https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/8a7c8135-5dbf-47e9-a756-67d137419087 'Comment Yukong Déplaça les Montagnes' / 'How Yukong Moved the Mountains' China, 1976, Joris Ivens & Marceline Loridan-Ivens Language Audio: ENG dub, Subs: N/A "Crowd scene The studio people directed Ivens and Loridan in the first instance to Dazhai, the renowned and successful model village that had served as an example for the national campaign ‘Learning from Dazhai’. But a perfect village full of stereotypes and official influence was the last thing they wanted.[24] As in his earlier career, Ivens thought it better to start as far from the centre of power as possible. In August 1972, the crew travelled to the autonomous region of Xinjang-Uygur, an area three times the size of France and sharing an extensive border with the Soviet Union. Exhausting negotiations with local party bigwigs followed, however. ‘It was unbearable’, Ivens wrote, almost certainly thinking back to the rigorous censorship he had had to face when filming The 400 Million in 1938. Things came to a head in Kashgar, where he was given permission to direct ‘the grandest production of my entire career. [...] At seven in the morning, a crossroads and street after street enlivened by hundreds of extras, men and women, all of them smiling, dressed in impeccable blue, and school children, each of them wearing a brand new apron’. Loridan referred to the entire – unusable – scene as ‘Nightmare in Kashgar’. Filming far from the city and out of sight of the authorities fared better: ‘In September I filmed an important episode in West China, i.e. in the mountains and along the edge of part of the Gobi Desert. Together with Marceline and our film crew (8 people, including two translators) I came across a nomad campsite full of Kazakhs herding scores of sheep, cattle and horses from the mountain grasslands to winter them in the lower-lying valleys; a magnificent mountain landscape at an altitude of 1800 metres’.[25] By the beginning of October the filmmakers were back in Beijing where Ivens was hospitalised after a bout of bronchitis and Hong Kong flu. The few months’ rest was a question of necessity, not only because of illness, but also because it took two months for Zhou Enlai to react to the complaints they had submitted to him by letter. They had pointed out that it made no sense to continue their work in the face of so many obstacles. They had only managed to film for 37 days in a period of six months and 7000 meters of film had been wasted in training Chinese cameramen and fending off party officials. Zhou Enlai finally responded, however, by appointing a new supervisor. As a result, the film crew underwent a serious metamorphosis." -https://www.ivens.nl/ (https://www.ivens.nl/en/163-yukong-on-cannes-classics-2014) Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:25:55 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/8a7c8135-5dbf-47e9-a756-67d137419087 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tankie.tube/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.