The film was made by Jean-Claude Lubtchansky, a close associate of Madame de Salzmann (who worked with Gurdjieff for nearly 30 years) with the support of the Gurdjieff Institute in France and there is a French version here: (unavailable)
This documentary was posted a few months ago and it is really quite fortunate to have access to it. It follows the life of Gurdjieff much more systematically and in detail than I have been able to do in my review of Meetings with Remarkable Men. It is full of old photos and even recordings of Gurdjieff himself and some scenes with recordings of his movements/dances. It is full of quotes and extracts from his books. If you are interested in finding out more about one of the most interesting, rapscallion philosophers/characters of the 20th century please check out this documentary.
Gurdjieff’s teaching is fully described in the book called “In Search of the Miraculous” which can be read at http://www.gurdjieff.am
(The pantry in Gurdjieff’s Paris apartment. Photo courtesy of the Gurdjieff Foundation of New York) As related in the movie such a place was also a place of meetings and counseling. Like a friend said: show your pantry to tell you who you are.
I am very happy I managed to see this movie. It has been a quest to find a subtitled copy and serendipity helped. Finally found a platform with new Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, HK, Indian etc. dramas to watch online. To watch a movie like this today can instantly mark one as a victim of Chinese propaganda or as completely disconnected from the world we live in. Well, think it is quite the other way around – in order to try and understand how connected we are and how we got here or how our world is at least partially the result of these vicissitudes of CCP having steered the worlds most populous country trough troubled waters. Watching 1921 from where one stands today puts in perspective the Western worlds trouble with China today, so one should give it a try.
There are several ways in which we might categorize bulk responses from a liberal democratic West to Chinese news outlets, CCP official documents, speeches, official spoke persons or historical dramas such as 1921: 1) they are lying 2) they are saying something else 3) they are trying to brainwash me or themselves 4) it is really hard or impossible to understand what they are actually saying 5) i do not care what they are saying since it is all authoritarian junk and propaganda anyway 6) i told you so it is the Yellow Peril. I am trying to steer clear of all of those knee-jerk responses and pitfalls. Essential to this is taking recent Chinese movies such as 1921 at least as seriously or earnestly as the ones who produced, played in them and contributed to them in any form. I think 1921 is important in how it stands within the legacy of “red modernism“, since we just found out that ‘the end of history’ did not happen in 1989. What is the place of socialist realist art or socialist state controlled + privately sponsored art of cinema nowadays and what is its relation with Hollywood Marvel capitalist superhero blockbusters? What about the older discussions about how and if the historical avant-garde’s art education ideals clashed or survived and coexisted (got repackaged?) within more poppy expressions or it they just got in line with what was (later) conceived as subservient propagandistic socialist-realist artistic expressions (an important counter-example constitutes the late oeuvre of Hungarian-Romanian artist Matthis Teutsch uncovered by artist/researcher Miklos Szilard)?
It is clear that nobody, at our particular historical juncture, in the 20s of 21st century is able to produce a movie like this or approach this particular history of communism or Comintern with something amounting to style. I do not think this is a product of propaganda in the usual sense (official parroting stale uninteresting statements). If you insist on the propaganda value of such a movie (beyond it being a mere fun historical drama), why not regard it as a contemporary form of stylish ‘pop-aganda’, that has more to do with K-dramas or J-dramas, C-bands or ‘young adult’ cultural productions?
1921 uses freely both the rich pictorial and iconographic history of Chinese Communist painting, poster and graphic art as well as the current wave of dramas and streaming services. In seeing these aesthetic overlaps or different vibes, I am not trying to diminish in any way the originality or the aim of this vibrant yet heavily controlled production. At the moment of this writing the CCP is not only the oldest, still surviving example of a ‘vanguard party’ in the world that surely has transformed over the years, but also serves as a strong, still-standing example or existing offshoot of that relevant revolutionary period, embodying its dreams, anxieties, constraints, trials, failures and plans that sprung up right after the successful Bolshevik October Revolution. Of course this does not make them founder saints nor wash countless (later) rectification campaigns or excuse Mao’s ‘war against nature‘. This movie is a total oddball in today’s capitalist realist world, but one that is also interested in making this content available in tune with today’s changing taste, keeping it real & intriguing, emotional and sexy enough to watch for 2 whole h. When there is so much clamor about strawmen like Cultural Marxism or the whole paranoia about the PC, it would be good to actually forget all that for a second and watch 1921.
