“Her Murmurs Among Ruins: The Gendered Soundscape in Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948)”

Mia Liu (Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University) - “Her Murmurs Among Ruins: The Gendered Soundscape in Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948)”

This paper discusses the profuse use of female voice-over in Fei Mu's film Spring in a Small Town (Xiao cheng zhi chun, 1948), and the tension it creates over the images of ruins on screen. The discourse of ruins in Chinese art history is generally male-centered. In the dominant literati tradition, ruins are understood as a lamentation of a past and a memorial of an absence, and that past is a dynastic and national concept, a patriarchal structure of power, and the person who does the lamenting is with no exception a male. However, the film Spring interjects in the classic poetics of ruins with a woman’s healthy body and especially a woman’s sane voice. The film’s ruins, if appearing first as an allegory of the shattered state and a broken culture, become a gendered polity. This paper examines this female soundscape and its intervention in the visual history of ruins, and argues towards the film medium's transformatively gendered intervention in modern Chinese art and visual culture.