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Film Movement: China’s 5th and 6th Generation Essay Example

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Film Movement: China’s 5th and 6th Generation Essay Example
Film Movement: China’s 5th and 6th Generation

Out of all the China films, the films from the fifth generation was most well received and have clinched recognition from international film festival. Two of the acclaimed film works were Farewell, My Concubine and Raise the Red Lantern. The fifth generation of China filmmakers has also made a great advancement in China’s film industry. Directors of this generation include Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuang Zhuang etc;

Being the first group of students to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy after the Cultural Revolution. This is a group of filmmakers that have gone through the most dramatic turns of lives. They lived through the Cultural Revolution, times of conflict and social upheaval.

People of the time are very much “controlled”; they have lived through an era of suppression, deprived of the right to truly express themselves. It is clearly shown that this suppression is well channel into their films. Zhang Yimou said that: “with the Cultural Revolution as the back¬ground, I want to show the fate of peo¬ple… and the most valu¬able things in human nature that sur¬vived this recent period of Chinese his¬tory” (Cardullo, 2007).

While the batch ‘suppressed’ directors are so eager to tell their story, the fifth generation films bear a common element that is their controversial relationship with the past. Films are mostly based on the hardship of people in the times of the Cultural Revolution. (Paul, 2005) Agreeing to Tang Yuankai (China Today, 2002) with regards to his point that the fifth generation filmmakers are not concern with serving the general audience with conventional story plots but is keener on with expressing their idea of artistic human expression.

The fifth generation filmmakers were found to be more interested in making films that were targeted at delivering their idealistic form of human expression than to make films that relates and serves the audience better. The filmmakers

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