Fei Mu’s 1948 Spring in a Small Town Restored and Playing in UK Cinemas

One of the greats of pre-Commie Chinese cinema, Spring in a Small Town, is now playing at various art house cinemas around the UK through the summer (click here for details)

Regarded as the finest work from the first great era of Chinese filmmaking, Fei Mu’s quiet, piercingly poignant study of adulterous desire and guilt-ridden despair – now restored – is a remarkable rediscovery.

After eight years of marriage to Liyan – once rich but now sickly and almost suicidally apathetic following a long, ruinous war – Yuwen does little except deliver his daily medication. A surprise visit from Liyan’s friend Zhang re-energises the household, the invalid included. Liyan’s young sister is not alone in her excitement over the much-travelled guest; Yuwen knew him before her marriage… Eliciting a great performance from Wei Wei as Yuwen, whose wistful voiceover offers insights into her conflicted feelings, Fei creates a tense, sensual chamberwork steeped in suspicion and suppressed longing, deep resentments and half-spoken truths.

The deft use of locations, dissolves and camera movements makes for a fraught, febrile mood of hesitant passion, entrapment and ennui; sophisticated cinematically and psychologically, the film eschews sentimentality for something far more beguiling.

Francis de Croisset’s 1936 Le Dragon Blesse

Belgian born, French naturalised Francis de Croisset visited China in 1934 and wrote up his travels, in the “style of an English gentleman”, in Le Dragon Blesse: Impressions de voyage en Extrême-Orient (The Wounded Dragon, published in 1936). Croisset was a playwright and opera librettist and while he evinced an interest in the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and other such political stuff, he was essentially the archetypal sojourner – enjoying dinners, parties, embassy receptions and the like mostly.

I am not one of those hardy “travellers” who leaves home with a bar of chocolate and a map – I like the five star life, so de Croisset appeals to me. He never travelled in China with less than ten suitcases and feels for his European hosts and their problems with housekeepers and cooks and, being French, has strong opinions on food and enjoys a regal banquet or five. As ever, past accounts of China feel oddly contemporary – de Croisset mourns when he sees an ancient temple destroyed for no particular reason and is romantic and sentimental about a past, lost ancient China he can’t quite touch. I particularly appreciated (in these days of shorts and t-shirts as de rigeur among ex-pats and their brats in Beijing in even the best restaurants!) that he insists on arriving by rickshaw to a dinner at the Bolivian Embassy in a dinner jacket despite dust storms and intense heat. Good man!

RAS Shanghai – Chinese Lawyers on the Silver Screen in the 1940s: Lawyer Yin and Lawyer Yang – 24/6/14

ALISON CONNER

 on

Chinese Lawyers on the Silver Screen:

Lawyer Yin and Lawyer Yang

Despite the relative newness of their profession, lawyers make a surprising number of appearances in early Chinese films, where they act in both criminal and civil cases. In some movies we see easy access to lawyers, but in others, a lawyer’s help is clearly out of reach for most. Chinese filmmakers also used courtroom scenes to great dramatic effect, whether as a stage for an upright lawyer or as an intimidating setting for ordinary people lacking power or connections.

This presentation will analyze the depiction of lawyers and legal issues in two important movies from the late 1940s, which some film experts view as a “second golden age” of Chinese film. Both movies were produced by the privately-owned Wenhua Film Company (1946-1952), which was known for its “humanistic” movies and its creative directors, writers and actors. Long Live the Missus (Taitai Wansui太太万岁)1947 was directed by Sang Hu and was written by Eileen Chang; it is one of two films they did together in Shanghai. Bright Day (Yanyangtian艳阳天) 1948, which starred the great Shi Hui, was written and directed by Cao Yu, China’s most famous modern playwright, and it is the only screenplay he wrote. The two movies are very different in character, plot and tone, but both movies involve important legal issues–and both of their lawyers are good.

These movies are very much the product of their time and place, and they address the system of an earlier age. But their broader legal themes–access to justice and the role of lawyers in the legal system–remain of great importance now. What lessons might these classic movies offer as we consider the role of bench and bar in China today?

