China

I'm a confused liberal, and this film served to solidify my confusion. Before entering the theatre, I had already pardoned the producer and photographer, Felix Greene, for a film which I knew would be rife with propaganda. I was not surprised when the China he showed me was as strikingly rugged as southern Utah and as green as Norway's eastern coast. As I expected, the peasant glee club sang a few rounds of "Socialism Is Good," and I nodded indulgently when the narrator noted that "no one starved, but rations were tight."

But the praise for the regime, for which my pencil lay in wait, did not appear. There was only a soft mention of how the Chinese have become happier and more well-fed since the Revolution. I waited for the army to march proudly through Peking's "Red-Square," but they never came. The movie was thwarting my every move into complacency, and the photography and color began to penetrate.

Traditional sword dancers, precisely terraced rice paddies, and a shot of a misty Chinese village at dawn, sent ohh-ing intakes of breath throughout the house. Mao appeared on the screen, and some of his U.S. fans--sitting in a bloc on the right side of the theatre--applauded, while a half dozen Chinese graduate students--conspicuously on the left--shhhhed loudly.

And then Greene began to poke at my conscience. A smiling, brightly scrubbed chorus sang, "...black and white together, we shall not be moved..." With the fields of waving rice, I could only nod my head.

Greene spoke before the show and admitted that "if the Time and Life boys went to China, they would not produce this kind of film." The HST audience chuckled knowingly. But this is exactly the paradox that the movie points out. The American public does not know. Thousands of Chinese are starving in the American papers, and peasant morale is ebbing, but Greene's presentation stresses the zeal and vitality of the Chinese people and their fat babies. He says that he was free to photograph what he wished and often traveled alone. He politely notes that the Chinese censored nothing--the film was developed in England. Who am I to believe?

Greene pointed out that he purposely did not cast the film in a cold-war framework. The narrator closed with, "We end with no solutions, only questions. And the questions remain for history to answer." I walked out of the theatre confused.