‘A scene in the fog’: Sixth Generation films 1991-96

This note looks at a number of ‘independent’ films by Sixth Generation film makers from 1991-96 (given the lack of a formal release, dates often vary somewhat by a year or even two).

Notwithstanding reservations about the generational approach to Chinese film-makers, the Fifth Generation perhaps shared a particularly close link as the first group to graduate from the Bejing Film Academy in the early 1980s after the gap due to the Cultural Revolution. They had all experienced the Revolution in one way or another and had seen their careers delayed as a result.

What became known as the Sixth Generation (those who graduated in the late 1980s and early 1990s) were much younger in general and had a very different life experience.

They had grown up during ‘opening up and reform’. However, unlike the Fifth Generation, they were not able to move quickly into directing jobs. Indeed, due to the restructuring of the film industry in the late 80s and then the Tiananmen incident, film studios were slow to hire the new graduates. So they ended up working on music videos and publicity amongst other things and did not have the option to direct films in the state system.

The opening up and reform meant that they could find the  money to make films (albeit on very tight budgets) and that the materials were available to do so. This meant that, for the first time ever since the early 1950s, they could make films outside the state studios.

The differences in the film they made will be discussed below. But one issue which must be highlighted is the impact of Tiananmen even if, despite their independence, directors all self-censored and did not explicitly mention the event. This influence can clearly be felt in films like The Days, Beijing Bastards and Red Beads.

Of course, despite this lack of explicit reference, most of these films were not officially allowed to be shown in China and most of the directors here were banned from film-making in 1994, though most got around this ban.

Mama [妈妈] (1990)

Directed by Zhang Yuan, Mama was the first independent (of the state) fiction film produced in China since the early 1950s. Xian Film Studios (whose name appears on the titles) only distributed the film.

It tells the story of a mother’s struggle (Liang Dan [Qin Yan who also wrote the screenplay]) to bring up her disabled twelve-year old son DongDong [Huang Haibo] (he suffers from epilepsy which has led to brain damage).

Shot mainly in black and white, and interspersed with actual documentary segments, the film is a tale of the difficulties Liang Dan and her son face in a society which does not really recognise or accommodate disability.

The father works far away and the marriage appears to have broken down. Dan has been involved in a subsequent relationship but she does not wish to pursue this.

A number of ‘kindly’ officials (school, work unit) and his father suggest that DongDong would be ‘better off’ in a welfare centre but Dan insists on raising him.

Qin Yan and Huang Haibo are brilliant in the roles and the quite-physical relationship between the mother and son is intense.

Although not acknowledged in the credits, Wang Xiaoshui was involved in developing the project but when he was assigned to Fujian Film Studios (to write scripts that were never filmed), he handed the project over the Zhang Yuan.

A stunning debut both for Zhang and independent cinema.

The Days [冬春的日子] (1993)

Wang Xiaoshui followed up with an equally striking debut in The Days. It tells the story of a married couple: Dong (Winter) and Chun (Spring) [played by actual married couple and artists Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong].

The film portrays their deteriorating relationship in a post-Tiananmen Beijing. Both are artists and art school teachers who originally met in college. Dong appears obsessed with converting his art into money while Chun uses her contacts abroad to move to the US.

The film cuts backwards and forwards in time (without any obvious markers) and shows the trails and tribulations of middle-class intellectuals. It follows the couple’s daily life as they make love, discover she is pregnant, and visit his family in the north east (below).

Dong meets an old friend [played by director Lou Ye] in a bar. Although not expressly stated, it seems that he was imprisoned in the wake of the Tiananmen incidents and has just been released from prison.

Like many of these films, the film is highly allusive and more difficult for a non-Chinese (or even today’s Chinese audience) to fully follow as we miss visual and verbal clues.

Shot again in black and white, the film looks completely different to most Chinese films of the time but resembles, for example, the style of East European films of the 1960s and 70s such as the Polish film Structure of Crustals.

Beijing Bastards [北京杂种] (1993)

Bastards was Zhang Yuan’s next film, again an independent production. But in contrast to the tightly scripted Mama, this was a much looser production though it retains the semi-documentary approach of the earlier movie.

Bastards involves a largely directionless wander around early 1990s Beijing held together by music by the famous Cui Jian (who also co-produced and co-wrote the script) and others. This only works if you were there at the time or are a fan of Cui Jian. Otherwise, there are far too many musical interludes with no obvious connection to the rest of the film.

Apparently, Cui was having problems finding places for gigs at the time due to his association with the Tiananmen protests so in a general sense there  is a link between the musical scenes and the rest of the film but this is not very obvious.

The stories between the music are too dispersed and directionless to give any coherence to the film. And the purely fictional scenes revolve around Karzi [Wei Li] who is the usual obnoxious, self-centred (male) Sixth Generation character, inspiring neither interest nor sympathy.

Presumably this sense of aimlessness was what the film was trying to convey but it works better as cultural history than as a cinematic experience.

Dirt [头发乱了] (1994)

Dirt is directed by Guan Hu who graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1994.

