Go Back

A Postcard of the 1940s China Spring Waters Flow East

To learn Chinese in China, the film “Spring Waters Flow East” was a white and black film produced by the Kunlun film company in the 1947; it was a classic which occupies an extremely important place in the artistic history of the Chinese movies. It is amazing to be discovered by foreign friends, who are travelling to study Chinese in China that the movie was released from the October, 1947 and had been consecutively on performances for three months, with a total number of audiences exceeding eight hundred thousand, making it one of the films with highest attendance before the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

The film directors of the “Spring Waters Flow East” are the famous film artists Chusheng Cai and Junli Zheng, own unique mythologies handed down orally from the past, what may arouse the curiosity of the friends who’d like to study Mandarin in China may be Bai Yang and Tao Jin , who act as the male and female leading protagonists.

The film “Spring Waters Flow East” endeavors to display the people’s sufferings and the struggles during the Anti-Japanese War as well as the continuity of forbearance of the oppressions and the humiliations of the Chinese people on the screen through depicting the vicissitudes of the lives of the Zhang Zhongliang’s family. Let people to become sober minded to explore the rooted cause of all those happenings, which is also going to be shared with friends who’d like to learn Chinese in China.

There are mainly three plot lines in this film, which may probably agreed by foreign students ready to study Chinese in China, the first one is the miserable life of Sufen with her mother-in-law and the children, which had vividly and authentically expressed the poverty and the pains of the people in the enemy-occupied areas during the Anti-Japanese War as well as in the all the regions under the rule of the KMT.

The second plot line lies in the process of how an anti-Japanese patriotic youth (Sufen’s husband Zhang Zhongliang) had degenerated into sneaking into the corrupted upper social classes, centering around this line, what’s worth-noticing for friends who’d like to study Mandarin in China that the film “Spring Waters Flow East” had also forcefully revealed the fact of a batch of politicians and state operated commerce’s, as well as the KMT bureaucrats who burry themselves in the embezzling of the national wealth and their dissolute and shameless life while turning a blind line to the national crisis and people.

The third plot line to be introduced when you come to learn Chinese in China lies in how the brother of Zhang Zhongliang, Zhang Zhongming had managed to seek refuge from the guerrilla forces in the mountain areas, and continued working in the liberated areas during the postwar era.

It must be paid attention to by students who’d like to study Chinese in China that the major three plots are interwoven and had constituted a life-like scroll of the lives of the Chinese people pre and post the Chinese Anti-Japanese War.

The foreign students waiting to study Mandarin in China must be concerned about the ending part, well, the film “Spring Waters Flow East” ends with the last words left from Sufen to her son before she committed suicide, “Do not learn from your father, and learn from your uncle.” The brief words had greatly deepened the theme. The reason for the warm welcome from the audiences is due to the two aspects, the ideological aspect and the artistic aspect, which both contains extraordinarily outstanding achievements, which must seem amazing for friends regardless of their races crowding to learn Chinese in China.It should be grasped by students who’d like to study Chinese in China that the movie was released during the ending period of the Anti-Japanese War, which had just met the psychological needs of the large groups of audiences.

In addition, the several leading characters’ wonderful performances had made the characters life-like on the screen, therefore, the audiences’ scrambling for the movie is easy to understand. What’s need to be noticed by friends who’d like to study Mandarin in China is that the movie “Spring Waters Flow East” had integrated the art performance skills of classical Chinese novels, the poetry, drama and painting into the forms of the expressions of the cinematography, which had helped in creating a type of artistic style loved by the large Chinese people.

Exit mobile version