Making The Bridge: Harbin Workshops, Changchun Studios

The old Changchun film campus began as the Manchuria Film Association site under Japanese occupation. A heritage directory dates its main buildings to 1937–39 and lists six numbered studios. This was an industrial complex of sets, stages and production rooms, built for an occupation-era screen culture. Its later use by Chinese filmmakers began with buildings already laid out for large-scale film work.

Accounts distinguish more than one institutional beginning: a commemorative history dates the studio’s origin to October 1945, while the Jilin gazetteer dates the formal organization of the Northeast Film Studio to October 1946. In April 1949 the Northeast Film Studio returned to the Changchun site; in 1955 it took the Changchun Film Studio name. These stages give the campus a history of both inheritance and new institutional purpose.

The Bridge put industrial labour at the centre of its plot. Its railway workers have to make bridge seats and rivets against a deadline, while the factory manager and crew solve production problems. The Jilin gazetteer credits Yu Min with the script, Wang Bin with direction, Bao Jie with cinematography and He Shide with music. Those credits name separate jobs behind the screen story.

Yu Min’s Harbin research has a specific setting: he told the 2007 retrospective that he spent three months at the Harbin rolling-stock works, where manager Song Jinsheng (宋金声) told him the story behind The Bridge. A 2020 Changchun Daily report independently identifies the factory account as the film’s story basis.

The retrospective places the railway-factory exteriors in Harbin and says the crew moved to Changchun after the 1949 Spring Festival for interior work. Yu Yang’s recollection estimates that about two-fifths of the interiors were shot there. Crew recollections mention a hand-cranked camera and tungsten lights inherited from earlier use. The real workshops supplied the industrial setting; the studio let filmmakers arrange interiors and stage a broken bridge at smaller scale.

Art director Liu Xueyao later recalled constructing the broken railway bridge at reduced scale inside a Changchun studio. Perspective and the actors’ positions made the model read as a full crossing; wind, snow and smoke supplied motion. The screen image depended on a real object, but its apparent scale came from how the crew positioned camera, performers and effects around it.

The Bridge was completed in 1949, the year the Northeast Film Studio returned to Changchun, according to the provincial gazetteer. Its credited team and railway-factory subject belong to this moment of institutional re-establishment. In 1955 the studio adopted the Changchun Film Studio name. A film made during the return to the old campus thus joins the site’s inherited stages to a new postwar production organization.