Sixth Generation Cinema (China)

Also called the independent or urban generation, Chinese cinema's “Sixth Generation” (6thG) emerged soon after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989. Starting in the early 1990s, a collection of maverick filmmakers confronted contemporary social problems by examining the personal lives of protagonists mostly unseen in Chinese cinema beforedissatisfied and dissolute urban youth, rock musicians, immigrant and migrant workers, and gay and lesbian charactersand 6thG cinema was born.

These emphases were driven partly by the young filmmakers' own experiences and partly by their distinctive mode of production. Technology and the political climate, together with access to foreign audiences and transnational financing, made it possible to cultivate a new, smaller scale filmmaking practice, independent of China's state-run studio system and characterized by low budgets and a documentary/art film/realist aesthetic. 6thG filmmakers were naturally drawn to the low glamour, high candor, socially provocative subjects that established their reputation.

Financed often by overseas investment, early 6thG films mostly offered personal accounts of [Page 458]their own adolescent experiencesnarrow slices of life that appealed to equally narrow audiences. Sharply diverging from their elders, they took their stylistic cues from European art film and from documentary filmmaking, featuring goal-less protagonists deployed in episodic narratives. Thematically, films such as Dirt (Quan Hu, 1994), The Days (Wang Xiaoshuan, 1993), Little Crazy Thing Called Love (Li Xing, 1993), and Rainclouds Over Wushan (Zhang Ming, 1993) articulated many 6thG directors' pervasive pessimism. More cinematic than dramatic, the films also relied heavily on voice-over narration to piece together disjointed narratives.

The early 6thG obsession with individual expression and its realist aesthetic excited critical acclaim at international film festivals, but the domestic market remained largely closed, whether from poor box office or official bans. 6thG filmmakers succeeded partly by cultivating (apparent) political subversiveness and social progressiveness, exploiting the “banned in China” cachet. As self-packaged dissidents, a few 6thG directors became bankable in overseas art circles and on the domestic black market, keeping the foreign finance coming. Zhang Yuan, for instance, made China's first “gay film,” East Palace, West Palace (1997), with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Under these conditions, with only a handful of films officially distributed in China, the new cinema was defined as “underground” or “independent.” 6thG is different from “independent” cinema in the West, which means independent from state funding and control rather than from Hollywood's entertainment conglomerates. The Chinese state, meanwhile, has mostly turned a blind eye to 6thG filmmaking, regarding it as non-threatening at home (small audience, politically mild films), and possibly as a boon for its international image as a tolerant regime.

From the mid1990s, however, the state began to woo 6thG filmmakers with better domestic market access. 6thG filmmakers have always exercised self-censorship by exploring provocative yet politically safe subjects so as to avoid serious confrontations with the state, even as they maintained their “subversive enough” edge overseas. However, increasing official tolerance has threatened to leave these entrepreneurial cultural dissidents with nothing new to say and little state interference to lament.

This shifting political economy resulted in the emergence of some 6thG filmmakers from the underground. Recent films by Wang Xiaoshuai (Beijing Bicycle, 2000), Jia Zhangke (The World, 2004), and Zhang Yuan (Green Tea, 2003) were released in China, although still not to huge box offices. Others have been successful, including Zhang Yang's Shower (1999), Jiang Wen's In the Heat of the Sun (1994), Jin Chen's Love in the Time of the Net (1999), and Shi Runjui's A Beautiful New World (1999).

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