Review: Early days of Chinese communism in official film
Posted by kasama on August 1, 2011
The film “The Beginning of the Great Revival” is a huge event in China (and therefore the world). The Chinese government is seeking to preserve the legitimacy of its party and state by revisiting the formative liberation struggle emerging out of the global shocks of World War 1.
This film both describes stirring moments of courage and class struggle — while it legitimizes one of the earth’s leading oppressive governments.
It is the celebration of a brutal ruling party — carried out by vividly describing the world-changing birth of a truly revolutionary party.
Clearly this film’s arrival is a cultural event with the kind of complexity that dialectics was invented to describe.
Kasama has already posted the trailer for this film. Here is our first review by a reader, coming from our correspondent in South China. (It is the latest of the reports by our Kasama reporter in China.)
The Beginning of the Great Revival
by Kasama correspondent in south China
You can tell me a movie is engaging the audience in China when people quit answering their cell phones. On the afternoon I saw The Beginning of the Great Revival, this point
occurred as the rebellious students of the May 4th Movement poured into Tiananmen Square to denounce the Versailles treaty that ended WWI. Like many points in the movie it was well crafted and powerfully evocative.
A young woman silently confronts a line of soldiers by holding a banner written in her own blood. Students appeal to soldiers guarding government ministers and win them over as they pour into the compound and roughly confront those in authority and then set fire to the building. Finally, the government brutally strikes back.
The middle aged woman next to me, who has already taken two calls and was on the phone when this scene began, had stopped talking; the phone still in her hand as tears streamed down her face. I am not sure what this scene meant to her but to me in brought alive the memory of all the times the radical youth of China have flung themselves at the authority of the state
and yes that means the Red Guard of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and yes that means the students and workers that poured into Tiananmen Square on May 4th, 1989.
Of course reviewing a movie in a language I am still learning (and far from proficient in) is its own unique challenge. Still the
outline of history is well known and the film follows the big events from the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 until the founding convention of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.
The young Mao gets a large role in the movie and like other current depictions in movies here, he is played with a serene, yet still commanding presence that has everyone always stopping to listen to him whenever he speaks. This exaggerates his own importance at this stage of history but there is also a recent emphasis on showing something of his personal life apart
from political pronouncements. In this movie this is done through scenes of the relationship with the woman who would become his first wife.
On the larger scale the Bolshevik Revolution is shown and Lenin is depicted addressing first congress of the Communist International.
This may not be the first portrayal of Lenin in a major motion picture since the fall of the Soviet Union but is no doubt the most enthusiastic. Within China the movie supports Mike ely’s comments about the danger of misinterpreting the small size of the Communist Party in 1921. It may have only had 57 members then but many of these comrades were already playing leading roles in not only the mass student movement but also the beginning of the labor movement. The potential of this small circle was well recognized by the communist International and there are great scenes of the two Comintern agents shaking the police agents following them to find the location of the congress.
The were a few surprises in the film for me. The depiction of Yuan Shih-k’ai was well done and oddly sympathetic. Sun Yat Sen, on the other hand, was shown mostly looking earnest but disconnected to the dramatic events unfolding.
I was expecting to see the famous “meeting on the lake” as comrades sought to avoid arrest but it was done in a very visually striking way that made it almost surreal. The first congress concludes in a classic Chinese depiction of transcendent beauty with the delegates singing the Internationale, in Chinese, as powerfully and movingly as in the great crowd scenes on “Reds.”
From there to the end are a series of short, superb scenes that flash forward to show the desperate fighting on the Long March, the entry of the Red Army into Yenan, the advance against the GMD, peasants and soldiers celebrating together in a village, and finally a vast overhead vista of Beijing in a sea of red flags.
Yes, I liked the movie even though the guy that sold me the ticket seemed perplexed and explained (in Mandarin) that it was not in English. I responded, in English, that it didn’t make any difference.
Red Salute from South China
celticfire said
There is another interesting review of this film here>/a>.
Simón Bolivar said
I only hope that this media leads to the reclaiming of the People’s Republic by the working-class itself for the working-class. Truly this type of media that is enthusiastic about the revolution and its motivations and goals is a beginning.
