Fei Mu's "shadow Play" Concept Of Transmutation

Fei Mu,one of the great pioneers who gave China its own cinema. His most famous film Spring in a Small Town dramatizes the emotional entanglement of four people,conveying an intense eroticism that is powerful and haunting.What most impressed audience is Yuwen's poetic ,modernist narration, which revealed the whole story ,in turn determined the camera movements.At first,this essay focus on the unique narrative structure of the film: by depicting events from Yuwen's point of view and adding a poetic voice-over,Fei Mu's film brings us elegance and intimacy,makes us much closer to the characters,while the charming omniscient female offscreen narration,which often oddly recounts incidents that occur in her absence with telling details ,also remains a mystery.The paper found the answer from the narrative perspective of Chinese opera,by which,the director perfectly build his own narrative discourse,with a total control of the context and tone,make the performance swing between the discourse of the characters and the narrator's realities.Through a return to the great traditional narrative,the film foretold the shape of the film of the 21st century.Then,from this point , looking back to"The New Movie Concept"period,in which Fei Mu advocated film should be establisheditself from shackles of opera, and made his first fame acclaimed as one of the most accomplished of all Chinese directors.Exploring the circumstances that have influenced Fei Mu's films,especially during the"Orphan Island"period,refusing to collaborate with Japanese,he transferred to opera stage directing after Japanese occupied the International Concessions in Shanghai; after the war, he directed the first color opera film in China——Sheng Si Heng(Sorrow in Life and Death,1947 ) , featuring Beijing Opera master MeiLanfang.It's the experience of opera stage directing and opera film that offered opportunity to propel Fei Mu to reconsider Chinese opera,at stake is the relationship between film form and the national culture,embodied in the concept of a Chinese aesthetic.As a result,with his masterpiece Spring in a Small Town, Fei Mu created a modern, yet wholly Chinese paradigm which is regarded as a"timeless"classic characterized by quintessentially Chinese aesthetics, such as the stylized codes of Beijing Opera performance, the formal methods of landscape painting (shanshuihua )and the mood of Classical Poetry. The formal beauty and the film language were expressed in a very natural way.At last,the research on Fei Mu's movie concept evolution provokes thoughts about Chinese films of modern and nation .