A few observations (please forgive me for not going into detail or getting stuck in debates about historical or ideological arguments and finer points):
-this struggle for founding the Chinese Communist party (like other various parties across Asia) is the culmination of a hide-and-seek with the European (and Japanese) Imperial powers. This is only the result of a long Asian (in this case Chinese) anti-Imperialis struggle that was already globalized, reaching from the heart of Empires (London, Paris) to Shanghai, Penang and Singapore. Asian revolutionaries dotted the urban centers as exiles, and they actively plotted and tried to subvert and leverage the overwhelming advantages of the West like in Tim Harper’s excellent book – using shadowy networks, printing presses (see below) and false identities to be able to stay one step ahead and avoid being crushed under the Imperial boot
-the movie is not just about the CCP youthful rise or the many (hard to keep track of) historical figures and contributors to its cause, but the Chinese people’s continuous struggle for national self-determination, against a backdrop of foreign power’s aggression and multiple competing interests that kept China under-developed, divided and in the grip of warlordism, basically a semi-colonial region in a permanent dependency limbo (important to understand that the later recognition of China as a state and the diplomatic taw – is linked with the US/West’s support of China’s only after the Sino-Soviet Split)
-remarkable is the “Internationale” song that is hummed and reappears, a sort of internationalist leitmotiv background that puts the whole small, incipient party 1st congress in a larger, global or historical context (that is unavoidably & always connected to larger struggles or aims)
-in its initial stages the CCP functions mostly on a pattern established by the patriotic ‘secret society’ model with the difference that it didn’t have the clout or influence or resources to match and somehow (because of its ideological support for worker strikes & unions) found itself in direct conflict with both foreign interests in China + ‘Green Gang’ crime syndicate type of secret society that was well connected with the police & KMT officials. Of course there was also another important element –Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement– a series of travel and work programs were organized between 1912 and 1927 largely by a group of Chinese anarchists who had come to Paris and wanted to introduce French science and social idealism to China (among the beneficiaries of such programs where Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai)
-the movie presents what AN Whitehead would likely call ‘an adventure of ideas (even if after reading his Aims of Education essays I am not sure he appreciated revolutionary thoughts themselves, though in practice he supported everything new, interesting and ‘kicking), in this case, the evolution of Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist), particularly after the May Fourth Movement ideas (one of the movie’s examples being classroom ‘class struggle’ lessons) outside of their actual place of initial elaboration (Western Europe), diffusion and further elaboration under different socio-historical circumstances
-remarkable is also the fragment when the foundation of the party sounds like establishing a successful ‘firm’ – yeah you heard me right, and this is not cynical, it’s also this business (?!) acumen in view of future profitable investment returns, and this has something peculiarly SF (not in the usual sense of superlative tech but in the sense of counter intuitive, not according to immediate facts), something quite speculative in it (that more or less led to today’s quantum entanglement space-based communication & Moon exploration program?!), the CCP being at that time mostly a ‘pipe dream dreamed up by a bunch of certainly at the time – pretty powerless youthful minority group – with a strong feeling that history was on their side
-1921 is mainly a history happening inside big urban centers (Beijing and Shanghai), inside reading groups or study groups, foreign language schools, of modernizing translation efforts and printing presses, a history that plays on largely inside (under the noses of) the French Concession in Shanghai and largely underground, small scale and always at risk at being found out, stopped in its tracks and quickly disbanded/eliminated (important to mention that the peasant question is brought only one time and only by Mao particularly) and you can always feel that it’s largely about young metropolitan Chinese literati
-we see here the very beginning of something in nuce – full of preparative phases and incipient stages, a very early start-up that is not yet steeled up or fully organized (or militarized), not yet having suffered the tremendous losses of the Long March and massacres under Chiang Kai Shek’s White Terror of 1927 , far from ready to win in the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949 (all this later history is compressed in the last 10 minutes or so of the movie in an B & W explosive, harsh, heroic + dramatic collage that includes the famous 1949 declaration in Tiananmen Square by Mao)
-another interesting effect is its decision to cast boy band members or Chinese rappers celebs in such important historical roles, this brings us back to the whole ‘auratic’ survival aspect of today’s media celebs (discussed by Shaviro elsewhere as in the aura of ‘cinema stars’ in the age of mechanical reproduction cum démocratisation and as a response to W Benjamin’s key text)
