Spring in a Small Town

Today is the 162nd anniversary of the birth of Louis Lumière (born 5 October 1864 in Besançon). With his brother Auguste he built the Cinématographe and, on 28 December 1895 in Paris, held the first public paying film screening in history. Their earliest films were Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat — capturing what could be seen was cinema's first and entire ambition.

Today's two films go in the opposite direction: their power comes from what is never shown.

Spring in a Small Town has the word "spring" in its title, and not one scene in it crosses a line. Zhou Yuwen's narration says a great deal — about the city wall she walks every day, about why she is still in this courtyard — but the camera never moves past the line between feeling and propriety. This 1948 Chinese film turns restraint itself into a cinematic language.

Alien has the monster in its title, and yet the film almost never gives it a complete, clear, steady frontal shot. It spends most of its time in shadow, in the gaps between cuts, in the audience's own imagination. Ridley Scott sold the script to studios as "Jaws in space" — and the thing that made Jaws frightening was precisely that Spielberg kept the shark out of the water.

The second reason is more concrete: these are the last two axes on the list that are entirely empty.

The archive holds eighteen films across eighteen countries or territories and ten decades. But there are two things it does not hold a single example of: mainland China, and horror. One is a hole on the regional axis, one on the genre axis. Today closes both.

The third reason is internal to the archive, and it happens to be neat.

The 1948 slot already holds Bicycle Thieves. The same year, the same postwar world: in one film a man runs across Rome after a stolen bicycle; in the other a woman keeps to a half-ruined courtyard in a small town on the Yangtze delta and goes nowhere. Both films point their cameras at ruins — one in the street, one behind a wall.

And Alien connects to 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the 1968 slot. The two films share one very specific device: a crew member who is not human, whose true orders rank above the lives of the entire crew. In 2001, HAL 9000 must kill everyone to protect the mission; in Alien, the science officer Ash has orders to bring the organism back to Earth, and the crew's survival is not part of the instruction. Eleven years apart, the most human-looking thing on board is never human.

故事发生在中国江南的一座小城里，时间在抗日战争结束之后。

戴家曾经是这城里的殷实人家，如今只剩一座塌了一半的老宅、一个忠心的老仆老黄，和兄妹两个人。哥哥戴礼言久病，整天坐在院子里，对着祖上留下的废墟叹气；妻子周玉纹每天做的事，是提着菜篮走过城墙、走过田埂，买药，回家，然后再走一遍。妹妹戴秀十六岁，是这院子里唯一还活着的一股生气。

玉纹和礼言的婚姻早已无话可说，但两个人仍然各尽本分。日子就这样一天一天地过。

然后，礼言的一位童年好友从上海来了。他叫章志忱，是一位医生——他同时也是玉纹战前的恋人。

（这里不再往下说。）

A film with five people in it

Spring in a Small Town is a black-and-white film produced by the Wenhua Film Company in 1948, running 93 minutes. It has exactly five named characters: Zhou Yuwen (Wei Wei), Dai Liyan (Shi Yu), Zhang Zhichen (Li Wei), the old servant Lao Huang (Cui Chaoming) and Dai Xiu (Zhang Hongmei).

The screenplay Li Tianji delivered was far longer. Fei Mu cut roughly two thirds of it and shot without a complete shooting script, finishing the film in three months. That explains why the film feels so empty: it is not a reduced plot but a deliberate selection of only what could be allowed to remain.

Sound: the most underrated element

In 1948 Chinese production sound was still optical, single-channel, with dialogue, music and effects mixed onto one track. That meant every sung performance had to be recorded in one pass on set — so Fei Mu had his actors sing live, rather than pre-recording and lip-syncing.

Two songs appear in the film: "In That Faraway Place" (sung by Zhang Hongmei and Shi Yu) and "A Lovely Rose" (Zhang Hongmei in the first half, Li Wei in the second). They are not score; they are things the characters do — the only action permitted to two people in a situation that cannot be spoken aloud.

The narration: a form almost unheard of in Chinese cinema

The film opens on Zhou Yuwen's first-person narration. She walks along the ruined city wall and says she takes the same route every day — buys medicine, comes home, and the days repeat as if they had not happened. That narration runs for nearly eighteen minutes, until she and Zhichen actually meet on screen.

In the history of Chinese cinema, sustaining a film on a first-person female narration was highly unusual. The critic Leung Ping-kwan read it not as a narrative device but as a "lyrical film form" whose characteristics belong to modern literature rather than to traditional storytelling; the narration cares not with what happened but with what happened inside her. Other critics have read the film directly as a feminist one — because her narration discusses her marriage "without guilt", and that absence of guilt was itself a departure from the norms of every other film of its moment.

How a courtyard becomes the shape of a mind

Fei Mu's framing follows a recurring logic: people are placed behind door frames, window frames and broken walls. What the viewer sees is a person inside an opening, not simply a person. The paths in the compound, the gaps in the city wall, the corridors between rooms form the film's real dramatic space — relationships advance not through dialogue but through who stands on which side, who enters, who stops.

This is why it looked strange in 1948 and looks modern now: it contains almost no "events", only changes of position.

Neglected, then rediscovered

The film opened in 1948 and was then long overlooked. One reason was that it appeared to have no politics: unlike the left-wing films of the 1930s it dealt only in private feeling, and it has no clear villain — unless time and circumstance count. That absence was criticised at the time as a retreat from reality. Fei Mu died in 1951.

The original print was later held by the China Film Archive. In the early 1980s the Archive struck a new print, and the film returned to audiences, gradually becoming recognised as one of the masterworks of Chinese cinema:

• In 2005, for the centenary of Chinese cinema, the Hong Kong Film Awards Association polled critics for its "100 Best Chinese Motion Pictures". Spring in a Small Town ranked first
• In 2011 the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival Executive Committee included it among the 100 Greatest Chinese-language Films
• Rotten Tomatoes: 100% from 16 reviews, average 9.7/10

Its descendants

In 2002 Tian Zhuangzhuang remade it as Springtime in a Small Town, well received at Venice but criticised for removing Yuwen's narration — cutting the narration means cutting the film's point of view, which is itself a measure of how much that narration was doing. In 2015 the director Li Liuyi staged it as a play with the Beijing People's Art Theatre.