NEW CHINESE CINEMA AND WESTERN FILM FESTIVALS

Introduction
Festival Circuits And The Selection Of Canonical Works
The Fifth Generation Cinema and Its Cross-Cultural Interpretation
The Sixth Generation Cinema: To Continue the Dialogue with the West

Chapter Three
3. The Sixth Generation Cinema: To Continue the Dialogue with the West
3.1 An Overview

While it is not difficult to delineate the artistic territory of the Fifth Generation directors, even the naming of a new generation of filmmakers proves to be challenging. Emerging in the early 90s’, the “post-Fifth Generation Cinema” is also known as “Chinese Underground/Independent Film”, “Dissident Film” and “Urban Generation Cinema”. I prefer to use the term “Sixth Generation” in this essay with the realization that “the Sixth Generation is an entangled cultural phenomenon tucked away under various names, discourses, cultures, and ideologies” (Dai, 76).
Dai Jinhua has classified the Six Generation Cinema, mainly according to the production mode, into three types of films and praxes. Such a classification, however, needs updating as the line between the “underground” and “aboveground”, “independent” and “within system” production becomes gradually fuzzy. The categorization I am proposing here has integrated Dai Jinhua and other scholars’ visions. Therefore we have these three clusters: the first includes directors such as Wang Xiaoshuai, Lou Ye and Lu Chuan, whose film language is reminiscent of Euro-American art-house and classic maestros; the second claims feature directors such as, among the others, Zhang Yuan, Jia Zhangke and Liu Bingjian. What they pursue is the film-vérité mise-en-scene blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Also included in this category are documentists such as Wu Wenguang, Shi Jian and Duan Jinchuan. These documentists, coming from a much diversified background, have participated in the innovative movement to record daily life and ordinary people who had to cope with the great changes the country was undergoing. The abovementioned categories have constituted the main body of what is considered the “independent” or “underground” filmmakers in the west. And into my focus are mainly the directors of feature films.
When it comes to the third category, however, we cannot omit the market-savvy Imar Films, the first sino-foreign joint-venture film company in China. Zhang Yang (Spicy Love Soup, 1998; Shower, 1999) and Shi Runjiu (Beautiful New World, 1998; All The Way, 2000), active figures of New Mainstream Cinema, are both closely associated with Imar Films and its founder, an American producer Peter Loehr (Chinese name Luo Yi) . Together with filmmakers like Li Xin and Zhang Yibai, this branch of Sixth Generation directors is more concerned with modern love and city lifestyles, appealing to both local and global audience.
Considering the changing and somehow intricate landscape of Chinese Cinema, I shall roughly divide the Sixth Generation filmmaking into three stages (not strictly chronologically and certain periods may overlap): the pioneering period (late 80s to early 90s), when several young filmmakers (most of whom are 85’ or 87’ graduates from Beijing Film Academy; graduated in 1989 or 1991 respectively) took their first steps in independent filmmaking; the underground period (till late 90s), when independent production constituted almost a movement and drew great attention internationally because of its acclaim in the West and the controversy triggered at home. Particularly in 1995 the Film Bureau tightened its censorship and regulations and a lot of projects failed to get permission; the transitional period (till present), which witnesses the so-called “transformation” of several underground directors and the impact of globalization on film market. While the Film Bureau announced new policies promising a freer and more relaxed filmmaking environment for the young filmmakers, the global net embraced by preeminent Fifth Generation directors Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige poses unprecedented challenges for this new generation.
In addition, some crucial aspects of the circulation and distribution of Chinese indie films will also be highlighted. Domestically, though banned officially, pirated versions of those underground films are available in major cities. The independent filmmakers hence hold a mixed feeling towards piracy, without which their works may never reach an already limited circle of audience, basically confined to urban and educated groups. Cafes, bars, or other itinerant venues—usually extended from the culturally liberal colleges and universities, artist communities and the peripheral areas—have been used for the temporary exhibition/screening. Also serious cinephiles’ groups in these cities organize screenings and relevant activities, which functions as forum/platform for the interaction between the amateurs, indie-filmmakers and other film professionals. However in recent years some once influential cinephiles’ clubs were disbanded and screening venues were gradually commercialized. Fortunately, domestic film festivals encouraging independent filmmaking are emerging.
On the other hand, several international film festivals, funds or institutions are also crucial to the burgeoning of the new generation’s underground films. Nantes Film Festival Three Continents has been a major showcase since 1980 for the national cinemas of Asia, Africa and Latin America. At the same time, the increasingly influential Rotterdam Film Festival has an encompassing vision in selecting Chinese films. Not only art-house directors like Zhang Ming, He Jianjun, Zhang Yuan and Lou Ye were granted by its Hubert Bals Fund and walked away with Tiger Award , but also lots of mainstream films (including those ex-underground directors’ within-system productions) were promoted in Rotterdam’s programs . Furthermore, The International Forum of New Cinema or Forum of Berlin Film Festival, aiming for “everything new and unconventional” , functions in a similar way in encouraging and funding young filmmakers’ projects. For instance Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu (Xiaowu, 1997) firstly attracted the West at Berlin.
Besides, international film festivals in Locarno, Vancouver and Toronto Film Festival have for long kept an eye on mainland Chinese filmmaking. Asian film promoters such as Tony Rayns has played crucial role in the programming. Importantly, the French film funding mechanism Fonds Sud serves as a vital link in bolstering the Sixth Generation filmmakers .  Meanwhile Pusan International Film Festival’s Pusan Promotion Plan (PPP Project) is another weighty fund alluring young Chinese directors.    
When it comes to distribution, boasting of their passion for films, professional instinct and “excellent relationships with key distributors, film festivals and international and local journalists” , Dutch company Fortissimo Film Sales has indeed identified and nurtured several new talent directors of the Sixth Generation. Films by the leading figures He Jianjun, Shi Runjiu, Jiang Wen, Zhang Yuan and Zhang Yang have all been included in Fortissimo’s catalogue. There are five titles by Wang Xiaoshuai, including The Days (1993) and the recent Cannes winner Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong, 2005). Especially, Sunflower (Xiang’ri Kui, 2005) by the New Mainstream Cinema director Zhang Yang already appeared in their list while in late May this film was just given a preview screening in Beijing, according to Chinese media report. Nevertheless, Fortissimo still bases their selection of potential films at high-profile international film festivals.  

