The great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni was at the height of his fame and his creative powers when he came to China in 1972 to document the revolution. He had the blessing of Communist authorities and was an intellectual left-winger who sympathized with China's new society.
When he completed his cinematic portrait of workers and farmers in China's cities and villages a few months later, he could never have guessed that it would be 32 years before the documentary would be shown freely to a Chinese audience.
To Mr. Antonioni's shock and confusion, his film was vilified by the Communists, who denounced him as anti-Chinese and "a worm who speaks for the Russians." His films were banned by the hard-liners who had seized control of China at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, and he became the target of relentless, vitriolic attacks in the state news media. Under pressure from Beijing, several foreign screenings of the film were cancelled, and Italy's Communists picketed his appearance at a Venice film festival.
Three decades later, still alive but in poor health, the filmmaker has at last achieved victory over his persecutors. When his four-hour documentary was screened to 800 people at the Beijing Film Academy as part of an Antonioni retrospective last weekend, it marked a moment of vindication for the 92-year-old director - and a significant shift in China's cultural policies.
It was the first public screening in China of the film, entitled Chung Kuo (the Chinese name for the country).
Indeed, it was the first time any film by Mr. Antonioni had been shown in China; they were all banned after the documentary controversy.
The director, celebrated in the West for enigmatic art-house favourites such as L'Avventura and Blow-Up, has been unable to speak more than brief syllables since suffering a near-fatal stroke in 1985. He was too ill to fulfill his long-held dream of seeing his film shown in China, but his wife, Enrica, sent a letter to the Beijing audience on his behalf.
"The idea that Chung Kuo can now be publicly seen in Beijing gives him enormous satisfaction and totally vindicates his efforts," she wrote. "Michelangelo regards this as a sign of great opening-up and change on the part of the Chinese side."
The documentary was proposed by Italian officials in 1971, shortly after Italy (and Canada) established diplomatic relations with Communist China for the first time. The idea was approved by Beijing, and Mr. Antonioni spent five weeks filming in 1972, shooting 80 hours of footage of a country that was still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution and that foreigners rarely visited.
In its first screening in Rome in early 1973, Chinese diplomats praised the film. But soon it was caught up in a Beijing power struggle. Hard-line zealots from the "Gang of Four," led by Mao Zedong's wife, Jiang Qing, used the film as a hammer against their rival, Premier Zhou Enlai, who was seen as an architect of the opening to the outside world.
The hard-liners complained that a foreign "imperialist" had been allowed to "defame the revolution and insult our people." In an editorial in the People's Daily in 1974, Mr. Antonioni was denounced for showing "unfruitful lands, lonely old people, tired animals and ugly houses."
The director was deeply hurt by the attacks and by the Italian government's failure to defend him. His bitterness continued for many years. After the economic changes that followed Mao's death, Chinese officials approached the filmmaker in the early 1980s to see whether he might be willing to visit China again. He demanded an apology for the attacks, but the Chinese refused and the visit never was made. In 2002, both sides talked of screening the film in China, but the idea was scuttled at the last minute when Beijing changed its mind.
Despite the vast changes in China in recent years, it took courage for Beijing to allow the film to be screened today, Italian officials said. The Cultural Revolution remains a sensitive and ambiguous subject for Chinese authorities, who have never apologized for the millions of lives it shattered. In Mr. Antonioni's case, the decision to screen his films is as close to an apology he is likely to get.
"It's a small, hesitant change, but a change," an Italian diplomat said. "It's a way for the new leadership to show the changes without much risk to themselves."
Chung Kuo bears all the marks of Mr. Antonioni's distinctively oblique style, the same enigmatic approach that caused such controversy in the cinema world when L'Avventura was released in 1960. The film contains not a single interview and not a single sentence of political analysis. The filmmaker deliberately rejected the conventions of script or story.
"I went to China not in order to know it but to have a look and to record what was passing in front of my eyes," he said later.
The film succeeds as an artistic work and as a portrait of ordinary life in an isolated country. With his customary detached tone and extremely long takes, the camera gazes at the Chinese people, their faces and movements. Long scenes pass without a word beyond the hubbub of background conversation and the sound of bicycle bells and street noise.
"Even today, the film is still fresh and natural and modern," said Mr. Antonioni's long-time collaborator, Italian director Carlo di Carlo, who helped edit the documentary in 1972. "What's very important is the slowness and reflectiveness of it, which is very Chinese, in a way. Antonioni's film language, in its understanding of time and space, is very close to the Chinese aesthetic."
The film's narrator makes it clear that the authorities had tried to control Mr. Antonioni's camera, forcing him to shoot some street scenes secretly. But the film remains sympathetic to the Communist regime, praising it for reducing malnutrition and even expressing envy for the leisurely pace of life in Chinese cities. "There seems to be neither anxiety nor hurry," the narrator says.
For the audience in Beijing, the film was a journey to a land long ago and far away, as alien as any distant galaxy. Most of the audience members were young people who knew little of the Cultural Revolution beyond the stories they might have heard from their parents. They gazed in fascination at the women in pigtails and drab clothing, the men in Mao suits and badges, the mud streets lacking any billboards, souvenir stands or glitzy trappings of today's capitalist economy.
Many of the Chinese audience members could not help laughing at the Maoist songs and revolutionary posters that the film captured. They giggled when an elderly woman explained that she had few grandchildren because "to build a socialist society, small families are better." They chuckled at the scenes of kindergarten children marching like Chinese soldiers, singing songs of praise to the People's Liberation Army.
"The people in those times were affected too much by propaganda," said Zheng Tianxin, a 19-year-old university student who attended the film. "They had even lost the ability to revolt."
Xu Qi, a 26-year-old bank clerk, said she was glad the film was no longer banned. "Certainly it was not a propaganda film," she said. "If anyone held such a view, it's a big insult to a real artist like Antonioni. A true artist will never obey the requirements of others."
Geoffrey York