On June 9, the International Archives Day, at the China Film Archive in Beijing, and on June 27 at the Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy, the 4K restored version of Labourer’s Love (also known as Romance of a Fruit Peddler or Romance of a Fruit Pedlar), a Chinese film produced a hundred years ago in 1922. It is the earliest surviving Chinese fiction film and the earliest Chinese film in the collection of the China Film Archive. There are very few Chinese films of the 1920s that can be seen today, and most of them are fragmentary, this 23-minute comedy film is complete and has remained the primary visual reference for the study of early Chinese films over the years.
The film was produced by Shanghai’s Mingxing Film Company, founded in the same year, directed by Zhang Shichuan and written by Zheng Zhengqiu. It depicts a fruit vendor who pursues the daughter of a doctor with the skills and tools of the carpenter, thus creating many unique visual tricks and jokes. The comedic sense of the film really depends on the cinematography and editing, using rich images and imagination to interpret the simple story, and the editing gives the layers of time and space and a unique rhythm to the film. Labourer’s Love is not only ‘the earliest extant’, but also a record of the achievements of Chinese films when Hollywood filmmaking came to dominate the world.
Watch now! Labourer’s Love:
https://youtu.be/JXMQ9J2BURw
Further reading:
https://eng.koreafilm.or.kr/kmdb/trivia/funfacts/BC_0000005070