3.2 Independence of the Sixth Generation Cinema
3.2.1 An Independent Generation

Indeed, as Sun Shaoyi has argued, “the Sixth Generation…lacks a collective identity as strong and integrated as that of the Fifth Generation” despite the fact that the designation of “the Sixth Generation” is widely circulating in media, the academic and among the common audience (Sun). Meanwhile, most of those filmmakers are themselves reluctant to be collectively categorized. Zhang Yuan believed “…filmmaking is personal” and expressed his will “to be different from my predecessors and different from my contemporaries”; he asserted, “When something is another’s, it’s no longer yours” (qtd. in Dai). Wang Xiaoshuai echoed his point of view when interviewed by Cannes and indicated, “…I am the type of director who makes films as a form of personal expression; I can't claim to represent a whole new generation of filmmakers”.  
Being afraid of slipping into the collectivism affiliated with a “generation” and thus endangering one’s “individuality” and “self” on the one hand, on the other hand, the new group of young filmmakers feels thrilled at the idea to challenge the previous generation, whose presence still overshadows their filmmaking. Although the Sixth Generation films in their early stages were often evaluated with the Fifth Generation Cinema as reference, I share Dai Jinhua’s optimistic vision that “when social transformations shattered cultural heroism, a new generation of filmmakers might be able to appear in their own names, rather than in the name of a new ‘generation’” (Dai, 78). The fact is that several ringleaders of the Sixth Generation indeed have established themselves as film auteurs with extraordinary personal styles at Western film festivals.      
I will approach the new generation’s “independence” from two aspects, both of which also indicate the dilemma the Sixth Generation faces. On the one hand, what strikes the West most about the Sixth Generation’s works is their remarkable departure both in film language and artistic vision from that of the Fifth Generation’s. Such a distinction, therefore, symbolizes their effort to be “independent”, by outreaching their predecessors’ influence. On the other hand, a crucial feature of the Sixth Generation filmmaking is the status of being “independent” in the sense of being “underground” or “outlawed”. For one thing, the independent productions were partially resulted from the profound social and economy reform in China; for another, most of this generation’s prize-winning films were actually shot and submitted to film festivals without permission from the Film Bureau and were henceforth distributed and circulated in the West while banned in China.  

