Big Waves, Great Earthquakes screening series presents - Screening no. 1: China’s First Environmental Film - Big Tree County (1992) featuring an introduction by Iza Ding
fairbank.fas.harvard.edu/even...
March 19 @ 6:00pm - 8:15pm
CGIS South Room S020
1730 Cambridge St.
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
United States
Screening is free and open to the public.
Introduction: Iza Ding, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University
Moderator: Sam Maclean, Communications Manager, Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies
The screening will be preceded by a short animated film, Wind, and followed by a Zoom Q+A with filmmaker Hao Zhiqiang.
Big Waves, Great Earthquakes film screening series explores the largely unseen early history of independent film in China, beginning in the late 1980s. Wu Wenguang-who’s usually credited as China’s first independent filmmaker-has likened the emotions of this era to a “big wave”; Wu’s contemporary, Wen Pulin, was working independently even earlier, documenting the avant-garde arts scene in Beijing with his legendary, but never-completed, film, The Great Earthquake. This screening series will unearth films long-suppressed by Chinese authorities in order to rewrite the narrative of modern film history in China.
Hao Zhiqiang has said that he wants to capture “the soul of the Chinese people” with his work. His first two films do this by showing how larger forces (the wind-like momentum of history and a town that cut down the giant tree it was named after) can render society helpless to change. Wind (1988) is the first independently produced animated film ever made in China; it meditates on the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, and how it shaped the social and political attitudes of many artists and intellectuals in the late 1980s. Big Tree County (1992) may well be China’s first environmental film: While working at CCTV in the early ‘90s, Hao was inspired by a newspaper article describing a sulfur-iron mining town to haul his station’s equipment hundreds of miles to the border of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces and film a village whose “Big Tree” had been chopped down decades earlier to build the pollution-spewing, labor-exploiting sulfur-iron mine that came to define the town. This modest but rigorous example of “direct cinema” documentary registers a forceful sociopolitical activism and an uncommon concern for environmental issues.
Big Tree County directed by Hao Zhiqiang. China, 1992, documentary, 42 min.