A common experience for tourists in China is sorting through the colorful and kitschy Maoist knickknacks sold to foreigners. In some ways, Yang Ban Xi is the filmic equivalent to that experience. Obviously aimed at foreign audiences, this documentary sets the Eight Model Works, the propagandistic musicals of the Cultural Revolution, in the context of today’s capitalist China. Director Yan-Ting Yuen serves us generous cuts of the surreally colorful and hysterically optimistic movie versions of the works, then leaps forward to digital video interviews with fans and performers. He also stages hip-hop and electronic reworkings of the musicals’ signature tunes.

In Yang Ban Xi, the digital present literally pales in comparison to the hyper-Technicolor past, suffusing the work with nostalgia that sometimes turns bittersweet. Its more poignant moments come from this interaction of past and present. It was jarring, for example to hear a Chinese artist who, like me, grew up in the 1970s, say that propaganda films such as The White Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women were the only popular culture he knew in his youth, as all other works were banned. (As he hit puberty, the latter film became fodder for his first sexual fantasies because the revolutionary outfits of the dancing Red Women showed a bit of leg.) In another scene, a director scolds the teenaged ballet dancers who are performing in a revival of The Red Detachment, who lack the fiery eyes of the original dancers. “Don’t look like it has nothing to do with you!” he shouts, but of course, it hasn’t. These lucky, young, bourgeois sons and daughters of the revolution know little of the madness and fervor of Mao’s decade. When Yuen’s young people dance to remixes of Model Works songs, the choreography is about the joy of movement and carries no other meaning at all.

While Yang Ban Xi does a good job of exploring the mixed meanings and feelings its subjects carry in relation to these Cultural Revolution spectacles, it doesn’t do as well at exploring the works themselves. Although the informed viewer will easily spot elements of Chinese opera and western ballet in the vintage footage, there is no explicit mention of this hybridization or how it came to be. The central role of Mao’s wife is made clear (in another of the documentary’s creative flourishes, the voice of dead Madam Mao caustically comments on scenes and interviewees) and key performers and a screenwriter are interviewed, but Yuen doesn’t look very deeply into the making of these films and attempts not at all to fit them into the cinematic and musical history of China. Instead, she presents the Eight Model Works like Mao wristwatches in a sidewalk display—colorful, gaudy, nostalgic and just possibly useful for telling us what time it is today.