Dai Qing (Domestic Reception)

Born 1941. Prominent Chinese journalist and human rights campaigner, not usually associated with cinema or culture journalism/criticism. However, wrote influential article questioning the authenticity and perhaps the self-orientalism of Raise the Red Lantern. The article was translated into English as 'Raised eyebrows for Raise the Red Lantern', and it makes the following points in sharp criticism of the film's content:

• 
  

Raise the Red Lantern (Film)

1991. Dir: Zhang Yimou. Scr:.  Cin: Zhao Fei.

Context:


The Film:


Reception:

• Raise the Red Lantern was one of the rare Chinese films successfullymarketed in America and its success has been ascribed to its exotic formula.
• Zhao Fei won the NSC award in 1992 for his cinematography on this film.
• Criticed by, amongst others, Dai Qing for supposedly pandering to Orientalist tastes. Contesting this kind of critical reception, Rey Chow proposes that they might be better understood in terms of a self-reflexive or 'autoethnographic' gaze. Ethnography is a sociological methodology, involving the mapping of a regional group's social practices and customs, traditionally undertaken by colonial or 'Western' outsiders. Chow suggests that filmmakers like Zhang Yimou have undertaken the role of 'autoethnographers', allowing the Chinese to gaze at themselves at the moment of their international emergence.

References:
https://film110sp12.pbworks.com/w/page/52547203/Color%20and%20Power%20in%20Raise%20the%20Red%20Lantern
http://www.clockwatching.net/~vroom/zyimou.html

Wu Tianming (Director, Industry)

 (1939-2014).
Director associated with the 'Fourth Generation'. Graduated from Beijing FIlm Academy, in late 1970s, but only from one of the intensive short courses open to studio employees.
Born in 1939 in Shaanxi province, north of Xi'an. His father was a Communist Party veteran. Began as an actor in the early 1960s. He moved to directing in 1979, after attending one of the short courses at the BFA. After directing several films there, he was elected to be head at Xi'an Film Studio in late 1983. In this position he would strongly encourage younger talents and act as a mentor-like producer of Fifth Generation films, from 1984 to 1989, where he made it a policy to give opportunities to young directors.
In 1986, he made it studio policy to specialise in what he termed 'westerns', an elastic term standing for any film set in the vast rural provinces of China, anywhere from Tibet in the West to to Yunnan in the South and Xinjiang in the North. The argument went that the bigger city-based studios like Shanghai and Beijing could cover urban films. This therefore gave an official justification for the rural-based films made by Fifth Generation directors, other than the more likely predilection behind it, namely their own pasts as sent-down youths who were relocated to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. As a result, Xi'an Film Studio produced such key films by all major directors of the era, such as The Horse Thief, The Black Cannon Incident, King of the Children and Red Sorghum.
His own directorial career, naturally halted like those of other Fourth Generation directors due to their prime years coinciding with the barren era of the Cultural Revolution, was rejuvenated by the influence of the Fifth Generation's innovation and output.
Spent some years between 1989 and 1994 in exile in the US.


References:
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 196.
Rayns, The New Chinese Cinema.

Xi'an Film Studio (Industry)

Based in Xi'an, capital of the Shaanxi province (and birthtown of Zhang Yimou). Founded in 1956.
Under the directorship of Wu Tianming, between 1984 and 1989, it became a fruitful production studio for many young Fifth Generation directors to make their breakthrough. Films produced there include:

• The Black Cannon Incident (1984)
• King of the Children (1987)

References:
http://contemporary_chinese_culture.academic.ru/877/Xi%E2%80%99an_Film_Studio

The Cultural Revolution (Culture/History)

(1966-1976).

May 7 Directive
In a last political gamble to regain power after the failures of the Great Leap Forward, and Liu Shaoqi becoming a threat to his stranglehold on the CCP, on May 7 1966 Mao mobilised his youth paramilitary movement the Red Guards into action, calling for the destruction of anything deemed to be bourgeois, capitalist, traditionalist or Western cultural elements. He also appealed for them to be 'educated' by the peasants by relocating to the countryside. During this period, urban intellectual youths, whose entire lives had been lived under the CCP, were very much ideologically loyal to Mao and the CCP and it was regarded as the highest achievement to be a 'good' CCP activists. Hence (whether out of sincerity or out of wanting to seem active) many of the youths went about putting Mao's rhetoric into practice with tremendous zeal.