-liked the iconic reinterpretation of the Pacific WWII flag photo of the US victory with the red flag instead of the stars & stripes, this might inflame many since a lot of critics try to depict today’s China as just another US, not as an alternative model
-really enjoyed the role of Japan – or let’s say the conflicting role of the Japanese, the freshly modernized Imperial power of the Far East playing this double role, of translating the Communist Manifesto and harboring ‘dangerous’ Chinese emigres, but also with secret police infiltrating and hunting down both its own Japanese citizens and Chinese anarchists (also considering Mao’s stint with anarchist thinking in his 20s) or socialists
-significant is how much political learning, teaching and practicing foreign languages (English, French, Russian) was part of this active transfer of radical ideas and how this was part of a longer modernizing effort that was very much part of China’s young literati intellectuals and students lives at the end of 19th c and early 20th
-really loved the great cameos of young (jokingly and affectionately called ‘small’) Deng (D Xiaoping being arguably the toughest of Mao’s 1st generation revolutionary peers, surviving all purges & perils) in a printing house basement in Paris ready for Bastille Day & spreading pro-Chinese manifestos or the Mao scene when he’s running at night being really pissed off after being kept outside the gates of the asshole french party people. It’s a scene almost emblematic – of RPC quest for international recognition and/or “Beijing Consensus”, craving inclusion while always being shoved around & emboldened to reinvent these organizations & forums that kept China on the outside
-a culture of lively debate was at the center of the establishment of the first Congress, but essentials are already there (dictatorship of the proletariat) – still, a lot of discussions are about how to adapt Marxist ideas or Bolshevic experiences to the local conditions, or what was the actual time scale of transformations or if one had to wait till the proper conditions (a key point) came about, yet this also tells us precious little about the future transformation of a revolutionary party into a ruling party. The movie also brings forth the way the Comintern (especially through the difficult role of Dutch internationalist communist Henk Sneevliet who was basically, according to Tim Harper, on the most important Western Chinese mission since Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci) started linking up the various revolutionary cells around the world
The #READCHINA team is happy to announce that we now have a designated space for hosting and browsing English translations of Chinese comics on our website! All comics come with a short intro and are viewable for free at: https://t.co/C5vD6ttepipic.twitter.com/4bUPw67xNo
“For most of the 20th century, pocket size comic books (lianhuanhua 连环画, often literally translated as “linked images”) were an integral part of Chinese everyday reading culture, providing readers with entertainment, information and/or political instruction. Established as such throughout the 1920s and 1930s, after 1949 these comic books continued to range from adaptations of literary texts or films to hagiographies of socialist heroes like Lei Feng to stories propagating the usefulness of using fertilizer in agricultural production. Published as handy pocket-sized booklets, they were shared among children and adult readers alike to be read at street stall libraries or at work units after hours. Lianhuanhua production was massive, with an estimated 50.000 titles published since the founding of the PRC. Moreover, one in three books published in 1986 was a comic!”(READCHINA)
6. A little while later, R2 walks out of the secret storeroom and finds another robot, C-3PO (Silipi’ao 思里皮奧). R2 can only speak electronic language (dianziyuyan 電子語言), but C-3PO looks like a person and can speak human languages.
1. In a certain vast galaxy, the entirety of which was ruled by the Galactic Republic (Yinhe Gongheguo 銀河共和國) in the past, but now this Republic has been destroyed and is now ruled by a Galactic Empire (Yinhe Diguo 銀河帝國). Not only does the Galactic Empire use despotic violence to oppress all of the planets in their galaxy, but they also are trying to rule the entire universe.
[6] At the beginning of the movement, she was among the first to join the “rebel factions.”
[4] The girl in charge gave me a scrutinizing look. Suddenly, she turned her head to her classmates: “You do your job, I’ll take him to the main building!” After we had taken two turns, she suddenly spoke to me in a lighter voice: “Teacher Wang, don’t you recognize me? …… I’m Lu Danfeng.” My memory came back.
[5] She had been secretary of the Youth League branch of her class in senior high and was the most active in the whole school in studying Mao’s Selected Works. She was an exemplary student.
[8] I had heard that she and Li Honggang were pretty close. After the start of the movement, they were inseparable. I never expected that they would later join two diametrically opposed factions. Originally, Li Honggang was called Li Qian’gang. But because “Qian” consists of the characters “black” and “today,” he changed it to Li Honggang.
Introduction: This is a science fiction comic book (科学幻想连环画). Through a reporter’s–Little Smarty’s–travel to Future City, [this comic book] vividly unfolds before [our] eyes future high developments in science and technology and the splendid prospect of limitless magnificence in people’s lives. It also tells its young readers: Only if [we] painstakingly study and only if [we] are bold in climbing scientific heights during the advance of the Four Modernizations, can [we] build our motherland to become as thriving and prosperous as Future City.
