Film Revisits Chinese Revolution

Xu Xing’s weapon of resistance, he said yesterday, is his memory.

Chinese documentary filmmaker and writer Xing spoke at a screening here yesterday of his film “A Chronicle of My Cultural Revolution,” which details personal childhood horrors he and his generation experienced during Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s.

In an event jointly sponsored by Harvard’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and the New England China Seminar, Xing juxtaposed the brutality he witnessed with the history perpetuated by the Chinese government, which Xing said has been sanitized.

Xing said that the Chinese government has intentionally tried to distort information about the Cultural Revolution and that through his film, he hopes to provide the next generation with accurate information about that period in history.

“The cruelties I experienced and heard remain in my memory,” Xing said in an interview through an interpreter.

In one particularly graphic scene, a woman describes finding her headmaster disemboweled and beaten to death behind the schoolhouse. Later in the film, a man recounts his mother’s shooting, using his own chest to trace the path the bullet took.

Merle Goldman, a professor emerita at Boston University and a research associate at the Fairbank Center, said she sponsored the viewing because it is the first Chinese movie she had seen about the Cultural Revolution.

“In China, it’s a non-subject, a subject the party does not want to talk about,” Goldman said.

Travis B. Pierce, a student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’ East Asian program, praised the film for its unique, first-person insight into the period.

“When I’m in China, I’m usually with people my age or in urban areas and don’t directly interact with people who experienced it,” he said. For people of his generation, he said, the Cultural Revolution is a hard thing to grasp, and this movie gave it a human face.

Xing’s film has been shown informally five or six times in China, Xing said, but there are no plans to release it with government approval.

Goldman commended Xing for his desire to educate a naïve young Chinese population. “As a westerner, we know the facts,” Goldman said. “It was clear he had problems making it, but that he was able to do it was an accomplishment.”