The 'zhiqing'
In 1968, two years into the Cultural Revolution, the relocation of urban youths (Red Guards but also many youths from the cities who had not yet finished secondary school) to the countryside in order to live with the peasants and be 'educated' by them, whilst simultaneously bettering the countryside too (it was also a matter of population reshuffling), started to be enforced compulsorily. These sent-down youths are referred to by the term zhiqing. The policy is sometimes called the 'Down to the countryside' movement or policy. Mao was quoted as saying "The intellectual youth must go to the country, and will be educated from living in rural poverty."
Many millions (17 million, Cornelius cites), aged 15 to 20, left their homes, families, and lives as university/school students to travel to the countryside as part of this process of 'rural re-education', where they worked with the workers and farmers of rural China. This movement can be seen as part of the recurring cycles of migration and population movement within China and Chinese history, but for this generation of youths (which included most if not all the Fifth Generation directors...) it was a formative and scarring experience. They witnessed realities in rural China which were very different from what their teachers and party officials had taught them. They experienced and lived through hardships alongside a working class people who were not happy under the Communist utopia as had the urban youths had made to believe, but rather were toiling and starving for very little reward other than bare survival. After the Cultural Revolution, a large number of them had no way back into city-life, had to stay in the countryside in poor conditions, were generally root-less, and many others had simply died during their stays. The scars left behind clearly informed and influenced the generation of writers and filmmakers that would break through in the 1980s, including the Scar literature movement, and of course the Fifth Generation directors.


"Most peasants did not welcome these city kids, who competed with them for limited resources despite their lack of basic farming skills. As marginalized individuals in marginalized regions, educated youth in exile were forced to reexamine their cultural center, which had been their home up to this point, as well as their former beliefs, implanted by the official educational system led by the Communist Party." [Lu Tonglin, 15]

Filmic representations

• Chen Kaige's 1987 film King of the Children, based on a novella by Ah Cheng, is directly set during the Cultural Revolution and its 'rural re-education' program.
• To Live ...
• The Blue Kite ...
• Farewell My Concubine ...
• Though I Am Gone (Documentary, 2006)
• Morning Sun (Documentary, 2003)
• Antonioni's Chung Kuo Cina was made during the CR but was strictly monitored by the Chinese government (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mGkGP1NOP0)

Generations of Chinese Cinema (Culture/History)

A categorisation system (generally devised by Chinese critics and historians) used to separate the history of Chinese cinemas into eras or 'generations'. These generations also came to be related with the generations of graduates at the Beijing Film Academy although they do not strictly correlate with every class of generations from there. In particular, the first three 'generations' are taken to split a historical period before the Academy was founded (in 1956), and though there have been more than one group of graduates from there since the 'fifth generation' graduated in 1982, the current era and cinematic movement of contemporary Chinese filmmakers is still called the 'Sixth Generation'. Xie Fei, for example, suggested that the 'Seventh Generation' would occur when Chinese directors could freely making films directly about Mao and his rule without censorship, indicating that they are split as historical labels of key periods.

• First Generation: Those who introduced film into the country and subsequently made films themselves (Zheng Zhenqui, Yang Shichuan).
• Second Generation: Directors who made films before Liberation (1949) and remained active for some time afterwards. 
• Third Generation: Those educated and who joined the film industry during the 17 years 1949-1966 (e.g Xie Jin).
• Fourth Generation: Those who came of age during the CR era but were only able to become filmmakers after it ended.
• Fifth Generation: Like all other educated young people of their age, they had been sent to remote areas of the countryside in the late 1960s, to ‘learn from the people’. The massive heritage of pre-Communist culture was as completely as possible suppressed to them. Tony Rayns writes of this group: "[They] have an impressive range and diversity. But they do have certain underlying elements in common. All of them reject the theatrical conventions that played so large a part in the ‘socialist realism’ tradition. They all minimise dialogue and trust their images to carry the burden of constructing meaning. They deliberately seek out subjects and angles that have been missing from earlier Chinese films… they are founded on a desire to forge a distinctively Chinese cinema, free of Hollywood and Mosfilm influences alike. Most important of all, though, they stand united against didacticism. They interrogate their own themes, and they leave their audiences ample space for reflection. After three decades of ideological certainty in Chinese cinema, they have reintroduced ambiguity…" Also notable trademark is symbolic use of landscape and colour.
• Sixth Generation: adopted a more documentary-style approach partly for aesthetic reasons but also out of the need for secrecy as they started out as an underground (not state-approved) movement. Films were contemporary-set and urban (in contrast to Fifth gen) and typically dealt with disaffected youths.

Of Fifth Generation in the 1990s and following generations: "Increasingly, Fifth Generation filmmakers have relied on foreign investment. While some have hailed them for creating a truly 'transnational' cinema, shaped and determined by myriad global socio-cultural and economic forces, others believe that the need to make films commercially acceptable to foreign financiers and audiences has made it harder to be stylistically and thematically adventurous - a line of attack particularly aimed at Zhang Yimou's films."

