https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/d4fcc6bd-abcb-49af-9c14-03b6c35802b5 'Comment Yukong Déplaça les Montagnes' / 'How Yukong Moved the Mountains' China, 1976, Joris Ivens & Marceline Loridan-Ivens Language Audio: ENG dub, Subs: N/A "The Roof of the World During the months of waiting, Ivens took the time to integrate his encounter with the desert and the highest peaks in Xijiang and Tibet into a film scenario for his international film. The idea was to film China from the air, from the perspective of the clouds and the wind, and at four different altitudes. The concept dated back to the end of the 1950s, a concept he had wanted to incorporate in Mistral and Rotterdam Europort but without success. The scenario begins with: ‘First level (tempo and rhythm of an Adagio). Overture: ‘Serene silence in the high mountains. Immense landscape with mountain ranges spread out in space ... a pure domain, white from ever-present snow. A clear blue sky. The film hones in on a conjunction of mountains, formed long ago by nature’s enormous powers – one senses The Roof of the World. [...] A small red spot becomes visible on a white slope. The camera swoops down towards it (airplane nose-dive). It is a red flag in the middle of a tent encampment, clearly a scientific expedition. The image soars upwards once again and somewhere in the skies sparse clouds disperse. Traces of powerful avalanches on the slopes below. The camera drops dramatically to follow a glacier; boulders, piles of snow, masses of ice – what energy – cold, blue, transparent, grey, luminous. Via the first rivulets in the snow, the sources of China’s mighty rivers, the camera reaches the snow line, where the image accelerates at breakneck speed, via a rugged landscape, out of focus, loess plateaus, the colours change to brown, grey, green, black, the acceleration is staggering – things can no longer be distinguished – the images become streaks, blotches, smudges that fall from the top to the bottom of the screen, announcing the second level.[26] Romantic revolutionary The scenario continues in the same vein for several pages, to a third and fourth level; the images extend to include the length of China, 5,500 km, via the Taklamakan Desert and the Great Wall to the cities and planes along the coast with its fishermen and the port of Shanghai, across the sea towards Taiwan. Everything has to move, change; human beings change the face of nature and of history. The scenario is ultimately a combination of Ivens’ own films – Creosote, Song of the Rivers, Mistral – John Fernhout’s Sky over Holland (1969) and Artavazd Pelechian’s Four Seasons (1975) in ‘une style romantique révolutionaire’. The film plan had to be ready by July 1973 when the crew was scheduled to leave Beijing and, as Ivens himself observed, because the aerial shots had to be filmed in the summer. Ivens refused to let go of his ‘sequence avion’ throughout Yukong’s years-long production process. He later abandoned it with a view to turning it into a separate film, reinstated it as one of the longer segments of Yukong, and finally had to give it up completely because the Chinese did not place the necessary airplanes at his disposal. The scenario remains important nevertheless, because the concept and the locations – Taklamakan Desert and the Great Wall – serve as the point of departure for his Tale of the Wind, in which the red flags and other references to passing political movements disappear, although he does take a swing at the stubborn local officials who provoked him beyond measure in Kashgar and elsewhere." -https://www.ivens.nl/ (https://www.ivens.nl/en/163-yukong-on-cannes-classics-2014) Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:23:23 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/d4fcc6bd-abcb-49af-9c14-03b6c35802b5 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tankie.tube/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.