Fei Mu's 1948 film "Spring in a Small Town", which was completed at the turning point of history, although the spring was steep, sandwiched between films that conformed to the national conditions such as "A River of Spring Water Flowing East", "Eight Thousand Miles of Road Clouds and Moons", "Ten Thousand Lights", "Crows and Sparrows", etc. After the release, occasionally admirers praised its "beautiful style" and "personnel pathos", and most commentators thought that "lack of thought" and "empty boredom", hiding in corners with untimely loneliness, hiding in a corner for more than 30 years.
In the early 1980s, under the impetus of institutions and individuals such as the Hong Kong Film Critics Association and the late well-known cultural scholar Wong Ailing, the dust on the surface of "Spring in a Small Town" was gently wiped away, and it was the first in Hong Kong to be tasted beyond the times. Since then, the decadent picture, gray tone, repressed emotions and avant-garde language of the film have touched the Chinese film circle or even the world film industry.
In 2005, on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Chinese cinema, the Hong Kong Film Awards named "Spring in a Small Town" as the first place in the 100 Chinese films of the 100 years. As a director, Fei Mu is considered to be the biggest contributor. This honor of posthumously awarded to Fei Mu by the younger generation is still well deserved in the hearts of many fans today.
Although 6 years later, the Taiwan Film Golden Horse Awards invited 122 senior filmmakers to evaluate the 100 Chinese films, "Spring in a Small Town" was ranked fifth by "Sad City", "Muling Street Juvenile Murder Incident", "Childhood Past" and "Ah Fei Zheng Biography", but from the perspective of the effectiveness of rooted in Chinese tradition and inheriting cultural roots, the unique film's jianghu status is quite solid. The heroine Jade Pattern, who steps or hesitates or detours in the broken town, has become the endorsement of the state of mind of the Chinese intellectuals represented by Fei Mu, who was at a loss at the time.
A protracted scripture that karma will promote
At the beginning of 1948, in view of the delay in the completion of the film "Good Couple" and the large expenditure, Fei Mu's Shanghai Wenhua Film Company planned to shoot a new low-cost film quickly and release it first to reduce the operational pressure. Huang Zuolin, Sang Arc and other directors of Wenhua Company were not interested in the script, and Fei Mu agreed to it.
Time is tight and the task is heavy, which seems to pose a great test for Fei Mu, nicknamed "Slow Car Old Fee", but he is actually confident of everything.
Before the film began, Fei Mu and Li Tianji spent time together, without harming the structure of the script and retaining the key scenes, to reorganize the relationship between the characters, reduce the number of scene changes, and named the script "Spring in a Small Town". The character settings of wife Zhou Yuwen, husband Dai Liyan, little sister Dai Xiu, and servant Lao Huang remain unchanged, and the roles of Liyan's friend and old lover Zhang Zhichen of Yuwen and the old Chinese medicine doctor are merged into one. Zhi Chen's emotional scenes with Dai Xiu were deleted two or three times, and his emotional entanglement with YuWen was placed in a more concentrated scene.
According to Li Tianji's recollection of Fei Mu's article, on how to change the script, Fei Mu and he had three private conversations with no outsiders, each time Fei Mu was discussed, demanding strict and equal treatment, earnest teaching but not leaving a trace, the big director's respect for the small screenwriter from the heart, so that Li Tianji remembered many years later, still vividly remembered and grateful. The first time the two talked, Fei Mu's writing of being able to read the script from between the lines was influenced by Su Shi's "Butterfly Love Flower", which surprised Li Tianji even more, knowing that his script found a real confidant.
Although the general appearance of the film has been formed in his mind, Fei Mu's live work style is not rigid. In an interview with Hong Kong film critic Wong Ailing, Wei Wei once mentioned that the scene where Yuwen and Zhichen traveled home from the city wall and ran to a chicken running behind them was not deliberately arranged, but accidentally entered the camera. Fei Mu felt that the effect was good after watching the sample, and retained the stroke of God.
From preparation to completion, "Spring in a Small Town" took only four months, but it did not affect Fei Mu's consistent artistic quality.
The wife's perspective and the husband's gaze
"Spring in a Small Town" was filmed on location in Songjiang, the hometown of fish and rice in Jiangnan, southwest of Shanghai. Matsue's ancient walls and old-fashioned houses have been destroyed by years of war, and the ruins of the broken walls and weeds are overgrown, properly constructing the closed and silent world that Fei Mu wanted. The wounded young woman who lived in the middle of it stopped and walked, and lived a routine life of buying vegetables and grabbing medicine every day, pacing the city wall, sending her husband away with three words and two words, and embroidering alone without making a sound, allowing the days to come day by day, and going day by day, resisting the surrounding dumbness with inner waves.