On the term 'Fifth Generation' the historian of Chinese film Cheng Jiuha declared:

"The term is inaccurate and inappropriate for these filmmakers. There are a number of filmmakers not included in the generally accepted definition who make films of equally high aesthetic value. Besides, we expect the works of the best directors to span more than a single generation" [asian film industry, 19]

"Facing this new phenomenon, people in Chinese film circles crowned it with a variety of names: 'New Chinese Cinema', 'Chinese Experimental Film', 'Exploration Films'" [asian film industry, 20]

"Despite the inaccuracy of such divisions (Chen Mei insists there are six, not five generations), and the seemingly endless disputes among scholars over the issue, the label 'Fifth Generation' has been so widely accepted that the arguments now seem academic." [asian film industry, 21]

"...the gradual diversification and increasing personalisation of Fifth Generation directors. The Fifth Generation did not form as a collective group with common goals and identical characteristics. There was no common agreement among them. In fact, these young people did communicate much with each other." [asian film industry, 26]

Red Sorghum (Film)

1987. Dir: Zhang Yimou.

Context:

• Zhang speaking about the film: "My personality is quite the contrary to the mood of the film, I have long been repressed, restrained, enclosed and introspective. Once I had a chance to make a film on my own, I wanted to make it liberated, abandoned."
• Yuejin Wang writes: "In the early 1980s, the speculation on the past, on our cultural history, and on the structure of the Chinese mentality, led to a radical change in taste… average theatregoers became fascinated by the charisma of ‘tough guys’ in Japanese and Western movies …Red Sorghum is a cinematic milestone that proposes a powerful Chinese version of masculinity as a means of cultural critique" and "Red Sorghum and many other culturally specific texts do not reflect the appearances of a culture; they mirror what the actual cultural landscape lacks. They reflect fantasies and imagined memories – that which society expels." and "Red Sorghum echoes certain motifs recurrent in the literary ‘search for roots’ that surged in China in the early and middle 80s. Set in an imagined faraway, long ago world where naked human existence is … crude… this new literary genre has as one of its leitmotifs the poetic celebration of masculine potency…. Masculine potency becomes therefore a figure of coming into one’s own being, of spiritual independence of authorial power". These quotes offer up illuminating ways of looking at the films of Zhang, and their perceived over-stylised aesthetics as part of 'fantasies and imagined memories'. A fractured past needs reinventing in order for culture to start again, leading to a real re-evaluation of culture, identity and past. Hence also the connection between this film and the literary root-searching movement, which also tried to look deeper into the past for a revived sense of culture and identity.

The Film:

•  
• Yuejin Wang argues for a gendered reading of the film. Elements based around masculinity are described above, while the early red sedan scene is argued to be shot from a 'female gaze' perspective with Gong Li's character checking out the male kidnapper's body and the camera following her gaze in POV.

Reception:

• Distribution: New Yorker (US theatrical and home video, 1988)
• The film had a controversial reception in China, where it was seen as too coarse and unrestrained (in its depictions of illicit sex, forwardness, violence…) and lacking in traditional Confucian values of restraint. This implies certain sections of the domestic audience saw it as 'un-Chinese'.
• 
  

References:

Yuejin Wang essay in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema.

Yellow Earth (Film)

Huang tudi. 1984. Dir: Chen Kaige. Scr: Zhang Ziliang. Cin: Zhang Yimou.

Context:

