It was here where he would centre his first three features, all of which were made outside of the state system and now go by the title of the 'Hometown Trilogy'. Upon graduation Jia left Beijing and returned to his hometown in the Shanxi province of Northern China. His student efforts immediately marked him out as a defiant talent: the first, a ten-minute documentary, focused on Tiananmen Square the second gave its lead role to a student named the worst actor in class by their professor. If international audiences had yet to twig the impetus behind the 'Sixth Generation', here was an obvious indicator.Ī few years younger than Zhang and Wang, Jia graduated from the Film Academy in 1997. 2001's Beijing Bicycle was particularly noteworthy given its explicit nod to the Italian neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves and all of the cinematic and political concerns that entails. He was blacklisted (alongside Zhang Yuan and four others of the 'Sixth Generation') for illegal filmmaking and yet somehow managed to continue working. Shot in black-and-white and only at weekends (so as to accommodate its non-professional cast and crew), this intimate tale of a slowly disintegrating marriage earned its director the attention of the authorities but for all the wrong reasons. Wang Xiaoshuai, one of Zhang's fellow students at the Beijing Film Academy, positioned his 1993 feature debut The Days, as a direct reaction to the "unnatural and pretentious" cinema of Chen and Zhang Yimou. Zhang Yuan's East Palace, West Palace (1996), for example, was able to deal honestly with themes of homosexuality and police brutality. Consequently the budgets are mostly negligible unless outside funding can be found, although this has also meant that more sensitive subject matters can be addressed. Their efforts have been largely governed by a documentary aesthetic and oftentimes made outside of the state system, thereby precluding any kind of official release. Most recently, Chen's latest feature, Caught in the Web, has been selected as China's official entry for next year's Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, demonstrating the continued good favour.īy way of contrast, the 'Sixth Generation' have tended towards a far rougher approach. Both have tried their hands at big-budgeted wuxia epics (Zhang finding the greater success in the early 2000s with Hero and House of Flying Daggers) and Zhang famously mounted the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. Rising to international prominence during the eighties – which led, in 1993, to Chen's Farewell My Concubine becoming the first (and to date only) Chinese production to have won the Palme d'Or – they've subsequently been swallowed by the mainstream. The 'Fifth Generation' was typified by Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, directors who favoured visual opulence and gorgeous cinematography (as the titles made so immediately plain: Yellow Earth, Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern). They first emerged from the film schools during the 1990s and set about re-inventing their national cinema in a distinctly different image to that which had come before. Jia is arguably the most visible of the auteurs who make up China's 'Sixth Generation'. Referring to the latter's work as "very good" (as well as endorsing its "low cost"), Xi opened up an irony that has since been pounced on: how do you square this acclaim for Jia when his cinema has always cast a less than favourable eye on the country you will one day run? That year Ruby Yang's The Blood of Yingzhou District had picked up the Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject, while Jia's fifth feature, Still Life (2006), had earned itself the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Randt, Jr., in which the future President declared his love of Hollywood war movies and praised the awards success of Chinese films abroad. The claims relate to a 2007 conversation between Xi and the then US Ambassador to China, Clark T. According to a recent profile in The Guardian, China's newly named leader Xi Jinping is something of a fan of filmmaker Jia Zhangke.
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