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by William M. Drew |
One of the greatest directors in the history
of Chinese cinema, Sun Yu was born on March 21, 1900, to a merchant family
in the city of Chongqing. After attending Qinghua University in Beijing,
he completed his education in the United States. He studied literature
and drama at the University of Wisconsin and after graduating went to New
York. There he studied cinematography and film editing at the New York
Institute of Photography and took Columbia University courses in theatre
(from Cecil B. DeMille’s mentor, the celebrated producer-playwright, David
Belasco) and scriptwriting. In 1926, Sun Yu returned to China where he
obtained work in the Chinese film industry centered in Shanghai. He directed
his first film in 1928 and, after working for the Changcheng and Minxin
film companies, ![]() The period in which Sun Yu emerged as a major director was one of the most turbulent in China’s history, a crisis reflected in his works. At a time when factional differences between Chiang Kai-shek’s increasingly rightist regime and its former allies in the Kuomintang, the Communists, erupted into open conflict and when China was menaced by Japanese imperial aggression, Sun Yu became an eloquent spokesman on film for the progressive left. Yet, unlike their Soviet contemporaries, Sun Yu and other Chinese left-wing directors were not working for the government establishment but rather for a privately-run studio. Partly for this reason, Sun Yu’s work in the 1930s represents a highly independent approach to social problems. And while influenced by Western filmmakers, Sun Yu’s films are also steeped in Chinese cultural traditions. Critic Li Cheuk-To points out in his article on Sun Yu that the strongest aesthetic influence on the director was the great classical Tang Dynasty poet, Li Bai, his idol since his youth. Another characteristic of 1930s cinema in both China and Japan was the very belated conversion to sound. With neither country making many talkies until about 1936, Asian filmmakers in the thirties like Sun Yu developed cinema art in a manner ultimately very different from contemporary trends prevailing in the West, despite their incorporation of techniques and some thematic elements from American and European films.
The director’s next film, Tiyuhuanghou (The Queen of Sport) (1934) is lighter in tone as it relates the experiences of a female athlete (played by Li Lili) who becomes a celebrity after breaking records in sprinting. Again, Sun Yu’s quick dissolves, wipes, and superimpositions help to sustain a mood. But this film, too, contains a social critique of the superficiality of fame and the dangers arising from competition. At the same time, Sun Yu intended Li Lili’s athlete to project a strong, positive image of Chinese femininity that broke with the frail heroines of tradition.
After Dalu, Sun Yu directed five sound films from 1935 to 1941, two of them war films made in Chongqing. In the midst of full-scale war between China and Japan, he was forced to relocate from Shanghai to Wuhan and, then, Chongqing. Following the end of World War II, he spent two years in the United States recuperating from a severe illness. He resumed his directorial career upon his return to China in 1947, but his later work was often hampered by the new, more stringent political controls that emerged as a consequence of the Communist Revolution of 1949. Wuxunchuan (The Life of Wu Xun), Sun Yu’s first film after the war, is the story of an educator trying to bring learning to poor people. Production began in 1948, but the film was not completed until 1950, due to the new political climate which resulted in changes in the script. Finally released in 1951 as a two-part film, Wuxunchuan was criticized by Mao Zedong in an editorial for The People’s Daily. In the stifling totalitarian climate heralded by this attack, Sun Yu’s career was adversely affected. He directed only three more films--Chengfengpolang (Braving Wind and Waves) in 1957, a story about female athletes that recalls his earlier work; Lubandichuanshuo (The Legend of Luban), a 1958 adaptation of a folk tale; and Lady Qin, an opera film made in 1961. Like others who had helped create the Chinese cinema in the silent era and had continued to work in China after 1949, Sun Yu was denounced during the Cultural Revolution, which brought a virtual halt to Chinese filmmaking on the mainland for a decade. Although Sun Yu would never direct again, he survived that tumultuous period and spent his last years working on his autobiography and publishing his English translations of Li Bai’s poetry. He died in Shanghai on July 11, 1990, at the age of 90. Sun Yu created a body of work that infuses realistic depictions of China’s contemporary social problems with a highly romantic spirit of idealism and enthusiastic optimism. His classics of the 1930s speak beyond the immediate needs of the time as they portray on film universal human problems. The filmmaker’s "urge to resist all forms of repression" is as apparent in his sensuality as in his arraignment of social inequities. Much like his American contemporaries, John Ford and Frank Capra, Sun Yu was simultaneously radical and traditional, capturing on film the spirit and aspirations of an entire nation. While looking forward to a brighter future, the director valued the lost innocence of his country’s agrarian past, seeking to recapture its ideals at a time when China’s culture was menaced by imperialism and a depersonalizing urbanism and industrialism. With the belated discovery of early Chinese cinema by the outside world, "the poet Sun Yu," as he was called in China in tribute to his passion and lyricism, is taking his place in the pantheon of the world’s great filmmakers. REFERENCES: Li Cheuk-To, "A Gentle Discourse on a Genius:
Sun Yu," Cinemaya: The Asian Film Magazine, Vol. II, 1991, pp. 53-63;
Derek Elley, "Peach Blossom Dreams: Silent Chinese Cinema Remembered,"
Griffithiana,
October 1997, pp. 127-180; Sun Yu, Yinhuifanzhou: hui yi wo di yi sheng
(Shanghai: Shanghai wen yi chu ban she: Xin hua shu dian jing xiao, 1987);
Jay Leyda, Dianying: An Account of Films and the Film Audience in China
(Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 1972); Li Suyuan, Chinese Silent Film History,
tr. Wang Rui et al. (Beijing: China Film Press, 1997); Yingjin Zhang and
Zhiwei Xiao, eds., Encyclopedia of Chinese Films (London: Routledge,
1998).
RELATED LINKS: Chinese films in the 1930s:
A page on actor Jin Yan, the star of Dalu:
A website devoted to Ruan Ling-yu, the great actress who starred in
Xiao
Wanyi and many other classic Chinese silent films:
Copyright © 2002 by William M. Drew. All rights reserved. |
This site is intended for educational purposes
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