Zhao Jiping (Industry)

Born 1945. Composer. Studied at Conservatory of Music in Beijing. A key Fifth Generation collaborator having scored the music for many of their most important films.

Composed the music for:

• Yellow Earth
• The Big Parade
• Red Sorghum
• Ju Dou
• Raise the Red Lantern
• The Story of Qiu Ju
• Farewell My Concubine
• To Live
• Temptress Moon

He Qun (Industry)

Born 1956, Beijing. Graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982 (from the 'design' class), as part of the 'Fifth Generation'. Was sent to Guangxi Film Studio, alongside his friends and fellow graduates Zhang Junzhao and Zhang Yimou. There, they would make The One and the Eight together, for which He would serve as art director. He would also be art director for Chen Kaige's first two films Yellow Earth and The Big Parade, making him one of the key Fifth Generation collaborators in those early years. Subsequently he would turn to directing in the 1990s.

Ah Cheng (Culture/History)

aka Zhong Acheng. Born 1949. Writer and screenwriter.
Worked with, and befriended, Chen Kaige whilst the two of them were zhiqing (sent-down youths) at a rubber plantation during the years of the Cultural Revolution. After this period, in the late 1970s he would become a writer and a member of artistic avant-garde circles. His short story 'King of the Children', inspired by his work camp experiences during the CR, would inspire Chen to adapt it into his film King of the Children.
He would also write screenplays including collaborations with Tian Zhuangzhuang.

Scar Literature (Culture/History)

This is generally the name attributed to the literary wave that occurred after the Cultural Revolution, when a new generation of writers wrote of their experiences under Mao, strongly influenced by what they (as intellectuals and urban youths) had lived through during the process of rural re-education and population redistribution (aka the 'Down to the countryside movement') leaving their city lives to go work in farms and labour camps in the countryside. They of course went against the pre-1978 traditions of favouring class consciousness issues instead of individual creativity, and that art should serve politics and specifically socialism, as had been prescribed by the 1942 Yan'an forum for writers and artists.

It is typically marked as having started with the 1978 story 'The Scar' by Lu Xinhua. The mood was one of anger, at the wasted youth and talent, persecution and suffering during the CR, and during this time of slight liberalisation under Deng Xiaoping they took the opportunity to harshly criticise the policies implemented by Mao (but still not directly attributing the blame on the CCP or Communist ideals themselves), or more typically by the 'Gang of Four'. A desire for reassessment of the past and of change to a new fresh start were also features of this movement, making a film such as King of the Children (based on a Scar literature story by Ah Cheng) potentially recognisable as a cinematic example of Scar literature.



Closely connected, but not always equivalent to, the movement which started in the mid-1980s known as Root-searching literature, which it gave way to, as well as subsiding into more introverted, humanistic and less specifically or directly critical literature.

References
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~chen24r/classweb/wp/Postmao.html
http://contemporary_chinese_culture.academic.ru/479/Lu_Xinhua

King of the Children (Film)

Haizi wang. 1987. Dir: Chen Kaige. Scr: Chen Kaige, Wan Zhi (aka Chen Maiping), He Jianjun(?).

Context:
Based on story by Ah Cheng, with whom Chen had spent his zhiqing days, working together in a rubber plantation during the Cultural Revolution.
It was Chen's first film to be produced at Xi'an Film Studio, under the wings of Wu Tianming, having moved from Guangxi Film Studio and his collaborator Zhang Yimou (who would himself soon make the move from cinematographer to director).

Reportedly Chen re-edited the film after seeing Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Dust in the Wind, and gave the rhythm an even more impressionistic feel. [Cheshire, Film Comment 1992]

The Film:


Relation to ideas about Chinese culture: "Chen does not attach to copying the value of a positive meaning as does Ah Cheng; rather in it he sees the contemporary Chinese culture's deconstruction of traditional Chinese culture. For Chen, the destructiveness of the Cultural Revolution is not an accident but the summation of the Chinese civilisation, and the act of copying, to which the students are reduced, signifies the emptiness of culture itself." [Rey Chow, Primitive Passions, 120]

Reception:
Distribution: ICA (UK theatrical, 1988); Orion Classics (US theatrical).