After dinner, Little Tiger, Little Swallow, and I went for a walk on the street. We slowly walked along the plastic sidewalk. I looked up to the sky and discovered two moons! A round moon, and a sickle-shaped moon, one shining to the east and one to the west.
In the distance, the high rises gleamed in soft pale blue and pink light, and the borders of the sidewalk also gleamed in pale green light. Even Little Swallow’s floral skirt and Little Tiger’s shirt were all resplendent in their bright colors.
It has been very hard to trace this series of documentaries, I really have not managed to find them anywhere. They are some of the fondest memories I have from childhood/adolescence TV, exactly at the cusp of 1988/1989 turmoil, screened by Soviet Perestroika era stations in Russian that we were able to tune into in the South of Romania. It had been a sort of revelation. It was the start of bush tucker documentaries, even a time of replicating bullroarers or spear throwers (atlatl) tools that I found fascinating as a kid in tow with Rahan bande desinee comics we had access to. Tools & technologies dating to upper Paleolithic had a special magic in the midst of the computer revolution. It is now speculated that the Mungo woman, child and man remains – the oldest paleo anthropological remains in Australia suffered from an atlatl elbow & that first migrants from Asia brought the bullroarer with them into the Americas. The 40.000+ yr lake Mungo remains are now protected by Aborigine custodians and also represent one of the oldest cremations we know of. This sort of hunter gather skills & reconstructions I guess is what we would call today paleo lifestyle or neo- anarko primitive ways. Alan Thorne was a non-indigenous archeologist from Australia that has made this incredible 11 episode series around his thesis of human settlements of the Pacific and regional continuity. However old or quaint from our perspective, this series promoted a long view of pre-European contact history, of continuous living across the whole Pacific. I find it very important in the case of aborigines & other native populations that have suffered so much and are still fighting against extractive industries and their first comer right to be there on their ancestral tribal grounds. Man (and woman) on the rim is almost a thesis of Pacific humanity, Homo maritimus of sorts spawning a myriad cultures developing not at a continental core but the largest water body on the planet – the Pacific Rim and the thousands of Islands that surround and dot it from one end to the other. More recently we’re being able to test another intriguing hypothesis – that the shellfish rich seas around South Africa’s coastaline have been the first examples of modern humans living off the sea as well a distinct stepping stone during a harsh period in our species history. Remains at Mossel bay in S Africa from 164.000-35.000 yr ago are proof of surving the so-called bottleneck of the Glacial Stage 6, revealed first by genetic evidence. Everybody now alive is descended from a small group of modern humans (maybe a few hundred), maybe even one ethnolinguistic group that spread outward afterwards & mingled with smaller bands it met along the way. It made it against all odds thanks to the mild paleoclimate & plenty of shellfish/geophyte energy rich bulbs of the fynbos – coastal refugia abounding along those coasts. This S African coastal region, growing & retreating with the sea level offers some of the the first proof regarding invisible cognitive enhancements to go with the anatomical modernity – such as lunar calendars to be able to follow ebb/flow, microlithic technologies, heat treated red ochre since at least 110.000 years ago and a special aesthetic value of seashells washed from the bottom of the sea to the shore. The tracking of shifting shoreline, the retreating or advancing oceanic waters during cooling & warming periods and a widening continental shelf speaks about the affordance of livingcclose to the ocean.
Man on the Rim offers an incredible vision of island jumping, of nautic travelers and nautic cultures, of boat makers, of boat people living most of their lives on the water. For me it was and is one of the most incredible and eye opening documentaries out there. Coming out of a period of isolation in Romania, a country that was politically closed down for much of the 80s, as well as the difficulty of having the means to travel right after 1989, you traveled on-board such documentaries. And what an occasion! Most of the time civilization (canonical version of history), settlement, human development, evolution has been always described as rising around big rivers, around big inland seas, or along fertile crescents. Here you can see the huge number of estuaries, coasts, rich mangrove swamps giving rise to new ways of life. Understanding the waters and living with countless fisherman tribes, villages and hunter-gatherer traditions fostered a wide array of boat designs – which are probably the most top notch sophisticated and accomplished pieces of design humanity has produces. These thalassocratic societies are explored in this documentary series. I guess the documentary also expresses a new confidence of the Asia Pacific economic Sphere, the Chinese coastal Special Economic Zones, cities like Singapore, HK or Shanghai on the rise or peninsular or insular powers South Korea and Japan being part of it. Australia was hoping to get more out of this regional hub, recognizing its role as more closely connected to Indonesia or China than say its remote British Atlantic progenitor. This account of regional prehistory is key to a larger role to be played by Asia-Pacific confluence, and Man on The Rim is coalescing around larger 80s- 90s economic, cultural & environmental coastal trends.
