Generation five

摘要

In 1978, something remarkable happened in Chinese cinema: the Beijing Film Academy, China's national film school, reopened for the first time after it was closed during the Cultural Revolution. Four years later, in 1982, 153 students graduated and were labelled the "fifth generation" of film-makers to emerge since the birth of Chinese cinema. They were the first to see what the rest of the film world was doing. The innovations of Michelangelo Anton-ioni and Akira Kurosawa encouraged these Chinese fledglings to experiment in ways long absent from the stolid Chinese movies favoured by Madame Mao.