Claude Hudelot is a historian of contemporary China and has published several works on Mao Zedong. He is a producer for public radio station France Culture and for television, as well as a documentary filmmaker.
Claude Hudelot presents his collection, The Panorama, Mirror of Celestial Bureaucracy, at the Rencontres d’Arles 2014, in the Bureau DesLices. This collection gathers pictures of panoramas, a genre which seems to prefigure the panoramic photograph in China: portraits of emperors or high dignitaries, alone or as a couple, then shown again with their descendents. These vertical ‘accumulations’ in the form of family trees are the ancestors of panoramas.
The ultimate development of the genre is undoubtedly the political panorama.
In short, the Maoist panorama, a genre on its way out, is an almost inexhaustible source of information for any historian of contemporary China.
Film making : Valentin Bardawil
