Sin Wai Kin Chinese Humanities Development Fund Modern and Contemporary Chinese Culture Talk Series - A Tale of the Wind: Joris Ivens, the Internation Avant-Garde, and Modern China

My interest in Joris Ivens (1898-1989) grew out of my previous work on the Chinese avant-gardist Tian Han and his generation of interwar international avant-gardes, and my recent work on the global travels of the White Snake legends and their powerful interventions in contemporary politics and cultural transformations. Ivens’s last film, Une histoire de vent (A Tale of the Wind), made on location in China and finalized in 1988, provides a good entryway for me to continue thinking through several important relationships, including those between fiction and documentary, between biography and history, and between private life and collective experience. In this talk, I will try out three layers of interpretation by first offering a close reading of the film text as a tribute to the art of filmmaking and a testimony to the power of the camera. I will then try out a biographical interpretation with a focus on the female visual artists that shaped Ivens growth as a socially engaged avant-gardist filmmaker. Last but not the least, I will trace Ivens’s engagement with China in search of the many possible interpretations of the meaning of the wind in the film, which hopefully will lead us to a deeper understanding of China throughout the twentieth century through Ivens’s camera. 

Liang Luo is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Kentucky and the author of The Avant-Garde and the Popular in Modern China (University of Michigan Press, 2014) and The Global White Snake (University of Michigan Press, 2021). Professor Luo’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities at Stanford University, the National Research Foundation of Korea at Ewha Womans University, the International Center for the Studies of Chinese Civilization at Fudan University, and the Humanities Research Centre at Australian National University, among others. She is working on a new book and documentary project, Profound Propaganda: The International Avant-Garde and Modern China.