While the first film made in China was “Dingjun Mountain,” the Fengtai Photographic Studio’s simple recording of a short performance excerpt from a Beijing opera, the country’s first feature film was “Nanfu, Nanqi” 《难夫难妻》(A Couple in Difficulty), with funding and distribution by the Asia Film Company, and actual filming done by the Xinmin (New People) Company. The script was written by Zheng Zhengqiu, and co-directed by him and Zhang Shichuan. The actors were all from the theater, and in keeping with the prevailing theatrical custom of the day that men and women not appear together on stage, all the actors were men.This film is now lost, but much is known of it from surviving written records. While “A Couple in Difficulty” was simple, it was certainly a meaningful start for the Chinese film industry, as well as the first step in the motion picture careers of Zhang Shichuan and Zheng Zhengqiu, the vanguard of China's first generation of filmmakers.
As with many of the screenplays Zheng Zhengqiu would write in the years to come, this first effort dealt with social injustices or feudal practices he sought to reform. In this instance, the target of Zheng’s satire was the system of arranged marriages. Although Zheng Zhengqiu had been born in Shanghai, he based his script on what he had learned of the marriage customs prevalent in his family's native village of Chaoyang, in South China.
From the documentation that exists, we know that “Couple” was the first Chinese film to have a scenarist and tell a story, a double distinction. It was also a social satire.
I came across a rare piece of writing which leaps across time and space to describe a major event, this landmark movie’s premiere showing:
"Shanghai, 29 September 1913--Zheng Zhengqiu sat alone in the left side front row in the Xinxin Dance Theater, his heart pounding. As he nervously waited for the film to begin, he repeatedly took off the dark glasses he had worn all morning and cleaned them. He had no way of knowing that at that very moment a crowd was massed at the theater’s front entrance, poised to surge into the theater like a human tide, in numbers that threatened to collapse the entryway. But this time they were not pouring in to admire attractive, fashionably dressed young women perform the latest dances from the West. Rather, they were there to see a movie called “A Couple in Difficulty”…
The story is this: two separate families in the same village have a son and a daughter who have reached the age of marriage. The children have never met, but are bound to follow their parents’ marriage choices. The families engage a matchmaker to make the arrangements, and through this intermediary going back and forth between the two families, conducting elaborate and unnecessary negotiations, a marriage contract is at last concluded and an auspicious date selected for the rites. But throughout the process, the hapless and unhappy young couple have no say in the matter, and in the end are forcibly bound together for life without ever having laid eyes on each other prior to the ceremony.
While the story may not sound of much interest today, it is still significant as a benchmark in Chinese cinema’s development from a curiosity into a device for telling stories, particularly those which convey ideas.
Although on the surface “A Couple In Difficulty” did not mark any technological breakthrough in its filming techniques, Zhang Shichuan in his memoirs remarked that “the director’s skill lies in creating a dream, not calling to mind the events of the past.” Of “Couple,” he said, “The camera was fixed, and the actors were instructed how to perform the scene in front of the lens, the various actions and movements to carry out the scene, right up till the 200 feet of film in the magazine was used up. The camera never moved, it was always a long-range view, and if when filming was finished the actions and movements had not conveyed what I wanted, then filming would resume until it did.” In a certain sense, “A Couple in Difficulty” did not say anything different with a camera than could have been said in a stage play. However, this process indicated that a totally new way of telling a story had appeared in
China, no less significant than the publication of its first novel.
Some Key Terms:
The Xinmin Company
By 1913, the Asia Film Company had become Shanghai’s leading importer and exhibitor of films from abroad. The head of the company (an American whose actual name is unknown, but was something like “Isher”) entrusted one of Asia Film’s managers, Zhang Shichuan, with setting up a new subsidiary to make its own pictures. Zhang sought out two men he knew who were involved in Shanghai theater, Zheng Zhengqiu and Du Junsan, and these three organized the Xinmin (literally “New People”) Film Company. Xinmin was the first company in China to specialize in movie-making, and the first such to have a Chinese name. But in 1914, when the outbreak of war in Europe cut off its supply of movies, the parent Asia Film Company went out of business, and Xinmin disbanded soon after.
“Director” and “Screenwriter”
These two functions first appeared in China in “A Couple in Difficulty”. In filming “Dingjun Mountain,” Ren Qingtai’s work was really that of a stage manager. Discussing the filming of “Couple” in his memoirs, Zhang Shichuan stated that Zheng Zhengqiu was responsible for controlling the actors’ expressions and movements, while he himself controlled changes in camera location, so both were filling the director’s role.
In addition, while the plot of “A Couple in Difficulty” was simple, with barely 1,000 words of script, still, Zheng Zhengqiu wrote it especially for the screen, making him the first screenwriter in Chinese history.
Contemporaneous Film-Related Events Elsewhere
August 24: Italian director Mario Caserini’s epic “The Last Days of Pompei” was released.
Early in 1913, D.W. Griffith’s 1912 short film “The Musketeers of Pig Alley” was released abroad, and quickly gained recognition as the world’s first film about organized crime.
