How Yukong Moved the Mountains

How Yukong Moved the Mountains ★★★★★

- Clocking in at almost 13 hours in 12 parts, and containing perhaps the most extensive footage of late Maoist era China ever filmed, Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Joris Ivens' "How Yukong Moved the Mountains" is massive in scale and ambition, attempting to be nothing less than a synoptic view of the entirely of Chinese society in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in the early 1970s. The documentary highlights big city factories, a fishing village, an army barracks, a school, oil wells, the city of Shanghai and more. Everyone from house wives to factory workers to professors to pharmacy drugstore employees are interviewed. The Ivens' perspective is uncritical and pro-Maoist. The Cultural Revolution is taken at the word of numerous interviewees as the proper campaign of class war and revolutionary consciousness against bourgeois revisionists, Mao as the savior of China. The views expressed and the access granted are seamless, no filmmaker could have been granted such an open and wide view of China and been able to interview so many people without the permission and support of the Party, as well as the interview subjects holding the right views and saying the right things. Joris Ivens was also pro-communist, and after the Sino-Soviet Split, pro-China, viewing the latter as the proper leader of the global communist movement. It would be easy then to dismiss "How Yukong Moved the Mountains" as Maoist propaganda, but that would be a mistake. While I am certain that many portions of the film are either scripted or function as a kind of Potemkin Village, the documentary is massive enough that this could not be the case for everything. To crib Deng Xiaoping's 70/30 rule regarding Mao, I think it's fair to say that while some of the footage and interviews are clearly set up, a majority of it is people in their natural state so to speak.

- "How Yukong Moved the Mountains" functions best when taken as a self-portrait of the Party and of Maoist China, how the Party and the state wanted China to be perceived by the outside world, given that the documentary was to be released abroad. The achievements since 1949 are touted, alongside extensive philosophical and political discussions. This is not a documentary about the reality of late Maoist China per se, but rather about the self-perception of late Maoist China, just as a guided tour of one's home is not necessarily about the reality of your life, but how you want your life to look to others. What was most fascinating to me then was not the discussion of the achievements post-1949 or the interviews, but the material reality of life shown, how people dressed, their homes, how the factories looked, the equipment used, the things that were left unspoken because they were taken for granted, but which reveal more than what is actually discussed. Taken as a work of historical anthropology, it's quite extraordinary. The only other work that bears comparison is Antonioni's "Chung Kuo," but which has an opposite approach. While also given unprecedented access at roughly the same time, Antonioni's documentary is that of an outsider looking in. Antonioni has no time to let the Chinese speak for themselves, rather it is about his perspective on what he encounters in China. I hesitate to say that this is a more honest approach, given that it too elides reality by not attempting to see China as the Chinese themselves see it. The distance created by Antonioni is just as unreal to getting a sense of life within a home as if one views a home only from the outside and never goes inside. But taken together I think both form as comprehensive a documentary view of China in the early 1970s as is possible.

Some highlights for me:
- There is an extensive debate about Engels' "Anti-Duhring" during a Party cadre reading group meeting at a factory in the fourth segment, which is framed as the debate of idealism vs. materialism, intention vs. reaction, free will vs. determinism, the Cultural Revolution vs. bourgeois reactionaries
- The change in teeth quality from people born before 1949 and those after
- How it all drives home the reality of Maoist China as a developmental dictatorship
- The huge explosion in the population since 1949. Children are always underfoot and a common topic of conversation, with facilities for taking care of children a major issue

- There's much more that could be said, but I'll stop here because it's all too much. This is essential viewing for understanding modern Chinese history. It's a tragedy that it hasn't been restored yet and that the only extant full versions of it are grainy copies on Youtube.

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