THE EAST IS RED (DVD)
by Phil Hall
(2004-07-01)

1965, Un-rated, 125 Minutes, Mei Ah Entertainment/HKFlix.com

<img src="http://www.filmthreat.com/images/SStar7.gif"><img src="http://www.filmthreat.com/images/Star7.gif">

[...]
There are occasional moments when "The East is Red" gets serious and impressive, most notably the imaginative depiction of the capture of Luting Bridge by a small brigade of Communist rebels (an elaborate dance staged in a very tight space) and one brief scene where the mother of a girl gunned down by imperialists confronts the captured dollar-worshipers and waves the bloody tunic of her slain child.

But on the whole, "The East is Red" is full of insanely happy Chinese running around in circles, waving large red flags and swords while insisting that Mao Zedong has saved their world. Even by the standards of Communist propaganda, this is an amazing spectacle and it is impossible to take it seriously.Even today's Chinese seem embarrassed by this film - it is no longer in official circulation in China and is being sold to the world via a Hong Kong distributor who is offering a somewhat scratchy old print on DVD. This print has no credits on it, so we can't assign blame to anyone specifically (and no details on who made this film are available online).

As political agitprop, this film fails totally. But as an unintentional comedy, "The East is Red" is a jaw-dropping treat.

The East is Red (1964), a film version of a musical extravaganza paean to the revolution, produced for the 15th anniversary of the founding of the People?s Republic of China.

The film was screened all over China as the Mao cult was sweeping the country. It featured Mao as the unique, ever-victorious and unassailable leader of China?s 20th-Century revolutionary struggle, eclipsing other leaders in its colourful narrative. While it was being staged, another revolution was getting underway. Young audiences who watched The East is Red [...] would go on to become the first Red Guards. They wanted to re-enact the kind of revolution that was depicted in The East is Red.

[ http://www.fdk-berlin.de/forum2003/kata ... ng_sun.pdf ]

VIDEO: [DIVX-ffmpeg] 608x288 24bpp 24,975 fps 1377,6 kbps (168,2 kbyte/s)
==========================================================================
AUDIO: [MP3] 48000 Hz, 2 ch, 16 bit (0x10), ratio: 20000->192000 (160,0 kbit)

TECHNICAL NOTE (for those who care... ) :

The guy who wrote the Doom9 IVTC Tutorial says:

"I worked for a couple of days recently trying to IVTC a movie with 3 interlaced frames out of every 6, and never could get it to play smoothly[...] Frequently, Hong Kong DVDs (and perhaps those from other areas also) are badly telecined and leave you with 4 of 5 frames interlaced. Those people should be shot for ruining perfectly good film material (?No trial, no jury-just straight to execution?-Pulp Fiction). You can try Decomb's Decimate(Mode=1), but it won't improve things much. Or you can just deinterlace. In addition, many PAL to NTSC conversions will have too many interlaced frames that won?t IVTC properly and will leave you with many deinterlaced blended or interpolated frames."

This DVD is one of such monsters, it has three interlaced frames every six and no IVTC filter seems to work properly with it. I had three choices: using an IVTC filter at "full power" ending up with a rip with a clear picture but very jerky movement (wasting the hard work of the spinning and jumping peasant dancers...), using a mild IVTC with a lot of deinterlacing ending up with a sickening flickering picture, or tweaking the setting of the damn filter until something looking good enough would magically crops up. I chose the last option and after some 15 trials I got lucky. The movie plays very smoothly, there are some not-perfectly deinterlaced frames here and there but they're barely noticeable if you don't stick your nose up to the monitor.

You may think the bitrate is too high, but there are seldom less that fifty rainbow-coloured pirouetting dancers on screen, and they chew up bandwidth more than a forest of leaves waving by the wind.

...weird enough that someone here might be interested.