Morning Sun

The sixties were tumultuous enough here in America, but it was nothing compared to the institutionalized insanity of China’s Cultural Revolution. One survivor, interviewed in this compelling and chilling documentary, calls it “an age ruled by the poet and the executioner. The poet scattered roses everywhere, while the executioner cast a long shadow of terror.” Gangs of Beijing’s young people organized, took to the streets, and bloodily revolted against those they thought were disloyal to the ideals of the 1949 revolution—a bizarre national mania somewhere between Beatlemania, Stalinist purges, and the Spanish Inquisition, whipped up by Mao himself to solidify his grip on power by advertising himself as a kind of demigod. In a weird irony, the antiestablishment youth were fiercely loyal to the head of state. That frenzied drive to maintain the image of Chinese Communism as heaven on earth was all the more frenzied, it seems, because China’s leaders were trying to cover up the recent millions of deaths resulting from the catastrophic agricultural debacle that was the Great Leap Forward. Morning Sun would have been improved with a less stiff and monotonous narrator, but it’s a minor problem in a film whose subject is anything but dry.
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