Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6(47) - China

Poster for Spring in a Small Town

Fei Mu b.1906, Zheng Junli b.1911, Xie Jin b.1923, Xie Tieli b.1925

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In the 33 years from the first Chinese produced feature film in 1916 to the Revolution in 1949 there were two so-called 'golden ages' of film production. The first was in 1932-7 during the Japanese invasion first of Manchuria in 1931 and the takeover of the Chinese part of Shanghai after occupying the Chinese section of the city. For whatever reason, the Japanese permitted, even encouraged, local film production. Leftist filmmakers had set-up as the Communist-dominated Film Group in 1932 and produced notable productions in the two major film studios in social realist style although 3 out of 4 films released were foreign, chiefly American. The studios became the training grounds for a generation of artists who dominated filmmaking into the 1950s and 1960s.

When full-scale war with Japan began in mid-1937 more direct patriotic appeals superseded anti-Japanese allusions (Clark 14). Some of these filmmakers moved to Hong Kong after the Japanese occupation. The second ‘golden age’ was in the postwar years to 1949. Paul Clark comments that “Chinese films in the late 1940s reflected Chinese concerns to an extent seldom seen in the artistic innovation of the previous decades” (15). Tony Rayns and Scott Meek designate a Chinese film from the 30s and 40s as “a site for a clash of ideologies.”

Every film, like every novel and every newspaper article, had to have a position on the key issues of the day: whether to resist Japanese aggression, what to do about widespread poverty and corruption. If they were progressive, then Kuomintang censorship would prevent it being expressed explicitly; it then became implicit, and the audience response completed the intended meaning. Left-wing films of the period prior to 1949 were essentially divisive; their emphasis was on society's gaps and contradictions (and their refusal to paper them over) was deliberately calculated to polarise reactions.

Poster for The Spring River Flows East

The first of the three key films in the short-lived revival of Shanghai cinema, Spring River Flows East/Yijiang chunshui xiang dong lei (1947) a film in two parts running 190 minutes, as Clark puts it, “the Chinese equivalent of Gone with the Wind” - a melodramatic story of a single family during and after the wartime resistance to Japan, a collaboration between Zheng Junli and Cai Chusheng as writer-directors. An unprecedented success, Spring River ran for three months in Shanghai to a total audience of almost three-quarters of a million. It was remarked at the time by a critic in a Guangzhou periodical quoted by McGrath, that audiences throughout China having recently experienced the horrors of the Japanese occupation, were receptive to a growing ambition to employ what the critic referred to as a “new [social] realism” with the ambition not only to expose society’s ills but to propel history forward into the revolutionary future through the depiction of the “shared suffering of our national history.” This contrasts with a subsequent valuation by a Chinese film historian who found the “cultural politics ofSpring River Flows East “decidedly conservative” and its style to be “classic melodrama,” having “not much to do with cinematic realism.” McGrath then quotes Kristin Thompson’s argument that such discrepancies “indicate strongly the historical nature of perceptions of realism,” her primary example being the incomprehension upon its initial release, of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game in 1939, that it was only after such films as Bicycle Thieves (1948) had taught audiences new viewing skills, that Rules also won widespread acclaim as a realist film (115).

Fei Mu

Although unrecognised as such at the time, the second key film of the Shanghai late 40s revival was Spring in a Small Town/Xiao cheng chi chun (1948) directed by veteran Fei Mu (1906-1951) “with an assurance and stylistic innovation that sets it apart from its contemporaries” (Clark 18). Spring in a Small Town was released only months after Spring River Flows East but to much more modest success at the box office, the simple story of a love triangle was criticised “for being bourgeois, decadent and out of touch with the times.” McGrath notes that “it was almost entirely forgotten after the establishment a year later of the PRC - at least until the post-Mao era when it was not only rediscovered and praised belatedly as a masterpiece but was famously selected as the greatest Chinese film of all time in a 2005 poll of critics conducted by the Hong Kong Film Awards on the centenary of Chinese filmmaking. “ Its rediscovery provided Chinese filmmakers and critics of the 1980s and beyond with a newly excavated lineage of Chinese art cinema that helped legitimise the rising auteurs of Chinese post-socialist realism in the post-Mao era of “reform and opening” (116).