First episode introduces the first ever water Wallacea migrations and maritime existence, and also the first insular early relatives of humanity from a skullcap, tooth and tigh bone fossil of Java man(Homo erectus erectus)- the oldest hominid at the time discovered by Eugène Dubois at Trinil on the banks of Solo river in 1891-1892. In the meantime we also have the telling, more complex and enlightening case of the Homo florensis a small archaic distant relative, result from a possible very early migration & island effect plus a bounty of new human fossils found both in Indonesia (Sangiran dated to almost 1.7 mil yr) and China (discovered in these last 30 years). It is an incomplete and quaint documentary, some things have not aged well, still I think the circumpacific vision should stay with us – and it’s thesis is intriguing. I will always remember the bamboo rafts that have been considered as some of the first potential designs and transport from Southern China, Taiwan and SE Asia into the incredible diversity of island universes that lay in wait towards Australia during the last glaciations, where the waters retreated, land bridges opened and cross-overs became shorter with the next shore in reach. They kept tracking the changing shore with each new Glacial period or in between. We have to remember there were no maps, no actual image of what was out there, just the experience of previous shores and previous ways of being on the water. It is also an important documentary to establish migration and waves of migration like the numerous continuous waves of the oceans as important and fundamental part of humanities existence on this planet, in spite of all the borders, the walls and all the current national ethnostate-politics. The bamboo is almost the basis for a bamboo civilization across Asia Pacific region. The earliest evidence of humans in Australia are btw ~50.000 to ~65.000 yr ago, and are final proof of maritime cross over, since there was always a 80 – 100km sea gap in Late Pleistocene between Australia & New Guinea forming the Sahul continent and the other islands of the Wallacea, Timor and Southern Malukku that needed to be crossed. The subsequent Austronesian and Polynesian wave of migrations is a marvel of history.
Second episode recounts the incredible 40.000-50.000 yr continuous old history of the peopling of the island continent of Australia, a complete biogeographic isolate in a sense for millions of years, with its own very specific and variegated flora and fauna, including some of the most bizarre (from our mammalian boring perspective) beings to roam on this earth, with lots of ancient living fossils (some like the Wollemi pine being discovered quite recently). The Aborigines, those who have suffered the full impact of the white man’s exploitation, genocide and colonization are the first ancient waves of migration that came from Asia (and many waves since), that still keep alive traditions of mangrove life, a life that made possible the exploration of the whole Pacific in the end, of living off the land and of feeling at home along this extended Rim of salt water biomes, a familiar environment that stretched on every coast, every atoll and that offers, shellfish, mussels, fish, and plenty of other things to the ones in the know. The mangrove living, the cooking on the beach, in the ashes or embers or in the sand are still to be found here in the northern islands of Australia. The newcomers from Australasia spread out into the inner of the continent, into various and other very different inland ecosystems, diverging & remotely related to the initial coastal fisherman newcomers, finding during the next thousands of years a home from the billabong to savanna to the jungle in the north or the mountains in thr east.
Third episode features the Pacific NW, one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse & rich areas in the whole of the Americas. It also dwells into the ancient North American cultures such as the ancestral Puebloans/Anasazi or the Mound builder cultures of the indigenous pre-Columbian populations. I will focus on the native tribes of the NW living on the Pacific coasts for countless years, enjoying fishing & hunting while this coastal route of migration is one of the oldest. From the Aleutian islands in the north when the Beringia was a bridge btw continents, some of the first humans made their way, arriving from Asia trough an ice free corridor along the coasts & in between the mountains. Salmon runs, shells middens, plenty of mussles, Eulacheon fish grease trails, kelp forests, dense gigantic redwood temperate rainforests, humidity & continuous rain a year long, rivers rich with fish flowing from the Cascade mountains to the Pacific made these coasts, inlets and islands one densest inhabited areas in the world for non agricultural populations. Many had developed highly hierarchical societies, sophisticated designs, carvings & huge ocean going canoes, elaborate songs and famous totem poles. They were united by lavish and opulent feasts of excess and gift giving ceremonies called Potlatch – specific for the whole region, that have been studied at length by antropologist and that have become banned by government and subsequently reintroduced.
TimeSpace Warps 