References:
http://alsolikelife.com/shooting/2009/05/967-109-hai-zi-wang-king-of-the-children-1987-chen-kaige/
http://worldcinemadirectory.co.uk/component/film/?task=view&id=1154
"The Pain of a Half Taoist" - an Jingfu, CInematic Landscapes pp117-125

The Three Major Film Festivals (International Reception)

Of key importance to the worldwide recognition of the Chinese New Cinema and other 'new waves' of world cinema, especially in the 1990s. In the 1980s, other, small festivals had already started the process. As Dudley Andrew writes: "As European art cinema was moribund, desperate festivals began looking elsewhere for signs of life. And life was found in what I call the Second Set of New Waves. By the early ’80s, as if sucked into a vacuum, came films from places never before thought of as cinematically interesting or viable: Mainland China, Senegal, Mali, Ireland, Taiwan, and Iran. This second set of waves is distinct from those of the 1960s not only in their provenance but in the way they functioned in a greatly changed international system."

Cannes
Held yearly in May. Initially founded in 1939, it only really took off as an international film festival in the post-war era.


Venice
Held yearly in late August/early September. Oldest international film festival in the world. Founded in 1932, under the title Esposizione internazionale d'arte cinematografica, it was under the influence of Mussolini's regime between 1934 and 1942, prompting the Cannes film festival to open as an alternative to its fascist rival.
In 1961, Ebrahim Golestan's documentary about an oildfield fire in Southern Iran, A Fire, edited by Forough Farrokhzad, was the first Iranian film to win a major international festival prize when it won the Bronze Medal.


Berlin
Held yearly in February. Set up in 1951by German and American authorities to show off to the world the success of de-nazification and of Germany's revival under American guidance.



"In the 1980s, the Big Three festivals were especially skittish about showing films from Taiwan for geopolitical reasons. Probably out of fear of being passed over for films by the Fifth Generation in mainland China, they did not want to antagonize the PRC which was trying everything to prevent Taiwan from gaining international recognition as the Republic of China. Berlin had invited Hou to show two films outside of the competition in 1985, but then withdrew the invitation for unspecified reasons. after Hou won at Nantes two years in a row, the big festivals clearly decided they could no longer afford not to show films from Taiwan, but they were presented in the non-competitive sidebars. Venice finally took the plunge in 1989 by entering City of Sadness in the competition. This changed the course of Taiwanese cinema, making it a true festival powerhouse in the 1990s" [James Udden, HHH (Suchenski), p130]



References:
http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/film/84968.htm (China)
Dudley Andrew, Waves of New Waves and the International Film Festival.
Bill Nichols, New Cinemas and the film festival circuit.

Black Snow (Film)

Ben ming nian. 1990. Dir: Xie Fei. Scr: Liu Heng.

Context:
The film's urban setting and handheld camerawork differentiates it from Xie's other, rural/province-set work and its tranquil smooth stylistics.

The Film:


Reception:
Winner of Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

Liu Heng (Culture/History)

Born 1954, Beijing. Writer, novelist and screenwriter of the same era/generation as the 5th Generation filmmakers and proponent of the Scar literature movement.

During the Cultural Revolution, he was a zhiqing (sent-down youth) and got displaced to the countryside and worked in farms and factories.

His short story 'Dogshit Food' won national literary prizes and was the basis for the film Ju Dou, which he also worked on the screenplay for. Also wrote the novel the film Black Snow was based on, which director Xie Fei was drawn to for its realist style and characters, as well as again working on the screenplay for that film too.

Xie Fei (Director)

Born: 1942, Yan'an.

• Graduated from Beijing Film Academy in the mid-1960s as part of the Fourth Generation, but like his peers did not get the freedom to make the films he wanted due to the Cultural Revolution. Instead, greater artistic openings only came for him in the 1980s and 90s, contemporaneous to the horizon-expanding of the 5th Generation's cinema.
• His 'real' (non-propaganda) debut came in 1983 with the film Our Fields, when Xie was already in his fourties.
• His two most famous and internationally acclaimed films are Black Snow (1990), and Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls (1993), recipients of the Silver and Golden Bear respectively at Berlinale.
• Currently teaches at the Beijing Film Academy, where he has taught since its post-CR re-opening, and hence he taught members of the Fifth Generation (remember in his talk, he spoke of their obsessive film-watching in all-nighter session with only Chinese buns to keep them going). He himself claims that in his peak years he taught for 2 years out of 3, and shot a film in the other year, with the twin practices of teaching and filming both reinforcing each other.
• Has made a number of films set in, shot in and specifically about Chinese ethnic minority regions and peoples (Mongolia and Tibet), much like Tian Zhuangzhuang or some of the NIC films, such as Gabbeh. 

