Morning Sun | Reviews
Better Red Than Misled
Morning Sun sheds light on China's revolutionary red guard
by Terri Sutton, City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul), Jan. 28, 2004
In an instructional coincidence, two of the best documentaries of recent
years dig up the files on a violent student revolutionary group of the
1960s. The Weather Underground sifts through the myths of our
homegrown bombers. Morning Sun, directed by Geremie Barmé,
Richard Gordon, and Carma Hinton, capably deciphers China's Red Guard.
Captured via film clips and speeches, the rhetoric of the two groups
tends toward the anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist, and pro-revolutionary.
The irony arrives in their complementary purposes: the Americans seeking
to tear down their corrupt (capitalist) government, the massive Chinese
movement seeking to uplift its corrupt (communist) leader. The films
together are an argument against revolution (though not against change),
if only because wheels tend to continue turning.
Never more so, apparently, than when Chairman Mao was pushing the tire.
Morning Sun is more accurately a documentary about Mao's Cultural
Revolution, of which the Red Guards were the shock troops unleashed.
From 1966 until Mao's death in 1976, China reeled in terror, trying
to keep up with the next chosen scapegoat: teachers, intellectuals,
artists, former shop owners in pre-communist days, Communist party officials,
children of CP officials, the Red Guard members themselves. "Anyone
could be accused," says a former Mao supporter, "of anything."
The punishments ranged from beatings and firings to firing squads.
Morning Sun charts these tidal convulsions efficiently but
quickly. Historical background on Mao's previous public policy disaster--the
"Great Leap Forward" of famine and starvation--speeds by in
a blur of stark footage and propaganda pipe dream. The following economic
recovery, orchestrated by CP moderates (and therefore threatening to
Mao's dominance), merits a couple of lines of voiceover narration. The
filmmakers explain who was who amongst China's leaders as events demand,
which can be confusing to viewers without previous knowledge. And yet
the movie fashions a compelling arc via the roller-coaster experience
of its idealistic teenagers.
As in The Weather Underground, these once-fervent activists
are now subdued and often horrified by their role in the violence. They
speak of their belief in Mao as if it were a kind of possession. Some
remember attending mass rallies in Tiananmen Square, being amazed at
seeing Mao walking through the crowd--or, conversely, acting hysterical
because everyone else was. The offspring of Communist party officials
composed the majority of the first Red Guards; those interviewees speak
movingly of painful maneuverings when their parents were subsequently
denounced.
The directors unspool an awesome collection of vintage propaganda, from
footage of the massive performance The East Is Red to placards
and radio speeches. One of the most disturbing clips shows deaf-mute
children being provided hearing aids, ostensibly through Mao's generosity;
having been taught to speak, they parrot lines condemning China's denounced
president Liu Shaoqi. A simpler film would've made those children a
metaphor for China under Mao: Certainly the deadly manipulations of
their chairman could reduce people to childish passivity. But Morning
Sun's interviewees provide a more nuanced (and nightmarish) picture
of thinking participants motivated by romantic idealism, heady power,
and revenge.
Perhaps the most poignant section of the film concerns the student rebels
who left the cities for the vast countryside. What they found there
was the vaunted proletariat, living in misery with Mao's blessing. The
former activists of The Weather Underground and Morning
Sun share a bottomless feeling of betrayal. All were stirred, as
children, by a shining vision of their country's aims--and discovered
themselves shamefully misled. No wonder this generation was reluctant
to support the Chinese student democracy movement of the late '80s (the
subject of Gordon and Hinton's equally complex documentary The
Gate of Heavenly Peace from 1995). They had learned the risks
of extreme idealism--that it can endanger the very lives it claims to
support. Yet what does it say that, since the '60s, youth activism in
the U.S. has been on the blink? Who's passive now?
Film · Vol 25 · Issue 1208 · PUBLISHED
1/28/04
URL: www.citypages.com/databank/25/1208/article11843.asp
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