ABSTRACT
In November 1970, one year before the United Nations agreed to admit China, Italy formally established bilateral relations with the country. on after, at the invitation of the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, Italian national television network, Radio televisione Italiana (RAI) commissioned Michelangelo Antonioni to make a documentary about the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Italian director left for China with a small crew Enrica Fico, Antonioni's partner, as assistant director. The crew's journey was a compromise, the limitations of which pushed Antonioni into a mode of looking and filming that, by his own admission, the director found liberating. This chapter considers the sense of new-found liberty and the aesthetics it has produced in the light of the enthusiastic response to Chung Kuo Cina in China since its premiere at the Beijing Film Academy. Ten years ago a new generation of Chinese got a glimpse of what China might have been like in 1971.
