Liu Beilin
China, France | 2014 | 40 min
World premiere
Languages : Chinese, English
Subtitles : English, French

On 8 August 1966, Chairman Mao launched the anti-bourgeois Cultural Revolution which was intended to lead the Chinese proletariat towards its ultimate liberation. “And then...” nothing proceeded as planned. In this caustic essay on the Great Helmsman’s last bluff, which continues to be celebrated in a contemporary China devoured by unbridled consumerism, Liu Beilin updates the  “discrepant” editing technique so dear to the lettrist cinema of Isidore Isou.

In Traité de bave et d'éternité, 1951, Isidore Isou invented lettrist cinema, based on discrepant sound and image editing. In reference to this principle, Liu Beilin offers a caustic vision of the heritage left by the anti-bourgeois Cultural Revolution launched by Chairman Mao Zedong in the mid-1960s, which was intended to lead the Chinese proletariat towards its ultimate liberation. In China, I Love You, the young filmmaker edits sound loops from Traité with fragments of political speeches from 1966, forming a monolithic mantra that other very current sounds interrupt – advertisements for a fast-food chain, the trailer for the modern “martial arts film” Cockpuncher with Steven Seagal, weather bulletins, the song Gangnam Style – as well as archival footage of withered beauty showing daily life in China during the Cultural Revolution: smiling Red Guards, morning gymnastics, dignified farmers... all the clichés of the time in the Empire of the Great Helmsman. But the testimony of a teacher, humiliated and tortured during this “blessed” period, and the deafening continuum of today’s consumer society, abruptly highlight what was the future of an illusion.   

Emmanuel Chicon

Trailer

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