Filmography:

• ...
• Our Fields (1983)
• A Girl from Hunan (1986)
• Black Snow (1990)
• Woman from the Lake of Scented Souls (1993)
• A Mongolian Tale (1995)
• Song of Tibet (2000)

References:
Live talk with Xie at BFI, August 2014
Interview + booklet on Black Snow DVD, Second Run

Ju Dou (Film)

1990. Dir: Zhang Yimou (w/ Yang Fengliang). Scr: Liu Heng.

Context:
Based on short story by Liu Heng (link to a translation below).
Zhang's CR experience of labour in a textile factory can be seen as informing some parts of this film.

The Film:

Zhang makes typical use of eye-popping colour cinematography, especially helped by several set pieces with the colour dyes.

It is possible to read the film's plot in many ways, including on Freudian terms, but also allegorically: the cruel old man might represent Confucianist traditions, and the blank-faced seemingly intrinsically evil boy the more modern Maoist dictatorship and the Cultural Revolution (in which of course Mao encouraged the youths to commit the anarchic revolts he was after). The central couple are then torn between these two miserable options.


Reception:




















References:
http://www.clockwatching.net/~vroom/zyimou.html
http://www.filmsufi.com/2012/09/ju-dou-zhang-yimou-and-yang-fengliang.html
http://www.academia.edu/9192367/Liu_Heng_Dogshit_Food_trans._Sabina_Knight (Original story)

The Horse Thief (Film)

Dao Ma Zei.  1986. Dir: Tian Zhuangzhuang. Cin: Hou Yong.

Context:
Wu Tianming at Xi'an Film Studio was aggressively purchasing novel rights at this time when he sought rights for this novel by Zhang Rui. Zhang then informed Wu that he and Tian Zhuangzhuang had already penned a screenplay (shortly after Tian made On the Hunting Ground) and that if he wanted to make it a film Tian had to direct it. Wu agreed to this.

During this time the Chinese censors still forbade the use of any dialects for film dialogue and so they asked for the film to be dubbed into Mandarin. This Mandarin dubbed version became the standard version in China, but the original Tibetan soundtrack was able to be rescued for the French and US releases.


The Film:

Lu Tonglin: "The film portrays the life of a Tibetan named Norbu and his family. Although its story line is seemingly stronger than that of On the Hunting Ground, Horse Thief challenges its viewers more because most of its religious scenes are often loosely related, if not unrelated, to the diegetic world. Taking into consideration the great proportion of religious scenes, the film develops almost on two separate fronts: a feature on Norbu and his family, and a documentary on Tibetan religious rituals."
"This film presents the life of Norbu, a Tibetan living on the margins of the Qinghai Province during the 1920s and relying on horse thievery to support his family. Because he robbed several Muslim messengers of governmental gifts for a temple, Norbu and his family are expelled from the tribe by the headman. Partly due to hardship in exile, his two-year-old son Tashi falls ill. Despite all their prayers, Norbu and his wife Dolma fail to save their son’s life. After burying his body in the snowy land, Norbu and Dolma start a long and strenuous pilgrimage journey, by the end of which his wife has become pregnant. Since Norbu believes that his first son’s death results from a divine punishment, he decides to steal no longer. In order to keep his promise, the horse thief is reduced to the lowest job, serving as a surrogate for the evil river ghost in a religious ritual, which no one else would do despite its financial incentive. (Even the actor playing Norbu was reluctant to perform this role, as he was afraid of contempt from his community.) As a result of his job, the tribe is even more determined to refuse Norbu’s plea for a possible return. As worse comes to worst, Norbu is forced to sell his beloved horse, which until this point has followed him everywhere. Afterward, he returns to its new owner’s tent to bring his horse some food for the last time and bid the animal farewell. Taken as a horse thief again, he is severely beaten by the new owner. On a stormy night, Norbu sends his wife and the child away on the back of a stolen horse in order to save the life of his newborn son, while he himself commits suicide in front of the tower of sky burial."
"The film presents three sequences of sky burial, often using exactly the same footage, each one closer than the last to the hero of the narrative world, Norbu. In the introductory sequence, the sky burial for an unknown individual offers a seemingly universal version of this religious ritual. Then, in the middle of the film, from Norbu’s impassive perspective, the film presents the sky burial of the headman’s father. Norbu himself is excluded from the ritual, and his gift has been disdainfully rejected by the headman because it came from an impure source, his thievery. As a result, as an unwelcome intruder, Norbu sits alone, watching the ceremony from a distance. Granny and the father of Norwe, another horse thief, earlier spoke of their belief that sacred hawks would send the soul of the headman’s father to heavens by eating his flesh. However, they believe, since Norbu and Norwe sin against heaven through thievery, the divine birds will certainly refuse to eat their bodies after their death; hence their souls will never be able to reach the heavens. As if to contradict this prediction, in the last sequence the image of Norbu’s dagger, drenched in blood and abandoned on the snowy ground, suggests his suicide near the tower of sky burial. Presumably, hawks perform their duty of sky burial for the horse thief, although monks, unlike in the two previous scenes, are conspicuously absent. Norbu’s implied suicide near the tower deliberately challenges the common faith in his community according to which a former horse thief is not entitled to sky burial – as Granny explained earlier. At the same time, this challenge is also an expression of unshakable faith in religious salvation."

