17 December 1991. Italy is the first country in the world where Lanterne Rosse, fourth feature film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou (former director of photography and leading exponent of the so-called “fifth generation” of Chinese filmmakers, already nominated for an Oscar two years earlier for the equally valuable Ju Dou), was distributed in cinemas after the Silver Lion for Direction won in Venice where it had been presented in competition a few months earlier. These are the last years in which the “festival” works still manage to impose themselves on us with economically important results; but also those in which the cinema of the People’s Republic of China completes the process of detachment from its original nature of “state art” (read: propaganda cinema, as Zhang himself remembers in his just released, and beautiful, One Second) and to finally circumvent those stringent limits imposed by the decade of the Cultural Revolution that not even Deng Xiaoping’s reforms had really managed to eradicate. With the formation and affirmation of names such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou himself or Tian Zhuangzhuang, Chinese cinema becomes subtly “subversive” (and therefore unwelcome to the communist authorities, who will not infrequently impose very heavy vetoes and censorships. Red Lanterns, for example, at home the exit was forbidden), bypasses the rules and finds an easy welcome in the major international festivals, ready to make their own the subtexts and metaphors of works in which almost always the representation of events related to past history of China is a pretext to metaphorize its present and place oneself in openly antagonistic positions. The “feminist” strength of Red Lanterns is an example of this productive and ideological process: and becomes the founding element of a huge international success that culminated in a second Oscar nomination for Zhang, then sensationally not “transformed” for the victory in surprise of the Mediterranean by Gabriele Salvatores.
December 16, 2021 | 10:26
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