Six Generations of Chinese Cinema

By Ernie Diaz

Don’t raise your hand, just sit there and blink in pre-enlightenment if you thought Chinese cinema was born with Jackie Chan. In cold hard fact, movies were among the first barbarian magic tricks to make it to civilization. In 1896, just three years after Thomas Edison dropped World Fair jaws by projecting a running man with his kinetoscope, Shanghai audiences saw a motion picture as part of a vaudeville revue.

And while Chinese cinema has stumbled across some fallow years – may it never see an age of Hannah Montana – , it nonetheless boasts the pedigree to now be in its sixth generation. That means a history running back before the beginnings of the PRC, to days when the fate of the Middle Kingdom, never mind the film industry, hung in the balance.

Warlords drive people to famine, not the theaters, so Chinese cinema had entrepot Shanghai for a steamy interracial womb. The slapstick shorts and flirtatious sketches flickering on Shanghai screens during the tweens and twenties of the 20^th century had international sensibilities. Soon the first Chinese studio, Mingxing Film Company was producing full-length features, Shirley Temple-style melodramas such as Orphan Rescues Grandfather.

By the 1930s, however, advocates of a progressive China had realized the persuasive power of film, and produced films celebrating the proletariat, while condemning class division. Not as blatantly political as, say, the work of Steven Soderbergh, the subtle message behind gripping stories such as Spring Silkworms, about a family of silk farmers, left a huge impression on audiences, as did the more taboo fare of The Goddess, about the tragic life of a Shanghai prostitute. The success, in retrospect, led critics to call this period the First Golden Age of Chinese Cinema.

Everyday settings and low-key, natural performances distanced these films from the stylized, high-falutin’ claptrap the pre-war elite called entertainment. Meanwhile, the socially relevant themes proved cathartic for a proletariat with little other venue to voice their woes, save students shouting in the public square before their police baton-bludgeonings. Such social consciousness could hardly check the inevitable rise of a cinematic pantheon, though. Actors like Zhou Xuan, Jin Yan, and the inimitable Ruan Lingyu soon became super-celebrity fodder, with predictable results. Hounded by star-obsessed paps and fans, Ruan Lingyu OD’d on barbituates at the age of 25, her obit grabbing the front page of the New York Times.

Invasion and war kaboshed this nascent Oriental Hollywood, save for a few brave souls in Shanghai popping off subversive gems such as Mulan Joins the Army, resistance against foreign invasion the theme, as opposed to the Disney version’s emphasis on girl-power and spurning all traditional values. But not until the Japanese had been thoroughly seen home did Chinese cinema begin fully reviving.

Something about making movies and leaning left go hand in hand. The vast majority of films made during the late 1940s thematically supported the Communists, and blatantly condemned feudalism. Classics of this Second Golden Age include The Spring River Flows East, Crows and Sparrows, and Fei Mu’s 1948 Spring in a Small Town, in terms of critical admiration China’s Citizen Kane. Many of these films dealt with the struggle of heartland, rural Chinese to survive with some sense of dignity in a world gone mad.The new order of 1949 split Chinese cinema in three, with a smattering of Chiang Kai Shek-loyal producers fleeing to Taiwan, ardent lefties staying to make glorious cinematic revolution on the mainland, and most of the true auteurs in Hong Kong.

It would be precipitous to write off the films of the Third Generation in the PRC’s early days as clumsy, Soviet-aping propaganda. And if the state-micromanaged films were far less subtle about the nobility of peasants and soldiers, at least huge swaths of the formerly lumpen masses were now discovering the magic of movies. Ten years of the PRC increased audiences tenfold, from forty to four hundred million. The seventeen years prior to the Cultural Revolution saw over six hundred feature films, in addition to thousands of stodgy documentaries and newsreels. Like most goods produced in the early days of a socialist regime, quality suffered, but everybody got a taste. By the 60s, the formula had matured enough to produce a few masterpieces, animated marvel Uproar in Heaven, which won the London International Film Festival’s top prize, and the gripping melodrama Stage Sisters.

Mainland cinema was one of the first casualties of the Cultural Revolution. The Fourth Generation belonged to Hong Kong, with the Shaw brothers working out the alchemical blend of gravity-defying choreography and Zen story-telling that would eventually result in China’s first great modern gift to the West, the kung fu flick. Taiwan actor-turned-director King Hu injected grace and a femine touch to the emerging genre in Come Drink with Me. In 1969, his martial magnum opus A Touch of Zen was widely touted as rivaling the best of Kurosawa.

But Hong Kong transformed its cinema into a reflection of its political id: arrogantly boisterous, while harboring severe size and castration complexes. 1968′s The One-Armed Swordsman serves as a case in point. Thus was the advent of Bruce Lee as unto that of a messiah, a diminutive yet hyper-macho entity meting out judicious ass-whoopings to oppressive foreigners and Chinese alike. Directors in mainland China were still so traumatized after the Cultural Revolution that they could only mopingly turn out “scar dramas”, attempts at dealing with recent horrors without the courage or perspective to have much force.

That courage would arrive with a fresh class of graduates from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou among them. Chen’s 1984 Yellow Earth marked the return of Chinese film as socially incisive medium. The heroine looks to Communism for relief from her peasant drudgery, yet Buddhist and Taoist concepts are deployed as forces that transcend man-made philosophies and undermine the all-powerful. Admiration west-side from heavies like Martin Scorcese helped draw attention to this Fifth Generation of Chinese cinema, so that films such as Farewell My Concubine and Red Sorghum reached the Blockbuster’s milieu.

Jeopardy fans may easily guess what 1989 event silenced the Fifth Generation and any other open expression for a few years after. When good cinema returned in the mid to late 90s, it was marked by the zeitgeist that still shapes China: urbanism, free-floating individuality, and disenchantment. While fifth-generation masters have mellowed into weaving visual epics the whole family will love, the Sixth Generation is aptly represented by films like Blind Shaft, a Richard Roundtree-less tale of running scams on coal miners. Jia Zhang Ke’s Unknown Pleasures also serves as an exemplar of the latest generation, a story of two shiftless teens drawn into the Western vortex of consumer zombieism. May the work of the Sixth Generation form a mighty bastion to resist the depradations of Kung Fu Panda, Andy Lau, and the evil forces behind the Rush Hour franchise.

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