Reception:
Distribution: International Film Circuit (US Theatrical and home video, 1988)

Joris Ivens recommended it to Bertolucci, then in China making The Last Emperor. Bertolucci suggested to Tian that he submits it to the Venice Film Festival, but Tian back then had no idea how to do that or even what the festival was...

Sight&Sound review 1987 (Stanbrook): compares to Paradjanov (can some of M. Makhmalbaf's films be too?)


References: 
http://worldcinemadirectory.co.uk/component/film/?task=view&id=1173

The Black Cannon Incident (Film)

Hei Pao Shi Jian. 1986. Dir: Huang Jianxin.

 Context

The film is often seen as a post-socialist satire on the state of things during the Deng reform era. The ineffectual intellectual (the protagonist) associated with the desire for progress is held back by the remnants of a bureaucracy which cannot go away.

The film can also be seen as a subversion of the spy genre common in the 1950s, which was a reflection of that era's national security fears and paranoia (see essay in Chinese Films in Focus).

The Film

• A kind of postsocialist reworking of the famous literary work ‘Story of Ah Q’, it satirises the regime more deeply than any film reviewers dared admit at the time.
• The sets, especially the all-white symmetric conference room with the absurdly giant clock overlooking everyone, are distinctly modernist rather than realist. This room should typically feel safe and imbued with a benevolent authority linked to the Party, yet this coldness and absurdity makes it feel totally different.
• The affable and honest German engineer Hans Schmidt is seen as perplexed and confused by the backstage intrigues and paranoia of his Chinese hosts --- a subversion of the role of the foreigner, typically the malevolent instigator of an external threat, in the spy film genre during the Maoist period.
• The 360-degrees pan at the end (also circularity of other scenes and objects like the spinning ball-bearing, the chess piece itself and its container substitute).... Huang linked it to the concept of a 'Strange Loop' (Hofstadter), a bit like a Mobius strip. In the end everything is back where it started, because the 'threat', the black cannon, was non-existent.

Reception


Resources:
Essay by Pickowicz on Huang Jianxin's trilogy + essay by Farquhar and Berry in 'Cinematic Landscapes/

Huang Jianxin (Director)

Born: 1954, Xi'an. 'Fifth Generation' director, although not technically a graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, but he did study some courses there over a year period after the 1982 graduation of the so-called 'Fifth Generation' graduates.
While at Xi'an Film Studio, he was spotted as one of the most promising assistant directors, and then-studio head Wu Tianming recommended he go take the intensive directing course at the BFA. Made an early short film which had censorship problems.made his first feature film The Black Cannon Incident in 1984, which in the context of post-Mao China under Deng Xiaoping was a particularly scathing and audacious piece of satire. His next two films continued to tread similar ground, being cynical satires and exposes of China's bureaucracy and underlying failure to truly modernise beyond surface rhetoric. The three of them together have been called a 'post-socialist trilogy'.

In recent years, he has apparently changed (or been forced to) in his filmmaking interests, and has made a series of state-commissioned propaganda epics.

References:
Pickowicz in New Chinese Cinemas, 54-.

Censorship (Domestic Reception)

• The Film Bureau in Beijing: set production levels for 16 main studios (in 1989), but responsibility for choice of projects was devolved to individual studio heads.

