"Morning Sun"

Interspersed among the footage are interviews with the people who slipped the confines of the fairy tale Mao was imposing on China. They include the student founder of the Red Guard, Luo Xiaohai, who became appalled at the violence the Cultural Revolution inspired; Song Binbin, whose name, meaning "gentle and refined," was rechristened by the press "Song Be Militant" when Mao said to her, "Better be militant"; Li Nanyang, who struggled for years to prove herself a good communist, even rejecting her father, Li Rui, a former party official who was disgraced after denouncing the economic policies of the Great Leap Forward; and Wang Guangmei and Liu Ting, respectively the daughter and widow of President Liu Shaoqi. In exile and in poor health, he was kept alive for the Ninth Party Congress in 1969 to prove the existence of enemies to the state and allowed to die of pneumonia shortly thereafter. Liu Ting was publicly ridiculed and denounced during the Cultural Revolution (we see film of her dressed in a humiliating costume before students who heap abuse on her) and jailed for many years.

These people speak as those who have awakened from a bad dream. Maybe one of the reasons they agreed to be interviewed for the film is that they have all been wronged themselves. That doesn't mean they appear before us to let themselves off the hook. You never get the sense, as you do listening to some of the collaborators in Marcel Ophüls' Holocaust documentary "The Sorrow and the Pity," that they're trying to cover their tracks or substituting justification for explanation of their actions. You do sense people who existed in a nation swept up into a fever dream, where resistance meant at best incredible hardship, and quite possibly death -- not just for them but for their families as well. Because all of the interviewees are so thoughtful and eloquent, we get a sense of how hard it was for them to suppress their doubts, and of the guilt those doubts caused them -- the suspicion that they themselves were backsliders.

The tension playing itself out in "Morning Sun" (the title comes from Mao's dictum that the young are like the morning sun, "the hope of the future") is the tension present in any revolution between inclusion -- the belief that revolution will sweep everyone into supporting it -- and the desire to maintain purity. One of the interviewees, Yu Luowen, had an older brother, Yu Luoke, who wrote an essay saying that the children of "bad families," in other words, the families deemed reactionary or capitalist, had as much right as anyone else to take part in the revolution. The essay won initial approval. What revolutionary doesn't want to believe that anyone can be won over by a revolution's truth? But "Morning Sun" shows how attitudes were mercurial, and Yu Luoke was arrested and shot. Luowen tells us that when soldiers came to inform his father what had happened, he reacted in disgust to see his father break down wailing. Li Nanyang relates an incident declaring to her classmates the infraction of calling her father, deemed an enemy of the state, "Dad."

Mao, whose visage seen throughout the movie is that of a fat, sedentary tomcat who'd scratch your eyes out at the slightest provocation, was the only father any child obeyed during the Cultural Revolution, and "Morning Sun" shows how the Revolution was the strongest expression of the cult of personality that surrounded him. His purging of many Communist Party officials was an obvious move to consolidate his power. But it also had the purity of revolutionary logic -- that is, the purity of something ready to eat itself alive. Disobedience to the party was a crime, unless it was disobedience or questioning of those whom Mao had branded traitors to the Revolution.

It would be enough if Hinton, Barmé and Gordon had made a movie that is consistently lucid, one that supplies all the information you need at any given moment. They are also among the most humane of documentarians, never pushing their interviewees, allowing them the space to present themselves, extending them the empathy of understanding how easy it was to get caught up in Mao's crusade. And they manage the trick of making their films aesthetically pleasing without blunting their force as historical, human or political documents. There's a brilliant section here intercutting a scene from "The East Is Red" with the same incident dramatized in a propaganda film. It's the most concise expression of this film's sensibility -- the sense that real life, real history, has gone into hiding, and only representations can be compared.

"Morning Sun" ends abruptly, with a few lines of narration setting out the paradox Mao represents for China: He is an ever-present image who stands for past tyranny but also for the possibility of rebellion. Whether that rebellion will be for good or another outburst of the nightmare of the Cultural Revolution, the filmmakers cannot say. The story they are telling here is still in the process of being written. It's as good a sign as any of how absorbing "Morning Sun" is that the film's sudden ending makes you greedy for more, for the balance of discernment and empathy that is their gift to contemporary documentary filmmaking.

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