Hip Joints – The Seventh Prison

Confucius said mastery of six arts make a gentleman: ritual, archery, charioteering, calligraphy, and mathematics. In the classical west, the seven liberal arts were defined as grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometory, harmony, and cosmology. At the dawn of cinema, Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo identified six arts — architecture, sculpture, painting, music, dance, and poetry. Cinema is the seventh. This explains the first half of new bar cum independent movie venue Seventh Prison, beside Qianhai around the corner from East Shore Live Jazz Cafe.

Seventh Prison boss and Beida graduate Zhang Jiangnan says, “Whenever you are working with an unknown art – in my case, independent films – you feel pressure from popular society. You and everyone around you are working underground. Sometimes we feel trapped by our work.” Zhang is a film-maker by trade, not a bar-owner. He knows everyone in his industry. The floor is lined with posters of films that you won’t find in your local DVD vendor’s cardboard box. More often than not, the director or actors are his close friends. This intimate [tiny] and unpretentious [shabby] closet along the lake serves beer (“I’ve found that beer complements indie films pretty well,” says Zhang), but the principal draw is a a pull-down sheet that takes over a wall. Seventh Prison plans to screen films you won’t see anywhere else, and Zhang assured us that every showing will have English subtitles. He’s not trying to make money, he says, he’s promoting awareness of the seventh art. Check that’s Beijing events listings for showing times.

The Seventh Prison
7 Baimi Xiejie, Qianhai Nanyan, Shichahai, Dongcheng District (6403 2968)
第七监狱电影吧, 东城区时刹海,前海南沿白米斜街7号