Among the relics of his ex-wife Lu Juan, there are two stills of her performing in the “Mao Zedong Thought Literary Propaganda Team”.
The “red propagandists” in these two stills are “old youths” from Chongqing who went to the countryside before the Cultural Revolution, most of them could not go to school or work in the city because of their “bad family background”. At that time, Lu Juan and Song Xiaotao were 16 years old, Duan Qianfang was 17 years old, they were junior high school graduates, and Zhang Yuanzhong was 13 years old, an elementary school graduate. They were sent to the so-called “social forestry” in Dazhu County, Sichuan Province, in the Daba Mountains. Before the Cultural Revolution, they became prominent by participating in communal and district cultural performances, and during the Cultural Revolution they were transferred to the county Mao Zedong Thought Literary Propaganda Team, and the two shows in the stills were performed around 1970.
In the two stills, the two performers are Lu Juan (front) and Duan Qianfang (back, holding a water jug), performing the program “Water”, which shows the spirit of “not benefiting oneself but benefiting others” by overcoming thirst during the march; the three performers are Lu Juan and Song Xiaotao (back right, pretending to be an old poor farmer) and Zhang Yuanzhong (back left The program is “A Broken Bowl”, which shows that the old poor farmer remembers the hardships and teaches his offspring not to forget their roots, and the soldier is the son of the poor farmer, while Lu Juan plays the daughter of the poor farmer.
However, it is saddening that the actors are too far away from the political identity of the characters they play. The fathers of Lu Juan and Song Xiaotao were both “rightists”; Duan Qianfang’s father was a businessman who was falsely imprisoned as a “historical counterrevolutionary” during the crackdown; Zhang Yuanzhong’s father was a so-called “capitalist”, that is, a private entrepreneur today. That is, today’s private entrepreneurs. Their fathers were “targets of the dictatorship” in the “first thirty years”, while they themselves were discriminated against and abandoned by mainstream society in those “red years”. They themselves were the “second generation of black people” who were discriminated against and abandoned by the mainstream society during the “red era”.
However, in the most revolutionary era, they were forced to play the most revolutionary role and propagate the most revolutionary ideas by those who were rejected and suppressed by the revolution. This was also the case with many of the creators of the most popular “model groups” of the time. It was almost a common contradiction at that time that the “black second generation” was the “main force of red propaganda”.
These “red” propagandists with “black” identities, Duan Qianfang later worked in Dazhu County, Lu Juan was transferred back to Chongqing to work in a bank, did not do the line of literary propaganda. Song Xiaotao and Zhang Yuanzhong have not been separated from the literary propaganda work.
Song Xiaotao’s father was the director of the Chongqing Opera and Dance Theatre, his mother was a film actress (was the head of the Xi’an Film Studio actors troupe), he was brought up in the arts, in secondary school had a traditional joke in the school storytelling session to lead the show, so that the whole school remembered the “laughing star”. But he was not born at the right time to enter an art school or art group and became an “old youth”. Later he became the main creative and performing force of the youth propaganda team, often combining scriptwriting, directing, stage art and acting, but because his image was not “tall, big and complete”, it was difficult for him to play the “revolutionary heroic characters” he aspired to, and he could only play some negative roles He could only play some negative roles or small roles such as the old poor peasant among the positive characters. Nevertheless, his performance still left a deep impression on the local audience and left some interesting stories.
Once, he played the role of Hatoyama in the sample opera excerpt “Going to a banquet to fight Hatoyama” in the previous program, but the waistband of his pants was dragged down because of the long robe he was wearing. He thought the audience was laughing because they were happy to see him on stage, because he could often make them laugh, so he continued to stand there with a smile on his face and waited for his rival actor to start his performance, but the playwright next to him hurriedly directed the curtain to be closed, and only then did he realize that his trouser belt was hanging in front of him and he had made a fool of himself. The show was a big success.
Another more sensational one is that in a small opera “Little Ulan”, he played the role of “Uncle Daoji”, a spy who had been “carefully lurking for decades, but once he was tired of living”, which was common in literature and art works at that time, and was bending down in front of the livestock pen to do damage. The “class struggle consciousness” of the red soldier Xiao Ulan found, with a red tassel gun against his back, according to the prescribed action, he should pull out the pistol inserted in the waist to fire a shot back and somersault to escape, but he crouched there when he found the pistol inserted in the waist of the pants slipped into the crotch, fell down the trouser leg, and the trouser leg and tied in the boots The gun was not available from the outside, so he had to hurry to loosen the waistband of his pants and reach down from the crotch to pull out the gun. At this time, the red tassel gun has been close to his back, time does not allow him to delay, he hurriedly backhanded a shot, and then somersault – has loosened the waistband of the pants fell down …… the next day, the news about this wonderful performance scene spread, the audience filled the door. The audience was full, everyone had to come and fight to see him that both thrilling and funny somersault turn off the pants action, of course, there will never be again.
He was later transferred back to Chongqing and became the backbone and department head of the Family Planning Publicity and Education Center, where he presided over the writing and filming of publicity television films, and created and performed in the annual cultural evening, and was known as the “laughing star of Chongqing.
Zhang Yuanzhong is also a very distinctive character. Although he only had an elementary school education and no family influence in literature and art, his family lived next to a cinema specializing in showing old movies at that time, so he often skipped school and went into the cinema to watch movies since he was a child. He became a popular “movie talker”. On the eve of going to the countryside, he also had the honor of playing a young newspaper boy in the movie “Red Rock” (later renamed “Eternal Life in Fire” when it was released), which was shot on location in Chongqing at the time, shouting on the road: “Sell the newspaper! ……” Although his footage ended up in the edited version of the film, he had a chance to meet the film’s lead actress Yu Lan (who played Jiang Sister) because of that experience.
After the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Yuanzhong became a worker in an iron factory. Based on the influence he received from watching movies and his life as a youth in the countryside, he wrote a script for a children’s movie on a rural theme called “The Clear Stream”, which was selected from a large number of natural submissions by the Children’s Film Studio, of which Yu Lan was the director. When he was invited to Beijing to rewrite the script, he talked to Yu Lan about what happened back then, and Yu Lan naturally felt close to him. The film was shot by the children’s film studio and won the Bronze Bull Award for children’s films, and he was thus transferred to the county cultural center to engage in literary tutoring, which was probably the only one of its kind at that time. Later, Zhang Yuanzhong was transferred back to Chongqing to work in the South Bank District Cultural Center, and died shortly before.
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