At the beginning of the film, before the voiceover of the jade pattern sounds, the camera rotates to scan the scenery of the small city, and the small figure that appears at the head of the city is the jade pattern. Then the audience followed her line of sight and saw the backs of the three people, and she was watching Dai Xiu and Lao Huang send Zhichen away. The narrative unfolded by means of Yuwen's inner monologue in the film was originally the "story of a small town" that she told as a party to her personal experience.
Yuwen's monologue uses an omniscient perspective that is sometimes subjective and sometimes sidelined, blurring the accounts of the past, the description of the present, and the pre-narrative of the future ("When he went into the city, I didn't expect him to come, how did he know I was married here", "He, they stood and waited for me", "Who knew there would be someone coming"), and the audience was able to glimpse the ups and downs of her mood on multiple levels. The third-person reference to the change of objects entrained in the first-person narrative (before the arrival of Zhi Chen, "he" refers to the etiquette), and the process of the jade pattern from the observance of the husband to the rekindling of the old love with the lover is even more exposed, and the second-person sentence "Why do you want to come, why do you want to come, tell me how to see you" is a watershed between the heart and the surging heart.
Although the plot of the big flashback structure is from the perspective of the jade pattern, the horizontal height of many pictures reflects that the perspective of the camera comes from the courtesy. With and without him, the height of the camera is the level and slight elevation of the gaze of an ordinary person after sitting down, which is undoubtedly determined by the etiquette or sitting on the bed or lying on a chair.
Li Yan's slightly inferior gaze and jade voice constitute a narrative contradiction, and to some extent even bind her behavior, suggesting that her and Zhichen's afterglow is not over, can only be an interlude. The emotional relationship that was once balanced between the three people will follow the guidance of ethics after the fall and reach a new balance.
The style of the film is highly integrated with personal temperament
After all, a friend's wife cannot be deceived, even if she is her first love. Zhi Chen's "passion ends with etiquette" is not to explain Fei Mu's moral lag, but to show his greatest respect for the value and order of traditional Chinese culture.
Born in 1906 into a feudal family, Fermo grew up in a conservative and strict environment. When he was a teenager, he read the books of the sages, and his mother was obsessed with local opera and folk rap, and he had a special preference for and in-depth study of traditional Chinese literary and artistic styles represented by poetry, Peking opera, and Chinese painting. At the same time, the experience of studying at the French Higher School opened the door to Western culture for him. In addition to his deep roots Chinese he is also fluent in English, French and other languages. In addition to his knowledge of both East and West, Fei Mu, as the eldest son in the family, is also flawless in his cultivation, and is an example for his three younger brothers. Throughout his life, he honored his parents, treated his friends kindly, and established a marriage and family concluded by "the words of his parents' destiny", and always loved his wife and children.
Fei Mu's only rebellion against his parents was to give up his stable paperwork to devote himself to the film industry. But after seeing several of his early films, his mother thought that his films were integrated with his personal temperament and no longer advised him to change careers. And this is exactly what it means to look back on him today.
In some ways, Fei Mu uses this modern art category imported from the West as a carrier for the gentle dissemination of traditional Chinese culture by relying on things to speak and borrow material metaphors. He is known as the "poet director", which not only refers to the timeless style of film, but also says that his filming thinking is in line with the writing style of ancient Chinese poets and literati. This is what sets him apart from his contemporaries and is the fundamental reason why directors in the post-"cultural fault" era cannot catch up.
He used "Tianlun" and "Confucius" to say that the "Zhongzheng Peace" of Confucian culture that the May Fourth New Culture Movement lashed out at was not meaningless in the era of chaos; using "Chopping Scripture Hall" and "Life and Death Hate" to record the performances of Peking Opera masters such as Zhou Xinfang and Mei Lanfang, the former brilliance of Chinese opera was intuitively understood by posterity; taking the fable story of villagers being afraid of wolves and fighting wolves in "The Blood of Wolf Mountain" evoked a sober understanding of the current situation and environment.
In other words, Fei Mu has been using unique images that are both forward-looking and distress-conscious, writing about his heartfelt love for national culture. And his difference has been vividly reflected in the highlight film "Lianhua Symphony" produced by Lianhua Film Company in 1937.
