Guo feng

National Customs was the last film that Ruan Lingyu made, and it is dedicated to her memory. After her swansong in 'New Women', with its real-life parallels, this film comes like an afterthought, more akin to Xiao Wanyi (Small Toys) which, as it happens, also co-starred Li Lili. These two actress play sisters, Zhang Tao and Zhang Lan, both graduates from Middle School, who are considering what to do with their education. They wind up continuing their education in Shanghai, where Zhang Lan (Ruan Lingyu) pursues her studies in a Spartan fashion, while her younger sister plays around and learns all about 'being modern', which seems to consist of wearing makeup and alluring clothes, as well as a freer approach to interaction between the sexes.

It is here that the theme of the 'New Life' movement pops up. This movement was initiated in 1934 by Chiang Kai-shek with the aim of returning China to Confucian social ethics by the rejection of Western-styled individualism and indulgence. As the film goes on, the 'modern' versus the 'traditional' society comes to be embodied in the disagreements between the sisters.

While ably supported by the rest of the cast (including several familiar faces from the Shanghai film industry), the stars of the show are Ruan Lingyu and Li Lili. They have been very well cast and use their talents appropriately.

The plot, while tending towards melodrama in the early stages, quickly turns to social issues which were of mounting importance for Republican China. In its attitudes, the film becomes an interesting time-capsule of the New Life era, and it is probably more important as a historical document than as simple entertainment.

The print used for the DVD I viewed wasn't in bad condition, but the transfer was quite blurred in places. Perhaps in the future a better version can be produced. But as with many films of that era, one must be glad that they have survived at all.

Seeing this from the 39th Pordenone Silent Film Festival, "Guofeng," or "National Customs," is a cultural artifact now, far removed from today in that it was a propaganda film for the 1930s New Life Movement of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist party. Beyond this cultural and historical curiosity, there's another culture clash within the picture--between city and country, modernity and modesty, individualism and nationalism, etc.--all of which is treated exceedingly melodramatically. To focus primarily or exclusively on that, what is often considered the "substance," the message and story, however, is to follow the "narrow path" of the self-righteous elder sister (played by star Ruan Lingyu in her last role before committing suicide) and her martyr complex in the film. The great contradiction of "National Customs" is that while its message rails against style--make-up, fancy clothes and the rest of modernization, Westernization and, I guess, the sins of music and dancing--the film is beautifully stylized, from the modern and largely-Western invention of cinema, and it was made by a company located in Shanghai, the city depicted as corrupt in the film, and it has since been preserved by an archive in Beijing and, to add to the cultural exchange, scored by a Canadian, Gabriel Thibaudeau, for the music of the Pordenone Festival. On the other hand, that this is a silent film is neatly analogous to its traditionalist and nationalist message, as the newfangled talkies divided the country by language, including the film industry with Mandarin and Cantonese.

In 1935, only a silent film would be this gorgeous, too. There are some lovely compositions beside water and of the sunset and of cloudy moonlit nights, as well as dolly movements inward for close-ups or medium shots. Alternately, a mobile camera tracks characters in some indoor scenes, while the eyeline matches of classical continuity editing are employed for a scene such as the one with the little sister on the balcony--both, regardless, being based on a system of character looks. My favorite aspect of the visuals here, however, might be the motif of framing shots through windows, as well as other foregrounded objects, such as foliage. There are a couple such beautifully composed views early on during the love triangle between the sisters over their cousin. Later, there's a counterpart to these scenes when the teachers check in on the students from the background through the school-room windows in some nice tracking shots. As well, there are some views through the village's new shop windows, as the community quickly morphs into a den of Western, modern extravagance and frivolity.

There's a montage, too, demonstrating the change to the village, which concludes with the downtown area spiraling, with superimposed images of wild animals and water rapids, in transitioning to another montage for the reactionary New Life Movement. Indeed, the entire picture is superbly edited. Aided by the score from Thibaudeau for the Pordenone screening, the film flows very well. Wipes transition between shots in more-brisk episodes, while fades stand in for the passage of time to connect longer scenes, in addition to the usual direct cuts. Dissolves are employed, too, briefly, at least, after a multiple-exposure collage of images of women at university chatting on phones. Another scene transitions from a photograph of a character to him in the flesh, and, after images of dancing feet, there's the calendar trope to represent the passing of time by days being torn off it.

Thus, if one can overlook a script that calls for its two most stuffy female characters fainting in hysterics, while the ungrateful disrespect for others demonstrated by the two more-foreign-influenced characters being arguably worse, then there's a striking picture to appreciate visually here. That style, too, reflects, to an extent, the manner in which this silent film from Shanghai was made and how it peers into the window of its themes of tradition, modernity and culture.

(Note: A fine restoration from the Chinese Film Archive. Unfortunately, the streaming video from Pordenone included a distracting and constant watermark for the Archive in the upper right corner of the frame.)