DAYBREAK (Sun Yu / 1933) 1 – The Commissar (Aleksandr Askoldov / 1967)
Sun Yu, who learned his craft at the likes of Columbia and New York Institute of Photography, was responsible for the first camera crane in Chinese cinema. That was for his 1932 effort, Wild Rose, which, if I remember correctly, did not star Li Lili, a staple of his ‘30s output. Though it did contain motifs recurrent in his work — for instance, the rural-urban dichotomy, which is given an interesting perspective in Daybreak since it’s hinted that the protagonist’s life wasn’t all rosy in the village either. But getting back to the camera crane, I couldn’t help but think of Borzage’s Seventh Heaven during the crane shot of the young couple going up the flight of stairs when they first arrive in Shanghai (there’s a similar shot later on, too, though, unlike Borzage’s couple, Sun’s don’t go up seven flights, and why bother as in this case there’s no transcendence to be found anywhere). Since Borzage clearly influenced Street Angel (Yuan Muzhi), Team China’s awesome selection in the previous round, it’s quite possible that Sun Yu was also familiar with him. And like the American filmmaker, his striking yet fluid mise-en-scène/montage help keep the more strained melodramatic and political elements at bay. Certainly, the presence of the ever-effervescent Li Lili plays a part in it (let’s not forget that she wanted to have a smile on her face even while being executed!). Li was considered the most modern of Chinese actresses at the time, and her athletic figure was given its due in Sun’s later Queen of Sports (if I’m not mistaken, she’s also wearing shorts during one of those nostalgic pastoral flashbacks in Daybreak ). Even though he wasn’t always regarded as such, Sun Yu was one of the more socio-politically conscious filmmakers of his generation. Did he partake in leftist propaganda? I guess so, but it could be argued that the loss taken in by the remarkable final crane shot is strictly and profoundly human.
Ah, you said that sooo much better than I could have. Well done Arsaib.
Raise the Red Lantern 1 – Nine Days of One Year 0
Romm wasn’t among the great Russian directors, but this Russian film was certainly interesting at the time, and it’s still fascinating with his ‘pictures’ of the Russian youth in the Cold War period. Still Yimou’s masterpiece wins easily.
City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan) 0 – Mother (Vsevolod Pudovkin) 1
Pudovkin is simpy The King of cinema, Lu Chuan is a servant – in comparison! :D
“Pudovkin is simpy The King of cinema, Lu Chuan is a servant”
dude,that was harsh :P
Daybreak 1 – The Commissar 0
Raise the Red Lantern 1 – Nine Days of One Year 0
City of Life and Death 0 – Mother 1
I want to talk about Daybreak this morning. Forgive me for ignorant rambling. What do I love about the film? Li Lili and her smile. That shot of the gears which mutates into workers entering the factory (echoes of opening to Modern Times). The sunlight and Li lying in the leaves on the boat. The cruel young policemen with the girls on both arms in the cab and the cigarette with which he punctures a balloon (just before a fade- you barely notice). The roots of the late-20th and 21st-century Chinese diaspora’s cinema of alienation (from Wang Bing’s focus on workers to Yang showing the obsolescence of Confucian norms in the global marketplace) can also be seen in a film like Daybreak, which expressed the isolation of urban life in a cosmopolitan metropolis… but in the end it always comes back to those smaller moments of brilliance like the bro-in-law with the pig imitation!! And Li. More of a real woman and less of an idealization than Ruan Lingyu, Li may lack her Shanghai cohort’s effortless grace, but she is more of an inspirational, flawed, well rounded fully human figure.
I feel Daybreak isn’t “communist propaganda” in the same way as something produced by a communist revolutionary government (Russia after 1917, China after 1949). I don’t think the film is “political second,” but it interweaves economic realities with an individual woman- and family’s- story- one to which almost anyone living in exploited, colonized, war-torn, depression-era China (and particularly in Shanghai, the Chinese city) could relate in some degree. Urbanization even in the best of circumstances caused people to suffer extreme shocks- the loss of the rural ways of life, but more sadly, the replacement of the traditional strong Chinese family unit with a system of exploitation where economics dictated that each person should be used as a tool of profit without regard for the social harmony of the family or society as a whole.