• Produced at Guangxi Film Studio after Chen asked to be transferred there to work with his friend Zhang Yimou, it was Chen's first feature film.
• Based on essay 'Echo in the Valley' by Ke Lan. This was a musical paean to the government and people, with a stereotypical story of an Eighth Route Army soldier bettering the life of a peasant girl by influencing her to struggle from the feudal traditions of her family (thereby emancipating her). The musical element in the film (i.e. the folk songs and recurring musical scenes of Cuiqiao's melancholy song over the river, overseen by pre-eminent composer Zhao Jiping) must be seen as stemming from this source, although it had no specific reference to the Northern China setting of Yellow Earth. A number of melodramatic and political clichés were dropped by Chen in his adaptation, which initially went under the working title 'Silent is the Ancient Plain', before the colour tones of the final result inspired a name-change.
• The film is a deconstruction of Communist mythology and propaganda: namely that their message spread like wildfire in the countryside, with peasants instantly being enthusiastic, as if the CCP and their message had a natural bond with them. The reality in Yellow Earth is shown to be vastly different, and the difficulties in bringing the Communist message to uneducated illiterate peasants, who are culturally steeped in ancient Confucianist beliefs and traditions, are shown to be deeply complicated.
• Chen, Zhang Yimou and other crew members scouted Shaanxi province, lived there with peasants for a month, and in the final film would recruit plenty of actual peasants and locals to star in roles or as extras. They would also include plenty of local 'colour', in the form of Shaanxi folk songs (xintianyou) and folk rituals. This would give the film an anthropological, documentary-esque film, although this was frowned upon by the official regime's views, presumably because they saw the film's portrayal of the rural population as clashing against their own propaganda of how they had made the peasants progressive and improved their lives.
• Technically the second 'Fifth Generation' film, it represents their efforts to disown and distance themselves from what came before them: propaganda films, didacticism, aged melodramatic styles. Chen Kaige said in an interview with Tony Rayns: "[The Fifth Generation graduates] shared two convictions: first, the older generation of Chinese filmmakers could be dismissed as propagandists, and second, film was an artistic medium that should be used personally. All of us hated what was passing for cinema in China – all that didacticism, all those dated, theatrical styles – and we set out determined to do something different and better." Such claims clearly sound like the words of a new generation of filmmakers starting what could be termed unde the label of 'new wave', as a cinematic movement.
• True to the Fifth Generation's ambitions to make a type of cinema completely different from previous Chinese films, its style and treatment of its content is very different to what came before in many respects. For instance, when compared with the many post-1949 films depicting feudal marriages, Yellow Earth can be seen as making a subtle comment on these films and their appropriation of such rituals for political rhetoric. E.g. Paul Clark states that one stock character from the 'model opera' type films during the C.R. was a "young woman eager to join the revolutionary struggle". Yellow Earth subverts this stock character.
• Like several other 1980s Fifth Generation films, it was shot in rural locations, specifically in the Shaanxi province just like Tian Zhuangzhuang's On the Hunting Ground, made the same year. Part of this interest with rural locales could be down to the directors' own experiences as zhiqing during the Cultural Revolution, to the greater ease and freedom (from the censorship and control of central regulations) they could enjoy working in such remote settings, and to bring to provide a cinematic portrait of/voice to some of the ethnic minorities of China.

The Film:

• Set in 1939, during the Sino-Japanese war (just as The One and the Eight had been, presumably because it is a safer era to touch on than any CCP era), in the rural parts Shaanxi province, with its parched yellow-ochre earth and by the banks of the Yellow River and also famously where Mao set up base after the Long March. Lao Gu (Wang Xueqi) is an Eighth Route Army (CCP) soldier on a mission to collate folk songs from the local peasants, in order to then turn them into Communist propaganda songs; it would both boost morales for the troops and presumably the goal is to also boost CCP support amidst these peasants. During this time Lao Gu is being housed by a poor family of farmers: a widower (Tan Tuo), his teenage daughter Cuiqiao (Xue Bai) and his young son Hanhan (Liu Qiang). The film however does not focus very much at all on Lao Gu's mission, or even that much on Lao Gu himself. Lao Gu as a central character works more as a focal and observational device, being our witness and guide to this harsh rural and feudal world (it must be noted that he has clearly far more modern values, as seen explicitly in his conversation with Cuiqiao's father concerning marriage). Lao Gu's role, as a relatively educated character from the city, sent to the rural backwards countryside in interaction with uneducated farmers/peasants, is easily read as a stand-in for the situations the zhiqing found themselves (including of course Chen himself the Yellow River. These traits should be seen as an attempt to directly and distinctly move away from the previous cinematic tropes of didacticism and melodrama.