Lu Xun (Culture/History)

1881-1936. Writer of The Story of Ah Q and Diary of a Madman. Key proponent of the left-wing intellectual movement in 1910s and 1920s, e.g. the May Fourth Movement. Typically regarded as the forefather of modern Chinese literature, along with Shen Congwen.

The concept of the 'crowd', passive and voyeuristic and letting things happen, is an important notion to his work and his conception of the Chinese psyche. Lu Xun himself was deeply moved and outraged when he watched a documentary footage of executions under Japanese rule and saw the numbed stupor of the Chinese crowds watching. At that time he gave up a career in medicine to become a writer, with the intention to jolt the audiences out of such a stupor. Apathetic crowds appear often in his work, notably in The Story of Ah Q.

Metaphor of the 'iron house' for China... windowless prison where most are asleep but for an enlightened few...

The Story of Ah Q, and the character of Ah Q himself, are extremely influential archetypes, in many films. For example, Huang Jianxin's The Black Cannon Incident, Jia Zhangke's Xiao Wu,...

Zhang Junzhao (Director)

Born: 1952, Henan.
Raised in Xinjiang province, in the uppermost north-west corner of China. His high-school education, like many others, was interrupted in 1966 with the start of the Cultural Revolution. He then joined the army as an ordinary soldier. For a while he would work for the Urumqi People's Theatre, from 1974 on.  He enrolled to the directors' course at Beijing Film Academy in 1978 and was hence a 'Fifth Generation' Graduate in 1982. Was sent to work at Guangxi Film Studio, where alongside Zhang Yimou, Xiao Feng and He Qun, he set up a 'Youth Film Unit' and made the film The One and the Eight.

After his debut film however, he moved on to making more commercially minded films. He was effectively then the first of the young 'fifth generation' graduates to turn to more commercial box-office oriented filmmaking. His films after The One and the Eight included a football film (Come On, China!), the bandit movie The Lonely Murderer, and a psycho-thriller (Arc Light), none of which gained anywhere near the same critical acclaim or influence. He also made some TV dramas.

References:
Interview with him in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 130-3.
Brief profile in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 200.

The One and the Eight (Film)

Yige he bage. 1983. Dir: Zhang Junzhao. Cinematography: Zhang Yimou.

Context:
Produced at Guangxi Film Studio. Based on an epic poem.


The Film:
This is a film which uses film language (cinematography, framing compositions, depth of field) to get across its meaning - dialogue is often sparse. For instance, in the first act of the film when the nine men are in jail: the 'one' is typically framed on his own (and also asymetrically, not in the centre of the frame) - this is a strong individual assured in his principles despite accusations against him. The 'eight' on the other hand are often cramped together, sometimes as many as 4 or 5 in the same frame - they are a group, a collective, but not a cohesive, unified one, they are essentially a rabble and clearly guilty of the charges against them. The 'one' is thus privileged as the hero of the piece, and his strong individual personality is put to the forefront, while the 'eight' are essentially weak men, confused at best, cowardly at worst. In this simple dichotomy of individual vs. collective, of conformity vs. non-conformity can perhaps be read a radical rejection of fundamental CCP doctrines, or at the very least of the paranoid purges of the Cultural Revolution.
The film, after an opening credits montage with voiceover narration introducing the historical context, begins on a shot of earth before tilting upwards to fill the frame with sky. This cinematography announces Zhang Yimou's style, which he'd use to even greater effect in Yellow Earth, a film in which the visual dichotomy between the land and the heavens plays a major role.


Reception:
The film was met with censorship issues, as the Film Bureau objected to the depiction of the falsely accused Communist officer and his treatment at the hand of his own party. The film was also criticised for supposedly downplaying the role ofthe Communist army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), essentially undermining the romantic myths which the ruling CCP aimed to foster about the past.
Changes were demanded of the film before it could be released, which eventually happened after the release of Yellow Earth - meaning that the latter was the first film to have impact and influence on Chinese film in the '80s. These changes included cuts as well as completely re-shot scenes. The revised version thus altered much of the film's original meaning. Domestically it then went on to some small commercial success, but internationally was banned from export until 1987.

Ni Zhen: "This change [in film style/language] was not an attack on their predecessors, however, but a natural evolutionary consequence of the growing sense of cinematic specificity --- as well as individual identity --- in the 1980s."

References:
Rayns, Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, 108.
https://cinescopeblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/23/the-chinese-new-wave-the-one-and-the-eight-1983/