Every change can be bittersweet. Peasants in the countryside had been tortured not only by the by a feudal system (the “taxes” mentioned in the first scene, I think) where landowners exerted total control, but women in particular suffered, as their work as well as even their sexuality had to be in the service of their family’s economic needs. The stunning first few seconds of Raise the Red Lantern, set in the 1920s, express this well, as a student is forced by the money circumstances of her dad’s death to become a feudal lord’s fourth concubine, rather than following the dictates of her own mind and heart. Of course every feudal society from Japan (Oharu) to England (Tess) gives us dramatic examples of rural women’s struggles and the resilience of exploitation of women across time and racial lines. Rural China was a hard place for women though, and even if not every family was unconcerned with its daughters’ own feelings, there often weren’t a lot of choices either sex could make about their own lives in such systems. One might think moving to the city would bring some liberation for women. Sun Yu’s film though- and Fei Mu’s The Goddess of one year later- emphasises that dividing up the family unit into separate wage earners unfortunately did nothing to ease exploitation of women, whose male protectors- and rural mores of propriety- were now powerless to stop bosses from doing whatever they liked with their female workers. The loss of a job for women alone in the city (and with the men being exploited in their own way, they might all be alone) would mean either starvation or outright prostituton- when one sees the mercilessness of Western-style markets, one can almost sympathize (almost.) with the system of repressive family control, and indeed the abuse of many women in rural life isn’t the subject of Sun Yu’s attention here. He gives us a true love relationship at the center of the film, seen in full flower not only in the memories of an afternoon on the water (one of the most purely beautiful sequences ever in a film) but in mutual concern and respect even in the harsh environment of the city. The hopes of this perfect match being consummated are destroyed though, not by the favorite stereotype of arranged marriage, but by traditional mores on marriage unfortunately combined with underlying economic facts that make marriage financially impossible for two young people in love- even today in a huge number of countries such difficulties persist. For me seeing her raped by the boss’s son is all the more cruel in this light- when she returns to those memories of the water, in some way I hope this is Sun Yu trying to say poetically what the censors wouldn’t permit.
Even if not, we would have the honesty and innocence of that real love thrown into contrast by the sexualized thuggery and lies of the bosses- the “dinner party” scene & the other womens’ reactions as they leave is utterly horrifying. It also approaches the absurd- the precondition for truthful melodrama imo- no wonder Los Olvidados is a film to which I always want to compare others I love. In any case, there’s nothing absurd, or even beyond common sense, about the conclusions Sun’s film actually draws. In choosing to focus on women who fall into prostitution due to economic exploitation, both Sun and Fei’s work- along with the more experimental Yuan Muzhi of the still-criminally-underseen AWC classic Street Angel- of course express something about the shocking incidence of these circumstances (the star of Street Angel, Zhou Xuan, herself had been sold into future prostitution as a child, though thankfully she escaped for a singing career before coming of age) but they also provide a metaphor for the situation of urban workers in general in the society of Shanghai. “Free,” like a prostitute may appear, of the boundaries of feudal society and morality, nonetheless they are enslaved by the market that reduces them to interchangeable, discardable parts, like the body of a woman kept in sexual slavery. I don’t mean to make any moral equivalence. But the films do show women being forced to take control of their own lives and understand that they have a certain power in that their labor is required, just as their bodies are, by those commonly seen as powerful- these women can exert power themselves as in Daybreak. I believe the woman who eventually comes to understand her own power may have been intended to suggest the worker, the time-clock prostitute, who understands his or hers- and Sun Yu’s film, with its earlier section, makes explicit the harsh situation of factory workers.
I feel that one special thing about the cinema of Shanghai- besides the glamor of the great stars like Li, Ruan, Zhou, and not to forget the male side, Zhao Dan- is that it was committed socially, for the most part, without being rigid ideologically. Shanghai was a capitalist city through and through. Shanghai was a westernized city, still colonized and carved up into different zones of European and American influence and exploitation, and menaced externally by the Japanese (kind of like Team China’s going to be feeling soon, though minus the European menace! :P) The filmmakers of Shanghai were oriented toward Hollywood as much or more than toward Moscow- Sun Yu was US-educated even. But in the worldwide depression of the 1930s, and the civil wars consuming China, everyone but a few at the top was suffering. Yes, people wanted escapism at the cinema (extremely charismatic stars! beautiful montage) but when things were so serious, even escapism would have to include serious acknowledgment of the poverty, the loss of home and life. Moreover, the filmmakers were interested in more than escape or art for art’s sake- they were not given the option (illusion) of being only neutral observers because no one, once they got to the city, was able to make enough money to live (you see this in Yuan’s earlier Scenes of City Life, a tragicomedy from 1935), because events swirled so fast around them and change was in the air- later the summer Street Angel came out, for instance, Shanghai was invaded and mostly occupied by the Japanese (apart from the western zones which wouldn’t be until 1941 I think) giving its own populist message such resonance. And the Japanese war machine was already engaged back in 1933, along with the nationalists who sought to preserve the kind of inequalities on view in all these films. But to view the “leftist” filmmakers as PRC party-liners would be ignorant. I don’t know about Sun’s views, but in 1951 he became the first filmmaker to be officially denounced by Mao himself when he made another film showing the- continued- poor conditions in which people lived- which didn’t sit well with propaganda. My understanding of “propaganda” is art made to advance one particular cause, of which it the art serves as an officially sanctioned part. The Shanghai films, rather than propaganda, seem like the work of artists trying to envision a better world into being- a world that didn’t necessarily exist for them yet, even on paper, in Russia or China or anywhere else. That Chinese communism ultimately took on an authoritarian form, does not reduce the fearlessness and compassion and at the very least, the artistic strength of the directors and actors’ dissident work at a time when an equal society was only a dream for many. These artists’ responsibility was only to be honest.