3.2.2 Features of the Sixth Generation Cinema
3.2.2.1 Social Background

Harvard Film Archive in February 2001 held a screening of the Sixth Generation’s works entitled Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society in Transformation. Before this event, in December 2000 a similar film exhibition New Chinese Cinema: Tales of Urban Delight, Alienation and the Margins curated by Berenice Reynaud also took place in UCLA’s Center for East Asian Studies. In both exhibitions, so-called “Urban Generation” directors’ independent films, including Zhang Yuan’s Sons (Er’zi, 1996), Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu, 1997) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Close to Paradise (Biandan Guniang, 1998) were showcased in the U.S. while most of these films were banned or circulated in a limited circle through pirated VCDs and DVDs in China. In the introduction of Harvard’s screening it is declared,

This emergent cinema departs significantly from its predecessors in its politics, values, and artistic sensibility…The subject matter and stylistic orientations of these films are intimately intertwined with the rapid modernization and social dislocation occurring in urban China today. (par.2)

Indeed, the difference between these two generations originated from the change of social environment. Most of the Sixth Generation directors were born in the late 60s and early 70s, that is, Mao-era’s political turmoil is just part of their distant childhood memory. Instead, their youth coincided historical with China’ attempt to reconnect with the world, accompanied by the introduction of Western thoughts, post-Mao socialist reform and the intensification of open-door policy. Furthermore, their professional career paralleled with China’s social transition in the post-Tiananmen era. They have witnessed the prosperity of a “socialist market economy”, the flourishing of popular culture and consumerism; they are participating in the transnational communication in globalization, and after all, they are part of the spectacular changes undergoing everyday throughout China.
Meanwhile, there were waves of groundbreaking art movement taking place in the nineties’ China. “The collective memory of history, especially of the Cultural Revolution, and the examination of national cultural traditions disappeared”. Instead, “art was characterized by individualism and irreverence for classical heroism”. Even before the Tiananmen Square Event, the idealism of the artists and writers began to wane, thus “the nineties turned out to be an era of obliviousness toward both history and culture” (Lau, 22).
Therefore understandably, cultural reflection and the search for roots, which were integral themes in the Fifth Generation Cinema, are no longer given priority in the new generation’s works. Sheila Cornelius in her critique indicates that the Sixth Generation Cinema is “…uninterested in the broad sweep of history”. Despite that they share their predecessors’ “cultural concern”, the new directors “concentrate on personal accounts of young people’s experience” (108). These directors believe they are sensitive enough to observe and capture the reality of China in metamorphose. Their personal record inscribes the common experience of Chinese people, especially the life of the marginal social groups, which was rarely depicted in the mainstream cinema.

