Spring in a Small Town
小城之春
1948 · China · 98 min · 1.37:1 · B&W
Directed by Fei Mu
Introduction
Spring in a Small Town is a 1948 Chinese film directed by Fei Mu, written by Li Tianji and produced by the Wenhua Film Company, with Wei Wei, Li Wei and Shi Yu in the principal roles. It is set in a small town in the lower Yangtze region shortly after the end of the war with Japan. Dai Liyan is in poor health and estranged from his wife Zhou Yuwen; his former schoolmate Zhang Zhichen arrives for a visit and proves to be the man Yuwen had once expected to marry. The two, together with Liyan's younger sister Dai Xiu and an elderly servant, share the household for several days before Zhichen leaves. The film has five characters, uses long takes and slow camera movement, and keeps its conflicts unspoken; a recurring sequence shows Yuwen walking along the town's ruined wall. It opened during a period of political upheaval and was criticised in some quarters for avoiding social questions, after which it went largely unscreened for decades. It returned to circulation in the 1980s and has since ranked highly in polls of Chinese-language cinema.
Editorial Note
The film opened in 1948, was faulted for looking away from a country in upheaval, and then effectively disappeared for three decades. Since it returned to circulation in the 1980s it has placed at or near the top of most polls of Chinese-language cinema. What it withholds is the reason for both verdicts. Liyan is ill and the family garden is half rubble from the war; his wife Yuwen climbs to the ruined city wall each day on the errand of buying his medicine. Zhichen arrives as Liyan's old schoolmate and moves in, and he is also the man Yuwen was once going to marry. Fei Mu then cancels, one by one, every moment that could constitute an event. Nobody leaves, nothing is confessed, and the single direct declaration is cut off mid-sentence. Characters stop talking halfway through what they mean, and the camera stays largely still. The psychological work falls to a handful of shots of Yuwen walking the same stretch of wall in different states, legible only through her pace and the light. There are five people in the picture and not one of them is functional; the younger sister's crush and the old servant's silences hold on their own terms. Watch it somewhere quiet. Nothing happens for long stretches, and whether you can sit with that seems to vary a good deal from person to person.
A Film That Stops at the Threshold
Wenhua produced the film on a very small budget; the courtyard house and the broken town wall were both built as sets. Fei Mu reworked Li Tianji's screenplay heavily, cutting the cast down to five.
After its release in 1948 the film was criticised in left-wing journals for standing aside from the political situation. Fei Mu left Shanghai for Hong Kong the following year, no further screenings were arranged, and for a long time the film survived only in archive prints.
Tian Zhuangzhuang remade it in 2002. In the poll held by the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2005 to mark a century of Chinese cinema, it was placed first.
Titles
- Mainland China
- 小城之春
- Hong Kong
- 小城之春
- Taiwan
- 小城之春
- English
- Spring in a Small Town
- Original
- 小城之春
Cast
- Wei Weias Zhou Yuwen
- Li Weias Zhang Zhichen
- Shi Yuas Dai Liyan