From Realistic Confrontation To Spiritual Exploration

In the development of Chinese films,the urban and rural areas are usually interpreted adequately,and the academic circle often uses city films and rural films to summarize the two categories of Chinese films in the social landscape.However,throughout the historical process of China's modernization and urbanization,there is not a clear demarcation between the city and the countryside,but a transitional region —— small town.Small town,as a concept,is put forward in the 1980s;as a social entity,it has attracted more and more attention.In the 1990 s,with its unique social representation,small town became the main writing fields of some sixth-generation directors.Since then,the social forms displayed in Chinese film are no longer limited to the modernized city or agrestic countryside.There emerges a transitional region where multiple contradictory factors including city & countryside,modern & tradition,conservation & advancement are fusing,permeating,crashing and tearing.Small-town films gradually become an important film category juxtaposed with city films and rural films.The Chinese small-town films can be traced back to the early 1900 s.In the early stage,small-town films focused on the mainstream narration of "concept first" and "politics first",and its spatial subjectivity had not yet been established,which was closely related to the social development of small town.The early process of passive modernization in China made small-town films with more local color and made cities with strong criticism as being invaded by evil.The social unrest in the war years made small town a haven for the intellectuals to escape from reality and release their depression.After the founding of the People's Republic of China,small town,city and countryside jointly constructed the mainstream discourse of collectivist ideal and collective reflection.With the awakening of subject consciousness,small-town films began to explore the modernization of film language and aesthetic concepts in a pluralistic way.It can be seen that small-town films have been integrated into mainstream discourse for a long time,and their unique spatial implication and artistic imagination were obscured.In the late 1990 s,a group of Chinese films with small town as their main narrative space began to appear.Most of them come from the marginal creation of the sixth-generation directors.With prominent underlying perspective,distinct documentary style and diverse individual writing,they present the reality and the living state of people in small town,opening a marginal narration which is different from the mainstream culture writing in city films and rural films.These works endow the small-town space with full subjectivity.Through image language constructing,the space presents bright landscape characteristic,possesses multivariate and open implication and reflects complex social context.At the same time,the academic circle set off the theoretical trend of special turn that broke through the text with interdisciplinary perspective.It provides us with an effective basis for examining the spatial subjectivity of small-town films,and with a possibility to comprehensively,objectively and deeply understand the diversified interactive relationship between films and small town.Subsequently,more and more directors choose small town as a specific social space for artistic imagination,but the spatial subjectivity is no longer their only narrative strategy.Diverse themes and rich individual experience gradually replace the dominant position of space to become the narrative focus of small-town films.Therefore,in these works small town often becomes the main field of individual nostalgia,emotional catharsis and social criticism.In recent years,with the development of Chinese society and the advent of globalized era,economic condition in small town has been greatly improved.Therefore,new characteristics have been presented in the film writing of small town.Some sixth-generation directors start to shift from the "cruel" realistic narration and critical attitude to the construction of a new space of spiritual contradiction in the small-town society.Through continuous innovation in genre creation and artistic exploration,young directors make small-town films present an unprecedented variety.It can be seen that spatial subjectivity is no longer the only standard for small-town films to establish their reasonable status.Diversified spatial representation and the space's role in thematic narration and style construction have enriched and strengthened the interactive imaginary relationship between films and small town to a certain extent.Therefore,the special cultural connotation and social significance of small-town films cannot be replaced by mainstream narration such as city films and rural films.Small-town films are participating in the image writing and artistic expression of Chinese films in a more independent manner.