Breaking With Old Ideas [PRC 1975]

决裂
Director: Li W.
Cinematographer: Cheng L.

Set in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward, but made at the very end of the Cultural Revolution, this film sets out the justification for the Cultural Revolution by telling the story of a project to set up a college, and how that project is divided between two camps--the revisionists and the Maoists. While the visual style is not exactly socialist realism, the characters and their interactions certainly feel like it.

First, the visual style. Some have commented that this film has a highly Hollywood-influenced look. Certainly there is nothing terribly innovative about the visuals here, and many of them are rather Hollywood-style. However, much of the film also has an interesting, almost poster-like colour scheme, which gives it a painted feeling at times; this is used to good effect in a couple of attractive shots, including one of peasants spraying rice paddies. There are also some social panorama type shots as in the Kalatozov and Urusevsky films, like The Cranes Are Flying.

The content of the film is more interesting. The basic point is that there is a conflict between two ways of carrying out education at an agricultural college. On the one hand, there is the bourgeois way: allow in only the best students so you can build on strengths, teach theory detached from practice, build the college near a city and allow students to become detached intellectuals who will therefore never want to return to their village. On the other hand, there is the Maoist way: allow in the hardest working, most class conscious peasants and workers who want to use their education to benefit their work brigade, integrate labour and education, gear education toward practical matters, and build the college in the mountains, giving classes in the fields, so that students remain peasants, even when they become educated. As Gurley claims in China's Economy and the Maoist Strategy, the notion of developing everyone simultaneously rather than banking on efficiency was one of the purported differences between Maoism and capitalism.

But of course here, the people advocating the non-Maoist way are not openly capitalist; they are members of the Party bureaucracy. They are technocrats, and believe that knowledge is knowledge, and must be imparted to the most intellectually able in order to create a new generation of more technocrats, to advance toward socialism. Tellingly, the film is peppered with references that identify these people with the USSR. At one point, a peasant comes up with a teaching theory using lumps of clay to demonstrate; one of the bureaucrats says something like 'What can lumps of clay tell us when we have Kairov' (the Soviet pedagogue). As an example of the irrelevance of the curriculum, one of the students asks why they are learning about the white birch of Russia rather than the bamboo, and the black soil of Siberia rather than the red soil of China. And the students who have decided to become intellectuals place great emphasis on reading books by 'foreign' experts--it seems obvious from the context and the time period that this is an allusion to copying the Soviet model. Of course, none of this stops Lenin being idolised alongside Mao; for the point here is not a problem with the USSR itself, but rather the Maoist problem with the supposedly 'revisionist' post-Stalin USSR.

In addition to being identified with the USSR, the opponents of the Maoists are painted as more or less corrupt, though some of them are just misled. They also clearly have a fetish for European styles and for intellectualism, and show contempt for peasants. One of them says at one point, defending the idea that peasants are not intelligent enough to be educated, 'Well, from each according to his abilities'.

As the film goes on, we are clearly meant to feel increasing dislike for these people, until finally the accusation is made by the protagonist that they are working in the interests of the bourgeoisie. By that point it is clear that they are, but that they control the middle-level Party positions; clearly the only way to solve the problem is for peasants themselves to rise up with the support and guidance of the very top levels of the Party--in other words, by the time the film is over, it is clear that the Cultural Revolution is the logical next step.

Toward the end, the film becomes increasingly like the Cultural Revolution. The peasants do start to rise up, at least verbally, against middle-level Party officials. It begins when the Party tries to implement the 'Three Selves and One Guarantee' policy of a partial return to private landholdings, for which Liu Shaoqi was later attacked by the Maoists. The peasants of course vehemently refuse this as a step backward, for which the most vocal of them is called for a public criticism session. This rapidly turns into the people denouncing the Party leaders and calling for socialism. Interestingly, this includes two young people publicly denouncing their fathers, Pavlik Morozov-like, for corrupt and capitalist behaviour.

This denunciation touches on another issue which is repeated a couple of times through the film: Confucianism. Again, the more reactionary side is seen as being closer to the Confucian way. For example, the Maoist protagonist refuses to let students bow to him as a sign of respect; but the more old-fashioned teacher has no problem with it at all. Similarly this denunciation of one's father is decidedly non-Confucian. So, Confucianism is added to the package of roles assigned to the reactionaries.

As for the general sense of the film, one of the reasons why it has a socialist realist feeling about it is the truly oversimplified way in which characters are depicted. The protagonist is a broad, smiling man, who seems to be able to laugh heartily and grin in almost any situation. Peasants sing revolutionary songs about the Party while they are doing their washing. Stereotyped enemies say things like 'I must read books written by foreigners, for that is the only way to become world famous'. And of course the protagonist looks like he is entering an altered state of mind when he reads from Mao's works. There is also utter devotion to labour and to collective property by the peasants; they drop everything and sacrifice their exam results to go save crops in the middle of the night, for example. In other words, in all of this there is a clear reason for everything good and everything bad--it all basically comes down to what side you are on. And that is emphasised often: a person's class background is the most important aspect in deciding whether they should be admitted to the school, and implicitly in deciding whether they are trustworthy.

However, one interesting difference between this film and Growing Up in Battle is that in that film, vengeance against the enemies of the people is more or less glorified without qualification; whereas in this film, there is a hint at forgiveness, so long as the person in question is willing to undergo a self-criticism session. It seems this might have been one of the ideals of the Cultural Revolution, even if things often did not work out that way.

It is interesting to think about a film like this being made in 1975. During the Cultural Revolution, film production dropped dramatically, only starting to pick up again in the early 1970s as the Cultural Revolution itself waned. So it seems a notable fact that a film would be produced just at that time that essentially justifies the movement and tries to remind people of why it was undertaken, the principles for which it stood and the problems it ostensibly sought to ameliorate. To what extent this was a message reminding people to continue being vigilant, and to what extent it was a way of praising the Cultural Revolution and saying it had been necessary is not immediately clear.

At the risk of making an unfair comparison, it is also interesting to look at this film alongside Agony, also made in the same year, though not released until several years later. That film is also a film about a pre-revolutionary period, dedicated in part to showing why the revolution was necessary. But the difference is that the latter film is subtle and sophisticated, depicting the reactionaries as complex human beings who do not necessarily have the power they seem to; whereas this film paints things in far more stark, black and white colours. In other words, the good and bad guys in this film are much closer to The Unforgettable Year 1919, made more than twenty years before. There is some possibility that may tell us something interesting about parallels between the USSR in the late Stalin period and China in the late Mao period.