3.2.2.2 A Close Analysis

 Here we shall delineate several aspects that separate the Sixth Generation from the Fifth Generation. Jenny Kwok Wah Lau has argued that three aspects of this new generation’s films deserve attention: no epic; stream of life and disengagement; free market or globalization (Lau, 17-9). I will follow Jenny Lau’s outline to introduce my observations of the Sixth Generation Cinema.  
No Epic and Realism
First of all, Lau believes “the classical form of larger-than-life heroes that characterized many fifth-generation films made before the mid-nineties…disappeared in the Six-Generation films”, in addition, she notes “gone are not only the traditional heroes, but also the idea of heroism it self” (17). Such a tendency, resulted from the disillusionment with social ideals, also testified that the marginal discourse has come to the center in the heterogeneous cultural scene. National allegory disappears from these non-epic works, and the presentation of life seems to be trivialized in a naturalistic way. Although the Sixth Generation Cinema has touched on controversial topics such as sexuality, bureaucratic corruption, unemployment, drug abuse, prostitution and AIDS, they don’t aim to enhance these social issues to the level of social reflection and moral hierarchy. Instead they are committed to the realistic portray of the individual world, which is fraught with sense of alienation, confusion and struggle.
In Quitting (Zuotian, 2001), Zhang Yang recreates the seven years’ effort of a family to help one of its members to find the way to redemption. This film is based on the true story of its drug-addicted protagonist Jia Hongsheng, a once promising young actor dubbed as the “thug idol” in the late 1980s. Jia's naturally fragile mental/psychological state coupled with his experimentation with drugs, however, gradually led him into a state of despair. Disconnected from the outside world, Jia locked himself in the Beijing apartment taking drugs and listening to his favorite John Lennon over and over again. Lost in the search for his own identities, Jia Hongsheng epitomized a generation of youth, who between the late 1980s and early 1990s, went through the seismic social change and got stuck in-between the clash of younger and older generations’ cultural values. Meanwhile, the film pursues the multi-layered narrative in a self-reflexive manner. In Quitting, not only is film character played by the real person who was actually part of Jia’s life (including his intimates in the psychiatric hospital), also juxtaposed are the interviews with Jia’s acquaintances and the rehearsal of the film crews. Such a narrative structure could hardly be found in the Fifth Generation or other mainstream films.
While in Quitting Zhang Yang seeks to give a hard-edged depiction of Jia’s painful transformation, the film arouses empathy as a harrowing human drama, which distinguishes the Sixth Generation Cinema. Also, like in Quitting, no attempt is made to portray extraordinary characters. What we have are no longer the porcelain Judou (Judou), Songlian (Raise the Red Lantern), the invented customs and exotic rituals, primitive temptations and all the “gory, cruel, and charming stories about women” (Dai Jinhua’s words). Instead, we are observing the embarrassment of the pickpocket Xiao Wu (Xiao Wu), the displaced sorrow of the professional mourner Guixiang (Cry Woman), the fighting for a mountain bicycle between two teenagers (Beijing Bicycle), the warmth and coldness of a metropolitan city felt by urban drifters Chen Mo and Mei Ting (Chen Mo and Mei Ting), the absurdity in a professor’s marriage and affair (Mr. Zhao) and the Hitchcockian romance of Moudan, Meimei, and Marda hovering above an age-old river(Suzhou River)…              
For independent films, the cinematic realism, including the documentary mise-en-scene, raw and grainy images, non-professional actors and on-location improvisation of dialogues, together with the practical subjects and non-conventional narrative of everyday life, are the direct result of the limited budget and shooting conditions. Jia Zhangke shot Xiaowu with RMB 400,000 (around 40,000 Euros), a 16mm camera and a cast of non-professional actors, which set up a common template for independent filmmakers. For underground films, shooting progress would often be interrupted or delayed because of the “illegimate” status. Some sequences in Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastard are blurry and unstable because they had to wrap up in advance of the official intervention.
