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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
The bizarre and colorful nightmare world of Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution comes alive in an extraordinary new documentary. Smash the Old World!
Oct 22, 2003 | At moments, watching the superb new documentary "Morning Sun" (now playing at Film Forum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston) suggests what it might be like to see atrocities rendered as oil paintings on black velvet. Two of the directors of this film about Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which aimed to rid China of Western capitalist influences, Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon, are the team that made the great 1995 documentary "The Gate of Heavenly Peace" (Geremie R. Barmé is the third director here). Hinton was born in China in 1949, the year Mao came to power, and lived there until 1969, and that may have much to do with the amazing access the filmmakers have to archival material and to the key figures who are interviewed.
Even though the century just past accustomed us to the grotesque lies of totalitarian propaganda as they appear in newsreel footage and "official" newspapers, the monstrous kitsch that recurs throughout "Morning Sun" to glorify Mao's rise and justify the mass denunciations and killings of the Cultural Revolution is flabbergasting. When you see footage of the 1964 musical extravaganza "The East Is Red" staged at the Great Hall of the People to celebrate the 15th year of Mao's rule, you feel like you've fallen down the proverbial rabbit hole. Remember those Hollywood musicals that climaxed with a big stage show so massive we realized it could never take place in an actual theater? "The East Is Red" is that big, and we're seeing it acted out in front of an audience. An entire Communist choir stands to one side of the stage while seemingly hundreds of performers move across it, acting out moments from Mao's quest to rule China. The singers step forward to perform numbers whose lyrics all appear to have been taken from Mao's doggerel poems or aphorisms.
Seeing the hearty smiles on their bland, confident faces is like having the most homogenized strain of American movie musicals reflected back at us in a sinister new form. It's what you might expect to see if Angela Lansbury had been triumphant at the end of "The Manchurian Candidate" and staged the inaugural ball as a celebration of the Chinese Communist struggle. When ballerinas in Mao outfits sprint, en pointe, across a woodland set, we're watching something that might have been produced by Metro Goldwyn Mao: "Seven Red Guard Soldiers for Seven Reactionary Counterrevolutionaries."
History as spectacle -- as predetermined narrative, as performance -- is the controlling metaphor of "Morning Sun." What plays out before us is a tale of the acceptance of mass delusion and mass hysteria. Mao, under unexpected criticism because the economic policies of the Great Leap Forward had been so disastrous, blamed those who worried about the mass starvation with being more concerned with economics than politics, with wanting to dilute a pure socialist state and open itself to imperialist/materialist/Western influence. What he proposed was an upheaval that would purge the very minds and culture of China, that would admit only the socialist purity he wanted, in which any recidivism would be a cause for public denunciation. First to go was Western literature and music and performances. Then, Communist Party officials themselves. His most useful tool was the young, especially the university students wanting to fulfill their revolutionary potential, even if it meant disowning or denouncing teachers, family members, friends.
"Morning Sun"
Directed by Carma Hinton, Geremie R. Barmé, Richard Gordon
So "Morning Sun" becomes a sort of a fairy tale, a story of children (Chinese youth and university students) coming under the influence of an all-powerful wizard (Mao), except that in this version the wizard is the good guy. Listen to the lexicon of Maoist iconography: the Long March, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Hall of the People. It's mythomaniacal language designed to propagate its own legend. The propaganda musicals and dramas we see produced by the Chinese film industry (one in particular, in which a working-class boy's materialist corruption is foretold by his admiring the cut of a new jacket) are as leaden and grotesque as you might imagine. In the context of the movie, they cut deeper than the newsreel footage narrated by a chirruping female voice proclaiming the greatness of Mao. (That's some feat, considering that one of the newsreels we see tells how a school of deaf children had their hearing restored by coming to understand the philosophy of their beloved leader. I'm not making this up.)
The footage has that effect because we are watching the story of people who took such shallow, banal things as signals for revolutionary action, which meant public denunciations followed by exile, public beatings and execution -- millions died in the Cultural Revolution. It all illustrates one of the contradictions of Communism: the way Marxist ideology, which is anti-religious, morphed in its official version into its own religion, inspiring a crusading fervor few modern religions achieve.
