In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

91 C H A P T E R 4 New Chinese Cinema of the “Sixth Generation” A Distant Cry of Forsaken Children At the 51st Berlin International Film Festival held in February 2001, a Chinese film, Beijing Bicycle, won a Jury Grand Prix of Silver Bear. In a large sense, the story of Beijing Bicycle is a contemporary Chinese variation on the Italian neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief. The prizewinning film was written and directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, a young filmmaker of the so-called Sixth Generation or Urban Generation.1 Years before, his debut work The Days (Dongchun de rizi, 1993) was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was chosen as one of the top 100 films of the century by the BBC.2 During the Berlin competition, an enthusiastic Chinese media predicted a public release for Wang’s latest feature, even though all his previous works have been banned in mainland China (another film by Wang Xiaoshuai, Frozen [Jidu hanleng], was shot in 1996 and released in the West under the pseudonym of Wu Ming, meaning “nameless” in Chinese). However, this innocuous Wang Xiaoshuai film was also prohibited by the State’s Film Bureau from being shown in any movie theaters, because the film portrayed Beijing as “a gray, dirty and disorderly place.” It was sent to the Berlin Festival without official endorsement.3 When I came back to Beijing in the summer of 2001 to conduct research on Chinese avant-garde art and cinema, I had a chance to watch Beijing Bicycle on VHS with a small audience of art critics at a private viewing held in an obscure office building located in the north of the city. It was a personal arrangement between an editor of Dushu (Readings, a liberal book review journal), and a certain Mr. Shan, who owned a “sample tape” of Beijing Bicycle and claimed to have the legal rights to sell films by the Sixth Generation directors to Westerners.4 In Mr. Shan’s office I also noticed VHS tapes of almost all the banned films of the Sixth Generation, such as He Jianjun’s Postman (Youchai, 1995) and Zhang Ming’s Rain Clouds over Wushan (1995). Access to these underground films gave me a pleasant thrill on a long hot summer day in Beijing. This tragicomic fate of Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle is common to all Sixth Generation Chinese filmmakers. Unlike their Fifth Generation predecessors, who 92 China’s Lost Youth through the Lens of Independent Cinema primarily worked within the state-run studio system in the late 1980s and early 1990s and achieved great success both at home and abroad, this new generation of Chinese filmmakers has been ostracized from the very start of their careers because of political and social aversion to their film art. The most talented Fifth Generation directors, such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, are still very much in the media spotlight, although the Chinese film industry is unable to compete with Hollywood imports. A journalist reported recently in Xinwen zhoukan (Weekly news), a popular Chinese magazine imitative of the American Newsweek: “It is unknown from when a declining Chinese movie industry, which used to make about 100 films a year during the 1980s, has silently dropped to 50 or 60 films at present. This figure seems shameful if compared with India, which produces 300 films annually. However, the situation would be worse if not for the fact that [Chinese] audiences of ten billion can share nearly 20 blockbusters from America every year....Because of uncontrolled piracy and a distrust of national cinema’s qualities, we do not want to waste our time in a movie theater.”5 Under these piteous circumstances, Zhang Yimou, a Fifth Generation director best known in the West for his masterpieces such as Red Sorghum (Hong gaolian, 1987) and To Live (Huozhe, 1994), has compromised with the rigid censorship and “degenerated” into “imbuing the audiences with false happiness” through his films for the sake of profit making. On the other hand, the state-sponsored film productions that intone the so-called zhu xuanlü (main melody) lately have had an “estimable box-office record” that even “beats imported [Hollywood] blockbusters.” This is because moviegoers were paid by their employers or “units” (governmental institutions or state-run enterprises) to see the assigned movies that propagate the Communist Party’s current policies.6 By contrast, the young filmmakers of the Sixth Generation live and work in obscurity7...

Share