Alison Conner is a professor of law at the University of Hawai`i, where she teaches courses on Chinese and comparative law; she has a PhD in Chinese history as well as a law degree. Before moving to Hawaii, she taught law in China, Singapore and Hong Kong for twelve years, and in 2004 she returned to teach law as a Fulbright in Beijing.

Her recent articles focus on the Chinese legal profession and on depictions of the legal system in Chinese movies, including “Don’t Change Your Husband: Divorce in Early Chinese Movies,” “Images of Justice and Injustice: Trials in the Movies of Xie Jin,” and “The Lawyer Who Haunts Us: Yin Zhaoshi and the Bright Day.”

Talk Cost: RMB 70.00 (RAS members) and RMB 100.00 (non-members). Includes glass of wine or soft drink. Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption.

Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.  Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption.

RAS Monographs: Series 1 & 2 will be available for sale at this event. RMB 100 each (cash sale only).

To RSVP:  Please “Reply” to this email or write to

RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

Working Class Formation in Taiwan

An interesting addition to the literature on early RoC Taiwan….

Ming-sho Ho applies Marxist theoretical perspective to understand the postwar trajectory of Taiwan’s state-sector workers. A global and comparative framework is used to examine the particularity of Taiwan’s working class. It revises the stereotypical image of labor docility by showing ethnicity, party-state, and internal labor market produces intra-class divides and generates a variety of workers’ resistance even under the repressive rule of one-party authoritarianism. The book looks at the rise of independent labor movement in the wake of political liberalization in the late 1980s. The similar current of social movement unionism of South Africa, South Korea and Brazil is also present in this oft-neglected case. Ho observes how labor activism gradually resides as democracy is consolidated and neo-liberalism becomes the new ideological hegemony.

RAS Shanghai – Shanghai on Film: the Epic Films of the Postwar Period, 1945-1949 – 21/6/14

RAS WEEKENDER  

Saturday 21 June

 4:00 PM for 4:15 PM at

 The Apartment, 47 Yongfu Lu, near Fuxing Xi Lu

 

LINDA JOHNSON

 on

Shanghai on Film: the Epic Films of the

Postwar Period, 1945-1949

1946 is one of those moments in Chinese film history when the industry had to reflect upon its role as mass media and the position it would take on the social situation in Shanghai. This was a moment defined not simply by leftist or rightist political affiliations, but by the voice filmmakers would raise on the social issues of the day. They were fuelled not by the imperatives of some national political agenda, but by their own experiences and by the cultural constraints of an industry situated by time, place and its own history. This was an industry of mass media, configured by the co-existence of private and state-run film companies that recognised the power of film to impact behaviour.

Just as 1931 had witnessed a wave of more patriotic film making, 1946 saw a localised form of patriotism in which the people of Shanghai and their particular experience of Japanese occupation were the target audience. The epic films of the period give expression to a particular historical moment in Shanghai’s story and offer insights into Shanghai’s film world poised on the brink of its next era.

The films Dr Johnson will examine in this period are about film culture; they create an interplay between fiction and reality by taking a romance and investing it with the real life struggles of Shanghai and the embedded real life stories of the actors and the filmmakers, known to the audience through the production of the star system circulated by a prolific print media. They both give recognition of the hardships of the postwar period and challenge their audience to produce a solution.

Dr Linda Johnson first came to China in 1986 as a Law Lecturer, working in the Law Faculty at Hong Kong University until 1995 when she moved back to London. In 1998 she came to live in Shanghai with her husband and three daughters, opening Madame Mao’s Dowry in 2001, a concept design store specialising in art and artifacts of the Mao Period. Her interest in Chinese film began in Hong Kong in the 1980’s and has been growing ever since. Linda was invited to act as convener for the RAS Film Club in September 2011. She regularly gives talks on both Mao Period propaganda and Shanghai film.

Talk Cost: RMB 70.00 for members, RMB 100 for non-members. Includes glass of wine or soft drink.

Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.  Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption.

RAS Monographs: Series 1 & 2 will be available for sale at this event. RMB 100 each (cash sale only).

