Pictures of Chairman Mao
China's cultural revolution was a group hysteria on an historic scale.
Using rare film footage, Morning Sun tells the story in all its weird detail.
by Alistair Highet

The East is Red, a song-and-dance epic produced in China in 1964 as a celebration of the great wonders of Chairman Mao Zedong and his leadership, is without question one of the most bizarrely beautiful, misguided works of theatrical art ever produced anywhere. In the documentary about the Cultural Revolution, Morning Sun, which is playing at Real Art Ways starting on Friday, we get to see long, colorful sections of this socialist-realist opera. It was made at the time of the Great Leap Forward in the mid-to-late 1960s, a period of radical reform when the Chinese Communist party decided to suppress the ballet and other bourgeois art forms, and embrace the kind of socialist realism that is now only produced by the weirdos in North Korea.

Frankly, the excerpts from The East is Red are awe-inspiring -- ballerinas in Mao jackets with rifles popping up out of cornfields to point their weapons in unison. It's amazing, and so, so deluded.

This film does a wonderful job of recreating the aura of the time. When students in Paris and California were smoking pot and talking about a revolution, the teenagers in Beijing were -- at least in their minds -- actually making one.

Mao and his allies in the party encouraged the students to attack bourgeois elements in the society -- schoolteachers, party officials and members of what had been capitalist families. The so-called "Red Guards," students, adopted the Mao jacket and went around beating up people they thought were counter-revolutionaries. Often beating them to death. Millions were denounced, sent into exile or imprisoned. "Looking back now, it was ridiculous," one former Red Guard tells the filmmakers.

Inevitably, two things happened. The students who went to the countryside discovered just how poor and backward China really was. "Mao should have known that the peasants would tell us things," says one former Red Guard.

Then the revolution, as they all do, turned on its most fervid supporters. Ultimately of course, Mao would die and the country would try the "Gang of Four," including Mao's wife, for the excesses of the period.

There is a lot of complicated inter-party stuff that the film, wisely, doesn't linger on. What you are struck with are the beautifully happy, smiling teenagers -- millions of them -- who fill the streets and the squares and gush at Mao like he is some kind of rock star. This isn't politics, it is religion. One without foundation. "Everything was a lie," one interviewee concludes of the period. "Nothing was true."

Alistair Highet, Hartford Advocate