China
Jasper Rees
The Great Wall is David Icke’s worst nightmare. David Icke (if you weren’t there in the 1980s) was a BBC snooker presenter. After ingesting a brain-rotting anti-elixir, he transmogrified into a doolally conspiracy theorist in a turquoise shell suit. He had a showpiece theory about lizards. Lizards – “tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids,” he specified – were hiding in underground bases and were “a force behind a worldwide conspiracy against humanity”. There are half a dozen scriptwriters credited on The Great Wall. Icke isn’t one of them but Universal Pictures should Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Mixing up your yakuzas and your triads can be a bloody business, as Takashi Miike’s films show in the goriest detail. The title of the earliest work in his “Black Society” trilogy, Shinjuku Triad Society from 1995, says it all – a Chinese criminal gang at the heart of Tokyo’s Kabuki-cho nightlife district, the traditional turf of Japan’s own deeply entrenched native criminal element. But Miike’s work – at its best when it’s most unsettling, and that's something that goes beyond the sometimes cringingly unforgettable violence – is about bringing all sorts of other different things Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
A welcome antidote to the mood of a time which seems hell-bent on closing borders and building walls, The Music of Strangers is about a unique musical collective that breaks through division and reaffirms the potential of culture to unite. Subtitled “Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble”, Morgan Neville’s film is about the band that came into being at the beginning of the millennium on the initiative of the great Chinese-American cellist, giving us snapshots from its history, as well as the stories of some of its many and varied members.It focuses on the lives of these individuals of diverse Read more ...
Graham Fuller
It’s comforting to reflect that some of the anonymous children seen in Around China With a Movie Camera – a DVD culled from films spanning 1900-48 held in the BFI National Archive – must live on today. If only the means existed to identify those former kids so they could see those moments from their pasts when they were photographed with their parents and companions.The world of their infancy has largely vanished. This haunting assemblage of surviving fragments of commercial travelogues, missionary films, and home movies (one made by British honeymooners in 1928 Beijing) captures Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Terracotta warriors, Bactrian two-humped camels, Heavenly Horses, Buddhist caves, sand dunes, the world’s first printed book, a silk factory and temples galore including one that was the great mosque in Xi’an, were but some of the ingredients in a breathless first hour in a trilogy of programmes about the world’s oldest trading routes. They were opened up by the explorer and trader Zhang Qian of the Western Han dynasty, about 2,300 years ago.The Han were experts in mobile warfare and were searching for Heavenly Horses, to use instead of their sturdy but small ponies, the better to subdue the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The playwright Anders Lustgarten has spent a considerable chunk of his life reading and writing and thinking about China, and clearly wants to set a few points straight. Tired of the persistent Western view of that country and its people as inscrutable and mysterious, and exasperated by what he sees as the clumsy anti-Maoist propaganda of popular works such Jung Chan’s Wild Swans, he has written a play that looks at the effects of the Mao years on a gaggle of ordinary people in one ordinary village – the fictional rural backwater Rotten Peach.The thrust of his argument is that the Chinese Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Last year China began formally to phase out the one-child policy which had been in place since 1979. So a drama called One Child arrives at the right time. It forms the least worshipful component of the BBC’s current China season, which mainly interests itself in food and history. Its focus is in fact not on the ruinous psychological and economic consequences for a nation of only children. Instead the drama deals with another contemporary Chinese ill: the corruption of the legal process by power and money.The irony of the title is that Liu Ying (Mardy Ma), the mother in the drama, has in fact Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The mesmerising martial arts drama The Assassin consolidates the reputation of the Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien as one of world cinema’s pre-eminent artists. Every film he has made since the emergence of his mature aesthetic – grounded in long shots, narrative economy, and the kind of emotional reticence that characterises Yasujiro Ozu’s work – has the quality of a revelatory, almost sacred text. That applies not only to such masterpieces as A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985), A City of Sadness (1989), The Puppetmaster (1993), and Flowers of Shanghai Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
China’s tumultuous recent past attempted to selectively obliterate the history of one of the world’s great and ancient civilisations, with the neatly complementary result in the past several decades of a huge upsurge in Chinese studies, East and West, from publications to exhibitions to enormous advances in archaeology. At the same time, a sense of preserving the material past has been threatened by urban development, a habit copied perhaps from the West.And here comes a six-part television history, sprawling and ambitious, of the past 4,000 years masterminded and narrated by Michael Read more ...
Sarah Kent
I think of Rose English as the performer who made Miranda Hart’s success possible. I remember seeing her back in the 1980s, improvising solo at a theatre in Chenies Street. She had the audience curling up with embarassed laughter as she took off her heavy boots, stuffed her large feet into dainty ballet pumps and slipped a delicate tutu over her too, too solid frame. While gallumphing around the stage trying to look as elegant and etherial as an anorexic ballet dancer, she addressed various topics such as ambition, longing, appearance, desire, gender and so on.It was a truly feminist Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Metal figures on the foreshore of Crosby Beach, Liverpool, set against a sunset, signify the preoccupations of Antony Gormley. The sculptor has been concerned consistently with the human figure, manifested in metal – lead or iron – casts of his own body.We were shown his career from work to work, interspersed with questions and answers between Gormley and Alan Yentob (pictured below, with Gormley), the presenter here diffident and attentive. Tim Marlowe, once connected with Gormley’s gallery White Cube (not referred to – the business of art did not get a look in, although we were told that Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Here comes the President, and with him a timely reminder about what the Chinese have been digging up over the past 40 years or so to further demonstrate their exceptional imperial history over the past two millennia. Treasures of the Jade Empire rather breathlessly told us of revelatory excavations of the tombs of the Han Emperors, and the regional kings they nominated to act as surrogate rulers over their gigantic empire – its boundaries closely related to China today. The parallel argument to the archaeology was the achievements of the Han in unifying a vast landmass, in which Han Chinese Read more ...