Clear & Bright

The Chinese have never been noted for mass production of anything but masses; but civilization is an old Chinese custom. Some 1,200 years ago, long before movies were invented, the Chinese had a fair substitute. They painted picture stories on long silk scrolls, to be scanned slowly from right to left.

One of the best of these self-propelled movies went on exhibition in Manhattan last week at the Metropolitan Museum. The scroll depicted a spring festival, Ch'ing Ming ("Clear and Bright"), as it was celebrated along the Yellow River in 12th Century China.

In 33 intricate, crowded feet (scaled roughly at a foot to a mile), the scroll follows a meandering road downriver, from dawn to dusk. In its 33-mile course, the road enters the gates of the high-walled Sung capital Pien-liang, and becomes a city street lined with pawnshops, paint shops, butcher shops, restaurants, lute shops, wineshops, needle shops, antique shops.

It passes a palace and mule-and camel-crowded courtyards, and, bristling with beggars, jugglers, doctors, fortunetellers, scholars, salesmen and young blades on the loose, arches over a river where freight and pleasure boats lie moored in clusters.

Beyond the city, it circles an archery meet, follows a fox and tiger hunt up into the blue hills, where the hunters have set up an overnight camp of silken pavilions, and winds down once more to the river where, in the evening cool, a farmer's family is having supper outdoors.

The road, the river, the rooftops, the mountains and the holiday throngs are braided into a clear flowing stream utterly unlike anything Western artists have achieved. The makers of modern documentary movies might learn something from a study of Clear and Bright.

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