The East Is Red! (Or Was, At One Point, Anyway)
I have been looking for this movie on VHS or DVD for some time, with no luck. (The brisk international market for Cultural Revolution kitsch evidently does not include the cinematic bits.) Now, thanks to YouTube, you can watch it in a series of fifteen installments.
Without sharing the ideology of the commentator, I’ll give credit to Maoist blogger Comrade Zero for both pointing to the film and giving an overview of its historical significance:
This movie was made so as to make such things as the Marxist theory of knowledge, the Mass Line, the concept of"red and expert", the concept of two-line struggle and continuing the revolution under socialism accessable to the broad masses of the people taking part in the revolution. We see in this film how contradictions sharpen under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and how class struggle not only continues, but deepens, under socialism. Breaking With Old Ideas is a movie about teaching and it is a movie for teaching. It is a film that interestingly and boldly tries to demonstrate and explain a Maoist pedagogy, and it does this very much in the style of the late period of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) when it was made. This film also shows a lot of the dynamic historical context that can sometimes be overlooked, giving one a small glimpse of what socialist construction can look like. It is also interesting to see the relationship between the Great Leap Forward (depicted in the film) and the GPCR during which the film was made.
For a rather less ecstatic look at this period, by all means keep an eye out for a new book from Harvard University Press called Mao’s Last Revolution by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals. (More on it, including an excerpt, is available here.) I expect this will be the definitive study in English for some time to come.
The emphasis is very much on the Party-eye view of events, so to speak – that is, how events were generated by and reflected within various levels and factions of the country’s leadership. In that sense, this is really the sequel to and culmination of MacFarquhar’s three-volume study The Origins of the Cultural Revolution.
A comparable synthetic overview of the social and cultural history (insofar as you can distinguish either from political history) would be good to have. But I don’t want that to sound like a criticism of Mao’s Last Revolution. The footnotes make you aware of just how much of the documentary record the authors have drawn on – thanks in large part to Chinese historians, who have undertaken some genuinely heroic labors over the past couple of decades.