The Fifth Generation and beyond: Reflections on contemporary Chinese film culture.

摘要

In studies of contemporary Chinese, Asian, or world cinema, the Fifth Generation is a term that no scholar can afford to miss. The term refers to a group of filmmakers that emerged in 1983 and initiated China's first art film movement. Although the art movement ended around 1988, these filmmakers have remained China's most important cultural figures. Although much has been written on them and their films in English, Chinese, and other languages, there was a regrettable absence of a systematic study of the Fifth Generation. This dissertation aims to respond to this absence by focusing on one question: what the Fifth Generation has changed?; The dissertation is structured around six concepts in China's critical discourse of the 1980s and 1990s: mass media, literature, nation, history, women, and personal narrative. The author regards literature, nation, and history as the three cornerstones of the Chinese film tradition and examines the Fifth Generation as a group of cultural rebels who has reshaped film's relationship with all the three concepts. Case studies are offered to provide new understandings of Postcolonialism, nationalism, and Orientalism along the theoretical discussion. The limitation of the generation's revolution is examined through its representation of women through engendered perspectives. The compromises of the Fifth Generation are reflected through an introduction of the Sixth Generation, as a more radical group of rebels who took nearly a decade to surface from the underground. From the personal narratives of urban stories narrated by these younger filmmakers, we may catch a glimpse of new trends in Chinese and world cinema.; In addition to textual analyses of film works by some rarely discussed directors, including Wu Ziniu, Li Shaohong, Feng Xiaoning, Ye Daying, and Yang Liping, the dissertation also offers concise historical reviews on how the Fifth Generation emerged, how film concept has been developed, how nationalism has been perceived, and how women have been presented by different generations of directors in China. By locating the Fifth Generation in the “big picture” of contemporary Chinese film culture and mass media, the dissertation reveals how Chinese filmmakers have to constantly negotiate with the market, the censorship, and, the West.