https://tankie.tube/videos/watch/fbeed595-1cc9-4038-8ac5-d50e954a2480 'Comment Yukong Déplaça les Montagnes' / 'How Yukong Moved the Mountains' China, 1976, Joris Ivens & Marceline Loridan-Ivens Language Audio: ENG dub, Subs: N/A "Ping-Pong In 1971, while Ivens was hard at work collecting material for a film commission on the Netherlands, he received a message from premier Zhou Enlai via the Chinese embassy in Paris inviting him to come to China. He had first met Zhou Enlai in 1938 and had filmed in China on several occasions, but in the aftermath of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976) he had become persona non grata. The invitation was part of the prime minister’s endeavour to ease the isolation of the People’s Republic. After the initial years of complete anarchy, the closure of schools and universities, the violence of the Red Guard, the relocation of hundreds of thousands of intellectuals to the countryside, summary executions, and a serious decline in production, the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party were determined to present a positive image of normalisation to the outside world. Ping pong diplomacy got into its stride. Ivens’ friend, the American journalist Edgar Snow, was among the first to sit down with Mao Zedong, thereby offering a signal to the Americans that the door was open.[1] Snow’s interview with Mao appeared in the April 1971 edition of Life and American table tennis players shared in the excitement by being allowed to play ping pong in Beijing and to talk with Zhou Enlai. In June of the same year, the American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger travelled incognito to Beijing. The new open-door politics quickly delivered diplomatic success: Kissinger offered China membership of the United Nations and laid the groundwork for a visit from US President Nixon in February 1972. Not without reason, Nixon was later to describe his visit as ‘The Week that Changed the World’.[2] Image Improvement In the same month that Kissinger was holding his first secret talks with Zhou Enlai, Ivens and Loridan arrived in Beijing. A meeting took place on June 11th with the most senior representatives of The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries together with the Central Newsreels and the Documentary Films Studio in Beijing, at which a potential commission was discussed. Lists of other western filmmakers were in circulation, but in addition to Ivens only the Italian filmmaker Antonioni was invited to make a major film about China. Zhou Enlai knew that he could trust Ivens to ‘clean up China’s image’ as he put it, and to restore some degree of balance to the distorted view of the country generally maintained by the western press at a time when image formed a crucial part of China’s rapprochement towards the west.[3] Ivens had told a Dutch journalist earlier in the same year: ‘My work is inspired by my revolutionary convictions, rooted in a Marxist-Leninist view of society. Mao Zedong in particular has continued what Lenin started, and the relationship between the individual and society is primary in his thought. You might say: the new person will live in an authentically socialist relationship with his fellow human beings’.[4] In the preceding years of western radicalisation, Ivens had come to side more with the political direction of China and to distance himself from the Eastern Bloc. This was partly to blame for the abolition of the Joris Ivens Prize at Leipzig’s documentary film festival in 1971 and Ivens being declared persona non grata in the DDR.[5]" -https://www.ivens.nl/ (https://www.ivens.nl/en/163-yukong-on-cannes-classics-2014) Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:44:37 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/fbeed595-1cc9-4038-8ac5-d50e954a2480 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://tankie.tube/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.