https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/85490d1e-bb1b-431f-a1c1-41a20b89cace 'Comment Yukong Déplaça les Montagnes' / 'How Yukong Moved the Mountains' China, 1976, Joris Ivens & Marceline Loridan-Ivens Language Audio: ENG dub, Subs: N/A "Mobile film school Teaching western camera techniques in the style of the cinéma vérité was no easy matter: ‘Piles of extra work, e.g. the documentary studio is not set up for 16mm film, no 16mm cameras. So I have to start from scratch, no reserve cameras. No experience as yet. But it’s pleasant to work here, not to be pressed for time, or agitated by small-minded producers, money-chasing distributers (chasing for themselves alone, of course), no bureaucratic state production procedures’.[21] According to Ivens, the problem with the Chinese camera crew was simple: ‘Chinese cinema differs from ours; it’s more contemplative, more static. The camera doesn’t move, doesn’t participate in the event; it observes and ascertains. As ancient Chinese philosophy puts it: the human person between heaven and earth stares at the tens of thousands of elements in the universe. Result: the camera doesn’t move’.[22] Ivens also explains the reluctance to film people in close-up in relation to China’s cultural tradition: ‘If one takes [China’s] visual arts as a whole, then one observes that there no portraits of people outside the Buddhist tradition. I thus had to explain the role of the close-up and why filming at close quarters is so important. It all took such a long time; you need patience in China to convince people. You can’t use authority based arguments, as is often the case elsewhere. That too is the cultural revolution’.[23] Ivens and Loridan devoted several long sessions to patiently explaining what they expected of the camera people. Cameraman Li Zexiang responded to everything with the only French words he knew: ‘A demain!’. The filmmakers had little to say in Chinese by way of response." -https://www.ivens.nl/ (https://www.ivens.nl/en/163-yukong-on-cannes-classics-2014) Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:20:02 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://tankie.tube https://tankie.tube/lazy-static/avatars/3ba3ff73-a8b6-49c9-add8-9653ef090c7f.webp https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/85490d1e-bb1b-431f-a1c1-41a20b89cace All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tankie.tube/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.