'Youth'
-a nostalgic cinematic reprise of a lost Cultural Revolution kingdom

Geremie R. Barmé

The 1977 film 'Youth' was made in the dying moments of the Cultural Revolution and directed by the famous Shanghai auteur, Xie Jin. Xie is one of the most extraordinary of the many chameleon-like cultural figures of socialist China. He has created an impressive cinematic oeuvre that represent strategic artistic responses to each and every twist and turn in party cultural policy.

Having come to fame for his 1957 paean to female athletes, 'Woman Basketball Player Number 5', it is ironically appropriate that he should have launched the acting career of Chen Chong (better known today in her post-David Lynch/ 'Twin Peaks' North-American persona of Joan Chen) via the vehicle of 'Youth', a celebration of the curative miracles of PLA-administered acupuncture and their life-transforming effects on a backwater peasant deaf-mute.

Behind the unintentional comedy of the film-and we should remember that it was banned the moment it was finished as its release date came after the denouement of both Chairman Mao and the Gang of Four (along with their attendant propagandists)-there is a deeper parable about tragedy, redemption and apotheosis. The clips of the film selected here display the salient features of this long-forgotten but fascinating work. Among other things they illustrate the fact that in the hands of one of the canniest of the party's cultural propagandists, Xie Jin, the crude late-1960s' formulations of 'Songs of Triumph' could have a particular artistic valence. It also shows (as do a number of other noteworthy films and plays created in the mid 1970s) that Cultural Revolution propaganda, far from being limited to a handful of Revolutionary Model Theatrical Works (geming yangbanxi), was continuing to evolve even as the impetus for the movement died a lingering death. 'Youth' is also an odd, even prescient, example of instant Cultural Revolution nostalgia.

The title of the film denotes that it is a work about the possibilities of the young, the force behind the seminal rebellion at the heart of the Cultural Revolution era. Yet 'Youth' was produced at a time when the youthful enthusiasm of 1965-67 was but a distant, and for many, distasteful memory. The lauding of palliative PLA acupuncture miracles is also dated and by this time (1977) risible, especially as professionals were once more at the forefront of medical care in China. In a way, 'Youth' prefigures by nearly two decades the director Jiang Wen's meditation on 1960s' youth, 'In the Days of Brilliant Sunlight' (1995; based on 'Vicioius Beasts', a novella by Wang Shuo).

(Xie Jin's other works of this time include the widely-seen 1974 film 'Spring Seedlings', which features class struggle and barefoot doctors, and the cinematic direction of 'Boulder Bay' in 1975, a high-choreographed new revolutionary opera about the infiltration of Taiwan-KMT spies on the mainland in the early 1960s. Showing all the alacrity of a faithful party apparachik, Xie Jin was quick to distance himself from the Cultural Revolution-era arts bureaucracy and he soon re-invented himself as something of a 'non-mainstream', even 'dissident' film-maker in the 1980s.)