It features Ye Tong [Kong Lin] who returns to Beijing after a long absence (her family were sent to Guangzhou during the Cultural Revolution).

She is bored by her medical studies  and is torn between handsome rock band member, Peng Wei [Geng Le], and childhood friend (and very boring policeman) Zheng Weidong [Zhang Xiaotong].

The film is an incongruous mix of realistic hutongs and MTV-style rock videos. No doubt, the emphasis on rock music may have given this a novelty value in early 1990s Beijing but it is otherwise anything but original.

Guan Hu is determined to have his cake and eat it and for every shot of the ‘rebellious’ rock band we have Ye Tong banging on about how the policeman is ‘the smartest of us all’.

Unlike the rest of the films considered here, one has to search for signs of disaffection. For every expression of malaise such as Tong’s rejection of a ‘good’ career and the criminality of marginal figure Lei Bing [Hu Qiang], there are happy pictures of Maoist crowds.

But when the band accidentally burn down their rehearsal space and she catches Peng Wei in bed with somebody else, Tong decides that enough is enough. She drops out of medical school and goes back to Guangzhou as the bulldozers tear down the hutongs.

At least she does not stay to care for the hospitalised Weidong (injured in a fight with a gang of hooligans).

Red Beads [悬恋 懸戀] (1994)

Even compared to most of the films here, Red Beads is definitely towards the art film end of the spectrum. This is a highly allegorical tale of Chinese society by director He Jianjun (who had worked as assistant director on a number of Fifth Generation films).

Jingshen is an attendant in a psychiatric hospital. The beautiful Jiyun [Shi Ke] is admitted to the special care ward and Jingshen is put in charge of her care.

The inmates discuss art and literature (one make a mock guitar and dances round imitating Cui Jian) while the hospital staff want to escape to the world outside.

Jiyun seems perfectly normal but dreams about mysterious red beads. However, Dr Sha wants to remove part of her brain so that she will be ‘more peaceful’.

The film is beautifully shot (albeit poor print quality) as the camera glides round the large and largely deserted psychiatric hospital.

The film opens in a busy restaurant where Jingshen arrives and closes in the same restaurant where Jiyun has finally appears to meet him for dinner. So was the hospital sequence all a daydream (or a nightmare)?

Postman 邮差‎ (1995)

Postman by He Jianjun is another interesting little film. When an old postman is dismissed for reading letters on his rounds (in the inaptly named Happiness District), the young Xiao Due [Feng Yuanzheng] takes over.

Xiao Duo lives with his sister [Liang Danni] who looks after him and won’t marry her boyfriend until her younger brother is settled.

But there is little sign that the immature Xiao Duo will ever move on. He tries to avoid his sister’s attempts to set him up with a colleague,  visits a prostitute and then leaves, and later initially rejects and then accepts the advances of his co-worker [Xin Huang].

Soon he is also opening and reading the mail. And he starts to get directly involved in people’s lives, writing to them or visiting them in person.

In his increasingly obsessive invasion of other’s lives, Xiao Duo discovers loneliness, sexual inadequacy, prostitution, drug abuse and homosexuality among other things. Unsurprisingly, this film was not generally released in China.

But director He does not use Xiao Duo as a simple window on these issues. Rather he is voyeuristically engaged in people’s lives. But not emotionally so. The film always adopts a detached position.

The film, as with many of these early films, deliberately refuses to follow a linear narrative or to explain why characters do things (or even what they are doing).

Xiaoshan Going Home [小山回家] (1995)

Jian Zhangke’s graduation film at the Beijing Film Academy (so unlike the other films covered here not a formal debut), this film tells the story of unemployed chef Xiaoshan [Jia’s future regular actor Wang Hongwei] as he goes around Beijing just before the Chinese New Year trying to arrange a trip home.

Xiaoshan is, yet again, a self-centred (male) lout with few obvious redeeming graces.

He visits various friends and acquaintances including a woman from his home town now working as a prostitute.

In the end, of course, Xiaoshan does not go home. The final shots show him getting his hair cut.

The film uses inter-titles and public announcements, such as the one discouraging public travel over the New Year holiday at a time when everybody is manically arranging to travel.

A small but engaging picture of a (male) rural migrant’s life in mid 1990s Beijing.

Frozen [极度寒冷] (1996)

The next independent film from Wang Xiaoshui (credited as Wu Ming since he was banned from film-making) was quite different to The Days. The film looks at a performance artist who decides to kill himself as part of the performance.

Adopting a documentary style approach, the film follows Qi Lei [the inexpressive Jia Hongsheng] as he prepares to die and looks at the reactions of those around him including his long-suffering girlfriend Shao Yun [Ma Xiaoqing].

His brother-in-law is mainly interested in profiting from Qi’s anticipated fame after his death (in fact, no one is greatly interested). His long-haired friend [Wei Ye] brings Qi to a psychiatric hospital for a check-up only to be mistaken for the patient and detained himself.