Spring in a Small Town

At the time of its appearance, McGrath suggests it would have been categorised in the category of wenyi or “literary art” genre. Set in spring of 1946 the emotional intensity of a love triangle played out in a family compound partially ruined by war, a potentially melodramatic mode is displaced by “the originality and brilliance [of Fei Mu’s] “proto-modernist experiment” in ambiguity” - naturalistic performance and detached long take camera style - condemned during the Mao era for its lack of political progressiveness. McGrath analyses Spring in a Small Town as an exemplary instance of what he calls apophatic realism (see part 2) - “which uses negation or absence to point to the real beyond representation.” He argues that apophatic gaps can be found in [Shanghai] films of the 30s “that subverted classical cinema norms through their sometimes jarring mixing of genres and their lack of narrative closure [while] Spring in a Small Town […] in its elliptical narrative as well as its long-take style, in retrospect,[…] fits well into postwar global art cinema” (119). Fei Mu’s classic was respectfully remade in 2001, after a ten year lay-off, by Tian Zhuangzhuang (Horse Thief, and the masterful ‘scar film’ The Blue Kite)

If Spring River Flows East, McGrath writes, constituted a look back at the traumas of the recent historical past and Spring in a Small Town seemed to be stuck in a cyclical present in which temporality had collapsed and human desire thwarted, Crows and Sparrows on the contrary was one of those rare films that seemed so much to coincide with a tectonic transformation in human life that watching the film feels almost like watching history hurtle before our eyes. Like Spring River Flows East, the film drew massive audiences, with an estimated 287,000 viewing it in Shanghai alone (144).

Poster for Crows and Sparrows

The production of Crows and Sparrows/Nu ya yu me ch’ueh (1949) was begun in 1948 at the leftist Kunlun Studios but was halted by the Kuomintang authorities when they discovered that the submitted script was not being followed and was heavily anti-KMT. In the interval it was rewritten by the director Zheng Junli with the stellar cast of popular veteran actors (6 are also credited as the writers) to be even more hostile to the KMT. The film was actually completed and released after the CP had seized power. Set mostly inside a single Shanghai tenement house occupied by representatives of various social classes in urban China - the intellectuals, petty bourgeoisie or small merchants, and finally the truly propertyless workers, the landlord being a villainous Nationalist section chief who had pushed aside the rightful owner, making the film a national allegory and as well a work of social realism.

‘The Seventeen years’ (1949-66)

The period from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 to Mao’s death and the fall of the Gang of Four in 1976, is generally referred to as the Mao era subdivided, as noted above, during which the transition from capitalism to state socialism was consolidated and various experiments in the name of Communism were carried out. The Great Proletarian Revolution (1966-76) began with renewed revolutionary activity and intense grassroots struggle, later settled into a more doctrinaire, top-down political and cultural situation (see part 3 to follow).

Clark comments that films continued to evolve on a number of levels into the 50s to the mid 60s both inside and outside the studios, “feature films reaching a level of maturity that matched the growth of the industry (94).” Clark devotes a chapter to outlining the development of six genres: minority peoples (given increased screen presence after 1949), the revolution, contemporary Chinese life, adaptations of operas, dance dramas and musicals, May the Fourth adaptations, and historical films; he indicates that his selection was not exhaustive. Genres shared stylistic features such as common character types and avoidance of naturalism or critical realism and, as noted above, the writer was given equal importance with the director in the credits, extended weight given to dialogue in theatrically presented scenes.

In the revolutionary cinema of the Seventeen years partly under the influence of Soviet socialist realism, Chinese revolutionary cinema developed an arsenal of codified stereotypes that (as in classic Hollywood genres such as the western) both entertained mass audiences and reinforced conventionalised and affectively charged collective values regarding morality, behavior, politics, and community belonging. The eventual sedimentation of such codes into clichés coincided in the bureaucratisation of political rule in general and the lessening of the ideological fervour of the revolution. This danger was answered politically by the Cultural Revolution, which in cinema eventually resulted in a striking new phenomenon, the films based on the revolutionary “model works” of opera and ballet. - McGrath p.161

In the first seventeen years of the People's Republic, cinema became, [by contrast with the pre- and post-war Shanghai film periods], unificatory in spirit. The liberated film industry set out to address the largest possible audience, including people in rural areas who had previously had little or no access to cinema. Films showed a determination to confront social problems constructively from the superstitions and fears of the tradition-bound peasant population to the constant risk of losing sight of the ideals on which the Communist party was founded. Films were subject to all the vagaries and shifts in government policy, as in any socialist country. The Hundred Flowers campaign aimed at China's intellectuals in 1956-7, encouraged film-makers to try new subjects and styles. Two years later, the Great Leap Forward campaign had the same film-makers producing naive and optimistic celebrations of breakthroughs in industrial productivity. And when it became clear that the Great Leap was an economic disaster, leaving a high proportion of the population disillusioned and short of food, the film industry came through with its share of morale boosters, designed to rekindle the idealism after the Communist victory. (Rayns and Meek)

