press
release
Secret History of Asian Cinema
at the 62nd Venice International Film Festival
Venice, 26 July 2005 – Davide Croff, President of the Fondazione la Biennale di Venezia and Miuccia Prada, President of Fondazione Prada, met in Venice at Palazzo Querini Dubois, to announce the programme of the Secret History of Asian Cinema, the section of restored and rediscovered works this year personally curated by the Festival’s Director, Marco Müller, to be presented at the 62nd Venice International Film Festival, August 31st- September 10th 2005.
The vitality of Asian cinema has need no longer be proven. More and more often, the most creative stimuli for a stylistic and thematic renewal of film-making arrive from that cinematographic continent, which, in large areas, is still unexplored. During the last 25 years in Italy and in Europe, many reviews and festivals have dug deeply into those territories, starting with the ground-breaking “Electric Shadows” (the first major retrospective of Chinese cinema, organised in 1981 in Turin by Marco Müller). Therefore, to “classic” Chinese and “genre” Japanese cinema, once again “invisible” after the following “rediscoveries” of the 1980s and 1990s, the Secret History of Asian Cinema is dedicated. This is a project that carries on the collaboration between the Biennale di Venezia, Fondazione Prada, Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali and Cineteca Nazionale, with the support of the Japan Foundation and the National Film Center (Tokyo), presented in Venice by a highly selected group of “godfathers”, including Xie Jin, John Woo, Tsukamoto Shinya and Miike Takashi.
The first section of the Secret History of Asian Cinema is a special monographic section dedicated to the Secret History of Chinese Cinema. Ten restored films will be presented, produced between the mid-1930s, at the end of the silent film period and the studios’ golden age, and moving into Revolutionary China in 1949. Together with these titles there will be: two small classic works of Shanghai genre cinema of those years, preserved at the Cineteca di Bologna; some restored masterpieces of the great director Xie Jin; and finally, two veritable “incunabula” of the modern period, the first films of the two Chinese nouvelles vagues of the 1980s and 1990s (thanks to the collaboration with the Cineteca del Friuli, which has archived copies saved by Müller). In the “classic” selection, the stress will be placed on “unusual” film-makers, those who successfully implemented a heretical combination of Hollywood and Soviet cinema, like the great Sun Yu, or those enamoured of the European avant-gardes (whilst not ignoring Hollywood), such as the innovative Yuan Muzhi. And without forgetting the great masters (a film-maker’s equivalent to Renoir and Rossellini, Ozu and Mizoguchi), as well as Fei Mu, Shen Xiling, Zheng Junli and Shi Hui. Among the rarest works are Tieshan gongzhu (The princess with the steel fan, 1941) by brothers Wan Laiming and Wan Guchan, the first feature-length Chinese cartoon. All these works, discussed since their inception by scholars and enthusiasts at an international level, were rarely presented to the public after the early 1990s and have never been, since their original release, presented in copies that revealed their original splendour.
As announced by actress and producer Xu Feng during the closing ceremony of the 61st Festival, a reconstruction project of the corpus by the most extraordinary Hong-Kong film-maker of martial arts, King Hu, is finally under way. The first of the completed restorations presents the Portrait of Patriots and Martyrs, a film of pirates and kung fu (presented more than 20 years ago in the Mezzanotte series in Venice) in its original “scope-colour” splendour.
This programme will be accompanied by a volume entitled Ombre Elettriche. Storia Segreta del Cinema Cinese (1905-2005), edited by Marco Müller and Elena Pollacchi, and published by Electa, constituting an encyclopaedia of Chinese cinema, with a collection of hitherto unpublished essays written for the occasion by the leading exponents of international research into the field and including a highly important iconographic section.
In the last ten years, Japanese cinema has presented film-makers and genres that have revealed a new aesthetic of violence and a poetic stylistic approach, which have together become important reference points for international cinema. As part of the 62nd Festival, the Secret History of Japanese Cinema explores the long development of popular cinema in the archipelago through 38 films, revealing the evolution and incubation of these genres through the work – largely unknown in the West – of some of its main pioneers. There will be screenings of the first fundamental works dedicated to sword duels of the 1920s and 1930s by Ito Daisuke and Yamanaka Sadao, which are still astonishing examples of stylistic modernity. The review will linger over the 30-year period between the 1950s and the 1970s: in the principal form of micro-monographs dedicated to the great Kato Tai, Misumi Kenji, Suzuki Seijun and Fukasaku Kinji, as well as on major works by such as Makino Masahiro, Kudo Eiichi, Okamoto Kihachi and Tanaka Tokuzo, showing the evolution of ronin to yakuza, the relationships governed by the “way of the warrior” fighting “without codes of honour”. There will also be some titles by the undisputed master of horror, Nakagawa Nobuo, together with fundamental examples of the aesthetic of the honour, with the B-movies by Mizoguchi Kenji and Naruse Mikio.
Through its President, Miuccia Prada and its Artistic Director, Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada has for the past ten years been involved in cultural production through the organization of exhibitions, catalogues and congresses concerning contemporary languages such as photography, video, sculpture, architecture and cinema. It is the private partner of the present project with a view to explore the new horizons of vision. This year, the project is once again realised with the support of the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali. The main institutional partner for the project is the Cineteca Nazionale of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia – Scuola Nazionale di Cinema.
The
delicate restoration work, which will enable all the forgotten works to
enter circulation once more, will be released in High Definition (HD)
under the supervision of Nicola Mazzanti, who is renowned for his
restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s masterpieces and of Expressionist
German films. HD copies of the restored films will be distributed through
the new circuit of “repertory theatres”. To complete this
fundamental collaboration between culture and industry, the best Italian
home-video distributors will publish a series of DVDs of the restored
films in the months immediately following the presentation of the Secret
History of Asian Cinema at the 62nd Festival, including
special content filmed in Venice. These materials will over time constitute
an extraordinary “digital film archive of Asian cinema”, forming
the basis for continuous non-commercial distribution of films in Venice,
Milan, Rome and other Italian cities, as well as in the leading film and
visual arts centres abroad, in the Asian capitals and leading Western
venues such as the Beaubourg in Paris and the Lincoln Center in New York.
For any further information please contact:
La Biennale di Venezia - Press Office, ph.+ 39 041 5218859 – + 39
041 5218861, e-mail: ufficiostampa@labiennale.org
Fondazione Prada - Press Office, ph. +39 02 546 70 981, fax +39 02 546
70 258, e-mail: press@fondazioneprada.org