• The parallels and contrasts between the film's two paternal figure - girl relationships (i.e. Father with Cuiqiao, and Lao Gu with Cuiqiao - representing respectively the relationship with/impact on of traditional confucianism and of communism on the population, both being impotent in improving lives) are key to its structure and meaning.
• Lao Gu's ineptitude and incapability to create any positive change to the fate of Cuiqiao (besides indirectly influencing her, he can do nothing as he cannot help her join the army before her marriage) can be seen as a reversal of the official version, where these peasants' lives were radically improved by the CCP and its soldiers.
• Aesthetic influences from pre-CCP classical culture: Its visual aspects and cinematography attempt to form a distinctly Chinese filmic language (as opposed to more conventional Western narrative filmic visual tropes) [c.f. Rey Chow describing the film's central dilemma as wanting to describe and comment on China with a technological medium and artform which the filmmakers were aware was 'non-Chinese' --- i.e. a cultural exchange of film technology and national culture]. In particular, the film has drawn comparisons to the non-perspectival tradition of Chinese scroll painting (long-shots of landscapes with dwarfed human figures, pans and tilts like the opening of scrolls, empty space, disproportionate horizons in the composition, etc), and to Taoist school of thought (the use of landscape is reminiscent of the Taoist dictum 'Silent is the Roaring Sound, Formless is the Image Grand'). From 'New Chinese Cinemas':"Yellow Earth’s reinsertion of nature into the coded semiotic system of Chinese film syntax, its reinterpretation of landscape and its strategy of emptying space constitute… the Daoist terms for the political reinstatement of a classical mode of the Chinese aesthetics". The peasants have a deep respect and understanding of nature (c.f. the father's respect for the land by ritually sprinkling grain on the revered yellow earth, which Gu laughs at and sees as supersition --- to him the earth is merely raw material to be exploited just like the folk songs are to the CCP, but to the peasants who work it, it offers livelihood and deserves deep respect, as do the folk songs --- and Yellow Earth also reflects that respect for both the earth and the folk songs and traditions) which fits with the Daoist view of harmonious order between man and nature.
• Zhang Yimou's cinematography, filmed on location, uses natural lighting and non-perspectival use of space to depict barren landscape in extreme long shots (with human figures as tiny dots in the distance). The horizon is very often oddly proportioned, positioned at the very top or very bottom of the frame, with the majority of the frame then being made up of earth/landscape or of sky. This leaves a lot of 'empty space' in the compositions, which traditionally feature in Chinese classical painting and is regarded as just as important as anything else in the painting.
• Visual symbolism of having to go against the current (non-conformity) occurs with Cuiqiao's escape in the river against the water's current and also at the very end with Hanhan running inthe opposite direction of the mass, when he sees Lao Gu.
• The intermittent shots of Cuiqiao watching on, during the first wedding procession, intercut 3 or 4 times into scenes of the festivities, have added resonance due to the Confucian teaching inscribed on the door behind her. The Chinese characters visible mean 'Three obediences and four virtues', referring to the Confucian principles, where the three obediences are a woman's obedience to father, husband and son. Of course these shots also foreshadow the second wedding procession sequence, which will be Cuiqiao's wedding.
• The rural peasants of the film have no time for CCP ideals or indeed ideals of any kind, since they are far more preoccupied with survival on a day-to-day basis. No collective farming is ever shown in the film, instead we see lone farmers with an ox and a trough, representing an age-old agrarian sensibility.
• Self-referentiality: (like Chen's King of the Children) the soldier Gu and his effort at making change, is a stand-in not only for Chen's experiences as a sent-down youth but for the artist trying to change the fate of the masses of peasants as per Mao's instructions for art/artists at the influential Yan'an conference. In the end both the efforts of Gu and of art are well-intentioned but futile, and Yellow Earth itself is self-reflexively inserting it and its filmmakers in the role of Gu. Just like usurping the folk songs for propaganda is doomed to fail, so is hoping that songs/art can improve the lives of the peasants, contrary to what the idealistic Gu at the beginning says to his peasant hosts at the wedding banquet. [See Helen Hok-Sze essay in Chinese Films in Focus for more on this]
• Folk elements, rituals and local colour: 

