'Morning Sun' An Illuminating Look at China's
Dark Time
By Ty Burr, Boston Globe, 10/17/2003
3 1/2 out of 4 stars
Of all the youthful rebellions of the 1960s, the weirdest and least
understood has to have been China's Cultural Revolution. As in America,
France, and elsewhere, college students banded together, took to the
streets, and wreaked outraged violence against their parents' generation.
The difference is that they were working for the government -- in particular,
in response to the urgings of Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong, who
set the hordes against his own ruling elite in a bizarre and perverse
bid to keep the Revolution honest.
It's as though Richard Nixon had personally handed out the Molotov cocktails
and invited the Weathermen to the Capitol.
All right, not really, but Mao was a genius at creating a cult of personality
that served his own political ends. Sensing that a new generation was
coming up that a) had no memories of pre-Revolution China and b) felt
cheated out of the heroic struggle their elders had waged, Mao kindled
the dissatisfaction until it burst into the flame of the Red Guards
-- student organizations that roamed the country, beating and sometimes
killing intellectuals, party leaders, and anyone deemed "counterrevolutionary."
Like all mass movements, the Cultural Revolution was strident, idealistic,
and deadly. It allowed Mao to purge several of his rivals; it also sank
the country into chaos from the mid-1960s until the Chairman's death
in 1976. "Morning Sun," a documentary made by the Brookline-based
Long Bow Group that is playing at the MFA until Nov. 1, is the first
film to stand back and take a good, hard look at the era, and it has
the force of shameful secrets being hung out in the air.
At nearly two hours and with overly dry narration by NPR correspondent
Margot Adler, "Morning Sun" has its dusty moments. It's saved,
time and again, by an astonishing archival mix of propaganda and news
footage, as well as firsthand accounts of those who were there. Structured
chronologically, the film begins with scenes from the 1964 Peking Opera
stage extravanganza "The East Is Red" -- a hugely popular
event that, for the young, carried a psychological force akin to the
Beatles appearing on Ed Sullivan. The 1955 Russian film "The Gadfly"
also proved crucial to the new generation's socialist-martyr yearnings.
As with youth movements elsewhere, the movies fused rebellion and romance
better than other media.
Prompted to speak out against enemies of the revolution, a Beijing University
faction called themselves the Red Guards, aimed criticism directly at
the country's inner circle, and called for a new revolution -- "the
messier, the better." To the shock of all, Mao agreed, positioning
himself as a benevolent father-figure/godhead and stoking the fervor
until it erupted into indiscriminate violence. "How could students
from such a school go from being nice girls to being murderers?"
wonders one of the interviewees, and then partially answers her own
question: "In the past, grown-ups never took us seriously."
"Morning Sun" gives us voices from across the spectrum, including
one of the founders of the Red Guards, his face in shadow and his words
filled with regret. We hear from the brother of a student newspaper
editor who was executed when the Cultural Revolution started consuming
its critics. The widow and daughter of scapegoated President Liu Shaoqi
are interviewed; so are Li Rui, a Communist Party veteran who was exiled
by the Red Guards, and his daughter Li Nanyang. The latter speaks of
her rejection of her father -- of her being too rigid to even call him
"dad" -- and how saying that word ultimately helped break
her doctrinal fever.
Perhaps the most telling quote -- the one that underscores why this
upheaval was different from all the others of its time -- comes from
former student Zhu Danian. "Why did we fight for the right to make
revolution and not some other right?" he asks. "Because there
were no other rights."