinion. Chung Kuo remains detached, studying another culture without comment. The subjects of the documentary are heard speaking Chinese, but not a single word is translated via subtitles, creating a constant sense of foreignness. Rinaldi’s voice is the viewer’s only guide, and it’s more often absent than present. Long stretches pass without anything but ambience: music can be heard playing through courtyards, children sing in playgrounds, pedestrians chatter, donkeys clip-clop through the centre of Beijing and flocks of chiming bicycles glide across concrete. The choice of 16mm film gives Chung Kuo the aesthetic of a home movie: footage shot by a tourist on holiday. Antonioni’s politics are carefully neutral, but his appreciation for the beauty of China’s cities and countryside is very clear. The camera is enamoured with every dark-green landscape and stretch of pavement.
The project’s avoidance of spectacle quickly becomes part of its texture. Antonioni’s camera visits Tiananmen Square, and passes through the enormous empty spaces of Beijing’s forbidden city, but it doesn’t capture state-organised rallies, national celebrations or historical lectures; only weathered old stone, curious faces and clothes cut from thick cloth. Antonioni began his career as a documentarian, capturing the poverty endured by the People of the Po Valley, and his expansive Chinese film is tonally consistent with this early short. No matter the location, an Antonioni documentary sees the common citizen’s routines of work, travel and housekeeping take precedence over the grander details of politics and industry. The human face always dominates the frame; the individual rising above their environment as the mystery of their emotions provides an infinite supply of cinematic fuel.
Chung Kuo was Antonioni’s first collaboration with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, a flamboyant stylist who restrained himself on this one occasion, creating vivid, tactile frames full of dust, dry grass and stone. Chung Kuo is dominated by earthy colours: the light brown of dried soil, the black of shade and the yellow-white of ancient rocks left to bleach under the sun. In line with Antonioni’s rejection of extravagance, Tovoli subdues every strong colour, leaving the red of Tiananmen Square an impression rather than a fact. Despite Antonioni’s austerity, moments of stylishness break through. As Dan Edwards points out in an excellent Senses of Cinema article, each episode of Chung Kuo ends with a performance. These are the project’s only moments of overt showmanship, capturing a puppet theatre in Beijing, a school sports day in Nanjing and a spectacular acrobatic display in Shanghai. The sports day section includes the project’s most dynamic act of direction: a handheld long take moves from a classroom interior, across a courtyard and into a line of marching pupils. The easy-going montage style is shattered, leaving an impression of uniformity and unbroken, graceful motion.
There’s a fascinating tension between Antonioni’s focus on the prosaic details of humanity and his communist minders’ desire for sanitised propaganda. The director scans across a crowd and picks out a single figure, following them for a while as they cross the street or pick through a vegetable display. In a Maoist propaganda film, the individual citizen wouldn’t get this much attention: the collective would always take precedence. Antonioni works differently because he was cinema’s champion of the individual. If his films have a single joining thread, it’s the hidden kingdom of the human mind, the endless enigma of our emotional make-up. He found a unique emotional frequency in all of his subjects, wordlessly exploring the inexpressible through gentle study of gazes, motions and movement. In an Antonioni movie, every tilt of the head or twitch of the lips tells an epic story. When moving through China, Antonioni’s camera never captures the crowd, just small clusters of humanity. It makes every face distinct.
The more obvious tensions are described in Rinaldi’s narration. The viewer is told when Antonioni’s guides ask him to stop filming. Each time the director continues, capturing sights and sounds that Mao’s government didn’t want recorded. Antonioni secretly captures the palatial gates to the Chairman’s private residence and a Chinese battleship on manoeuvres in the port of Shanghai. Most daringly of all, he breaks with his minders to film a gathering that puts paid to Mao’s endless propaganda: a black market. Antonioni’s dedication to capturing the prosaic details of life leads him to dusty street where livestock and agricultural tools are traded for clothes and furniture. Innocuous as it may seem, depicting this marketplace punctures the red balloon of Maoist propaganda. Life exists outside central planning, and we’re allowed to witness it. This footage is invaluable and strangely beautiful.
Chung Kuo was broadcast in three parts on RAI, the Italian equivalent of the BBC, before being shown (in a truncated two-hour version) on America’s ABC network. It was an immediate success with critics, but it enraged the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and all who sympathised with it. The People’s Daily (the official newspaper of the CCP) savaged Antonioni’s documentary, calling it a ‘reactionary’ film with an ‘anti-China essence’. The hit-piece went so far as to describe Antonioni as a ‘counter-revolutionary’. The backlash was so strong that Antonioni’s safety was placed in jeopardy when the film was screened. Umberto Eco describes a bizarre and threatening scene at the 1974 Venice Film Festival, where a showing of Chung Kuo had to be protected from an angry mob by a police cordon. Enraging Italian communists was no laughing matter in the mid-70s: the decade that saw the Red Brigades kidnap and murder Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Chung Kuo was eventually screened in China, but only in 2004: thirty-two years after its creation.
Chung Kuo is a glorious work of ambient documentary film, placing the immediacy of the image above all narrative and political curation. Antonioni uses an immense span of time to cast a hypnotic spell over his audience, immersing every viewer in a sea of common culture. He doesn’t bow down to the state line, looking underneath the fluttering red banners to see the human beings passing through their lives, capturing the looks on their faces, the speed of their pace and their offhand conversations with friends and colleagues. Without the entry point of language, there is only the image. With only the image, the human face triumphs over all. Without a word of moralising or preachiness, Antonioni uses the power of his form to create a work of gentle humanism. This staggering film has been left to languish without any form of restoration. DVD copies are vanishingly difficult to obtain, and their picture quality is muddy and faded. If any film qualifies for the attention of Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, it’s this one.
Additional Sources:
Healy, G. (2024). Michelangelo Antonioni, Tourist Snapshots, and the Politics of the ‘Backward Scene’ in 1970s China. Journal of Contemporary History. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/00220094241271006.
Hoberman, J. (2017). Forgotten Masterpiece: Antonioni’s Travelogue From China. The New York Times. [online] 28 Dec. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/movies/chung-kuo-cina-antonioni-moma-forgotten-masterpiece-a-china-travelogue.html.
The (1973). Television. [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/28/archives/whose-china-is-nearer-the-truth-television.html [Accessed 28 May 2025].