The Kite, the Wind and the Monkey King

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

This session will welcome Ling Zhang for an exploration of the cinematic and diplomatic exchanges between China and France during the Cold War, through a study of emblematic works born of artistic cooperation between French filmmakers and Chinese cultural institutions.

Presentation of the project

"This seminar traces the cinematic and diplomatic currents that shaped Sino-French cultural exchanges from the 1950s to the 1980s. By examining films such as Sunday in Peking (1956, Chris Marker), Before Spring (1958, Joris Ivens), The Magic of the Kite (Cerf-volant du bout du monde, 1958, Roger Pigaut & Wang Jiayi), How Yukong Moved the Mountains (Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes, 1976, Ivens & Marceline Loridan), and A Tale of the Wind (Une Histoire de vent, 1988, Ivens), it explores how recurring narrative and audiovisual motifs—wind, kite, and the Monkey King—evoke cosmological, aesthetic, and metaphorical resonance while activating transcultural, revolutionary, and internationalist imaginaries under Cold War conditions. Spanning diverse cinematic genres and modes, including travelogues, documentaries, children’s cinema, and essay films, these works emerged from shifting political alliances and artistic collaborations over three decades. These motifs reanimate Chinese cosmology, folklore, medicine, opera, revolutionary movements, and everyday life, occasionally veering toward exoticism but predominantly forging a vision of socialist solidarity and cross-cultural understanding. Foregrounding cinema and Cold War diplomacy, this chapter reveals how French leftist artistic circles and Chinese cultural institutions and audiences cultivated a shared utopian vision that continues to shape contemporary popular memory and audiovisual culture."

Speakers

Ling Zhang is associate professor of cinema studies at State University of New York Purchase College and a research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (2024–25). She holds a PhD in cinema and media studies from the University of Chicago. Her current book projects explore Chinese cinema’s transnational soundscapes and Cold War media circulation. She is coeditor of The Politics of the Soundtrack and Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media (2025). Her research has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly, Journal of Popular Culture, Comparative Cinema, among others.

Discussant: Anne Kerlan is Director of Research at the CNRS and a researcher at the CECMC-UMR Chine Corée Japon (EHESS-CNRS).