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.46 In a broadsense, He Renzhai s failure suggests the impossibility of transforming the rural Chineseeconomy directly into an urban industrial economy controlled by the Japaneseimperialists.It also signals the doomed fate of the domestic industry under the samepolitical and social conditions.These are the crucial points that the Chinese film critics inthe 1930s failed to see or acknowledge.What is the future for these fishermen? Director Cai was both realistic and pessimistic.Xiaohou, the only son of the Xu family, is weak and retarded.His inability to continuehis father s profession symbolizes deep troubles in the countryside and the end of hopefor fishermen.The deaths of several Xu family members and He Renzhai ensure that thefuture of these Chinese fishermen will be dominated by foreign imperialism andurbanism.The future thus lies in Ziying, who has been educated abroad in oceanography.Like Fritz Lang s Metropolis (1926), whose biblical myth is used to construct theideological message about the division of labor into the hands that build and the brains Country and City 39that plan and conceive, a division which, as the film suggests, must be overcome, 47Songs of Fishermen hopes that Ziying, like Freder, son of the master in Metropolis, willbridge the class gap between rich and poor.Ziying is kind and sympathetic toward thepoor, quite different from his parents.The fact that he was born in Donghai and had beennursed by Mrs.Xu explains his ties with the poor and with rural China.While still achild, Ziying tried to stop the twins from addressing him as their master.Later, inShanghai, he offers them money and helps them.The link between rich and poor amongthe younger generation suggests that there is still hope, and probably the only hope.In Songs of Fishermen, Director Cai shows the suffering of poor Chinese fishermen tosuch a degree that some have called this film a successful tragedy. 48 But Cai was notable to find a solution the way he did in The New Woman or to call for revolution asdirector Sun Yu often proposed in his films.Ziying is still young and inexperienced andcan do very little to change the fate of the poor.Hence the film ends with Xiaomao s Song of Fishermen, which is about the suffering of the Chinese people.Songs of Fishermen is highly stylistic in its filmic narration.It depends mostly onimagery and rapid cuts to tell a story rather than on explanation through inter-titles asmany films of the 1930s did.The entire film is accompanied by melodramatic music,which heightens the theme.Director Cai Chusheng poured out his heart and soul for theChinese fishermen.The film premiered at Shanghai s Jincheng Theater on June 14, 1934,the day the heat set a sixty-year record of 103.8 degrees in Shanghai.It showed foreighty-four days, setting a box office record.49 It won China in 1935 its first internationalfilm award at Moscow International Film Festival.Chinese audiences would have to waitthirteen years for A Spring River Flows East (Yijiang chunshui xiang dong liu), directorCai s another melodramatic masterpiece, to match this record.FROM COUNTRY TO CITY TO NATIONDuring modern times, as the gap between China s countryside and cities grew wider, lifein rural China became harder.Domestically, as some have pointed out, the Nanjingnational government was too busy fighting with the Chinese Communists to work onimproving the conditions of the Chinese peasants.50 Additionally, in the early 1930s, theflow of silver into Shanghai caused a silver crisis, pushing the rural depression evenfurther.As a result, it tightened the supply of money and credit in the interior. 51The following is from Small Toys (Xiao wanyi) made in 1933.Directed by Sun Yuand produced by Lianhua Film Company, the film is set in 1910, in a village namedTaoyecun (The Peach Leaves Village) on the shores of beautiful Taihu Lake:Taihu Lake at dawn.Like a thin veil, the morning fog covers the surfaceof hazy and waving water.A fishing boat slowly appears in the mist&(dissolve)The fishing boat gently glides past the lake embankment, the bloominglotus flowers and the other boats that are casting their nets.The cast netfalls into the water, breaking the reflections of mountains in the water& (dissolve) The origins of left-wing cinema in China, 1932 37 40The fishing boat slowly passes the streets
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