September 14th is the second day of this year's Mid-Autumn Festival holiday, and in general, I am used to sleeping lazily during the holidays. However, on this morning, I inexplicably woke up early, picked up my mobile phone and opened WeChat, and saw the short seven words left by President Zhu Feng in the member group of the Shanghai Film Critics Association: "Forever miss Director Wu"... After confirming the news, I sat on the couch in a daze and did not look back for half a day.
In the past thirty years, I have not had much personal contact with Teacher Wu, but the name "Wu Yigong" is a general existence of "spiritual godfather" for me or for our Shanghai Theater Academy 86-level film directing class. After my fingers subconsciously swiped countless times on my phone's calendar, my mind flashed back to September 1, 1986. It happened to be Monday, and it was our first day of school when we entered college. The 20 students in the class who were selected by the three examination areas across the country sat neatly in a classroom in the Red Building of the main teaching building on Huashan Road, and the main teachers from the Shanghai Theater Academy and the Shanghai Film Studio stood around the podium. Under the introduction of the class teacher, a tall and elegant middle-aged man with black-rimmed glasses that I had seen in the photos of "Popular Movies" slowly walked out of the teacher group, calmly walked up to the podium, and began his speech at a steady speed. He was Mr. Wu Yigong, a famous film director, the founder of our class, and the director of the Shanghai Municipal Film Bureau at the time.
Mr. Wu Yigong stood on the podium and said many words, and all I can remember is the following three points. First of all, he cites the three well-known realms of life in Wang Guowei to describe our future artistic path. Second, he warned us not to rush to do tomorrow's things today, but to do today's things well first. Third, any life experience, whether good or bad, is an asset for film directors in the future. This last point is obviously aimed at his own early years of ups and downs.
It can be seen that this long precept has been brewing for a long time. For half an hour or so, although his tone was gentle and his mood was stable, he seemed to want to instill all his feelings about art and life into us, and his voice was not too much like a teacher, let alone like a leader, but like a father who had great expectations for his children and at the same time feared that his children would make mistakes in their future lives. After saying this, he ended the first lesson in due course, and after politely saying goodbye to the teachers around him, he walked out of the classroom.
In the next four years, Mr. Wu Yigong rarely appeared in public among our classmates, but his influence and concern were omnipresent. In addition to successively mobilizing a number of outstanding creative personnel from the Shanghai Film Studio, such as the famous directors Ye Ming, Li Xiepu, Wu Tianren, and Fu Jinggong, photographers Zhang Yuanmin and Wu Liekang, artist Jin Qifen, sound recordist Lu Jiajin, screenwriter Si Minsan, editor Lan Weijie, film theorist Yang Zhongwen, and other famous professors of the Beijing Film Academy to teach for us, Ni Zhen, Zhou Chuanji, and other famous professors of the Beijing Film Academy came to Shanghai to give us lectures. On two occasions, through somehow, he "intercepted" an Englishman named Tony Wren and another Marlon Brando classmate for a few days.
Under the extremely limited teaching conditions of the 1980s, each student in our class had a "viewing certificate" with a photo attached to the studio. With this certificate, we can see almost all the internal reference films that can be seen in Shanghai at that time, such as the Shanghai Film and Literature Department at No. 52 Yongfu Road, the Xinguang Cinema, and the Huaihai Middle Road Film Bureau, with an average of six films per week. If Shanghai hosts Foreign Film Week, we can even see six movies in one day (two in the morning, two in the afternoon, and two in the evening). It should be said that compared with the Beijing Film Academy, the professional class of film directing in the theater has a congenital shortage of academic and teaching equipment, so the Shanghai Film Bureau has allocated special funds to us to allocate five "Seagull-df" cameras and five "Sony" home cameras for photography operations. In addition, we also have an internship once a year, and after four years, our classmates have traveled to major provinces and cities across the country, which has greatly opened their eyes. Now that I think about it, Mr. Wu Yigong should have made the best use of all his public and private resources at that time, and done everything in his power to provide us with the best conditions that Shanghai Beach could have at that time to study film majors.