1. The folk songs (xintianyou of Shaanxi province), bitter and lamenting, songs of oppression and hardship, sung variously by the man at the wedding banquet, Cuiqiao several times (each intercut with shots of the river long-shots of nature) and one time by Cuiqiao's father (c.f. what Helen Hok-Sze writes of this instance, which demonstrates that the father is not as simple-minded as Gu and perhaps we the audience might have assumed.He is not unsympathetic towards his daughter's fate but knows he cannot change it. He sings now for Gu because, though he knows his song-collecting project is bound to fail, he still wishes to help him avoid trouble with his superiors.)  
2. The rain dance..
3. The waist-drum performance....
4. The wedding ceremonies.... 

• The film can overall be said to have three major aims: 1) to investigate and perhaps create cultural and historical meaning (a look at rural folk culture and back in Chinese history, much obfuscated by propaganda, also an attack on feudal and Confucianist patriarchical traditions which imprison these otherwise lively peasants full of vitaly); 2) to attempt to move away from the didactical unambiguous discourse of social propaganda by introducing some uncertainty and opening up questions; 3) to give a platform and voice to specifically Chinese aesthetics.

Reception:

• Distribution: International Film Circuit (US theatrical, 1988); Fox Lorber (US VHS, 1997)
• Famously premiered at the 1985 Hong Kong film festival, on 12 April 1985, where its screening was met with much 'collective rapture' and the audience stayed for a long time afterwards in a post-screening discussion with Chen and Zhang, both in attendance. Although most of the audience were from Hong Kong (thereby people who generally would have low expectations of mainland China art/culture but who were shocked by the quality of the film), there were enough foreign journalists and critics (including of course Tony Rayns) present to report back to the West and garner the film's acclaim and international attention. It was hailed as a 'bold breakthrough' and as an 'exploration of film language'. It won five festival prizes in 1985, in China, in Hawaii, in Locarno, in Spain and a prize for cinematography at the Three Continents festival at Nantes. It also sparked a great deal of debate within China amongst critics and scholars.
• Within China, the official views towards it were suspicious, due to its seeming subtle reversals of the official story of the CCP bettering the peasants lives then (in 1939) and of possessing high quality of life now (bearing in mind that the film makes extensive use of local peasants as actors and of local rituals and location settings). They were also not keen on the 'ethnocentric' 'celebration' of 'poverty' and 'backwardness'. However the film was not banned by the Film Bureau, probably largely thanks to its ambiguity as well as the success of its premiere at the Hong Kong festival which prompted the regime to modify their initial reactions, presumably because they felt they could instead turn its international reputation to their advantage. Tony Rayns has written: "Yellow Earth was received with considerable hostility by the older members of the film establishment, but its triumph at the 1985 Hong Kong Film Festival (with a 99 per cent Chinese audience) meant that it could not be dismissed as an aberration. In the film press and among the jury for the annual ‘Golden Rooster Awards’, the film was attacked for being obscure, incomprehensible and above the heads of the mass audience; the filmmakers were also accused of trying to deal with a subject they were too young to know anything about." Rayns in a contemporary Time Out 1986 wrote: "Yellow Earth has ruffled feathers in China partly because it doesn't look, sound or behave like other Chinese movies"
• Older, more conservative members of the film establishment received it with considerable hostility. In the film press and among the jury for the annual ‘Golden Rooster Awards’, the film was attacked for being obscure, incomprehensible and above the heads of the mass audience; the filmmakers were also accused of trying to deal with a subject they were too young to know anything about.
• One could certainly say, as Rayns and Yau suggest, that Western audiences enjoyed this film more for its exquisite visuals than for its politics. Indeed, to a Western audience, the vast 'empty' landscapes of this rural peasant land could signify a nostalgic return to a simpler pre-industrial bygone age. It also opens up questions which recur for many rural-set world cinema films in their international reception, which ask whether Western audiences (perhaps subconsciously) prefer to see such films because they exoticise their third world 'others', as opposed to show some urban metropolis similar to their own.
• Hence accusations of this film, and other contemporary new wave films, of being 'un-Chinese'. Read for instance the translated essay by the older director Wu Yiqong, warning against films being too experimental and esoteric and driving audiences away. ("I want to be a Chinese artist, and not a foreign artist or an artist enslaved to foreigners. Without Chinese national characteristics, how can something become international? If a film can’t be understood by the Chinese people, how can it achieve international affirmation?") But do these films not have Chinese characteristics? Is it right for them to be judged by box office revenue, when [to a large extent] the opening up of Chinese cinemas to foreign imports meant domestic urban audiences wanted something else.
• To some foreign critics, it was misconstrued as simplistic CP-dictated propaganda, example.
• In the opinion of Tian Zhuangzhuang, the film was a pioneering work that paved the way for him and others.

References:
Rayns in Time Out, 1986.
Rayns in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema.
Wu Yiqong translated essay in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema.
Yau in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 62-.
Hok-Sze in Chinese Films in Focus.
Cornelius in New Chinese Cinema.

Tian Zhuangzhuang (Director)

Born: 1952, Beijing.
His parents were both prominent in the Chinese film industry; his father Tian Fang was an actor and one-time Vice-head of the Ministry of Culture's Film Bureau, and his mother Yu Lan was a major star actress. He used to tag along to censorship board screenings with his father as a child, although he avoided films after the age of 12 after vomiting due to sitting too near the screen during the screening of a Soviet epic. 

In 1968 he was sent to Jilin province (north-east) as part of the 'sent-down youth' during the Cultural Revolution, and one year later he joined the army. He trained as photographer and cinematographer at the Beijing Agricultural Film Studio in the late 1970s. In 1978, he was admitted into the director's course at the Beijing Film Academy.
Already during his time as a student there, he made a name for himself with a TV play called Our Corner, which already featured minimal dialogue and naturalism - thereby foreshadowing the change from dramatic conventions.
He caused more of a stir, and controversy, with his early films On the Hunting Ground and The Horse Thief. They are almost non-narrative, quasi-documentaries about Chinese ethnic minorities, with spectacular visuals. However their strangeness and difficulty alienated the Chinese audience, while winning plaudits abroad.

He faced a ban after he made The Blue Kite, and did not direct another film for 10 years (his return to directing would be a remake of Fei Mu's Springtime in a Small Town). During these 10 years he did much work as producer, advisor and mentor to the new generation of younger filmmakers, helping them get their projects off the ground.

He has also composed some of the music for his films (e.g Horse Thief) as well as for Chen Kaige's King of the Children, and Life on a String.

