Chung Kuo, in many ways a reaction to [the interiority of Antonioni's previous films], presents a surface view of people and settings. Aside from a couple of references to Marco Polo, there is no awareness of history and nowhere does Antonioni attempt any sort of analysis of, say, the meaning of the cultural revolution. We are left with the material gathered by the camera—bland figures in an unspectacular landscape. We see a society without hunger, cities without anxiety, people without poverty or pain…. [Antonioni] resists the idea of examining the inevitable cultural paradoxes—there are no clips from Sternberg movies of the 1930s to stress the incongruity of Mao's China and our imaginations, coloured by memories of Marlene Dietrich as Shanghai Lily. Antonioni presents his material in long, uninterrupted sequences without humorous or explanatory detail so that we are driven to reach our own conclusions about the...