Wild roses that bloom all over the road

——The vitality and beauty of Sun Yu's films across the ages

Author: Liu Qing

In the first two weekends of September, the Shanghai Art Film Alliance's "Retrospective Exhibition of Director Sun Yu's Works" screened the director's seven works: "Wild Rose", "Volcanic Love Blood", "Tianming", "Gadget", "Dalu", "Sports Queen" and "The Legend of Luban". From "Wild Rose" in 1932 to "The Legend of Lu Ban" in 1958, Director Sun Yu's works have their own style of wind and bone, and his contemporaries Shen Xiling praised him as a "poet" director, more than 80 years later, "Wild Rose" is still blooming on the "big road", and those pictures that rush with passion and poetry are still "pioneers" in this era.

From student film critic to popular Ruan Lingyu

In the early 1920s, when Sun Yu was studying at Tsinghua University, he participated in a film criticism competition and won the grand prize. The organizer of the competition was a wealthy businessman, Luo Mingyou, and later the boss of Lianhua Pictures; among the judges were Zhu Shilin and Fei Mu, two well-known film critics who co-founded the film magazine Hollywood. Sun Yu really intersected with these people and became the "children of the storm" among the second generation of Chinese directors, seven or eight years later. After graduating from Tsinghua University, he first went to the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin, completed his thesis "On the Translation of Li Bai's Poetry into English", transferred to New York to study photography, and then returned to Shanghai in 1926.

In the Chinese film industry at the end of the 1920s, with the bubble of "liantai play" and "martial arts god and monster films" fading, the film industry entered a continuous depression period, and from 1928 to 1929, nearly 100 film companies in Shanghai collapsed one after another. Luo Mingyou and Li Minwei established Lianhua Pictures in a lament in the industry, showing the slogan of "reviving national films and opposing imports". After completing his debut work "Xiaoxiang Tears", Sun Yu, who had worked several times due to the sluggishness of the production company, was recruited by Luo Mingyou, Sun Yu's first work in Lianhua, "Spring Dream of the Old Capital", quickly broke the box office records in various places, followed by "Wild Grass and Idle Flowers", which was also a sensation, and these two films and the subsequent "Gadgets" made Ruan Lingyu a generation of celebrities, competing with the "movie queen" Hu Die.

"Spring Dream of the Old Capital" is Ruan Lingyu's famous work, the original film was lost, Ruan played a popular singer in the film, met the male protagonist, she was committed to the warlord after rolling up the family's wealth. According to secular morality, this is an unscrupulous snake and scorpion beauty, but she eventually has a good idea and blocks the bullet for the male protagonist. Sun Yu has a gentle heart of compassion, and deliberately portrays the absurd joy of the lawlessness of small people in the chaotic world. Director Guan Jinpeng restored some fragments of "Spring Dream of the Old Capital" according to historical materials in the film "Ruan Lingyu", allowing Maggie Cheung to reproduce the situation that Ruan Lingyu was still delicate and distressed despite being sophisticated.

The Wild Rose

Ruan Lingyu comes from a humble background, and the melancholy she presents in the static and dynamic images is natural, revealing the melancholy of the wind, her beauty, with a sense of vulnerability that withers at any time. She plays a variety of "unruly", "depraved and dusty", "watery Yanghua", "insulted and hurt" women, but conveys a kind of extremely ascetic beauty on the screen - the high-necked cheongsam is meticulously buttoned, the thick eyeshadow reveals a tired and sick look, and her words and deeds are cowardly, like the begonias that are doomed to fall helplessly in the storm.

Ruan Lingyu's "fragile beauty that can be destroyed at any time" monopolizes the aesthetic of early Chinese films, and it is also the discipline of the environment for actresses. This shows the preciousness of Wang Renmei and Li Lili, the "girl group idols" of that year, who stood out from the Mingyue Song and Dance Troupe of the Godfather of Pop Music, Li Jinhui, sang and performed well, and jumped to set off a healthy and clear tornado for Chinese movies at that time.

