It is the individual faces of young Chinese women and men in the foreground that catch the reader's attention in the opening pages of photographer Li Zhensheng's new book about the Cultural Revolution. Some scowl; others smoke, applaud or jeer. Behind them, a huge banner-waving crowd fans out and disappears into a blurry background that fills most of the spread. We know all about that faceless mass of young revolutionaries and what they did under Mao Zedong. But Li's emphasis on a few fresh faces hints at something more complex: What of the individual in 1960s China? What drove him to smash authority, lay waste to centuries of culture and give into that mob mentality?

These are questions that have never been satisfactorily answered. Li's groundbreaking book, "Red-Color News Soldier" (315 pages. Phaidon )—along with a stunning new documentary film called "Morning Sun"—may help start the process. "There hasn't been an effort in China to understand the Cultural Revolution as a human event before—how did people get wrapped up in it?" says Jeff Wasserstrom, director of East Asian studies at Indiana University. "You could talk about how you suffered in it, but to try and recapture more than that was taboo."

For Li and the creators of "Morning Sun," to do less was not an option. As a young photographer, Li covered the Cultural Revolution for a communist newspaper in Heilongjiang province. While snapping the requisite upbeat images of Mao's China, he also took plenty of darker shots, which he squirreled away in his apartment. Now, at last, the world can see them: former mayors and provincial officials forced to wear dunce caps, their faces smeared with ink; landowners, bowed before salivating crowds, with their hair hacked off by young students; firing squads and their victims. Li himself was a member of the Red Guard—a reluctant one, he claims—and admits with a mix of shame and reminiscent glory how he received a red band with Mao calligraphy on it in Beijing—but considered it too precious to actually wear outside. It read red-color news soldier, giving his book its title. "I put it away like a treasure and wore the old Red Guard one instead," he writes. "And I still have it—even today."

Likewise, Carma Hinton, one of the producers of "Morning Sun," grew up in China as the daughter of an American China expert. She is roughly the same age as some of those she returned to interview for the film, including one woman who recalls stepping forward at a rally to place a red band on the arm of Chairman Mao himself. We also meet broken families, in which fathers were exiled to hard labor based on dubious denunciations and their daughters persecuted by schoolmates. "The film is quite revealing in showing a number of different reactions," says Elizabeth Perry, professor of government at Harvard and a China expert. "Many remember the violence above all, but many also remember the excitement, the thrill of joining."

Yet nothing can evoke the emotions of the Cultural Revolution more powerfully than the old symbols so masterfully used by Mao's propaganda machine. In "Morning Sun," we learn about the impact of the film version of "Gadfly," an 18th-century English book about an idealistic student indoctrinated into a secret revolutionary order who must turn against his father. We see the colorful and victorious spectacle of Chinese dancers re-enacting in epic style Mao's Long March and the battles with the Nationalists. It was the heroes portrayed in these spectacles that some of those interviewed admit they sought to emulate during the Cultural Revolution. They could look to "Gadfly" when they turned against parents who didn't support the revolution. Many sought to become the characters in the epic ballets and glamorized mythology of the Long March when they waged their own revolution.

At its heart, we learn, this movement was terrifying because its cruelty grew less out of noble political ideals than out of adolescent turmoil: a thirst for romanticism, an urge to smash authority and a shallow desire to be trendy. "I believed in Mao," Li recalls. "He said we were going to have revolutions like this every seven or eight years, so young men like me were thinking that we were lucky. We would have the chance to experience several of them during our lifetimes." Li demonstrates how well the party understood the power of images to influence young minds, recalling that any photograph that happened to have a picture of Mao in the background had to be doctored so the image was perfectly clear. These two new works now bring a very different kind of clarity to Mao's revolution.

Li Zhensheng's book, Red-Color News Soldier,
is available at Amazon.com