Nitrate Film: The East is Red

2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse in the Chinese zodiac. The sign is associated with rapid and decisive activity in both matter and culture. The tangible animation is evident in the intensifying development of China’s technological, financial, and entertainment industries. To understand the zodiac’s leap in the arts, however, we need to look back to 1965 — the year in which the resplendent agitprop opera The East is Red signalled the Cultural Revolution and the Fire Horse’s last arrival.

Charting the history of the Chinese Communist Party from inception to the founding of the People’s Republic, The East is Red is a song-and-dance epic. The choreographed movements of the dancers on the stage of the Great Hall of the People are nothing short of a revolution that aligned a traditional folk piece with the state’s cultural apparatus.

As the music of the people was co-opted by the Party, so were the people themselves. With grandiose, intricately choreographed set-pieces performed in front of a mass audience, the opera turns the dancers and the audience into the constituent parts of an intricate, dynamic mechanism. The East is Red is an industrial revolution in cultural production. Its scale and all-hands-on-deck success both impress and terrify even sixty years on.

The East is Red, 1965
dir. Enjie Li, Ping Want.
1h 57′

Nitrate Film is a series of screenings selected by the film programmer Kit Ramsay, accompanied by discussions led by friends of Verdurin. The events animate live, public critique, bringing attention to filmic artefacts deserving perdurance. 

The series reconstitutes a critical audience, from camera to projector. The flammable Nitrate Film disrupts cinema’s proximity to reality that, in turns, breeds passivity in judgement. Where cinema’s rhetoric — or even propaganda — looks measured and life-size, the discussions separate them from the larger-than-life gestures of theatre.