In 1932, Wang Renmei starred in "Wild Rose" directed by Sun Yu, and she played a poor Jiangnan fisherman girl. In the first set of shots in the film, she is dressed in a short spanking, with strong arms and long toned legs. The girl was mischievous, turned over from the window and entered the house, and after making lunch for her father, she staggered into the yard to feed the geese and pigs, tiptoeing her strong calves and playing with the big goose. Under the lens of Sun Yu, Wang Renmei opened an unprecedented chapter in Chinese cinema with her youthful and toned body, and this savage and lively girl was unique in the screen at that time and even in Chinese films for a long time. The male protagonist played by Jin Yan is a returnee painter who studied art in Paris, who escapes the hypocritical, manneristic, and repressive upper class family and is destined to be attracted to the country girl. She is a wild child between heaven and earth, not bound by ethics and rules, without the feminine virtue and female shame in her mind, she is one with the wind, the land, the river and all the lush life under the sun in Jiangnan. The warm breeze disturbs the golden flames of the bangs, he stares at Wang Renmei who reclines on the willow tree for a long time across a bay of water - Sun Yu should enter the pantheon of world cinema with this picture alone, not before him, and after him, few male directors have stared at women for a long time with such a gaze, with love, tenderness and respect, to see her, to find her, to appreciate her.

In the early Chinese film industry, most of the actresses were born in the party scene, or the tycoon side room, or the jianghu drama class, so the "actress" became the work of the original sin, even if it was a post-film level figure, appearing in the gossip, it was also scorned - Xuan Jinglin was always mentioned as "qinglou black history", such as Ruan Lingyu's emotional lawsuit was known in the streets. Whether it is the industry and the general environment to treat women, or the director's lens to treat actresses, more is peeping, asking and playing. In "Wild Rose", Sun Yu uses his broad consciousness to broaden the vision and capacity of Chinese films, which not only has the exploration and performance of multiple possibilities of beauty, but more importantly, it is a healthy and natural sexual expression to fight back against the stubborn misogynistic habits in East Asian culture. The image of Wang Renmei, breaking free from the stereotype of the duality of "holy woman" and "prostitute", finds the optimism and strength of women in secular daily life, they cannot defy the rules of male power lawlessly, and live and love vigorously, which is beauty.

He has always been a "trailblazer"

Sun Yu's 1934 film "The Great Road" was epoch-making, not only did the film span two generations of silent film and sound film, but even from today's point of view, it can still be seen as a "new" film. In this bloody work, there is a healthy body, healthy desires, healthy human relations, it appears in any era, it can be a new child, proud of the old power structure and order, transcending conservative aesthetic rules.

This is the first Chinese film with workers as the protagonists, and it is more pioneering than the theme itself, and it is Sun Yu's bold entry into the themes of "labor" and "resistance" from the perspective of the body. At the beginning of the movie, the actors sing the theme song "We are the pioneers" composed by Nie Er, and the boys enter the picture with sweat, their upper bodies naked, the young and strong bodies shining dazzling in the sun, and the sweat slides down the muscle lines. Singing sonorously, the sun is hot, the skin is shiny, and the masculinity is out of the screen, in the era of the birth of the film, these pictures with hot temperatures are simply opening the way for a new era.

Sun Yu establishes a poetic aesthetic connection between the themes of "laborers", "struggles at the bottom and the change of the times" and the rhetoric of "the masculine beauty of the young body". The defenders and oppressors of the old order lived in eerie, carved mansions, while the young men who had "nothing but shackles" were laborers in the sun, with a toned physique, with a lust for openness, and their longings, and even their very existence, were one with heaven and earth. There is a passage in "The Road", Li Lili played by the bold and spicy Jasmine, gently said "I like all of them", she used a dream-like look and a dream-like monologue, stated the advantages of each young boy, praised their optimism, integrity, kindness, and forbearance... This extremely romantic passage is an excellent illustration of the left-wing creative spirit of the 1930s: left-wing creators see not only the hardships and sufferings of the underclass, but they also cherish the fraternity and unity of the underclass, and cherish the light and hope that humanity will not be indelible in the difficult situation.

Looking back at his creations in the 1930s, in addition to his clever creative techniques, his compassion and gentleness for the bottom, his respect for women, his encouragement and appreciation for women's freedom... Today is also the first to lead the way. His broad consciousness is the most important legacy left to Chinese cinema. (Liu Qing)