This talk revisits the contested visual legacy of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 documentary Chung Kuo, Cina by placing it within a broader network of Cold War–era encounters between Western filmmakers and a carefully stage-managed People’s Republic of China. Connecting Antonioni’s state-sanctioned visit with projects by Shirley MacLaine, Jean Painlevé, and Canadian filmmakers Donald McWilliams and Marcel Carrière, it shows how foreign guests navigated a pre-packaged documentary experience that blended fascination, disorientation, and political curiosity. In contrast to these outsider perspectives, the talk also examines China’s own 1960s–70s state-produced scientific and educational films, which conveyed more than a didactic instruction of socialist promises. Together, these intertwined visual histories reveal shifting boundaries between state-directed self-representation and foreign interpretation, while evidencing a media landscape that has largely disappeared. The traces that remain are recycled here as a form of retro-prospective media excavation by Xin Zhou.

This event is free and open to the public. As space is limited, registration is recommended.

Xin Zhou is a PhD student in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University. His research focuses on state-sponsored science and education films from socialist China onward, with an emphasis on collecting, cataloguing, digitizing, and critically interpreting these discarded materials. More recently, he has examined the residues of socialist media and their unexpected intersections with the circular economies of analog film and agricultural production in China’s rural hinterlands. He has written for ArtReview Asia, The Brooklyn Rail, Film Comment, and Frieze, and has curated screening programs at Anthology Film Archives, ICA Boston, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, among others.