In celebration of Women’s History Month, the AFI Catalog shines a spotlight on the Oscar®-nominated documentary THE OTHER HALF OF THE SKY: A CHINA MEMOIR, which was released 50 years ago this March. Co-directed and co-produced by AFI Life Achievement Award recipient Shirley MacLaine and feminist filmmaker Claudia Weill – who was 28 at the time, THE OTHER HALF OF THE SKY follows MacLaine and a delegation of 11 women as they visit China in 1973, shortly after the Communist Chinese government led by Chairman Mao Zedong opened its borders to the U.S. (The title itself is adapted from an adage by Mao who referred to women as “holding up the other half of the sky.”[i])
According to MacLaine’s autobiography, “You Can Get There from Here” (1975), concepts for the project began in October 1971. At that time, members of the Permanent Mission to the United Nations of the People’s Republic of China, including one of its foreign ministers Chiao Kuan-Hua, visited New York, and MacLaine was welcomed to a luncheon in their honor by Iran’s Princess Ashraf Pahlavi. The three-hour conversation was not political, focusing instead on universal human capacities for development and change, and by the end of the event, Chiao invited MacLaine to his country, as he believed it was “very important for the American people to understand China.”[ii] MacLaine also noted in her autobiography that Chiao appreciated the significance of Hollywood performers and writers in “influencing masses of people and public opinion.”[iii]
MacLaine later received permission to shoot a film, with the goal of focusing the lens of her documentary on Chinese women and their liberation; according to MacLaine, the trip was financed by “generous benefactors who would prefer to remain anonymous.”[iv]
MacLaine spent several months securing the participation of American women representing different perspectives: Unita Blackwell, an African American Southerner who MacLaine befriended while promoting voter registration in the 1960s and who lived in a tin-roofed home without running water – she later became the first Black female mayor in Mississippi and returned to China on various other diplomatic missions; Patricia Branson, a conservative Democrat and clerk for the Texaco Oil Company; Rosa Marin, a writer and sociologist at the University of Puerto Rico; Ninibah Crawford, a Native American single mother working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs; Karen Boutilier, a poised 12-year-old with experience volunteering as a United Farm Workers Union grape boycott organizer who had never traveled abroad; Phyllis Kronhausen, a cultural anthropologist and psychologist interested in human freedom and sexuality; and Margaret Whitman, a Republican housewife. The all-female film crew included Weill (director), Nancy Shreiber (electrical technician), Cabell Glickler (sound) and Joan Weidman (camera operator). Armed with film equipment and 15 suitcases, the delegation started their journey in April 1973 to explore the story of modern China and its stated commitment to human equality.
While covering thousands of miles from Shanghai to Hangchow to Peking in just three weeks, the group was accompanied by two Chinese government-approved female interpreters and guides – Yeh Sing Ru and Chang Chingerh – who frequently briefed the women with propaganda celebrating China’s Communist order. Footage gathered by the film crew included visits to trade conventions, nursery schools, agricultural communes, the Great Wall and a delivery room in which a mother gave birth via C-section with only acupuncture for pain relief. According to MacLaine, women’s equality was perceived by the Americans as a work in progress, even though the Chinese citizens the delegation met widely praised the revolution for ushering in gender equality.[v] They pointed to the new reality that men and women wore the same clothes and held the same jobs, and that men were tasked with taking care of children and maintaining household chores alongside their female counterparts. Still, the monetary compensation for work was measured on rates of productivity, and women were often paid less because they were not always able to match the output of men.[vi] As MacLaine told the press upon her return to the U.S., Chinese citizens “have a strong recollection of their past life. The women remember when they were bought and sold and when their children could be bought and sold. They are very cognizant of this progress.”[vii]
The film, which also features a rare and candid discussion of political and social issues with Yingchao Deng, the wife of Premier Zhou Enlai, screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974 and premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in February and March 1975. Despite an Oscar® nomination and a television release on PBS, the film remains difficult to access today. There is a 16mm print at the Academy Film Archive in Los Angeles, but it is not currently streaming.
MacLaine, along with her consummate work as an actress, added the narrative feature film BRUNO (2000) to her directing credits. Weill went on to have a prolific directing career in film and television, and was the third woman to be admitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Directors’ Executive Committee, after Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, the only women directors to work during Hollywood’s Golden Age. Weill’s pioneering and notable work includes GIRLFRIENDS (1978), a movie about female friendships, now preserved by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry for its cultural significance. GIRLFRIENDS began as a short film funded by a $10,000 grant from AFI which Weill received in 1975, the same year she and MacLaine were nominated for Oscars® for THE OTHER HALF OF THE SKY: A CHINA MEMOIR.
Listen to Shirley MacLaine speak with Studs Terkel about her travels to China.
