The Unfinished Comedy

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Unfinished Comedy
Directed by
Wei Xu
Production
company
CountryChina
LanguageMandarin

The Unfinished Comedy (

satirical comedy has been described as "perhaps the most accomplished [Chinese] film made in the 17 years between 1949 and the Cultural Revolution".[2] Due to its controversial subject matter, the movie was received very poorly by the censor critics and not shown to a wider public, and led to Lü Ban's ban from future film making until his death two decades later.[1]

Plot

Two comedians perform a series of sketches in a theatre for a group of

Communist Party
officials, including a critic censor.

Cast

Cast members include:[3]

Production

The movie was directed by

Lü Ban of the Changchun Film Studio during the period of lessened censorship in 1956–57 (known as the Hundred Flowers Campaign).[2]

Reception

During the

Communist Party itself, as after all it was the Party that argued for the necessity of censorship.[4] It headed the list of problematic movies, the so-called "poisonous weeds" list, and was banned before its release.[1][5] Chen Huangmei, an important Party official described as "film czar", lambasted the movie in an editorial in People's Daily, as "thoroughly anti-Party, antisocialist, and tasteless".[1] The movie and Lü Ban became subject to a number of highly critical articles in Chinese press.[1]

The Unfinished Comedy ended Lü Ban's career as shortly afterward, Lü Ban himself was banned from directing for life and sentenced to internal exile; he had to abandon work on film-making, leaving behind several unfinished projects, and died in 1976 without being allowed to work on another film.[1][6][7]

The disastrous reception of the movie by the film censors was one of the reasons for other Chinese film makers putting more effort into self-censorship and abandoning the genre of satirical comedy (the next one would not appear in

Chinese theaters until mid-80s);[1][7] for years to come, the dominant model of comedy in China became one that avoided conflict, and presented safe stories involving model socialist citizens learning how to better live in the harmonious socialist society.[8]

The reception of the movie abroad has been significantly better. Paul Clark in his book on Chinese Cinema described it as "perhaps the most accomplished [Chinese] film made in the 17 years between 1949 and the Cultural Revolution".[2]

References

  1. ^
    JSTOR 41482537
    .
  2. ^
    ISBN 978-0-521-32638-4
    .
  3. ^ "Film: Unfinished Comedy (1957)". Chinese Movie Database. Retrieved 9 December 2018.
  4. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-872930-3
    .
  5. ^
    ISBN 978-1-84457-580-0
    .
  6. ISBN 978-0-19-874242-5
    .
  7. ^
    ISBN 978-1-4443-3029-8
    .
  8. ISBN 978-981-10-4960-6
    .

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Unfinished_Comedy&oldid=1225017432"