Tag Archives: living

The Revolutionary

Sidney Rittenberg arrived in China as a GI Chinese language expert at the end of World War II. Discharged there, he joined the Chinese Communist Party, and was an active participant and eye-witness in the Chinese communist revolution and its aftermath, including the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward and The Hundred Flowers Campaign.

An intimate of the Party’s leadership, including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, he gained prominence at the Broadcast Administration, one of the most important agencies of government. But in the convulsions of a giant country constantly reinventing itself, he twice ran afoul of the leadership, and served a total of 16 years in solitary confinement. He returned to the United States in 1980.

Rittenberg’s story would be just a footnote to history, except for his exceptional intellect, uncompromising honesty, and engaging personality. Over a five-year period, award-winning former-CBS journalist and China specialist, Irv Drasnin, interviewed Rittenberg to produce a compelling, complex and unique understanding of the 20th century’s biggest revolution. From Sid first meeting Mao in the caves of Yan’an, to his becoming famous and powerful during the Cultural Revolution, to his battling insanity in solitary, his journey and his profound insight illuminate a much greater history—a history few Chinese are aware of, let alone many Americans, told by an American who was there.

Quadrangle

Quadrangle is an unconventional documentary about two “conventional” couples that swapped partners and lived in a group marriage in the early 1970s. Coming out of the era of free love, and struggling with the monotony of marriage and suburban life, Deanna and Paul, began swapping partners with another middle class married couple. This four-way affair became a domestic living experiment when the two couples moved into one home, along with their children. While their individual marriages were failing, they found that together they were happy and thought they had discovered an alternative to divorce – a brave new world that would pave the way for how couples would live in the future. Instead it unraveled. Both couples divorced and married their foursome partners, but they could never truly separate because they were bound by the children they shared.

This film examines the story of the group marriage as told by Deanna and Paul in the present. They are forty years older and estranged, and through seperate interviews a simulated conversation takes place as they recount their stories. How do we grapple with marriage, monogamy, and desire? What happens when you challenge the boundaries of social convention? And what, if anything, did we learn from all that sixties-inspired experimentation?