Movies: China on film at Walker
It might not have Jim Carrey in 3D, but I'll take the Walker Art Center's cinema over a suburban cineplex any day.
Since the Walker opened its $130 million expansion in 2005, the theater that once also housed performing arts has become a full-time film house, with programming you often can't find anywhere else. More than 190 films played there last year.
Following an impressive Coen brothers retrospective, the Walker is starting a series that's as ambitious as they come: "The People's Republic of Cinema: 60 Years of China on Film." This year marks the 60th anniversary of Communist rule, and the 14 films -- showing at the Walker and the University of Minnesota's Bell Museum -- will trace China's growth and hardships through the eyes of its filmmakers.
Friday night's film at the Walker is exactly 60 years old -- "Crows and Sparrows" was completed just as the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists was coming to an end.
"The filmmakers had to have their script approved, and they were rewriting it as things were changing in the news," film curator Sheryl Mousley said. "The revolution was literally at their doorstep."
While you might expect a bunch of documentary snoozers, all of these movies are narrative features. Just don't come looking for kung fu flicks or John Woo shootouts. That's Hong Kong cinema. This is mainland China, whose cinematic history is fraught with censorship. That's not to say this series is filled with propaganda films. In fact, it's the opposite -- the movies abound with subversive messages. Most of all, the filmmakers relate stories of normal people striving under a repressive system.
The seeds of the series were planted almost a decade ago when Mousley began traveling to China, researching films for the Walker.
"I had heard that there was this whole underground scene," she said, "movies that were being made but couldn't be shown in public. I tapped into that community and was brought into these underground screening rooms where you could watch this material."
A retrospective of this size is rare. It can be difficult to track down usable 35-millimeter prints of these films, said associate curator Dean Otto. Chen Kaige's "Yellow Earth" is probably one of the more well-known films in the series, but Otto knows of only two prints in the world, and one was already loaned out. The other arrived at the Walker just days ago from Australia's National Film and Sound Archive.
