The East Is Red (1965)

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

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)

More like this

• The Grand Substitution (1965)
• Night in Jinling (1985)
• Founding Ceremony (1989)
• Ashima (1965)
• Farewell My Concubine (1993)
• Eternity in Flames (1965)
• Mao Zedong in 1925 (2001)
• Youth (2017)