Sergueï Loznitsa. Un cinéma à l’épreuve du monde

Abstract

and temporal relationship between China and revolutionary Russia’ (143) that Soviet filmmakers wanted to create and their desire to make both films about China and films to exhibit in China (in order to radicalise Chinese audiences). This chapter ranges widely, from the animated film China in Flames (Kitai v ogne) to Vladimir Shneiderov’s 1925 expedition film The Great Flight (Velikii perelet), to Tret’iakov’s own, unmade project with Sergei Eisenstein and Eduard Tisse, Dzhungo, to the 1928 documentary Shanghai Document (Shangkhaiskii dokument) and Isaak Babel”s script for the now lost film The Chinese Mill (Kitaiskaia mel’nitsa), in which humour undermines international solidarity. Chapter 4 considers Den Shi-khua, Tret’iakov’s extensive ‘bio-interview’ of one of his Chinese students, a work that evolved over a decade of new editions in the late 1920s and early 1930s, entailing the articulation and elaboration of a new theory of both writing and reading. This complex text requires a complex analysis, a task for which Tyerman is supremely well equipped. The book’s epilogue takes the story further into the 1930s, through the work of the Chinese returnees from Moscow and, in Russia, through the journal International literature and the contribution of two Chinese intermediaries, the poet and translator Xiao San (Emi Siao) and the Peking opera actor Mei Lanfang. It concludes with numbing details on the way in which the arrests and executions of the 1930s decimated the ranks of those involved in the political and cultural reception of the Chinese revolutionary movement. Internationalist aesthetics is a staggeringly erudite, formidably argued and fundamentally important book about which a great deal more could be written than I have space for here. Its case study of political and cultural exchange between nations provides a model for approaching such issues in other areas and epochs and is particularly relevant at the present time of political and cultural competition and the battles for influence.