Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films, and: Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (review)

When Chinese-language films like Yi Yi: A One and a Two; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; and Hero became international sensations, the new generation of Chinese directors-from mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong-successfully established Chinese cinema as one of the most vibrant in the world. This phenomenon has given birth to a new "Chinese film fever" in the West. Two very remarkable books among many recent scholarly writings on Chinese cinema in English are Paul Clark's Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films and Michael Berry's Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers. The perfectly timed publication of both in 2005 coincided with the one hundredth anniversary of Chinese cinema. Both books contextualize the rise of the new Chinese cinema(s) in all of China's historical, political, and cultural complexity, and both portray contemporary Chinese film in such a lucid and vivid way that they can serve not only as sourcebooks for students of Chinese culture but also as wonderful introductions to Chinese film for ordinary readers.

In Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films, Paul Clark explores, against the dramatic historical backdrop of China since the Cultural Revolution, the great transformation that has taken place in Chinese cinema under the fifth generation of Chinese filmmakers. Clark has put together various personal accounts of this fifth generation-the stories of their formative years, their aesthetic development, and their political and financial frustrations-in a well-constructed narrative of youth, apprenticeship, maturity, achievement, and hopes, dreams, and compromises. The ten film directors Clark has chosen to examine are Chen Kaige, Hu Mei, Jiang Haiyang, Liu Miaomiao, Peng Xiaolian, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Wu Ziniu, Zhang Jianya, Zhang Yimou, and one cinematographer, Zhang Li. Clark's close contact with these filmmakers enabled him to gain access to the materials essential to constructing a history of this generation; at the same time, his fine critical judgment allows him to make insightful observations on many key works from this generation as well as the aesthetics and politics of contemporary Chinese cinema in general.

Reinventing China is divided into three parts. Part 1 explores the early experiences of the fifth generation during the Cultural Revolution, with an emphasis on their unhappy encounters with politics at a very young age. Most of them were "sent-down" educated youths, and they had to grow up in an alienated and hostile environment. Through their personal experiences, they came to understand the Chinese nation as something totally different from the image that was promoted during the communist revolution. Part 2 focuses on how, as young people, they were trained in filmmaking at the Beijing Film Academy-which became the birthplace of the fifth generation. Since there is already available an English translation by Chris Berry of Ni Zhen's Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China's Fifth-Generation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), which provides the details of the fifth-generation's entry into the Film Academy and its curriculum, the second part of Clark's book is more concise, focusing in particular on the process by which their artistic identities were fashioned. In a more straightforward way than in Ni Zhen's book, Clark points out that the fifth generation mostly trained themselves, learning little from their teachers that was of any use. This kind of self-training set the stage for the radical position that the fifth generation would take as a part of China's avant-garde movement, which by the mid-1980s was attempting to reinvent a new national culture.

Part 3 follows the fifth-generation filmmakers after their graduation...