Nathaniel said
The sympathetic portrayal of Yuan Shikai was no surprise to me, since “Founding of a Republic” had a very similar conciliatory tone for its enemies. The portrayal of Chiang Kai-Shek (and his son, who is practically a tragic hero) showed them as wrong, but not particularly evil. Despite the magnanimity (about which I have mixed feelings, since I don’t think we should caricature our opponents in a dramatic film, but I think they come out of recognition of the CCP’s victory and current state), this film is much, much better than “Founding of a Republic”. I wonder what the differences are between the China and International cut (I saw the International version). Also, there was a fair amount of laughter among the Chinese people watching it in Toronto, which (my Chinese is much worse than yours) may have been due to Chow Yun-Fat’s accent in Mandarin or just in spotting cameos.
It’s not from after the fall of the Soviet Union, but the most sympathetic and up-close portrayal of Lenin I have seen in the West is Patrick Stewart’s in the BBC miniseries “Fall of Eagles”. I think at least two episodes are mainly devoted to him.
tellnolies said
I saw the film with English subtitles in NYC. The attendance was poor and aside my companion and myself 100% Chinese. I studied Chinese in High School but remember very little. But even with the subtitles and a decent foundation in the history being covered, I found many parts of the film confusing. In general I think films that attempt to fill in a lot of historical background the way this one does tend to be less successful in capturing what makes a story like this truly interesting — namely the ability of a small group of people to feel and seize on a historical moment. The scenes around the May 4th Movement were definitely the high point of the film precisely because they involved the intersection of the (not yet) communist core with the masses in the process of making history. In my view this is where the film should have really started. I think the decision instead to tell the story of the party’s founding as an epic overflowing with generals, heads of state and battle scenes is very much in keeping with the intent to make it a propaganda vehicle for the current regime. A movie more focused on the May 4 Movement and the clandestine organization of the party’s founding congress would likely have drawn too sharply the contrast between what the party was and what it is today. All that said, I was nonetheless stirred by several scenes. I got weepy during the May 4 Movement scene described above and during the singing of the Internationale on the boat.
dcsteveinwuhan said
I saw it too, in China where I am currently living. I also am a big fan of the docu-soaps on TV a genre featuring revolutionary themes as well, and the current reading of historical events. My Chinese is non-existant so all of the dialogue escaped me, but like the docu-soaps it is possible to follow a film that is well made through the images rather than the narrative. Generally I feel the thrust of the red ideological campaign all around me. Movies, TV, posters, red songs and such point to the inherent contradictions of capitalism under CP leadership.
The corruption, the lack of meaningful civic enagagement, the home demolitions and shortcomings of capitalism stand out in sharp relief when compared to the portrayals of the party and cadre of the past. Around me, people are cynical and very critical of the excesses and inequality. It shows in comic T shirts and ironic participation in red song singing. The second and I think more important message of the whole campaign is that revolutions and uprisings wars and popular struggle are bloody, and in those periods of intense class struggle, there is no luxury for irony, cynicism and disengagement. Today`s ironic consumers of red culture have the luxury to be disengaged, ironic and cynical. That like Piero Pasolini`s poem Victory suggests is a victory of sorts.
Given that neoliberal globalization is path-dependent, and universal, the choices for any subaltern state are limited for now, unless confrontation and war are acceptable. The trade off made by the CPC are a deal made in hell, development, infrastructure and food in exchange for corruption, and domestic discord. At least the develpment and infrastructure being built today will lay the groundwork for socialism in the future.
Ultimately I belive the limitations of third world communism are mostly related to the still-born revolutions in the West, where ideologies of national chauvinism and Imperialism together with post-fordist global production chains have blunted the power of workers at the point of production. Unless there is a serious change in the command centers of finance and a popular resistance in the US to wars , occupations and the military industrial complex there will be only a limited opening for delinkage, and not a large opening for socialism.
China is not utopia, but at least there is peace,autonomy, electricity, water, food and a high growth rate and thats more than can be said for other places.