Leo Robson in Sidecar: 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. (Chen and Zhang even won BAFTAs.)
The relationship was initially one of gratitude. Wang has pointed to the ‘huge impact’ of Yellow Earth, which came out just before he entered the Beijing Film Academy; Jia Zhangke, who emerged slightly later but soon became the Sixth Generation’s leading figure, said that it was seeing Chen’s film as a 21-year-old art student, at the social club of the Department of Roads and Highway in Taiyun, in the Shaanxi Province, that inspired him to apply. (He was initially rejected twice.) He was a product of ‘yellow earth’ country, and he felt that the film, though set in the 1930s, was consistent at least in spirit with realistic portraiture of contemporary social problems, the approach he would adopt in his hour-long short Xiao Shan Going Home (1995), a sort of migrant-worker Waiting for Godot, and his early features Pickpocket (1997) and Unknown Pleasures (2000). In order to tell the story of modern China – and to preserve what was being eroded at such speed – the Sixth Generation drew on the early work of their predecessors and on kindred aesthetic movements like neorealism and the French New Wave, but perhaps especially on the example of the Guangdong-born, Taiwan-raised director Hou Hsiao-Hsien, work first introduced to the BFA students by the British Asian cinema scholar Tony Rayns. (Hou later donated a set of prints to the school.)
Hou’s trajectory goes some way to complicating the Mainland narrative of successive and seesawing philosophies. If his work displayed overlap with Fifth and Sixth Generation habits, it failed to do so chronologically. Though his early period films, notably A Time to Live, A Time to Die (1985) and A City of Sadness (1989), could be seen as similar in theme and scope to what Chen and Zhang were making at the same time, Hou was all along engaged with stories about young people in the present day, the Sixth Generation reflex. For Jia, a largely unheralded Hou film like The Boys from Fengkui, made as early as 1983, could serve as a great liberator, his other Yellow Earth, when he saw it at the BFA, even though, looking back at Hou’s work – he announced his retirement last year – the more ragged and looser-gaited tale of ‘urban youth’, Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), stands out as his honorary contribution to Sixth Generation aesthetics. (Wang included A City of Sadness on his list of the ten greatest films, with the citation: ‘The light of Chinese cinema, directly facing the unbearable history’; Jia, on leaving BFA, sought out Hou’s producer Shôzô Ichiyama as a collaborator, and later wrote the introduction to Boiling the Sea, the 2014 book of interviews Hou did with the American scholar Michael Berry.)
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