Depoliticized Tone and Alternative Narratives
Jenny (Kwok Wah) Lau cites the concept of “stream of life” from Maria Galikowski, author of Art and Politics in China. According to Galikowski, “stream of life” art offered “intimate and personal portrays of ‘low-key’ non-political subjects” and was a reaction against the overt politicization of the traditional socialist art/media. Therefore, rather than elaborating on “grand theme of reflecting on cultural roots or socialist tradition”, the Sixth Generation prefers a variety of alternative narratives (qtd. in Lau, 18).
Beijing Bicycle (Shiqisui de Danche, literally means “the Bicycle of Seventeen”, 2001) can be regarded as Wang Xiaoshuai’s ode to the bicycle that has even become the emblem of mainland China. Set in contemporary Beijing, the story focuses on a bicycle that has linked two seventeen-year-old males from disparate backgrounds through chains of fortunes and misfortunes. Guei is a humble migrant from the countryside who is hired by an express delivery company as a courier. His supervisor promises that he could own the shiny mountain bike once he has earned six hundred yuan (based upon earnings of ten yuan per trip). However, just before Guei’s dream comes true, the bike is stolen. In Guei’s persistent and desperate searching for the bike, he meets Jian, the new owner of his lost bike, a student at a local co-educational school who claims he bought the bike at a flea market…
The juxtaposition of Guei and Jian’s seventeen highlights their difference in social standing and status. Reminiscent of Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), Beijing Bicycle offers a compelling interpretation of China’s city life in transformation. Wang Xiaoshuai illustrates two teenagers’ conflict and alliance against the changed social environment, in which their youth bears vivid witness to the booming of consumerism and popular culture, from dissimilar perspectives though.
Far from extending the superficial sympathy for the living situations of those rural migrants like Guei, the film further contemplates over the relationship between modernity and traditions. Guei struggles to secure his first luxury belongings, the bike, for keeping his job and even leading a better life in Beijing, whereas Jian regards the bicycle as the symbol of his popularity (or vanity, among peers and in front of the girlfriend), honor and independence. Nevertheless, nowadays most urbanites no longer aspire to own a bike as necessity. This comparatively affluent society has more glamorous varieties to allure and to offer. While the cobbled lane ways and alleys in the bike chase scenes unveil the remote past of this metropolitan city, they are contrasted strikingly with the hustle and bustle on streets and the forests of high-rise that confuse Guei in his routine works.
Beijing Bicycle, backed up by the French Fonds Sud and the Taiwanese Arc Light Films, has achieved maturity in both techniques and aesthetics superior to Wang Xiaoshuai’s previous works. Although once banned in China , the Silver Bear winner has unfolded such diversified angles to perceive contemporary urban life that a one-dimensional political reading seems inadequate and outdated. Wang Xiaoshuai indeed has indicated certain negative aspects of city life and commented on city dwellers in this film. For example, Guei and his friend have mistaken a mysterious girl, who’s always dressed up when left alone, for a wealthy but empty single woman before it turns out that she is only a maid of that house. However, Wang doesn’t intend to make any social criticism. Rather, much of his concern lies in the new face of youth culture and particularly the parallel but unlike worlds behind its protagonists, which encourages an honest look at the social and cultural reality of China.
The depoliticized tone in most Sixth Generation films differs from the Fifth Generation’s political reflection on the mythologies created by the mainstream ideology. Even with regards to Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastard, though it depicts the anarchic life style of Beijing rock musicians, this film doesn’t delve into moralistic judgments such as blaming the police or the rock singers. Such a disengagement from the political discourse and the variations of narratives exactly characterize the films of the new generation.

