The Crack

Directed by Li Wake

A low-budget independent film made on 35mm, that was screened only four times in a small circle in China since its completion in 2000. This semi-autobiographical film, set in the Cultural Revolution, provides the missing link between the roots-seeking and scar literature and art of the 1980s and the performance art of the 1990s and 2000s. It grounds many of the embodied extremes of China’s famous performance art in the persistent psychosexual fetishes and neuroses produced by the extreme denial of individual desire under “mass line” socialism (Chinese Independent Film Archive).