In 2003 he made the video documentary Delamu, which depicts the peaceful life of different ethnic communities along the mythic millennia-old Tea Horse Road, and can be seen as a return to the ethnographic interest in ethnic minorities of his early films. "Arguing that there is only a thin line between documentary and fictional feature film, referencing his two previous documentary-like movies (Zhang and Jie 2004: 34), Tian may want to justify why Delamu does not focus strongly on specific histories (though the film has touched on some interviewees’ personal histories in a rather disperse and disorganized way) and social facts (of the ancient Tea Horse Road and the ethnic peoples living along it) but rather on his own personal feelings about the environments and the life stories of the inhabitants in order to convey humanistic issues such as universal human conditions, the meaning of life, and eternal truth. In short, Tian apparently appeals more to universalist ideology than to ethnic particularism, which is conventionally an attractive aspect of ethnicthemed productions." [Kwai-Cheung Lo]

"In his two minority feature films, On the Hunting Ground (Liechang zasa, 1985) and Horse Thief (Daoma zei, 1986), Tian Zhuangzhuang created a new cinematic model through his documentary approach, which subverted the melodramatic pattern of his predecessors in socialist-realist cinema. Both films emphasize the relationship between individuals and their communities. On the one hand, these communities reject any transgressor of their rules. On the other, the arbitrariness of the rules seem to invite transgression and make conformity to the rules difficult, if not impossible. Using minority cultures as allegories of the dominant Han culture, Tian’s films revive the nightmarish situation of the Cultural Revolution indirectly." [Lu Tonglin]

Filmography:

• On the Hunting Ground (1984)
• The Horse Thief (1985)
• The Blue Kite (1993)

Personal quotes:

• "I shot The Horse Thief for audiences of the next century to watch."
• "If it hadn't been for Yellow Earth, there couldn't have been the whole debate about film aesthetics, and there couldn't have been the overall progress that cinema has made."
• "Wu Tianming once said 'I'd rather a film didn't sell a single copy, just so long as the quality is good'. I don't think one should fixate on one person's works, or on a group of people's works. Let's have less yelling and shouting just because one person's work is slightly different from the general run."
• "The theme of [The Horse Thief] is very simple, in fact - the relationships between humanity and religion, and between humanity and nature. Its message is quite clear, too, otherwise how would we have been able to make sense of our fanaticism during the Cultural Revolution?"

References:
Interview, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 127-.
Profile in idem, 194.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070416073506/http://kinema.uwaterloo.ca/ghy-941.htm

Chen Kaige (Director)

Born: 1952, Beijing. Fifth Generation director and Beijing Film Academy graduate.

Was born into a film family, much like Tian Zhuangzhuang. His father, Chen Huaikai, had made his name at Beijing Film Studio making Chinese opera films, and his mother worked as a script editor. In 1966, his high school education was cut short by the start of the Cultural Revolution. In 1968, he was sent, along with schoolmates, to Yunnan province (South-west) as a zhiqing. There, he worked in a rubber plantation for three-five(?) years, a formative experience that would shape his outlook on life and open his eyes to the discrepancies between ideology he had been taught and reality. He also joined the army, leaving his plantation job but staying in Yunnan, and served patrolling the border with Vietnam (still some years before the Sino-Vietnamese border war of 1979). In 1973, he moved back to Beijing where he ended up working in a factory(?).

In 1975, he found work in a film processing laboratory in Beijing. In 1978 he applied to the Beijing Film Academy and was accepted.

After graduating, he initially worked as assistant to older director Huang Jianzhong at Beijing Film Studio, working on two films under him (interestingly Huang's later films were themselves more experimental, perhaps indicating some influence from the spirit of innovation of the younger director and his peers at the time).

In 1984, following the success of his fellow BFA graduates Zhang Yimou, He Qun and Zhang Junzhao in making The One and the Eight at Guangxi Film Studio, he applied to be relocated to join them at Guangxi.Once there, in collaboration with Zhang Yimou and He, Chen directed Yellow Earth and The Big Parade. The latter film was involved in a dispute with the authorities over censorship and final cut, which probably led Chen to agree to sign up to make a film for Wu Tianming at Xi'an Film Studio. This would end up being King of the Children.


In 1988, he took up a fellowship at New York University and stayed there through 1989, making a Duran Duran music video in an attempt to raise funds for future projects he had planned.




Filmography:

• Yellow Earth (1984)
• The Big Parade (1986)
• King of the Children (1987) 
• Life on a String (1991)
• Farewell My Concubine (1993)

References:

http://filmmakermagazine.com/72318-the-studios-are-dead-chen-kaige-on-chinas-new-filmmaking-machine/#.VAJrLPldXqk
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 188.

