Of the 18 films directed by Fei Mu (1906- 1951) only a dozen survive, mostly in poor state. On the occasion of the centenary of Chinese cinema in 2005, his famous Xiaocheng zhi Chun (Spring in a Small Town, 1949) was voted undisputed best film by hundreds of cineastes in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In an attempt to “re-embrace” these three adversarial souls and their turbulent cinematographic past, Jia Zhangke dedicated a large part of his recent film Hai shang chuan qi (I Wish I Knew, shown in Cannes 2010) to the Shanghaiese Fei Mu, who died an exile in Hong Kong. The miraculous rediscovery and the meticulous restoration of Confucius by the Hong Kong Film Archive has contributed on the one hand to exalt the stylistic mastery of Fei Mu, and on the other to tear away a veil on the period of Japanese occupation. There is an evident comparison with the period of Nazi occupation in France, when it was possible for masterworks by Claude Autant-Lara, Marcel Carné, Henri-Georges Clouzot to emerge. The Hong Kong historian Wong AinLing, author of an excellent monograph on the director (Shiren Daoyan: Fei Mu, Hong Kong Film Critics Society, 1998), has shed light on the production difficulties inside the “orphan island” of Shanghai’s foreign concessions, despite the feverish idealism with which Fei Mu made Confucius. In the view of Fei Mu, while “a great educator, thinker and philosopher, Confucius (551-479 a.C.) was doomed a victim of the politics of his time”. In the film, the historical character is presented, in the opinion of the historian Li Ling, “as a living Confucius, one that has not yet been canonised as a saint”. Various schools of thought have treated the film as a supreme gesture of patriotism, as a work of intense pessimism, and again as a model of neutrality, neither for nor against Confucius. Fei Mu’s constant quest for “poetry in pictures” for formal simplicity, for narrative essence, are fundamental elements of the Confucian aesthetic, according to the historian Sam Ho. The final smile of Confucius, so confident of transcendence, matches the equally sublime finale of Spring in a Small Town, in which the protagonists seem to contemplate the Dawn of the World. (The quotations are from Fei Mu’s Confucius, Hong Kong Film Archive 2010). A retrospective of Fei Mu’s films will be organized by the Cineteca di Bologna in the Autumn of 2010 in collaboration with the Confucius Institute of Bologna and the China Film Archive of Beijing.
Lorenzo Codelli