Wo zhe yi bei zi (This Life of Mine)
Shi Hui, CN 1950; Screenplay: Yang Liuqing after the novel by Lao She; Cinematography: Ge Weiqing, Lin Fa; Editing: Fu Jiqiu; Music: Huang Yijun; Cast: Shi Hui, Wei Heling, Wang Min. DCP (from 35mm), bw, 108 min. Mandarin with English subtitlesOne of the first films released after the 1949 Communist victory, This Life of Mine shows how Chinese cinema responded to a new world. The film's director and star, Shi Hui portrays 40 years of Chinese revolutionary history via a Beijing policeman, whose struggling conscience vies with his duty to serve successive regimes: from the 1911 Republican revolution, through the progressive May Fourth student movement, the depredations of corrupt Warlord rule, the brutal Japanese occupation, the even more corrupt post-1945 Nationalist rule, right up to the Communist victory of 1949. Narrated by the unnamed policeman on the eve of Liberation in 1949, Shi's film deploys richly authentic local Beijing language (sourced from Lao She's realist novel), powerful noir-style low-key lighting, and startlingly creative editing to balance a story of humanity under historical pressure with the new regime's obligatory class analysis. Shi Hui himself was hounded to death during Mao's anti-Rightist Campaign eight years later. (S.K.)