The China Film Distribution and Exhibition Company, in little more than a decade operating through provincial, city and country offices, massively increased exhibition units across China : from 646 theatres in 1949 to 20,363 units in 1965 with 13,997 projection teams showing films on 16mm to peasant communities in the countryside, total annual attendance growing in 15 years from 139 million to 4.6 billion. A film school, the Beijing Film Academy, was established in 1956. In July 1949 the First National Congress of film and literature professionals “consecrated Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at the Yan’an Forum’ as the guiding principles for works in art and literature.” ‘Worker-peasant-soldier types’ in what Mao called “revolutionary realism” became an official mandate.” The filmmakers were far from uniform in background and outlook; key members of the 1930s underground left-wing movement, previously non-aligned employees of private Shanghai studios, and members of theatre troupes from Yan’an and the army, they borrowed formal and narrative strategies from traditional drama and literature, and in Soviet and Hollywood films of the 1930s and 40s (Esther Yau 694).

Xie Tieli

The early 60s were years of difficult social conditions with widespread famine during which the Soviet Union also withdrew financial and technological assistance. Although the effects of the Anti-Rightist backlash during 1957-9 against the outspoken Hundred Flowers critics of the Party line were still being felt in the film industry, some of the best films of the classical revolutionary period (1949-64) were made. Clark considers that the problems of adapting May Fourth authors was most clearly shown in the adaptation of the 1929 novella February/Eryue chosen in part for its martyred Communist author’s would-be revolutionary credentials. Scripted and directed with assurance by Xie Tieli 1925-2015), who had worked as assistant on the condemned Lin Family Shop (1959), the morality of the open story ending of Early Spring in February/Zaochun eryue (1963)was attacked for its modernist ambiguity despite the attempt by Xie Tieli to make the ending more positive (112). Spring was actually shown widely in a number of cities as an salutary example of “bourgeois morality” (Yau, Nowell-Smith ed. 696).

Xie Jin

Third Generation director Xie Jin (1923-2008) is regarded as a main transitional figure between the first and second generation of classical Chinese cinema and the fourth and fifth generations, in the new waves of the seventies and eighties (post Cultural Revolution). He ensured his popularity (and hence political survival) through “demonstrated exemplary skills in adapting traditional [Chinese melodrama] and Hollywood type narrative and characterisation strategies to revolutionary contexts” (Yau 696). Ma Ning identifies the melodramatic tradition as “typically Chinese” but in Xie Jin's case well-woven into the narrative bi-polar structure that blends history with fiction or legend, the personal and the political. This structure also enabled him “to establish an almost endless set of contrasts in terms of setting, character traits, and actions.” Xie Jin's films exhibit a strong social dimension and sensitivity to fluctuating political issues that functioned “as the catalyst for his creative activity.” Xie achieved a critical edge in some of his films indirectly evoking the arbitrariness and absurdity of ethical-political criteria with which the Party patriarchy used to divide people into political insiders and outsiders. Two Actresses and The Legend of Tianyun Mountain, “became a source of inspiration for the younger generation of Chinese filmmakers.” The rebellious Fifth Generation “went much further in breaking away from the Chinese melodramatic tradition in which Xie Jin operated. (Ma Ning 15).

Paul Clark notes that in Chinese cinema “prominence was always given to the writer over the director in film credits and also in reviews.” Part of the reason, Clark suggests, was probably the pre-production censorship vetting the script rather than the finished film.” He further points out that “this emphasis on the written word had been strong in Chinese filmmaking since the 1930s. “It reflected the customary attitude of educated Chinese in granting more respect to the written word and its offspring, calligraphy and painting, than to stage art, for example” (94-5). The fluidity of Xie Jin's mise-en-scene in his best films stood in contrast to the theatricality of films directed by most of his peers and older directors in long dialogue-driven scenes filmed, tableau style, with a static camera carrying the main weight of character and story development.

