Recently, London's National Film Theatre presented the West's first historical retrospective of Chinese cinema, in a major series consisting of over 50 films made over last 45 years. Our program consists of three of these rare films, programmed by Steve Horowitz. Tomorrow evening's program will be introduced by Steve Horowitz and Scott Meek who, along with Tony Rayns, organized the London program and published extensive historical notes on the films in “Electric Shadows: 45 Years of Chinese Cinema,” a British Film Institute publication. In their introduction to the NFT notes, Meek and Rayns comment:
“The cinema of China has remained almost entirely unknown in the West. If we have an image of it at all, it is almost certainly one of the ‘heroic' posturings associated with the Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s. In China itself, it is only since the overthrow of the ‘Gang of Four' that the public has had the chance to rediscover the richness, range, and achievement of its own cinematic heritage....
“The earliest films in our selection were made in the 1930s, a time of great social and political turbulence in China, by young talents who found ways of supporting the ideas of the radical May 4th Movement, despite KMT censorship. Their work skilfully combined entertainment values (many learned from Hollywood) with a passionate determination to confront the issues of the day: poverty, unemployment, government cor-
ruption. They came together (from backgrounds in theatre, literature, and music) in a spirit of collaboration virtually unmatched in world cinema. Films like Street Angel and Crossroads reflect their extraordinary creative energy, as well as a political commitment that matured in the late 1940s into the anger of films like The Spring River Flows East and Crows and Sparrows. Such films were to shape the Chinese cinema for many, many years....” (excerpt)
