Marking the 60th anniversary of “New China,” the Walker Art Center and the University of Minnesota co-present a timely series tracking the decades of political tumult and massive cultural and economic change that followed 1949’s Communist revolution. “The People’s Republic of Cinema” traces the evolution of the nation through the eyes of its most innovative filmmakers, as well as the changed landscape of its film industry.
The fourten films span from the leftist classical, made at the eve of the Communist victory, Crows and Sparrows (1949) to such “model plays” produced during the Cultural Revolution as Red Detachments of Women (1961, modern ballet version 1970) and Red Lantern (1970), from the “historical and cultural reflection” of the fifth generation like One and Eight (1983) and Yellow Earth (1984) to independent products of the sixth and the digital generations, such as Beijing Bastards (1993), Platform (2000), and Good Cats (2009, by dGenerate director Ying Liang, area premiere). As a whole, the series charts the unprecedented propulsive energies at work through years of radical transformation and looks to the future of a country still in flux – one responding both to its past and its relatively new prominence in the larger world.