Globalization and Local Sensitivity

The power of “free market” has liberated to some extent the new generation’s filmmakers and enabled them to represent their own vision without pretending to “convey grand universal truths”. Jenny Lau advances her argument from the perspective that the films by the Sixth Generation represent “an important cultural product resulting from the most central social change in China in the past twenty years”, namely, “ the process of globalization” (Lau, 19). The Sixth Generation films not only reflect the modernization of China, but also participate in the process. When it comes to the film market, film festival exists as the taste-maker that will in turn influence the circulation and distribution of these transnational cultural products not only regionally, but globally. 
In September 2004, Jia Zhangke premiered his fourth feature film, which was the first government-sanctioned one, The World (Shijie) at Venice Film Festival. First and foremost, the production of The World was collaborated by three countries, China (Xstream Pictures), Japan (Ichiyama Shozo; Office Kitano Inc.) and France (Lumen Films). Such a “multinational” teamwork is quite common for the new generation’s art films, which parallels with the influx of overseas capital in the coproduction of commercial films. An art-house laureate at international film festivals, Jia Zhangke accumulated considerable “critical capital” with his previous three films (Xiao Wu, Platform and Unknown Pleasures). Only with the strength built up through international success is Jia confident to bring his works back to the domestic market. Furthermore, Jia’s own experience at international film festivals has prompted him to collaborate with some peer filmmakers to discover and nurture budding young Chinese art-house directors. Jia has henceforth been active in promoting and curating new directors’ works for international festival circuit. For instance, at Rotterdam Film Festival 2005, there were three short films curated by Jia.     
The World is set in the World Park in Beijing suburb (part was shot in another theme park in Shen Zhen), where lavish daily shows are performed amongst the scaled-down replicas of the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Pyramids and even the Twin Towers, echoing the neon promise “Give Us A Day And We’ll Show You The World” at its entrance. The film primarily focuses on people that are performing or patrolling in the artificial landscape, and the mobile crowds they have to deal with day by day, the majority of whom are curious tourists, some may be their relatives or friends.
While some reviews regard this above-ground debut as Jia’s most boisterous ever, considering the trendy sequences of FLASH animation, the flamboyant dancing performance, the mixed electronic music and the ostentatiously exotic and delicate scenery, Jia Zhangke’s humanistic vision hasn’t altogether reduced to the “surface” of what we see.
Despite the dazzling stage and landscape that appeal to the ordinary Chinese’s eagerness for a glimpse of the world, people in this film are not actually walking any closer to what they are dreaming of. Instead, they are still hurt and suffer from problems of the individual “world”. As indicated by Jia, “we’re living in a globalised age, in a world saturated by mass media, in an international city, as it were. But despite all that, the problems we’re facing are our own problems” (qtd. in Jaffee 2004b). In this film, although the protagonists, a young dancer and her security guard boyfriend managed to leave their provincial hometown and secure a foothold in the World Park, they are still steeped in troubles and feel alienated. While they are living and working in the replicated “world”, while they are making efforts to present the tourists the impressive simulacrum full of joy and wonders, they themselves, just like the tourists, immersed in the sham cosmopolitanism, are just the outsiders of the world they are longing for.
Jia Zhangke’s protagonists begin the search for their Promised Land when they try to escape from the desolate home in Platform; the desire to run away is also palpable in Unknown Pleasure when the teenagers find nothing other than ennui and violence in popular culture and emblems of cosmopolitanism. Finally, when they are able to embrace “The World”, what they want still eludes them.
The World Park, a typical but naïve product of globalization, is the virtual reality stimulated by the local’s wish to join the chorus of globalization. The World, rather than displaying the ironies surrounding the tourists and performers who are “infantilized” by the fake scenery, reflects on Chinese reality when people are offered chances to be so close to the world. Jia Zhangke has always exhibited the humanistic vision to target at the destiny of those “victims” suffering from the social changes. While the urbanites are obsessed with the material achievement brought about by modernization and globalization, it is these marginal social groups, like the migrant workers in big cities that are paying price for the development. Jia Zhangke’s focus on the “problems of our own” as a whole embodies Roland Robertson’s argument on the “heightened sensitivity to one’s local culture”. The interaction between different cultures, which constitutes the dynamics of globalization, does not necessarily generate homogenization or a cultural hegemony from the West alone (qtd. in Lau, 23). Such sensitivity to local culture can also be found in the dichotomy represented in the bicycle in Beijing Bicycle.
Through the textual analysis of the Sixth Generation’s works, what I intend to present is not only the differences between them and their predecessors, but also the various perspectives to perceive their films. While Jia Zhangke is dedicated to describing Chinese reality, another layer of “reality” indicates that he is the most daring fighter “in the face of institutional myopia” (Corliss, par. 12). In the West, Jia has been considered the leader of these film outlaws and the pioneer of Chinese independent films. The “independent” production mode and the filmmakers’ conflict with the communist censors have refueled the Western passion for the Sixth Generation Cinema. In my opinion, this new generation’s filmmaking practice constitutes another layer of the misreading. The trajectory of Zhang Yuan from an “underground” rebel to an “aboveground” director working within system will especially enlighten our discussion of the Chinese indie films.    
      
