Xiao cheng zhi chun (Spring in a Small Town)
Fei Mu, CN 1948; Screenplay: Li Tianji; Cinematography: Li Shengwei; Editing: Wei Shunbao, Xu Ming; Music: Huang Yijun; Cast: Wei We, Li Wei, Shi Yu. DCP (from 35mm), bw, 99 min. Mandarin with English subtitlesFei Mu's 1948 Spring in a Small Town is a perfect chamber film, a radical experiment in film poetics with subtle psychological power. Five characters spend several days together in a run-down mansion by a ruined city wall: Yuwen, her sickly husband Liyan, his sprightly little sister, their elderly servant, and Zhiwen, a visitor who is Liyan's old schoolmate and Yuwen's former lover. Yuwen's modernist voice-over narrates (in past, present, and future voices) the repressed erotic yearnings that threaten to overflow the bounds of the decaying moral structures barely holding together this post-war ruin of a society. Fei Mu's film language – his long, horizontally mobile takes, unprecedented dissolves within scenes, Yuwen's hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness narration – anticipate many film modernisms: film noir, neo-realism, and the New Wave's cinema of psychological alienation. Savaged by leftist critics at the time for "spreading passive, contradictory, decadent, pale, sickly, depressing, gloomy sentiments," the film is now universally hailed as an avant-garde masterpiece. (S.K.)
Free admission for members on September 11, 2026