Actor, director, film theorist, star of Shanghai’s golden age, victim of the Cultural Revolution: Zheng Junli led a life as remarkable as any fictional character’s. Born to a poor family in Shanghai in 1911, Zheng became one of Chinese cinema’s biggest silent-era stars. His high cheekbones and floppy hair projected a debonair charm, yet his appeal was grounded in his frequent roles as a fighter for justice and anti-imperialist action.

The Second Sino-Japanese War found Zheng moving behind the camera, filming several remarkable news documentaries. After World War II, he returned to Shanghai, codirecting the classic Spring River Flows East. As China transitioned not-so-peacefully into the era of Mao Zedong and the People’s Republic, Zheng rode the various waves of change to create some of the era’s most intriguing blends of melodrama, art, and politics, each fueled by an innovative merging of Chinese art history with film form. (He also published several volumes of film theory.)

Like many artists in the Mao era, though, Zheng would be praised during one political moment and damned during another. Swept up in the Red Guard furor of the mid-1960s, his entire career was slandered as counterrevolutionary. He was arrested in 1967, and died in prison in 1969, at age 57.

Anchored by new restorations from the China Film Archive, this series presents not only several classics of pre–People’s Republic Chinese cinema, but a rare chance to discover the popular genres, styles, and movements of Maoist China.

— Jason Sanders, Film Notes Writer

• 

  The Spring River Flows East

  • Saturday, November 16 7:30 PM

  Cai Chusheng, Zheng Junli
  China, 1947

  Digital Restoration

  This screening replaces the reprise of Crows and Sparrows, which had played previously on October 6. We apologize for any inconvenience.

   

  Included on the Hong Kong Film Awards list of the greatest Chinese-language films of all time, this decades-spanning epic following a couple’s separation during the Sino-Japanese War has been called China’s Gone with the Wind.

   

• 

  The Spring Comes to the Withered Tree

  • Sunday, November 10 1 PM

  Zheng Junli
  China, 1961

  Two rural lovers—one struck with a deadly disease—encounter both disaster and hope in Zheng’s intriguing merger of Soviet-style socialist realism with his own blossoming experiments in cinematic technique.

   

• 

  The Big Road

  • Saturday, November 2 5:30 PM

  Sun Yu
  China, 1935

  Digital Restoration

   

  A group of Chinese youth awaken to their patriotic duty while building a strategic highway in Sun Yu’s stirring agitprop drama, set during the Japanese invasion and starring a who’s-who of legendary Chinese actors, including Jin Yan (the “Chinese Valentino”), Zheng Junli, and Li Lili.

   

  Introduction by Weihong Bao; Judith Rosenberg on Piano

• 

  CANCELED—New Women

  • Saturday, October 26 7:30 PM

  Cai Chusheng
  China, 1935

  Canceled
  This screening has been canceled due to the UC Berkeley campus power shutdown. Please watch this page for ticket refund information.

  Digital Restoration

   

  A strong-willed teacher and writer (Ruan Lingyu) is driven to despair by gossip and lecherous men in this hard-hitting melodrama that gained further power from Ruan’s own post-filming suicide.

   

  Judith Rosenberg on Piano

• 

  Husband and Wife

  • Sunday, October 20 4:30 PM

  Zheng Junli
  China, 1951

  Digital Restoration

   

  A Shanghai intellectual marries an illiterate peasant woman–turned–collectivist hero in this Maoist take on the Hollywood marriage melodrama, as fascinating an example of genre filmmaking in the PRC as you’ll find.

   

• 

  Nie Er

  • Saturday, October 12 5:45 PM

  Zheng Junli
  China, 1959

  Digital Restoration

   

  Shot in gorgeous color, this fascinating communist flipside to fifties Hollywood music biopics chronicles the life and tragic early death of Nie Er, the composer of the PRC’s national anthem.

   

  Introduction by Weihong Bao

• 

  RESCHEDULED—The Spring River Flows East

  • Thursday, October 10 6:30 PM

  Cai Chusheng, Zheng Junli
  China, 1947

  Digital Restoration

  Rescheduled
  This film has been rescheduled to screen Saturday, November 16.

   

  Included on the Hong Kong Film Awards list of the greatest Chinese-language films of all time, this decades-spanning epic following a couple’s separation during the Sino-Japanese War has been called China’s Gone with the Wind.

   

• 

  Crows and Sparrows

  • Sunday, October 6 1:30 PM

  Zheng Junli
  China, 1950

  Digital Restoration

  Crows and Sparrows also screens with a lecture by UC Berkeley professor Weihong Bao on Saturday, November 16.

   

  A Shanghai apartment building serves as a microcosm of China’s class struggles in Zheng Junli’s striking urban drama, filmed during the last days of China’s Nationalist rule and already looking forward to, as one character says, “a New Society.”

   

  Introduction by Paul Fonoroff

• 

  The Blood of Passion on the Volcano

  • Friday, October 4 7 PM

  Sun Yu
  China, 1932

  Digital Restoration

   

  A warlord’s lusty nephew destroys a simple farming family’s pastoral idyll and sends its favorite son into tropical exile in Sun Yu’s delirious fusion of Chinese peasant drama with Hollywood-style island exotica.

   

  Introduction by Paul Fonoroff and Weihong Bao; Judith Rosenberg on Piano

• 

  Struggling

  • Thursday, October 3 7 PM

  Shi Dongshan
  China, 1932

  Digital Restoration

   

  The tale of a young woman’s battle against her bullying father expands into a rousing cry against all tyranny in Shi Dongshan’s strikingly fresh 1932 melodrama, recently rediscovered through a brilliant restoration from the China Film Archive.

   

  Introduction by Paul Fonoroff and Weihong Bao; Judith Rosenberg on Piano