Fei Mu is considered part of the Second Generation of Chinese filmmakers, memorably captured in Centre Stage (aka Ruan Lingyu, 1991), Stanley Kwan’s biopic of actress Ruan Lingyu. The Second Generation flourished in the 1930s, against the backdrop of the intense civil war between Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists. Unlike his contemporaries, such as Cai Chusheng, the director of New Women (1935), and Wu Yonggang, the director of The Goddess (1934), Fei Mu was not especially interested in furthering the leftist agendas of the film cadres who dominated his base at Lianhua Studios. He was instead viewed as a ‘poet director’, not much of a commendation during an age when political affiliation meant all. His interest in formal experimentation, symbolism, philosophical contemplation and use of subjectivity (a list identified by David Bordwell) set him apart from his contemporaries, who largely deployed Hollywood story structures and technique to convey their progressive messages.
In fact, Fei Mu took a dim view of all non-native philosophies of politics and art, with a particular disdain for the May Fourth Movement, the student movement and literary tendency that began in 1919 and which implored China to modernise through the selective implementation of Western ideas. Instead Fei Mu saw himself as a promoter of Confucian values, pre-Republican morality and steadfast nationalism.
Fei Mu’s career was put on hold, like most filmmakers, during the war years. He made two films between 1941-48, but little is known about them and both are presumed lost. In 1948 he agreed to collaborate with Peking opera legend Mei Lanfang on China’s first full colour film, Eternal Regret. (Also a title and theme riffed on by Stanley Kwan). Technical issues prevented its completion so Fei Mu took on a small project called Spring in a Small Town, based on a short story by Li Tianji. Made in three months with little-known actors, it takes place in 1946, one year after the end of the Sino-Japanese War, and was released in 1948, months before the Communist takeover in 1949.
The film allowed Fei Mu to test some new theories from ‘On the Future of Chinese Made Cinema’, a second major essay he wrote after the war. It deplores the then-prevalent reversion to sentimentality in realist blockbuster epics such as The Spring River Flows East (1947) and seeks a way to transmit traditional Confucian values to a nation where history has been obliterated; how, he asks, will one now ‘ponder the fate of modem China’?
The plot reads like a conventional love triangle: depressed wife, bedridden husband, the arrival of a hunky doctor. But the film’s setting, the Yangtze Delta, the desolate epicentre of Japanese wartime destruction, is no place for love to blossom. Fei Mu also fully rejects the inherent melodrama in the story, opting for psychological nuance and poetic undertone instead. In a facetious moment, Fei Mu was quoted as saying: ‘In order to transmit the gloomy mood of old China I have undertaken a presumptuous and daring experimentation with my work, relying on the long take and slow motion, without seeking further craft. As a result the film comes across as being too dull.’
It is precisely these techniques, along with his radical use of dissolves within scenes and a strange hallucinatory voiceover, that have given the film its international reputation and remarkable resonance in modern and contemporary cinema.
The slowness of Spring in a Small Town, marked by a palpable hesitancy in the performances, emphasises how the characters lag behind their moment in time and are incapable of real action – a trick reactivated by Wong Kar-Wai years later in his own masterpiece In the Mood for Love (2000).
The long takes, especially those that linger over ruins, evoke the weight of history and the perils of nostalgia, strikingly like the celebrated cinematography of Manoel de Oliveira’s work. And yet those same takes also manage to evoke the exquisite detail of scholarly scroll paintings. Fei Mu has a particular fascination with walls and the vegetation that ekes a life out of their crevices; this metaphor has been deployed in Chinese art to highlight the difficulty of living in a state ruled by a harsh king, a subtle political dig that rhymes with the sombre, dispirited tone of his earlier Confucius.
Those astonishing dissolves have been written about with great insight by the Hong Kong International Film Festival programmer Li Cheuk-to: ‘Dissolves bring in a sense of continuity… the film’s long takes linked together by dissolves are so constructed that conflict and contradictions develop within the same space.’ They are, in effect, a technique to further elongate key scenes, to brutally emphasise the film’s feeling of entrapment, while allowing a change in perspective for character and viewer alike. Though unique in his hands, one cannot help but think of Orson Welles’s highly original use of the dissolve in Citizen Kane (1941), though the two men deploy them differently and are after different metaphors and effects.
The film’s use of voiceover – eerily presaging the French New Wave and especially several films by Alain Resnais – has an unmistakable ghostly quality. According to scholar Carolyn Fitzgerald, the technique allows the wife, the film’s unreliable narrator, to draw our attention to the epistemological and psychological problematics of representing trauma.
These technical features of the film, however, do not fully explain its insistent modernity. For that we must turn to the film’s second half, as the protagonists wade into sultry, near-silent eroticism, mostly sublimated but occasionally, shockingly not. Comparisons to Antonioni, made by Bordwell among others, come closest to describing its discomfiting effect, but the gesture is very much Fei Mu’s own metaphor, bearing witness to the half-digested violation of China itself and the unbearable shame left in its wake.
Spring in a Small Town was savaged by leftist critics as decadent and ambiguous, and was disliked by many other critics for just being boring. It was a thorough box-office flop. In 1949, Fei Mu fled to Hong Kong and set up a production company, but died in 1951 before completing another film. Spring in a Small Town was effectively banned in mainland China for its petit-bourgeois ‘decadence’, its ideological ‘backwardness’ and its alleged ‘narcotic effect’. Rediscovered at the China Film Archive by the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers in the 1980s, it was shown several years later at the Hong Kong International Film Festival and proclaimed a masterpiece on the spot. It has been cited as a significant influence on their own work by such esteemed Chinese filmmakers as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang (who remade it in 2002), Jia Zhangke, Wang Xiaoshuai, Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-Wai.
Noah Cowan, Sight and Sound, July 2014
Spring in a Small Town Xiao cheng zhi chun
Director: Fei Mu
Production Company: Wenhua Film Company
Executive Producer: Wang Wanbin
Producer: Bi Jianping
Production Assistant: Wang Yun
Screenplay: Li Tianji
Director of Photography: Li Shengwei
Editors: Xu Ming, Wei Shunbao
Art Director: Zhu De’xiong
Sets: Chi Ning
Props: Zhi Guang
Costumes: Qi Qiuming
Make-up: Da Xu
Photofinishing: Xu Hexiang, Du Zhenkun
Music: Huang Yijun
Sound: Miao Zhenyu
Cast
Wei Wei (Yu Wen)
Li Wei (Zhang Zhichen)
Shi Yu (Dai Liyan)
Zhang Hongmei (little sister)
Cui Chaoming (Old Huang)
China 1948
98 mins
Digital
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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