Chinese Painting (Culture/History)

"The perspective system of Chinese painting must be understood as a conceptual one, not dependent on biological mechanisms of the naked eye, as was the Renaissance system.... Chinese painting strove for a timeless, communal impression, which could be perceived by anyone, and yet was not a scene viewed by anyone in particular." [Dazheng, 46]

"In classical Chinese art theory all things have their own individual spirit (shen), the essence of their form. The highest aspiration of Chinese painting was to render a spiritual, rather than a purely physical, likeness. Each painting had its own intellectual and philosophical world to which the viewer gained access by means of the imagination." [Dazheng, 46-7]

"...the world of landscape painting was the utopia of the Chinese intellectual, who firmly believed that by means of an understanding of nature one could return to nature and find a resting place for one's spirit there. The frequent use of 'empty shots' of nonhuman subjects in traditional Chinese films conveyed the message that humanity could not be separated from Nature." [Dazheng, 50]

"In traditional Chinese films, human characters are primarily actors in a plot, and not the object of visual appreciation... Medium shots, which clearly portrayed the activities of the characters without revealing much detail, were preferred." [Dazheng, 50]

"The rejection of chiaroscuro techniques in Chines painting implies a rejection of Western principles of realism. Light reveals the shape of objects, but objects exist even without light. Chinese painting sought to transcend light which reveals only a transitory existence, in order to express the forms of eternal existence" [something like Platonic idealism?? Dazheng, 54]








Resources: 
"Chinese Visual Representation" by Hao Dazheng, in Cinematic Landscapes (Erlich, Desser, eds.)

The Tales of the Water Margin (Culture/History)

Classic Chinese tales, regarded as dating back to the 14th Century and deemed one of the 'Four Great Classical Chinese Novels', featuring 108 different characters, some of them Robin Hood-style outlaws, others less morally likable. Each usually has an animal associated with them.

A clear influence on Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin. It is also of course an influence whenever there are bandits in a Chinese film, e.g. The One and the Eight, Red Sorghum, etc.

Shen Congwen (Culture/History)

1902-1988. Writer, typically regarded as a forefather of modern Chinese literature, along with Lu Xun. Cited by Jia Zhangke as a major influence on his sensibilities. Writer of the original source for Xie Fei's film A Girl from Hunan.

Root-searching literature (Culture/History)

Literary movement, coming in the 1980s, shortly after the Scar literature movement.


References
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~chen24r/classweb/wp/Postmao.html

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

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.

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,...

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]