Wang shows us, at length, other performance artists eating soap. It’s not clear if he is celebrating this rejection of the post-Tiananmen consumerist society, satirising this nonsense, or (more likely) doing both at the same time.

Then there is the lengthy (and apparently lethal) Ice Burial. Wang Xiaoshui provides a cynical twist in the tail which might have been more effective if the body of the film had moved faster to this point.

The film is quite interesting but, in addition to its glacial pace, suffers a lot from the fact that, unlike the artists in Bumming in Beijing, watching Qi Lei/Jia Hongsheng is much less interesting than watching paint dry. One might agree with the views expressed by one onlooker (his sister [Bai Yu]): ‘if he wants to die, let him have his fun with it’.

One character says that ‘time is immeasurable’. Not in this film it’s not.

East Place, West Palace [东宫西宫] (1996)

Finally, in this listing, Zhang Yuan shot East Place, West Palace (aka Behind the Forbidden City). This was the first film about a homosexual relationship in mainland Chinese cinema.

Typically Zhang Yuan did not attempt to portray a non-challenging relationship but managed to combine as many taboos as possible into one film which would remain challenging today. It still could not be made officially in this form.

The film is set in a small park (near the Forbidden City) where gay men go to meet each other. A Lan [Si Han] is a regular visitor. He meets and is attracted to policeman  Xiao Shi [Hu Jun].

Later in a routine raid on the park, Xiao Shi arrests him and takes him to the park police office. A Lan tells Xiao Shi a number of stories about his life which may or may not be true and which generally reflect his desire for the policeman.  Xiao Shi  in turn, is obviously interested in A Lan.

The film involves not only gay relationships but also sado-masochism, transvestism, and the relationship between those in power and individual subjects (Tony Rayns has suggested that Zhang had the Film Bureau and himself in mind). Indeed, the film is probably as much about the relationship between authority and the subject (by no means one way) as it is about gay lives.

Discussion

As can be seen from the discussions above, there are quite a range of approaches and themes in these films. They certainly do not adopt one standard approach or look.

However, one can identify a range of areas where they differ from the classic Fifth Generation movies. This is, of course a highly stylized comparison and one can find Fifth Generation directors (such as Xia Gang) who would be more similar to the Sixth Generation approach (and films which do not fit in).

	Fifth Generation	Sixth Generation
Space	Rural	Urban
Time	Past	Present
Visuals	Vibrant colour	B&W/muted colour
Genre	Melodrama	Realism
Influences	Cultural Revolution	Tiananmen/post-Tiananmen

One big difference is approach is the rejection by the post-1990 films of a linear narrative approach. Albeit that some Fifth Generation films (such as Horse Thief) chose this approach, in general most earlier films opt for a linear narrative.

In contrast, most if not all of the films here (and others looked at in related posts) do not have a linear approach. They are often highly allusive which means that there is often no definitive plot and certainly no definite rationale for the actions (or inactions) of the characters. Arguably this is linked to a sense of paranoia and schizophrenia in society more generally. This makes them more difficult to follow for a non-Chinese (or perhaps even today’s Chinese) audience.

One area which marks a step back from the Fifth Generation is gender. While the earlier directors could not be described as feminist, they did recognise women’s oppression in Chinese society and frequently produced strong female characters. In contrast, women hardly feature in over half the films noted here. Even in Mama, the mother’s main concern is her (male) child and while Dong and Chun (The Days) are equally important in the story, the film focuses much more on Dong. Many of the lead characters are self-centred and/or immature males and while one can argue that the directors are just reflecting society, most of these films show little gender awareness at all.

The phrase ‘a scene in the fog’ is from critic Dai Jinhua who suggested this metaphor for Sixth Generation films which she saw as ‘highly exposed in the outside world but little known inside China’.

Indeed, few Chinese film-goers have ever seen these films: none has received 10,000 votes on the Douban site (compared to 15,000 for King of the Children, 22,000 for Yellow Earth and 175,000 for Red Sorghum all older movies). To borrow another Dai phrase, in escaping from one trap (the Fifth Generation approach), the Sixth Generation fell into (or more accurately were driven into) another. That is that independent film was not a viable structure if you wanted anybody to see your films.

There are two major (and related) issues. First, censorship still limits what can be said very significantly (and the longstanding China Independent Film Festival (CIFF) has recently closed its doors for this reason). Second, there has been very limited interest in art films amongst Chinese audiences, even films allowed to be shown.

Many of these directors have subsequently moved into the mainstream though (to date) most have resisted the temptation to make films glorifying the PRC/CCP (unlike many earlier directors).

However, this type of ‘independent’/art cinema has continued in two ways. First, there is a strong documentary tradition. Given that most documentaries will not have extended cinema runs anyway, they are perhaps more suited to an independent approach.

Second, significant numbers of small independent/art films continue to be made in China (albeit a small proportion of total film output). The Douban database indicates that (depending on the definition) tens or even hundreds of such films have been made since 2000 and CIFF has shown around 1,000 films including features and documentaries since 2003.