One of the great challenges for the makers of historical documentaries involves figuring out how to give complexity its due: how to revisit events without reifying them. In piecing together the past, the documentarian's standard options include archival footage, talking head experts, and the testimonials of those that were there on the scene. But these conventional ingredients of historical documentaries are limited in their ability to get at the intricacies and ambiguities of history, and they often raise perplexing questions about the reliability and selectivity of memory and, for that matter, of the historical record. The best attempts to plumb the past are those that focus not only on historical episodes but also on historiography; their subject is not just the events in question but also the formation of historical consciousness and the vexed interplay of individual and collective memories and histories.

The makers of Morning Sun, the new documentary about China's Cultural Revolution, rise to the challenge of doing justice to the convolutions of history by amplifying the standard formula for past-gazing documentaries. In The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995), one of their earlier forays into Chinese history, directors Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon probed the story behind the iconic image of a dissident facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square. In Morning Sun, joined by Geremie R. Barmé, they again aim to get beyond historical simplicities by presenting the events in question through a complex collage of cinematic strategies.

The Cultural Revolution, China's grandiose experiment in reshaping revolutionary consciousness, extended from the mid-1960s to the mid-70s. It was a period of dizzying shifts in political orthodoxy and revolutionary protocol, and tracking its tortuous path is a feat of history - and of filmmaking. Claiming, in the voiceover, that the Cultural Revolution has been "passionately debated yet little understood," the directors of Morning Sun negotiate the challenge of revisiting the past on film by offering a chronological account of the Cultural Revolution alongside a meditation on the ideological etiology of revolutionary thought and action. Their film proceeds from the premise that identity is profoundly shaped by popular culture, and that mythic narratives - the stories that a culture tells to itself about itself -- play a large part in shaping collective consciousness and, by extension, historical events. With the filmmakers' focus on mythopoeia, Morning Sun is ultimately about the cultural forces that shaped the revolutionary mindset as much as it is about the revolution itself.Hence, in addition to preexisting documentary footage, voiceover narration, intertitle chapter headings, and affecting testimonies from participants in the Cultural Revolution, Morning Sun includes copious excerpts of popular movies of the period. Brandishing the iconography of revolutionary art, these film clips form the centerpiece of the documentary. The selected movie segments are simultaneously seductive, simplistic, and moralistic and, as such, they function as visual metonymy for the revolutionary zeitgeist.

Morning Sun opens with a scene from an epic titled The East is Red, a 1964 theatrical spectacle celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the People's Republic of China that was later turned into a widely seen film. Replete with lurid color, a cast of thousands, chorines in Mao jackets, and overwrought camera angles the movie is proletarian agit-prop by way of a Busby Berkeley extravaganza. Rousing scenes of mass revolutionary devotion are accompanied by a hortatory voiceover narration. The makers of Morning Sun repeatedly intercut segments from The East is Red with interviews attesting to its wide-ranging influence on young Chinese.

The revolutionary zeal of the film is also, at points, ironically counterposed with documentary scenes of peasant life that belie its fervid claims. The other major filmic influence on Chinese youth was a Soviet movie titled The Gadfly (1955). Based on a novel that achieved cult status across the socialist bloc, the film was a melodramatic mix of romanticism and revolutionary ardor, and thus appealed strongly to the generation coming of age in China in the 1950s and 60s. The scenes excerpted in Morning Sun are full of sturm und drang, as the young, revolutionary hero is martyred to his cause. In the mid-60s, The Gadfly was branded bourgeois art and banned as politically retrograde, only to be rediscovered and reinterpreted as the excesses of the Cultural Revolution began to come to light. The film's shifting fortunes serve Morning Sun as an analogue for the ever-changing gauge of political correctness in Mao's China.

As the Cultural Revolution reached its peak, only works displaying unalloyed fealty to Communist party ideals were allowed on the movie screen. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, produced eight model works extolling peasants and laborers and excoriating avatars of bourgeois values. But even such carefully honed examples of thought reform could not purge their audiences of freedom of response. One interviewee remembers his fixation on a rumba dancer in a movie called Adventures in the Bandit's Den; although the character's intended propaganda function was to represent western decadence, instead, for him, she incited plain old adolescent lust. Other adolescent impulses -- idealism, restiveness, impressionability, self-righteousness - are cited as explanation for the political and cultural extremism of those years. One after another, Morning Sun's interviewees attribute the fundamentalism of the infamous Red Guards to generational as well as class insurrection. Indeed, several conflate revolutionary ardor with teenage rebellion, and the film -- which takes its title from Mao's metaphor for young revolutionaries -- presents the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution as a sort of adolescent acting-out on a mass scale. One witness to the political frenzy compares the deification of Mao to teenage idolization of rock stars. In retrospect, he wonders, "What was there to worship in Mao: an old guy in an army suit who had nothing to do with you. He couldn't even sing and dance!" Perhaps the most moving interview in Morning Sun belongs to Li Nanyang, whose father Li Rui was initially part of Mao's inner circle but was eventually denounced and banished from the party. As a dutiful young revolutionary, she too repudiated her father, calling him "a burden that I had to bear forever." After the end of the Cultural Revolution, it took her many years to think of him as "Dad" rather than as a reviled counterrevolutionary.

By deftly juxtaposing first-person accounts, archival documentary footage, and scenes from once popular movies, Morning Sun weaves a dense tapestry that is, at once, particular to its time and place, and universal. The documentary's exploration of the sources of revolutionary conviction and the heady appeal of utopian promises reverberates far beyond China's borders. Having culled and collated a vast quantity of footage, the film's directors achieve a cinematic pluralism that ably elucidates the reciprocity between cultural myth making and political ideology. In its presentation of history as a nexus of recorded events, personal recollections, and cultural artifacts, Morning Sun is a suitably manifold rumination on one of the twentieth century's most momentous upheavals.

Julie Levinson is a professor of film at Babson College and an independent curator. She is working on a book about the American success myth in film.