“One Second”: Zhang Yimou’s nostalgic film about the Cultural Revolution is coming to cinemas late and probably heavily altered by the censors
It’s not often that biopics are shot about people who make films themselves. But a film about Zhang Yimou would be worthwhile. The first scene could take place in Beijing on the evening of August 8, 2008, at the Olympic opening ceremony. Zhang is staging the most expensive live show in history, budgeting $300. 2000 drummers chanted Confucius: “When friends come from far away, isn’t that a cause for celebration?” Steven Spielberg had canceled as artistic advisor – in protest against China’s support of the political leadership in Sudan and thus the genocide in Darfur. So the sovereignty remained in the hands of China’s most famous filmmaker, Zhang Yimou.
Flashback, the Chinese city of Xianyang in the 70s. Zhang slaves away in a textile factory, his family is among those persecuted in the Cultural Revolution. In 1978, however, he was admitted to the Beijing Film Academy. After initial successes as a cameraman for Chen Kaige, he won the Berlinale in 1988 with his first film “Rotes Kornfeld”; the visually stunning cinema of China’s “fifth generation” is sweeping the world. In his own country, however, Zhang’s films remain under lock and key. That only changes when he switches to opulent genre cinema. With the martial arts epic “Hero” he finally reached the home audience. What it sees is not a little reminiscent of the state-supporting epics of the Cultural Revolution – when tens of thousands of soldiers filled the screen.
“I don’t do politics”
And again we are in the Olympic Stadium with our biopic: while the drummers work on their bronzed instruments with glowing sticks, the preferred camera angle is the long shot: moved diagonally, the camera section transforms the crowds into semi-abstract ornaments. Every hand movement blends into the finest shades. “I don’t do politics, I make films,” the director explains to the press. And not only does he look like it, he also sounds like Leni Riefenstahl, with whose style his “hero” has already been compared.
Whatever twists and turns our biopic might have in store, his film “One Second” might be good for the last one: In 2019, Zhang was back in the Berlinale competition with this drama from the time of the Cultural Revolution. The world premiere was canceled shortly beforehand – due to “technical problems”. In the language of the censors, these are mostly political.
So now, after almost two years under lock and key, the film is coming to German cinemas in a probably heavily modified version – halfway to the start of streaming on Mubi in September. And who would have thought: He approaches the year 1975 from that angle which in China is also associated with nostalgia among many who suffered: the propaganda films celebrated even in the remotest collective farms. Compared to Zhang’s epics, it’s a chamber play – even if it starts with a big picture. A nameless fugitive (Yi Zhang) fights his way through sand dunes, escaping from a prison camp where he ended up after a fight for re-education. His destination is the nearest cinema, where he hopes to see a certain newsreel. Someone thinks they recognized his daughter in it, who has renounced him since imprisonment.
Like in a Chaplin film
Too late for the performance, he wants to go to the next district cinema, which is showing the film the next evening – when a young thief makes off with the film roll before his eyes. A chase ensues, as curious as her motive for the theft – she wants to replace a lamp made out of film strips that her brother accidentally destroyed. Played by then 18-year-old Liu Haocun with a dirty face and wild hair, the teenager looks straight out of a Chaplin film. Her film character is similarly innocent and asexual.
When films today tell of the vanished culture of celluloid, they usually attribute the medium to cult pre-yesterday – as if Eisenstein, Godard or the young Zhang Yimou had not set out to create the most modern works of art in the world with his means.
Arriving at the central venue, the workers’ cinema run by a perfectionist projectionist, there is more than just a whiff of “Cinema Paradiso”. But at least Zhang surprises with irony when he presents the cinema manager known as “Uncle Film” as the most respected comrade in the village. When, of all things, the long-awaited newsreel arrives badly damaged, something like a collective film restoration begins: Under the guidance of Onkel Film, the whole village cleans the damaged film strip. Here Zhang – finally he has a crowd to stage – succeeds in his most beautiful sequence. You could show them at film galas – even if the film itself hardly has what it takes to become a classic.
In any case, Onkel Film meets the taste with its evening entertainment: There is “Heroic Sons and Daughters”, a propaganda melodrama from 1964. The Chinese audience will make the connection – an officer discovers his own lost daughter in a female soldier. Zhang presents this so lovingly, as one would perhaps quote “Die Feuerzangenbowle” in our country.
Apparently having reached its goal, a mildly ironic reflection of the peasant party loyalty of the rural population in their propaganda entertainment, the film is far from over. In the further course it then looks similar to the strip in Onkel Films projection room: dressed up, and yet somehow tangled.
Zhang took the plot idea from a novel by the Chinese-American author Geling Yan, “The Criminal Lu Yanshi”. Was it the work of the censors that made the film look like this, or Zhang’s own concept? You will probably never find out from him – at least as long as he wants to remain one of China’s leading filmmakers.
Eine Sekunde. VR China/ Honkong 2021. Regie: Zhang Yimou. 104 Min.