Beijing Film Academy (Industry)

Founded in 1956. Closed in 1966 due to the Cultural Revolution. Reopened to students in 1978. Was the first and only professional film school in China. Changed location but in the 1978 era was located at Zhuxin village just outside Beijing.
During the days of the Mao regime, students of the BFA were taught not only film practice, theory and history, but also political economy, ideological theory and CCP history.
Its students graduate in 'generations', with no new students being allowed in until the current batch complete their studies. Courses were offered in a range of practical and theoretical domains. These 'generations' have also served thereby as a categorisation device for historians of Chinese cinema (and as a result for critics, etc), with the history of Chinese film thus being divided into different 'generations' although only the last three (fourth to sixth) generally consist of graduates from BFA. (See 'Generations of Chinese Cinema')

The 1978-82 cycle had 27 students in the directors' class, including 8 women. Note: at that time there were five different overall courses: directing, screenwriting, cinematography, design and acting (also sound, maybe later?). At this time, and before 1989 anyway. the procedure was that a BFA graduate from any of the 5 courses would automatically be assigned to one of the 16 film studios, which were scattered around China. After 1989, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre (as well as due to Deng Xiaoping's 'opening up' policy inciting the film industry to renovate its traditional models in favour of more self-sufficient means), the studios were far less willing to automatically hire graduate students.

Fourth Generation graduates include:
Wu Yigong (later head of Shanghai Film Studio),

Fifth Generation graduates include:
Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, He Qun, Hu Mei, 

Guangxi Film Studio (Industry)

Located in Nanning, Guangxi province, in the south of China, bordering Vietnam. It was founded in 1974. A key production studio and learning ground for the emergence of the Fifth Generation, notably in part due to its geographical distance from the central regions and powers, as well as the fact it was understaffed and desperate to get productions completed. Thus, such a small distant studio allocated more freedoms to the young directors.

The head of the studio at this period was Guo Baochang, himself a director. He would go on to act in Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite.

Three '5th Generation' Beijing Film Academy graduates were sent there together shortly after graduation - Zhang Yimou, Zhang Junzhao and art designer He Qun. Together they formed a 'Youth Film Unit' and soon made The One and the Eight. Following this success, other regional studios followed suits in forming youth production units of their own, for example the Pearl River Studio in Guangzhou. Eventually even the larger studios began giving younger recruits the chance to direct films themselves.
In 1983, Zhang Yimou and He Qun would invite their former BFA classmate Chen Kaige to join them at Guangxi, in order to collaborate with them and benefit from greater freedom. Chen eagerly accepted the invitation, and after being granted permission to make the move, he would famously go on to make Yellow Earth together with Zhang Yimou in 1984.

Zhang Yimou (Director)

Born: 1951 (1950?), Xi'an.
His mother was a dermatologist, his father could not find work due to being effectively politically blacklisted (he had been an officer in the KMT army before 1949). During the Cultural Revolution, in 1969, he was sent to a village north of Xi'an, working as a farmer. He was later transferred to a cotton mill 40 km from Xi'an, in the small city of Xianyang, and whilst there he took up photography and painting. One famous anecdote tells of his managing to save enough money to buy his first camera by donating blood.

 His application in 1978 to the Beijing Film Academy was initially rejected due to his being over the age limit, but this was overturned after pleas to the Academy's heads and the Minister of Culture. He was allowed in despite his age, considering his evident photographic ability and strong entrance-exam results.
After graduation in 1982, he was sent off to the small, regional-outpost studio Guangxi Film Studio. There, his talents as cinematographer would shine in the films The One and the Eight, Yellow Earth and The Big Parade.
Later on, in 1985, he would move back to his home town of Xi'an, 'on loan' to the Xi'an Film Studio, under the leadership of the influential mentor-like producer/director Wu Tianming. There, he would show off more of his versatility, by acting the lead part in Wu's film The Old Well, for which he'd win a Best Actor award at Tokyo Film Festival. Still at Xi'an Film Studio, he would try his own hand at directing, and made his first three films there: Red Sorghum, Codename Puma (aka Codename Cougar, an action film obviously in part prescribed by box-office pressures) and Ju Dou.

His visual style is characterised by vivid use of colours and colour-coding for symbolic purposes within segments of the same film; by striking framing compositions and by frequently immobile camera shots. It seems easy to connect these to his early sensibilities as a still photographer. The versatility of his visual style can be seen for example, by the difference between the highly stylised sets and colour compositions of Raise the Red Lantern, and the far more neo-realist feel and unadorned depiction of rural China in The Story of Qiu Ju.


Filmography (as director):

• Red Sorghum (1987)
• Codename Cougar (1988)
• Ju Dou (1989)
• Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
• The Story of Qiu Ju (1992)
• 
  

Resources:
"Zhang Yimou: Local Hero" --- Stuart Klawans, Film Comment, Sep-Oct 1995.

http://www.chinesefilms.cn/141/2011/12/21/201s6386.htm
http://www.clockwatching.net/~vroom/zyimou.html
http://www.criterionforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6561
http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/zhang/
Profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 201.
Cardullo, Essay and Interview in Out of Asia, 111.

http://offscreen.com/view/hou_yong