Jiang Jie (2002)

Jiang Jie is famous throughout China: the “Chinese Joan of Arc,” in the words of director Zhang Yuan, a communist heroine executed by the Kuomintang in 1949, on the eve of the revolution. Zhang Yuan’s film, a passionately engaged tribute to the 1964 “revolutionary opera” based on Jiang Jie’s life, follows the original closely...The Revolutionary melodrama plot, not that different from Verdi’s 19th century versions, has of course a completely different resonance today. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) enshrined this kind of “revolutionary opera” — based on traditional Beijing opera, but with substantial stylistic and formal revisions — as the epitome of Maoist propaganda art. In the past ten years, Chinese and Western experts have begun to re-evaluate the art behind the propaganda, to find creativity, and even shocking beauty under the layers of kitsch and repellent politics the works have sometimes embodied. —Shelly Kraicer