by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on a fascinating film for our last night’s “feature,” The
East Is Red, a filmed record of a giant
propaganda spectacle put on in 1965 by the Communist government of China,
telling the story of the turmoil China went through from the fall of the Manchu
Dynasty in 1911 to the final takeover of the Communists in 1949. Charles had
downloaded this from archive.org as part of his sudden interest in all things
Chinese (he’s using an online program to teach himself the language, and while
he was more interested in speaking than writing it he has learned at least two characters used in this film,
“Red” and “Mountain”), and while it’s hardly at the level of Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will (a movie with
a similar political and propagandist agenda even though it comes from the other
ideological “side,” the Right instead of the Left), it’s an overwhelming
spectacle even though, aside from North Korea, it’s hard to imagine any other
country producing this sort of thing now. The East Is Red begins with an overture filmed in a theatre — the
huge complement of singers and musicians needed to perform it left very few
seats available for any sort of audience — and I was amused to see an entire
section of er-hus (the four-string Chinese violin, which sounds like a
scratchier version of its Western counterpart and which the player holds, not under their neck, but in their lap, bowing it like a
cello) as well as a section of Western violins. In fact, the entire orchestra
and chorus needed to perform this is so gargantuan even Richard Wagner, had he
had a chance to see it, would probably have said, “Aren’t you overdoing this a little
bit?”
The East Is Red tells the
story of the Chinese Revolution in six episodes and drops a lot of Chinese
historical allusions to events like the “Autumn Harvest Uprising” that were
probably well known to the Chinese audience (most of whom would have been going
to school and hearing this same propagandistic version of their nation’s
history) but were lost on me. What holds up best about this show is the sheer
power and skill of the dancing and the mass choreography; there are sequences
that are reminiscent of American musicals (including an early scene of Chinese
laborers loading silk crates onto a ship that makes it look as if director Ping
Yang had seen the similar sequence of “Ol’ Man River” in the 1936 James Whale
film of Show Boat, and a later
one of a chorus line holding and manipulating giant sunflowers that reminded me
of the big banana sequence in Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here and one scene of native girls posed in a ring that
had me waiting for King Kong to appear) but for the most part this is a pretty
home-grown spectacle. One admires the precision with which these masses of
singers and dancers perform (and wonders how much they had to rehearse to get
this good) even though the overall sameness of the spectacle gets wearying
after a while. One wishes that director Yang and the show’s other creators had
been able to do a better job of dramatizing the villains so there’d be some respite from all the scenes of heroic peasants,
workers, prisoners, near-slaves and whatnot rising up and rebelling. There are
a couple of shots towards the end that pull back from the proscenium and remind
us that this is, at least supposedly, a stage production being filmed in real
time (though I suspect most of it was shot in a movie studio since, like the
Busby Berkeley numbers that were their inspiration, many of these scenes just
cover too much ground to be believable as stage productions, especially in the
big but not that huge theatre we
see them performing in), but for the most part this is an enormous historical
pageant that’s absolutely amazing but also gets a bit boring after a while. The
production of The East Is Red is
credited to the August 1 Film Studio and the Peking Central Newsreel and
Documentary Film Studio (the English subtitles used the older spelling of Mao’s
name, “Mao Tsetung,” instead of the current “Mao Zedong”) and no individuals
are listed on the titles — Ping Yang’s directorial credit comes from the film’s
imdb.com page, not the actual credits. It’s also subtitled in Chinese, as if
Yang and his colleagues were afraid that even the Chinese audience wouldn’t be
able to tell what was being sung or spoken without help.
Though the whole point
of the spectacle was to glorify the collective spirit (though, in the manner of
a lot of Communist regimes — not
only Mao’s but also the Soviet Union under Stalin and North Korea under its
succession of Kims — there’s also a conscious effort to build a cult of
personality around the Great Leader; unlike Hitler in Triumph of the
Will, Mao doesn’t actually appear on
screen, though there’s an actor playing the young Mao who looks sorta-kinda
like him), there are at least two voices, a tenor who sings a solo at the end
of the sequence representing the Long March and a soprano who kicks off the
sequence about the Japanese occupation of most of China during World War II,
who clearly had the chops to have sung Western-style opera if they’d been
allowed to. Charles wondered how much this movie reflects the pre-revolutionary
traditions of Chinese opera — my understanding is that when they took over the
Communists had closed all the Chinese opera houses as part of their general
campaign against all previous
artistic traditions in China, though it’s possible they called back the artists
they’d rendered unemployed and brought them back for hagiographic spectacles
like this, drawing on the historical traditions of Chinese opera for a very
different artistic as well as political purpose. One of the imdb.com reviewers
also pointed out that this film was made just before Mao declared the Cultural
Revolution in 1966, and Charles wondered how many people in this film were
ultimately denounced as counter-revolutionary and purged or sent to the
countryside to do farm labor. The East Is Red is a fascinating slice of cultural as well as
political propaganda, and I’m not sure there’s anything else out there even
remotely like it aside from Triumph of the Will and whatever propaganda spectacles the North Koreans
(led by Trump’s good buddy, the murderous thug Kim Jong Un) are churning out
these days.
