Underplayed Gems

The East Is Red (1965)

The East Is Red poster
Original title
东方红
Directed by
Wang Ping
Genre
drama film, musical film
Country
People's Republic of China
Runtime
1h 57m
Rating
6.1 of 10 from 12 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
The 3D catalogue: film cases on wooden shelves, with the cat sitting at the counter next to its greeting.

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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How it feels

This is a 1965 Chinese musical drama that stages a series of performances about the history of the Chinese Communist Party and the rise of Mao Zedong. It uses song and dance to tell a simplified version of revolutionary history.

grandpatrioticpropagandisticstagedmusicalhistoricalearnestceremonial

What happens

The East Is Red was originally a folk song called "Sesame Oil" or 麻油歌 from the Northwestern Shanxi Province of China. It was a love song with unknown authorship or exact date. In 1938, after the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the song was rewritten as "White Horse Tune" to inspire people in the fight against occupation by the Empire of Japan. After the rise of Mao as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1942 it was rewritten as "The Immigrant Song", until 1945 when it formally renamed into "The East in Red". This musical evolution illustrates a systematic alignment of traditional art with state ideology. The adaptation was not a passive aesthetic choice, but a deliberate political recontextualization. By stripping the original regional melody of its secular, private romantic meaning and replacing it with grand political praise, the production co-opted existing oral traditions. This transformation functioned as a powerful cultural apparatus designed to foster a mass personality cult and prime public consciousness for upcoming political campaigns. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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