We are extremely pleased to welcome Mark Lee Ping Bin, one of the world’s most celebrated and influential cinematographers, to the Harvard Film Archive. Born in Taiwan in 1954, Lee rose to fame as the director of photography for such Hou films as A Time to Live and a Time to Die and Dust in the Wind and became known for the grace of his camera movements and especially for his ability to capture beautiful and evocative images, ranging from the earthy to the stylized, shooting on location with often only the smallest of crews and the simplest of resources, including natural light. Lee has gone on to work with such filmmakers as Wong Kar-wai and Kore-Eda Hirokazu, as well as directing films himself. – David Pendleton

The original Springtime in a Small Town, made in 1948, is now a classic of Chinese cinema, with its melodramatic story of an unhappily married woman who re-encounters a past lover only to learn he’s also a close friend of her husband. It was to this time-tested material that director Tian Zhuangzhuang turned for his first film after being blacklisted for his celebrated The Blue Kite (1993). Mark Lee Ping Bin’s cinematography crisply captures the uneasy calm of the brief window of time between the end of the Japanese occupation and the Revolution that brought the Communists to power and powerfully evokes the currents of unspoken desire between the film’s few characters.