 To RSVP:  Please “Reply” to this email or write to

 RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

Macao’s Rua da Felicidade – 1900 – Every House a Bordello

In 1900 Macao’s brothels were generally dirty and run by notoriously rough Eurasian pimps and Lisbon Madams who were known for hooking the girls on opium and for importing kidnapped or trafficked young Portuguese girls. The Rua de Felicidade (suitably named Happiness Street in English) was a narrow lane where every house was thought to be a bordello. The street was close to the historic centre of the enclave near the otherwise respectable Lenal Senado square where the better class of Europeans in Macao took their evening promenades.

Today, Rua de Felicidade is a touristy shopping street (within the UNESCO World Heritage site of Macao) with a few shophouses with traditional red louvers left. Those who watch Hollywood films  may recognize the street from Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Doom.

And The City Swallowed Them…The 2008 Diana O’Brien Murder in Shanghai

Shanghai based journalist Mara Hvistendahl has done a solid job of work reconstructing the events around the 2008 murder of the Canadian model Diana O’Brien in her new e-book And the City Swallowed Them… Hvistendahl’s retelling of the horrific murder, the seedy underbelly of the Chinese modelling business, the police investigation and the underlying tensions in Shanghai on the eve of the 2008 Olympics is excellently done and revealing (as someone living a stone’s throw from the murder scene in 2008 all that permeated out was rumour and supposition at the time).

At age 22, Diana O’Brien left a small island community on Canada’s Pacific Coast and moved to China to work as a model. Twelve days later, she was stabbed in a Shanghai stairwell. The actions of both police investigators and O’Brien’s Chinese modeling agent soon aroused suspicion as her family sought answers from China’s opaque legal system. Ultimately, their quest would put them face to face with her accused killer.

At once a page-turning murder mystery and a work of deep investigation, And The City Swallowed Them is a true crime nonfiction story based on dozens of interviews with investigators, models, and both the victim’s and the convicted murderer’s families. The short book moves from Shanghai’s back alleys to the seedy underbelly of high fashion, where young models travel alone to strange cities, often with falsified work papers, and sleep ten to an apartment between cover shoots. Set against the backdrop of Shanghai’s explosive urbanization, the work also explores the world of China’s liudong renkou, or floating population, where the hopes of newcomers from poor villages often turn to dust—leading some to horribly desperate acts.

The debut digital title from the writers cooperative Deca, And The City Swallowed Them overturns assumptions about both China’s feared justice system, where the conviction rate for criminals is 99.9 percent, and the glamorous world of international modeling. More than a murder tale, And The City Swallowed Them lays bare the powerful forces that send two families on a collision course from distant sides of the Pacific.

The Saga of 81 Chaonei Dajie Continues

I first blogged about 81 Chaonei Dajie back in 2008 and have done so occasionally ever since as new rumours surface as to the Beijing buildings future. Frankly I’m amazed the French baroque style buildings are still there!! In Shanghai they would have either gone by now or become a bar, but Beijing’s record is far more awful and that they’re still standing, even in their current rather untended and decrepit state is something close to a miracle. Fitting perhaps as the buildings were the former missionary language training school. There have also been rumours about some French train magnate owning the buildings but I know of no solid evidence of that. Another erroneous tale has been circulating that the buildings were formerly the USSR Embassy pre-1949 but that’s nonsense too. Certainly the property is now controlled by the Beijing Catholic Diocese but they have not proved to ever be great lovers of preservation.

And so now Shanghaiist reports more rumours about renovation plans – rumours that have periodically cropped up every six months or so for years now. And while it is true that No.81 has a preservation order applied to it this, as regular China Rhyming readers will know, effectively means nothing as this blog is packed full of Shanghai and Beijing properties with preservation orders who were bulldozed at 3am to make way for a shopping mall.

Maybe this time something will happen. As the insides have largely been gutted already and partially open to the elements for a decade or more now there is probably little left to salvage inside but it is to be hoped that any “restoration plan” doesn’t involve knocking the whole thing down and rebuilding it in a sort of similar style! A Beijing developer tactic we’re all familiar with time and again.