First nude scene in Chinese film

Press, 3 July 1985, Page 41

First nude scene in Chinese film

NZPA-AFP Peking For the first time an actress has appeared naked in a Chinese-made film. The “Offering of Youth,” which premiered in Peking recently, featured a back view of a Yunnan province native girl removing her loincloth while slowly wading into a river. Since the People’s Republic of China was founded in

1949, the Chinese cinema has been very discreet in its portrayal of the human body. Observers said the sight of a loincloth slipping from a girl’s thighs, coming as it does 18 months after a campaign against “spiritual pollution” — including “all artistic expression of capitalist decadence” — was enough to send shivers of horror down the censors’

spines. They added that it would be many years before the censors would allow the cinema to show the same scene from the front view. The “Offering of Youth” is adapted from an autobiographical short story by a young woman novelist, Zhang Manling. It deals with the problems of integration experi-

enced by a Han Chinese schoolgirl sent to a village in the extreme south-west-ern province of Yunnan. Little by little she adopts the traditional customs of the province’s native Dai people, but finds it difficult to throw off her Confucian prudishness in her relations with boys — or when faced with an invitation to bathe naked in the river with her friends.