Mr. Wu Yigong is known as a "prose director", and his elegant temperament is also quite in line with this title. I called him "Teacher Wu" in public, and privately I called him "Uncle Wu" according to the names of the children of the film circle. Since 1986, when we first met, I have never seen Mr. Wu's high-pitched and commanding "director's style" or "official temperament". His voice was never loud, and his tone was usually very calm. In the early days after he was promoted from a professional director to a bureau-level position, he still lived in the "snail house" near the "Meilong Town Restaurant" on Jiangning Road, West Nanjing Road, and still rode his "old tank" to and from work. It is said that due to various objective reasons, Teacher Wu "sadly" sat in the car equipped for him. In the first few years, though, I noticed that he was always side by side with the driver, sitting in the passenger seat himself. I have also seen countless times that when he talked to Sang Arc, Tang Xiaodan, Xie Jin, Sun Daolin and other artists of the older generation in the factory area of the Shanghai Film Factory, he was almost a "disciple ceremony", his body was slightly forward, his face was smiling, and his attitude was always humble and courteous.
Mr. Wu Yigong is a mild-mannered "scholar-type director". Mr. Wu's favorite and used in his masterpiece "Seongnam Old Things" as the theme song of Li Shutong's school song "Farewell" almost became our class song. And this "literati and scholars" atmosphere not only runs through the whole process of "Seongnam Old Things", but also deeply penetrates into my creative concept.
Mr. Wu Yigong's creative philosophy and temperament have deeply influenced the creative outlook and outlook on life of the students in our class. The teaching he has given us over the years is that "deeds are more than words." Since I went abroad in 1992, I have had much fewer opportunities to meet my husband, and several times in the limited meetings I have actually been at the airport. A few years ago, one afternoon, I was boarding a flight from Beijing to Shanghai, and while waiting in the waiting hall to board the plane, I saw Mr. Wu Yigong walking from a distance accompanied by staff. At that time, the gentleman was already white-haired, and his previously straight back was involuntarily bent and his steps had become staggered. Getting into the same shuttle bus, I immediately went up to greet him. Teacher Wu was very happy not to see each other for a long time, and in just over ten minutes of conversation, I remembered the two sentences he said: The students in your class, whether they are still engaged in film work or not, are doing a good job! I have now moved to Minhang and become a "countryman", and you have time to play.
It seems that the first sentence of praise, but it stings me a little. Because in front of the teacher, I am doing a good job now, after all, I am also out of the film directing profession, which has always been a hidden pain in my heart. Especially when I, more than twenty years after graduation, as an executive of a multinational company, confronted Mr. Wu Yigong, who once had great expectations of us, his encouragement made me feel ashamed. At that time, I remembered what he said in his first class: "Any life experience, whether good or bad, is an asset for film directors in the future." "After many years of wandering after graduation, the "wealth" given to me by life experience is very much, but I don't know when this "wealth" will be "cashed" in my movie dreams...
The rest of the way was silent, and Mr. Wu Yigong seemed to see my thoughts, sighed softly, and twisted his head out of the car window. The shuttle bus quickly drove to the front of the plane, and I helped him up the plane gangway. Since my husband and I were in business and economy class respectively, we were no longer able to say hello when we got off the plane. Unexpectedly, the teacher and the student parted ways, and he never saw the work of me, a student who was late but was about to be released...
"The end of the heavens, the corner of the earth, the knowledge of the half-scattered." Life is rare to be together, only to be separated. The teacher left, not even a chance for us to say goodbye to him for the last time, so gently waved goodbye to his beloved film career, drifting away, just as my classmate Director Liang Shan said in the WeChat student group: "Today he is in the middle of the lights..."
However, in the hearts of those of us students, the works of director Wu Yigong are immortal, and his dedication to film lives on! Teacher all the way!
(Editor of this article: Xu Yunqian.) ）
Column Editor-in-Chief: Wu Bin Text Editor: Xu Yunqian Photo Editor: Zi Xi