Cai Chusheng (12 January 1906 – 15 July 1968), original name Cai Tong, courtesy name Maochu, was born in Shanghai to a peasant family from Chaoyang in Guangdong. He was sent back to his home village at the age of six, then apprenticed in a grocery in Shantou in 1918, working as a shop assistant. He entered the film industry in the late 1920s, joining Shanghai's Star Film Company in 1929 as a disciple of Zheng Zhengqiu and assisting on films such as 'Peach Blossom Lake' and 'Red Tears'. In 1931 he moved to the Lianhua Film Company as a writer-director, co-directing 'Facing the National Crisis' and making his solo debut with 'Spring in the South' in 1932. 'Song of the Fishermen' (1934), a story of fishing families, ran for eighty-four consecutive days in Shanghai, breaking box-office records, and won an honorary prize at the 1935 Moscow International Film Festival, the first Chinese film honoured at an international festival. In 1937 he made 'Old Wang the Fifth', continuing his realistic portrayals of ordinary people. After Shanghai fell to the Japanese, he moved south to Hong Kong and spent more than four years there making Cantonese-language resistance films. He returned to Shanghai in January 1946 to help organise the Kunlun Film Company, formed out of studios including Lianhua. In 1947 he co-directed 'The Spring River Flows East' with Zheng Junli, a sweeping family saga reflecting the turmoil of the war years and now regarded as a classic of Chinese cinema. He completed the first part of 'Waves of the South China Sea' in 1962. Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and forced to make public self-criticisms, he died in Beijing on 15 July 1968, aged sixty-two. In 1995 he was honoured with the Chinese Film Century Award.
Cai Chusheng fused social realism with popular storytelling; 'Song of the Fishermen' and 'The Spring River Flows East' drew huge audiences in Republican China and set the narrative model for Chinese realist cinema. His habit of carrying historical change through family drama influenced a generation of Chinese-language directors, and during the war he stayed in Hong Kong making anti-Japanese Cantonese films; he was also among the first Chinese directors honoured at an international festival.
Achievements
- 1932 · Directed his first solo feature, 'Spring in the South'
- 1934 · 'Song of the Fishermen' ran for eighty-four days, setting a box-office record
- 1935 · 'Song of the Fishermen' won an honorary prize at the Moscow International Film Festival
- 1947 · Co-directed 'The Spring River Flows East' with Zheng Junli