Water Ink

I’m very proud of the fact that I had watched Fei Mu‘s 1948 masterpiece Spring in a Small Town (小城之春) in cinema. I can’t help keeping telling my friends at every opportunity that how I watched it with excitement, how I love this film and how I fell for the leading actress instantly. My friends probably have been tired of my bragging, half of them having no faintest idea what I talked about.

I watched Spring in a Small Town Hong Kong, during a retrospective of Fei Mu’s work held in Hong Kong Arts Centre in mid-90s. That was a rare event, because this movie disappeared from the public sight after initial release in Shanghai and was only re-discovered in 80′s, which makes it extremely difficult to locate a copy. The copy I watched was in excellent condition though. After the screening,
I approached Fei Ming Yi, the master’s daughter and one of the organisers of the retrospective, asking her where she got the copy. She said she borrowed it from Beijing Film Archive and, certainly used her influence to get the deal, had to ‘garantee the return on my life’. Afterwards, I always take it as a badget of honour as being in that cosy small theatre that evening.

There have since been VCDs and DVDs of the movie available. But nothing compares with impact of watching the film on big screen. This film is made for cinema, although it tells a story only involves five characters in a small town.
It has now been regarded as one of the best Chinese films ever made, an excellent and innovative fusion of Chinese literal and opera tradition and western cinema language.

So you can imagine my surprise and delight to see Spring in a Small Town features in the programmes of Chinese Cinema 07 organisied by Edinburgh Unversity and Filmhouse cinema. Claimed to be ‘UK’s the biggest ever festival of Chinese film’, it will show about 30 Chinese films from 1940′s to the latest – a preview of Zhang Yimou‘s Curse of the Golden Flower, not mention the presence of Maggie Cheung. For those 1940′s films though, such as Ruan Lingyu‘s Goddess (with a specially-commissioned musical accompaniment conducted by my friend Kimho Ip), Crows and Sparrows, and Spring in a Small Town, this is indeed a chance not to miss. So cancel your another engagement, travel by air, land and sea, and come to Edinburgh in the spring.

Cinema China 07

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