Behind the Great Wall (1958)

In 1957 Carlo Lizzani spent ten months of his life as a filmmaker and researcher in China, to make the first feature-length documentary film by a Western director in that nation which at the time was considered almost like a fairy-tale country by Westerners. Lizzani surpasses the considerable difficulties of such an operation and with a small crew he ventures into the infinite steppes, travels along the great wall, crosses the river expanses until reaching the big cities, Shanghai, Beijing. In making "Behind the Great Wall." Lizzani almost transforms himself into an anthropologist. The first half of the film is in fact dedicated to the ancient traditions of farmers, fishermen, religious people, people of the villages in constant contact with an overlying nature. Thus we witness the fishing with the cormorant, the hunting of the tiger with a net, the ceremonies of the Buddhist teachers, and the daily practices of the common people that originate from past centuries. Then Lizzani contrasts tradition with modernity by focusing the contrast on the role of the woman: from a young bride sold to a boy husband to a worker in the great construction of the Wuhan bridge, or a young student who in the future will probably constitute an element of closure of a centuries-old cycle of female exploitation. The film ends with the grandiose parade of thousands of acrobats, fantasists, schools which seems to want to bring everything back to a unity, driving force and true strength of a people, despite the extreme diversity of the various ethnic groups of such a large country.