Michelangelo Antonioni, Tourist Snapshots, and the Politics of the ‘Backward Scene’ in 1970s China

Abstract

In 1972, Radio Televisione Italiana, Italy's state broadcaster, commissioned famed director Michelangelo Antonioni to film a documentary in the People's Republic of China, following the resumption of diplomatic relations between the two nations. Socialist China, in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, was a subject of intense Western fascination at the time. Radical activists worldwide were drawn to Maoism, and references to the Cultural Revolution abounded in European popular culture. Against this backdrop, Antonioni's Chung kuo/Cina found a receptive audience in Europe and North America. Yet by early 1974 the director's ‘anti-China film,’ which had not yet had a public screening in the nation, became the subject of strident condemnation in China's state media, caught up in struggles between competing political factions. This article presents a close reading of Chung kuo/Cina, and examines how the campaign condemning the film spilled over into stricter management of foreign tourists and the production of new forms of tourist literature by state publishers. Examining how notions of China's ‘backwardness’ implicated photographic practice, this article explores how Chinese officials regulated tourist photography, how foreign tourists understood those regulations, and how guides and ordinary Chinese citizens entered into the visual discourse of tourism on their own terms.