The Ruin Monologues: Women's Voice-over and Landscape in Chinese Cinema

Abstract:

This paper explores the ruins in Fei Mu's iconic Spring in a Small Town (1948). Defying the melodramatic norms of its time through understated narrative and stylistic choices, the film is nonetheless saturated with the seemingly superfluous imagery of ruins. I argue that Fei Mu deftly interweaves the Chinese art-historical tradition of ruins with ruins in global film history and in postwar visual culture, proposing a modern film form that reflects this convergence—a form that finds its temporal, narrative, and emotive shape in ruins. But more importantly, Fei gives the reins of this film form—cinematic ruins as a new iteration of ruins as landscape—to a female voice-over. In a history where voice-over has been overwhelmingly male, this gendered shift is significant for both film history and art history. I examine how the female voice reshapes our experience of time, memory, and loss, what it means to transfer the authority of the ruin gaze to a woman, and how Fei Mu ultimately reframes ruins, long viewed through a male lens as national and stately monuments, as spaces of female interiority and desire.

Bio:

Mia Yinxing Liu is an Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago in 2013, where she also trained in film and media studies. Her fellowships include a Yale Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Getty Fellowship at the Getty Research Institute (2021–2022). Focusing on inter-medium dialogues in modern Chinese art and visual culture, her research spans painting, cinema, photography, and optical devices. The Literati Lens: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema (University of Hawai'i Press, 2019), her first book, examines landscape as a field of contesting visions in Maoist-era cinema and is the recipient of the CAA/Millard Meiss Publication Fund. In addition, she has published extensively on photography and modern and contemporary Chinese art. Currently, she is completing two books: Between Photography and Ink Painting, on the inter-medial dialogues between Lang Jingshan and Zhang Daqian, and another on the woman's voice-over and cinematic ruins in modern Chinese art and film history.