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Spring
in a Small Town (Xiao
Cheng Zhi Chun)
(China, 1948, 85 minutes, b&w, DVD)
Directed by Fei Mu
In Mandarin with English subtitles.
Cast:
Chaoming Cui ……….Lao Huang
Wei Li……….Zhang Zhichen
Yu Shi……….Dai Liyan
Wei Wei..........Zhou Yuwen
The
following film notes were prepared for the New York State Writers
Institute by Kevin Jack Hagopian, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies
at Pennsylvania State University:
All movies are remakes; the best are revisions.
Great movies wind skeins of influences – individual films, directors’ entire
ouevres, the life experiences of the filmmakers – around the pretext
of plot. In the case of 2002 film Springtime in a Small Town, Tian
Zhuangzhuang’s remake of the legendary 1948 film by Fei Mu, Spring
in a Small Town, the challenge was immense, for the original was a towering
monument to the art of cinema in the minds of those fortunate enough to have
seen it. Now, re-released, the original exists in a remarkable dialogue with
its younger descendant.
Obstinately, the Hong Kong Film Awards voted the film “the greatest
Chinese film ever made” more than once, an act of defiance, for
the film was suppressed anew each time. It presented a China exhausted
by war, and by endless promises of reform which played out in
yet more brutal exploitation. Read as a political allegory, Spring
in a Small Town is an absurdist parable of the hope for deliverance
dashed, of ambition turned inward to bitter reflection. State censors
at the time of its original release were suspicious of the film’s
refusal either to romanticize the lives of ordinary people, or to make
two-dimensional fools of the property-owner classes. Instead, they arched
their eyebrows over what they called the film’s “narcotizing
effect,” and withdrew it from distribution. Its original screenings
had become lore, and audiences have been calling for its rerelease for
many years.
Fei Mu’s film is a small, cloistered drama of a soul crushed like
a flower petal underfoot. Its portrayal of Chinese society is sustained
by melancholy. We meet a couple, a loveless squire and his wife. Their
marriage is rotting away from disinterest and distrust when a doctor
arrives to treat the husband, and discovers a coincidence that is heartening
and foreboding in the same instant: he was the wife’s first
love, her true love, never forgotten. The spaces of the film are strewn
with debris, austere and disturbing places with a Tarkovskian dread clinging
to them. “I simply don’t know how to live in the future,” says
the wife, and this is the future. It seems as if the doctor has been
thrown into the woman’s life to break the brittle dead stem of
her marriage. He is everything her husband is not, a vital new
species of maleness in the woman’s dessicated emotional life.
Reviewer J. Hoberman called the film Strindbergian, “claustrophobic
and shadowy…” Its cinematic brothers and sisters
might be a world away, in the somber, romantic French interwar cinema
of Prevert and Renoir, and films like Le Jour Se Leve and The
Human Beast, or American domestic noirs likeMax Ophuls’ Caught,
an equally moody film of a woman caught in a dead marriage to
a disturbed man of wealth. Born of a society that had endured 15 years
of bloodletting and occupation at the hands of the Japanese, and long
generations of cynical plundering and exploitation by warlords, the morbidity
of Spring in a Small Town is well-earned. Its narrative
voice is that of the woman herself, who is allowed to tell her story,
sometimes to plunge deep into her memories or her unconscious. Like other
films of shattered narration, like Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon
Amour, this is a film which understands that consciousness itself
is a fitful, strange thing, moving from place to place in the world we
have made in our heads.
It is difficult to tell what the fate of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s younger
film will be in the wake of the long-awaited reappearance of Spring
in a Small Town. When Brian DePalma’s Obsession was
released in 1976, with its many borrowings from Hitchcock’s Vertigo (then
missing from distribution), it satisfied the deep longings of cinephiles
for some souvenir from their absent object of desire. But when Vertigo was
re-released in the 1980s, Obsession suddenly became odd, even
pathetic. The remake of Springtime in a Small Town does not
suffer from the vanity of Obsession: clearly, Tian’s film
could imagine a time when its own popularity would help to restore the
original Spring in a Small Town to movie screens, and when the
two films, one less an impersonation of the other than an echo, would
be compared directly. Now, thankfully, one does not need a faded
photograph of the blossom to smell its bouquet.
For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.