Stills of "Spring Broken Dreams" from the Lianhua Symphony
The film is composed of eight short films directed by Fei Mu, Sun Yu, Shen Fu, Cai Chusheng, etc., although they all revolve around the people's anti-Japanese sentiments or the life of the bottom water, but Only Fei Mu's "Spring Dream" is not written about the actual situation, but adopts the form of silent film, with two women sleeping in the same bed with three interrelated nightmares, bringing out the depression and resistance of the national emotions, which is extremely expressionist. The twitching of facial muscles during the dream, the begonia leaves in the dream, the demon with the horns on the head, and the burning fire in the dream have become the external symbols of emotion. The resistance of the soldiers on the battlefield by parallel montages is the result of the classical poetry Ofsing.
This experiment of enriching the language of cinema with the creative techniques of ancient Chinese literature has produced fruitful results worth re-tasting in "Spring in a Small Town", and has expanded from literature to the fields of Chinese painting, opera and other arts.
The spirit of the times is entrusted
"A feeling of helplessness, on this ruined and empty wall", "like a drunkenness, like a dream, at this time, the moon rises high, slightly windy". The voiceover of the jade pattern in "Spring in a Small Town" repeatedly tells her allegory in the scene. The way natural scenery is painted is a reference to The freehand painting of Chinese painting. The opening shots of the city walls, trails, flowing water, and spring branches are the loneliness of spring and the sullenness of people. The pot of orchids that the jade pattern gave to Zhichen is a symbol of temptation and wait-and-see.
The water sleeves and cloud foot techniques of Peking Opera Danjiao were also used by Fei Mu to change the footsteps of The Jade Pattern several times when she went to find Zhichen, from wandering in steps to slowing down to rushing forward, with the gradual refinement of her dress and ornaments, pointing to the change in her state of mind. Xie Tieli's 1963 film "Early Spring and February" also uses the natural environment to reflect the mood of the heroes and heroines, and close-ups of their rapid or slow steps several times, but the use of effects is far less than Fei Mu's several strokes.
Chinese culture pays attention to inclusiveness, and in addition to drawing nourishment from classical poetry and Chinese painting opera, Fei Mu also finds inspiration from the new drama and drama art that he has been engaged in for many years and also from the West. The monologue of Yuwen from the language of the film is that the camera points to the character's heart, externalizes her inner emotions on the screen, and seems to be communicating with the audience "eye-to-eye", and it is the unique charm of the drama to say the secret of the heart face to face. Bergman's 1953 "Bad Girl Monica", Monica's eyes slowly turned to the camera, and the audience had more than 10 seconds of staring, which was said by fans to be the first time in film history, but in fact, similar functions have been used in "Spring in a Small Town", and Fei Mu uses sound.
Yuwen was surprised to say to Zhichen, "Unless, of course, he dies."
At the end of the film, seeing the suicide of her morbid husband in a long shirt, he once said "unless, he dies" to the lover in the suit, turned to the lover and issued a "you save him, thank you" ("He" who once pointed to Zhichen pointed back to the courtesy), and even used the reply of the jade pattern mentality that experienced the flames to tell Fei Mu's attitude towards Chinese culture that was hit by the new western trend of thought. Yuwen did not choose to leave, but waited for Li Yan to tremble and climb up to the head of the city, and the two watched Zhichen leave together, reflecting that Fei Mu and other Chinese intellectuals who were at the pass of history at that time were difficult to give up their homeland.
Probably because Fei Mu's spiritual confusion and hope to stretch can not be separated from the context of the times, Tian Zhuangzhuang's 2002 tribute remake of "Spring in a Small Town" has become a difficult painting of the skin. Tian Zhuangzhuang's version of "Spring in a Small Town" conceals the voiceover of the jade pattern that runs through the whole film, and the picture is adjusted to color and extends the space. In addition to the five people in the original film, there are many young people in the small town who are as energetic as Dai Xiu, who can use the railway that stretches out to the far side, and can walk at any time and connect with the outside world. The richness and meaning of Fei Mu's lens language disappeared.
It is a pity that Fei Mu had no choice but to leave Hong Kong for various reasons the following year after filming "Spring in a Small Town". He was full of hopes to return to the mainland as soon as possible, but he died of illness in Xiangjiang in 1951. His feelings of home and country can no longer be expressed through movies.
【Screening Information】
Spring in a small town
Director: Faymu
Sunday, June 17, 18:30-20:09 Tianshan Cinema