Leo Robson in Sidecar:
Is there a ‘Seventh Generation’ of Chinese film-makers? It has not materialised in any formal sense, and the term is not in use. As a mode of classification, the idea of succession, one cohort following another – with no gaps in between – encompasses more than a century of cinema. But its ubiquity, at least among Western festival organisers and cinephiles, goes back forty years, to the emergence of the directors who were identified as the Fifth Generation though were, more significantly for descriptive purposes, the first to appear since the end of the Cultural Revolution and, with it, the reopening of the Beijing Film Academy. The graduating class of 1982 announced itself almost immediately, with Tian Zhuangzhuang’s September, Zhang Junzhao’s One and Eight, and – above all – Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, about a soldier’s relationship with a teenage girl set on Loess Plateau in Shanxi Province and shot by Zhang Yimou, who emerged as a director with the Mo Yan adaptation Red Sorghum (1988), which won the Golden Bear at Berlin. During the next five years, Zhang received a Silver Lion at Venice for Raise the Red Lantern, then a Golden Lion for The Story of Qiu Ju, while Chen shared the Palme d’Or – with Campion’s The Piano – for Farewell, My Concubine.
These films, a rejection of the socialist-realist habits that had dominated earlier practice, were dramatic and pictorial, not dialogue-driven, and usually historical and rural in setting, literary in source. What came next, reflecting differences of social attitude as well as aesthetic inclination, was altogether harder-bitten, more self-conscious and self-consciously abrasive, carnal, lo-fi, ad hoc. Films like Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days, Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards, Lou Ye’s Weekend Lover, and Guan Hu’s Dirty, set in the capital in the modern day or recent past, and typically concerned with members of the post-Tiananmen generation working as artists, musicians, or petty criminals, began to appear less than a decade after the first films of the Fifth Generation, and coincided with the height of its international renown.
More here.
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