Long Bow Takes Great Leap Forward with a Gripping Doc on China's
Cultural Revolution
Eastward To The World
by Hua Hsu
Village
Voice October 22 - 28, 2003
China's Cultural Revolution endures as an ugly symbol of the human
psyche's weakness in times of groupthink. Between 1964 and 1976, Mao
Tse-tung's experiment in nation building took on a life of its own,
plunging China into a period of spectacular cultural reprogramming
marked by the greatest of ambitions - to effectively reboot Chinese
history and culture - and the lowest forms of suffering. The skepticism
of the few surrendered to the swelling deification of Mao and the
savage logic of the party line. Few people, short of the Chairman
himself, understood how catastrophic the revolution was to the millions
suffering in secluded silence; the country - starved, anxious - was
preying on itself.
Directors Carma Hinton, Richard Gordon, and Geremie Barmé -
members of the celebrated Long Bow Group - sift through the official
truths and unofficial conjectures for this gripping, relentlessly
tragic retelling of life in revolutionary times. Morning Sun
is the unofficial sequel to The
Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995), the trio's three-hour tour
de force about the 1989 Chinese democracy movement. Just as Gate conveyed
the desperate drama of Tiananmen through grueling pacing and twisting,
seemingly infinite narratives, Morning Sun's elegiac tone and
bottom-up perspectives humanize events that are often described through
faceless masses. Through key interviews and extended looks at the
culture around the revolution (film, music, theater, fashion, etc.),
one gets a taste of utopian mania.
The interviewees range from Luo Xiaohai, founding member of the Red
Guard movement, to the widow of state president Liu Shaoqi, who was
the main target of the revolution. There is a rare conversation with
Song Binbin, a young student immortalized when she pinned a Red Guard
armband on Mao in 1966. "Today high school kids get hysterical over
rock stars . . . but these kids can laugh at what we did," says writer
Wang Lixiong. "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 or
dance." (Though, according to a state propaganda film excerpted here,
he did cure 105 deaf-mutes with his revolutionary wives' tales.)
As the revolution was a movement of young people with the Party as
parent, Morning Sun treats the intergenerational tensions and
renunciations in the home as metonymic for the violence and public
humiliations outside. There is an amazing sequence from Zhao Likui's
never-before-seen documentation of the "Long Marches" of 1966-1967,
wherein thousands of students left home and imagined a revolutionary
future by embarking on a legendarily tedious hike from China's revolutionary
past.
At its core, Morning Sun is a film about the difficulty of
nostalgia. Recalling the news of China's first atomic bomb, Xiao Ming
is genuine and unembarrassed: "Back then I was ecstatic, like I had
the A-bomb in my own backyard." The speakers temper today's orthodoxy
that Mao was pure evil with their own memories of the sublime, innocent
beauty of their faith. And they think of this blighted time with a
regretful, humane spirit that probably has more to do with who they
are now than with who they were then. Morning Sun succeeds
because it gives its speakers- many of whom went from being culprits
to being victims - the space to grieve, and preserves, rather than
judges, their exuberant hopes. For many, the burden of seeing the
grand experiment's magnificent, arching failure was punishment enough.