One Second (Zhang Yimou, 2020)

This is hard to really evaluate, of course, because it arrives as damaged goods. The PRC engages in censorship all the time, but seldom is it this high-profile. Zhang, probably the most renowned Chinese director currently living, had One Second yanked from the Berlinale competition just days before the festival opened. The official reason was "technical problems." But then, if we think of ideology as a kind of machine, one that needs constant maintenance and recalibration, then the problems with One Second were highly technical indeed.

The film takes place in the midst of the Cultural Revolution, and its two protagonists have been affected by Mao's pitiless reign. An unnamed man (Zhang Yi) has escaped from a prison where he was sent for punching a Red Guard. The child he meets by chance, Orphan Liu (Liu Haocun) appears to have lost her parents to the purges, although this is never stated directly. For quite different reasons, both of them are obsessed with a newsreel film ("No. 22") that is making its way from Unit One to Unit Two for screening.

One Second is a frustrating film. Its overall trajectory and mini-epic sweep is quite impressive, even as Zhang stumbled badly over minor details such as plot and character. Perhaps not coincidentally, the most compelling figure in the film is Mr. Movie (Fan Wei), a loyal Party projectionist whose movie house provides proletarian pleasures for everyone in the village. He is truly a materialist cinephile, in both the Marxist and the structuralist sense. He treats celluloid with a tenderness that no human being could expect during this time, and yet Zhang himself makes a glorious fetish out of his manipulation of 35mm film. (The climactic scene has Mr. Movie thread a film loop across the booth, and the results look like an installation by Anthony McCall or Bruce McClure.)

The film has a fairly bracing conclusion, in which Mr. Movie gifts the escaped prisoner with a couple of film frames, which are then lost in the sands of time. In this regard, Zhang recodes film fetishism and allows it to serve as a metaphor for death and heartbreak. (Losing the film equals losing a loved one during the Cultural Revolution, as well as emphasizing the collapse of life actually lived and the "glorious" China projected by the Communists.) Alas, Zhang appended a ten-minutes coda -- "Two Years Later" -- that not only suggests that the protagonists both survived the Mao era but have a chance at a future of some kind. I'd like to think that Zhang meant for this epilogue to be as lame as it is, but One Second sounds plenty of bum notes all its own. 

The real question, for which One Second may prove to be a useful piece of historical evidence, is whether Xi Jinping actually means to rehabilitate Mao and the Cultural Revolution. Is this it, or is he is just an authoritarian with no real commitments, someone who believes that any recognition of China's complex, troubled history is bad for business.