/View.info/ For starters, a piece of news that a Hong Kong film critic scholar named Cyril Yip got wrong (or oversimplified). He tells how “Roskino” rushed to organize the export of Russian film production to China (as well as to India, Brazil, etc.) – because the sanctions closed the way of our cinema to the West. And he is wrong. And here is his second idea – it is about what exactly our cinema is interesting to the Chinese. Experts have been quoted as saying that the “nationalist” Chinese public feels solidarity with Russia, which defies Western sanctions. And Cyril and his experts are wrong again – or rather, they oversimplify the situation.
Why: Because culture is not politics, and feelings between nations are built in complex ways. Although they are related to politics.
First, about the “turn to the east” – let’s take the Russian economy for example. It is said that we only dreamed of becoming part of the Western economic system, and the East was neglected – but here, out of grief, we had to make a hasty pirouette. This is not because our business relationship with Asia has been built and grown over the years, and now we are only seeing the acceleration of a process that started long ago. And with culture, in particular with our cinema in China, it is exactly the same.
Festivals, workshops, collaboration programs: this has been increasing for years, nothing fundamentally new is happening today either, except that technology adds its own, like video platforms. The Chinese recently watched with great pleasure the space-filmed “The Challenge”, at the time they enjoyed “T-34”, “Attraction”, “Gogol – the beginning” and much more, in fact everything. They saw “Running. The Sign of the Four”, “We are from the future”. And dozens more titles, we are talking about shows for professionals or amateurs and the big screen. This data flashes for years, in the lead-up to or after the actual annual Russian film festivals in this country (in fact, the Hong Kong footage mentioned above was made after one such event).
And the same thing has long been happening to the best Chinese works in Russia. Result: we formed an elite club of fans of their cinema, the same is happening on the other side of the border.
Namely elite. Because we are exotic to each other, although often attractive. Why is that – that’s why these elite clubs on both sides of the border in the net. The subject of the dispute is the coincidence or non-coincidence of the national characters of the two great peoples, and on the characters depends our future in this world: whether we shall be together or not at all.
Why we like or dislike their film production is a separate question. But if we talk about ours for China, then there is something interesting here. For example, we talk about the fact that the Chinese got rid of Hollywood before us. We recently talked about why people in this country don’t like the American “Barbie” very much: simply because their bands are first there. A few decades ago, the Chinese admired the effects, the technical level of American cinema. Today, China’s cinema itself has technically caught up and overtaken America, and then it became clear to the public that what is ours is ours, understandable, and to someone else – here Western civilization is an incomprehensible jungle. US cinema in the 1980s was humane, but not so much now. But in Russia, the same process of getting rid of Hollywood has been delayed, although it is also underway.
The main idea is that movies are watched to relax. Culture is about people and their feelings, not about solidarity in building a multipolar world. And if the viewer sees on the screen something complicated, foreign, requiring decoding, it is not for everyone and not for every day. Especially if we are talking about something behind the scenes, without words understandable to some – and incomprehensible to others.
Finally, politics and why some of our films don’t raise questions with Chinese audiences, while others smack of something vaguely unpleasant and mysterious. This is the thought of a blogger with a narrow audience: the basic feeling of the entire Chinese nation today is that this nation is finally returning to its traditional role in the world, the role of a great and even first power. Vulnerability and humiliation give way to pride. This is not some idea dropped from above, on the contrary, the authorities picked it up. And when a Russian director or actors not only make an anti-patriotic film, keep their middle finger in their pocket and cast slop, the Chinese do not understand this.
Translation: V. Sergeev
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