Xie showed a penchant for survival from the 50s through to the new wave of the Fifth Generation of filmmakers and the emergence of an art cinema in China in the 80s. He directed at least 20 features 1957-2001. His greatest achievement, praised in the West for its mise-en-scene, is Two Actresses/Two Stage Sisters (1964) which Xie directed and co-wrote with Lin Gu and Xu Jin. Attacked for “advocating reconciliation of the social classes it was one of several films singled out during the Cultural Revolution and screened around the country as an example of “a poisonous weed.” Many filmmakers from the pre-revolutionary years were sent to work in the countryside. Mark Cousins refers to Xie at one stage being consigned to cleaning toilets. During the decade, however, he also worked on one of the dozen “approved” revolutionary operas and ballets, the only features that were made during 1966-72. The Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1979), directed by Xie cited and written by Lu Yanzhou, “marks a decisive break with the propagandist tradition of the Cultural Revolution and of the earlier Anti-Rightist campaign” (Kaplan 13). Yet despite this apparently unhealthy attention for “bourgeois tendencies” in their more recent films both Xie Tieli and Xie Jin were invited to direct the first two of the five model of modernised revolutionary operas. This would seem to be because, as third generation directors, ”they were relatively young and not tainted with involvement in the jealousies of 1930s Shanghai or wartime Yan’an’s Lu Xun Art Academy and were therefore regarded as more pliable” than the thirties Old Guard (Clark 142) exemplified in the eyes of Jiang Quing and her allies, by Zheng.

Zheng Junli

Zheng Junli (1911-69) was born into a poor family and did not complete his formal education at junior high school level but self-developed his language skills particularly in Russian, using dictionaries in painstakingly translating Constantin Stanislavski’s book on acting. Zheng also wrote Art History of World Movies in which he compared western films to those of the Soviet Union.

His entry into acting on the stage in his teens and subsequently into filmmaking rising to stardom playing the love interest opposite the legendary Ruan Lingyu. After the War he shifting focus to the role of writer-director on two classics The Spring River Flows East and Crossroads, q.v., the latter dynamically welcoming the establishment of the new Communist government. When he turned to directing comedy in A Married Couple/Women fufu chi jian (1951) adapted from a best-selling comic novel about the trials and tribulations of a Party cadre who returns to the city with a countryfied wife. “In a sense […] a parable of the Communist Party’s own return to an urban context after years in Yan’an, ”Zheng as co-scriptwriter was accused by Party critics of catering to “the vulgar petit bourgeoise tastes of unreformed Shanghai audiences” and the film was banned from public release (Clark 51).

Zheng had used his administrative position to support the making of The Life of Wu Xun/Wu Xunzhuan (1950) , the history of the production and criticism of the best known of modern Chinese films which, Clark suggests, “offers a case study in the problems of transition from Shanghai to Yan’an (45).” As a cherished project of a number of prominent figures in the Shanghai film world its difficulties contributed to the difficulties the whole industry experienced in the early 50s. While 518 films made during the 17 years were put into ‘cold storage, Wu Xun was shown in the ten years of the CR as negative teaching material’ (ibid 145). Wu Xun is an historical subject about a poor peasant folk hero, an exemplary story of an early effort to educate the poor. Underlying the two year controversy “was not simply a problem of the relations between the new cultural regime and Shanghai artists” but also ongoing disagreement with Mao and Jian Quing on the initial portrayal of the revered revolutionary surrendering to the Qings, the last imperial dynasty, as a ‘bourgeois’ landlord and educator, even after Zheng and Sun Yu as the co-writers, compromised by substituting another historical figure for the revolutionary Wu Xun.

Poster for The Life of Wu Xun

In the end the second Wu Xun film made “as atonement” was banned, the damage done despite Zheng’s “guilt” for his part in this failure being partly alleviated by the positive reaction in 1959 to his two subsequent biographical pictures both also starring Zhao Dan: Nieh Erh based on the fictionalisation of the life of a composer, and Lin Zexu, three years in production, also like Wu Xun, set in the 19th century with “melodramatic exaggeration of the good or evil on each side of the Opium Wars in avoiding the pitfalls of the Wu Xun project” (65).

Zheng, along with the great actor Zhao Dan, became the victims of a personal vendetta by Mao’s wife, former actress Jiang Qing in 1966, their homes ransacked for evidence of corruption, Zheng’s family only allowed to visit him on his death-bed in 1969. His progressive co-director on The Spring River Flows East, Cai Chusheng, also died under the pressure of militant harassment at age sixty-two; one estimate of those from the Shanghai film circle puts the figure at over 30 such deaths following imprisonment and torture. Ironically, a few of the survivors of this cultural witch-hunt were able to return to work in the early 1970s when their experience and skills were needed by the perpetuators of these excesses” (ibid 133).

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke