Neorealism travelled East
In Blind Mountain/Mang Shan (Li Yang, 2007), director Li Yang tells a loose yet haunting narrative about a kidnapped young woman who is sold to a villager as a bride in the mountains of China. The film centers on her various futile attempts to escape and commit suicide. Like many other of his peers, Li seeks to present the untold stories behind China’s remarkable economic progress with an urgent social concern: exploitation, marginalization, desertion, and rootlessness. Evidently, Li’s film has demonstrated the profound influence of Italian neorealism on the Chinese Sixth Generation filmmakers. Although the two cinemas are separated by geography and a time span of half a century, they share a common impulse to chronicle everyday life and, above all, a humanistic concern. In this article, I shall use Pickpocket/Xiao Wu (Jia Zhangke, 1997) as an example to illustrate how the Sixth Generation has inherited and expounded the aesthetic ideals of neorealism and integrated the spirits of humanism in China’s context.