Those who haven’t already might enjoy reading an excellent article on the development of the leftist cinema in Shanghai in the ‘30s. Of all the world cup films I think these have been some of the best “discoveries” and well, just my personal favorites. Unfortunately if China wins people will read it as a result of a miscalculation by Russia owing to a Tarkovsky deficit. But Myra obviously didn’t just make predictable choices either. She deserves much credit for going with personal favorites from the 1930s period regardless of how wrongly neglected some of these films have been- outside and perhaps inside China- and how unpredictable the votes would be.
Thanks a lot for all that Paul, very instructive and insightful. “the replacement of the traditional strong Chinese family unit with a system of exploitation where economics dictated that each person should be used as a tool of profit without regard for the social harmony of the family or society as a whole.” I think this undermines the notion of the political Right as the bastion of the family!
i’ll have a good digest of the comments we’ve had in since i last looked. Yes Chinese leftist cinema of the 30s deserves a lot more attention, i’m a fan of Daybreak, Goddess (Wu Yonggang) and Street Angel (and there are other goodies too) and i’m very glad they’ve been chosen and appreciated. Oh and Fei Mu’s marvellous 1948 Spring in a Small Town another world cup classic
current scores:
Daybreak 11 The Commissar 3
Raise the Red Lantern 17 Nine Days of One Year 2
City of Life and Death 5 Mother 6
back in the 1950s Mother was voted among the top 10 films to then. I like all 3 Russian films here, the scores disguise their quality i think.
Great post Paul, and you’re right about Myra’s choices. Her picks from the 30s have been some of my favorites in the competition as well.
Oh, and in response to the “political second” question, I meant in comparison to Soviet cinema where the individual becomes an abstract rather than retaining the same sense of reality they do in these Chinese films. Here the individual is the focus of the political thinking rather than the political thinking dictating the way we think of the individual. So by second, I just meant that in Daybreak the individuals are identified and made “real” before they are confronted by ideological concerns, whereas in something like Mother, the political concerns seem to determine the shape of the individual characters.
I feel Daybreak isn’t “communist propaganda” in the same way as something produced by a communist revolutionary government (Russia after 1917, China after 1949).
Am I incorrect to say that the film was later criticized by the Maoist government?
A bit of Chinese cinema from the 30’s has become available on DVD but the prints vary from unwatchable to poor.
If decent prints are available this would make an great Eclipse edition for Criterion.
Thanks for the insightful essay, Paul.
I can imagine that the Maoist government must have disliked the role of the female main character in “Daybreak”, though most Chinese silent films were critizised and censored during the Cultural Revolution. It´s interesting to note that Mao himself wrote an essay in which he attacked Sun Yu´s film “The Life of Wu Xun” (1950) right after the PRC was established which basically ruined the director´s career.
daybreak 0 — 1 the commissar
VOTING CLOSED – THE RESULTS ARE GOING TO BE PUBLISHED SOON
RESULT
CHINA 2 RUSSIA 1
Daybreak 11 The Commissar 4
Raise the Red Lantern 17 Nine Days of One Year 2
City of Life and Death 5 Mother 6
China 33 votes Russia 12 votes
I want to thank Arsaib and Paul for such interesting comments re Daybreak and films of this period. I have really learned a lot re the technical and social context of Daybreak and Shanghai films from this great and creative period. A post can never be too long for me, Paul, so full cudos for giving us such a detailed and insightful political and social commentary with so many apt points.
I think Greg has also hit the nail on the head that the Chinese films from this period are totally more people oriented as opposed to the more thematic orientation of the Russian films. This is a clear and fine distinction.
I want to thank all who have commented on the films in this group or the event in general. I always learn from all your insights and appreciate the time and effort all of you have put into your observations. This makes this much more than just a dry exercise in film watching. Film is much more than just aesthetics, as there is ALWAYS the political/social/economic component, as well. I think this particularly applies to the films from India, Africa, and Iran in this 1/4 finals, too. All are reflecting the complex social dynamics of societies in transition – especially amongst the most marginalized – where the cruel economics of disenfranchisement come to fore.
I reckon Russia would have won this match if they’d used their biggest weapon, Andrei Rublev.
I agree with you, Jon. I´m not quite sure if Jorge had been planning to hold back some of his biggest guns for the two final rounds, but he certainly wanted to give us some new discoveries in this match which deserves respect. I´m especially glad to have seen the Romm film “Nine Days of One Year” through this competition, and likely wouldn´t have rewatched “Andrei Rublev” or “Battleship Potemkin” if he had selected one of these two. I feel that most of the managers have made a great effort to keep a fine balance, and Team China definitely deserves the win since it has given us many wonderful selections throughout the competition.
i’m so glad Jorge didn’t put Tarkovsky,i fully enjoyed his best line-up in the WC,even if Russia lost with this risky line-up….so what? (2 out of 3 of his picks i didn’t even know at all!!!)
why does Russia have to win with Tarkovsky and not with Pudovkin or Muratova?
Blue K, Custodian of the Cinema
Raise the Red Lantern 1 – Nine Days of One Year 0
This turned out to be an agonizingly difficult decision. I was truly pleasantly surprised by Nine Days of the Year. But in the end, what may be Zhang Yimou’s most elegant film—even though I’ve always found it a bit less involving than Ju Dou or Red Sorghum—barely won out.