by Luanne Paul King

Sept. 1, 2010 — This 2004 Chinese film, directed by Xiao Jiang, will intrigue film aficionados who love the Italian movie Cinema Paradiso. There are only a few women directors in China making narrative feature films. For her debut feature, director Xiao Jiang also co-wrote the screenplay with Cheng Qingsong. The title Electric Shadows is a literal translation of the Chinese words for movies, dian ying. The film was warmly received in the U.S. five years ago.

The story is based on the supposition that films we see in our childhood and adolescence have a lasting effect on how our imaginations transform our personal attitudes toward families, friends, adversaries and ourselves. In his review of Electric Shadows, Stephen Holden, The New York Times movie critic, wrote, “Even in rural China, during the Cultural Revolution, it suggests, movie iconography was so potent that the most austere, government-approved propaganda could instill counterrevolutionary dreams of glamour and stardom.”

Electric Shadows begins in the present as we see a grown-up bicyclist Mao Xiaobing (Yu Xia) carrying water bottles, speeding around the corner of a narrow street. He careens into a wall of bricks, toppling them. A woman (Zhongyang Qi) wrathfully attacks him. Neighbors call police who arrest her and dispatch the cyclist to a hospital. When Mao is released he goes to visit the woman at the police station to ask her why she reacted so vengefully. Without speaking, she hands him a note and apartment key and asks him to go feed her fish. Mao complies and finds her walls covered with pictures of movie scenes. A projector stands beside stacks of film reels and videocassettes. Mao also sees the woman’s journal and begins reading it. He realizes that the mute woman is his childhood playmate Ling Ling. When his family moved away, he gave her the beloved binoculars through which they viewed magical movies together.

Then the film flashes back to an earlier time when we see Ling Ling’s mother Jiang Xuehua (Jiang Yihon) employed at a radio station in Ningxia. She is pregnant and her lover has abandoned her. Citizens of the town brand her as a counterrevolutionary and she flees to the countryside. There she becomes a friend of Pan (Haibin Li), a movie-projectionist. They marry and conceive their own child, a son named Bing Bing. Since boys get first choice for attending school, Ling Ling can’t enroll because her parents can’t afford two tuitions. She is bereft. But then childhood friend Mao Xiaobing comes to live with his father in Ling Ling’s village. The father beats Mao each day. Ling Ling’s mother invites Mao to live with them. A family tragedy occurs. Is Ling Ling responsible? Why is Ling Ling deaf?

The village cinema goes out of business due to television’s ascendancy. Electric Shadows is a tribute to movies shared by children whose lives reconnect later in life to create new dreams.

95 minutes. Available on DVD. Mandarin with English subtitles.