3.2.3 Zhang Yuan and His Independent Filmmaking

Zhang Yuan is considered “the first and the leading director” of the Sixth Generation (Lau, 14). He graduated from Beijing Film Academy in 1989 (Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke also graduated in the same year), when the state-owned studios had to survive the transition period and march towards the “socialist market economy” through self-funding. Those new film academy graduates could no longer be assigned jobs by the state. As a result, “the young sixth-generation directors are challenged to curve out unique ways of production simply to ensure their survival” (13).
Meanwhile, it should be made clear that in order to obtain government recognition and get permission to show their films in national theaters, a Chinese filmmaker should live up to several requirements: they must purchase a quota number from a state-owned studio (though it is not necessary that the studio agrees to produce or finance the film; meanwhile, to sell quota number also enables the studio to make profit), they must submit both a plot synopsis (until late 2003, a full script was required; however, new policies in early 2005 prefer the synopsis, again) and the completed film to government censors, and they must not make the film public—including submitting it to international festivals—until the censors’ approval is secured. Filmmakers who fail on any of these counts can expect that their film will be banned and they themselves forbidden to make any more films in China until further notice.
 Squeezed in such strictures, the “unique way” that many Sixth Generation directors have opted is to become “cinematic outlaws” and produce films without official recognition. In such an underground mode of production, money was raised through private investors or Western cultural funds, and shooting took place in real location; negatives were smuggled out of the country for post production or film festivals (Reynaud, 56). As expected, their films were afterwards banned in China.
In the case of Zhang Yuan, when he made his first film Mother (Mama, 1990), he got permission from the Bureau. However, the distributor gave up Zhang Yuan’s debut feature claiming it was beyond the general Chinese audience. However, Mother was highly regarded by international critics when it was sent outside China and won Jury Award and a Special Mention at France’s Festival Des Trois Continents in Nantes. Later, Mother was well received when broadcast on Chinese TV program.
Berenice Reynaud believes Mother is “the first independent production since 1949” and asserts that this film “marked the birth of the Sixth Generation at a time when a whole underground culture was developing in Beijing in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre” (58). Nevertheless, the value of this very groundbreaking work in Chinese independent production would not be fully appreciated if it were not for the international festival circuit.
 Zhang Yuan’s second film Beijing Bastard (Beijing Zazhong, 1993) brought to light the life of underground artists and staged Chinese rock culture on screen for the first time. In particular, Cui Jian, China’s rock “godfather” was cast in the leading role. Knowing that the officials would not feel pleased with his project, Zhang Yuan shot the film on the run without bothering obtaining the permission from the Bureau. Later the post-production was completed in France with help from French Cultural Council. Beijing Bastard won awards at international film festivals and was distributed in western countries. The Film Bureau, irritated by this film’s international distribution, prohibited Zhang Yuan from filmmaking within China. Undaunted, Zhang Yuan co-directed a documentary The Square (Guang Chang, 1994) and won Jury Award at Hawaii Film Festival. His next feature Sons (Er’zi, 1995) garnered the Tiger Award in Rotterdam Film Festival.
The next project of Zhang Yuan was also completed with capital from the Europe. As the first gay independent film in China, Zhang’s EastPalace, WestPalace (Donggong Xigong, 1996) testified his resolution to give voice to the marginal groups in Chinese society. However, as his fifth feature film, EastPalace, WestPalace infuriated the censors and they confiscated his passport. Consequently Zhang Yuan was not able to be present when this film was screened at the 50th Cannes Film Festival.
Nevertheless, while Zhang Yuan’s filmmaking career seemed at risk in his homeland, his status as a film auteur has been greatly enhanced with the “critical capital” he accumulated throughout the European film festivals. Most importantly, the notorious “oppression” from the Film Bureau on the director and his film works further confirmed Zhang Yuan’s identity as a brave “dissident” and triggered the fervor for Chinese outlawed films in the West.
The following year 1998 turned out to be the transitional point of Zhang Yuan’s filmmaking, which from my point of view also heralded the starting point of the third stage of the Sixth Generation filmmaking. Zhang Yuan, acknowledging his “faults”, made an apology to the Film Bureau and adopted a cooperative attitude on his next project. The official then gave green light to his filmmaking again.
After his first within-system films Seventeen Years (Shiqi Nian, 1999), Zhang Yuan has been criticized for being “tamed” by commercialism and have “self-relegated” to a “compromising talent” (Cornelius, 108; Jaffee, 2004a). Later on, Zhang Yuan has directed I Love You (Wo Ai Ni, 2002), Jiang Jie (Jiang Jie, 2002) and Green Tea (Lu Cha, 2004), which suggest that the director has “betrayed” the dissident stance he was supposed to stick to and became a mainstream filmmaker whose trajectory serves as a negative example. For Valerie Jaffee, Seventeen Years is a “spineless capitulation to political forces” while Green Tea is already “a soulless appeal to the bourgeois market”. Jaffee even concludes, “Zhang Yuan’s career…indicates…that there are several ways an ex-underground director can earn opprobrium for ‘selling out’” (2004a: par. 14).
Jaffee’s concern with the Sixth Generation directors’ underground status and their “compromise” with the official has once again foregrounded the problematic issue of Western selection rationales regarding this generation’s film works.    

3.3 The (Mis) Reading of the Sixth Generation Cinema: the Politics of “Underground”
3.3.1 The Politics of Underground

There is a bewildering link between the Sixth Generation Cinema, banned films and western film festivals. While only several films by the Fifth Generation were banned (such as Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Blue Kite) in China, the quantity and scale of banned Sixth Generation films is quite considerable. By Jia Zhangke’s estimate, around 100 films that bypassed formal government approval have been made in Chine since 1999 (Jaffee, 2004b). In film scholar Zhang Xianmin’s research on banned feature films from 1992 to 2002, altogether around forty titles are listed in his incomplete catalog . At the same time, ironically, such a list of the Sixth Generation’s banned films also covers the winners at international film festivals.
Previous to his Silver Bear winner Beijing Bicycle (2001), Wang Xiaoshuai was already known to the West through his debut The Days (Dongchun de Rizi 1993), which gives a gloomy portray of a couple at the rocky edge of their marriage. With a shoestring budget of US$10,000, The Days was shot during weekends and the director’s friends were playing the leading roles. Even Wang himself admits that, if possible he’d like to remake this movie to “improve on the production values and technical things” because of its coarseness (Wang). However, banned in China, The Days was not only highly acclaimed at Italian and Greek film festivals, but was also selected by the New York Museum of Modern Art and by BBC as the one and only Chinese-language film in a list of the top 100 best films since the film industry was born.
Actually what the Sixth Generation directors were dedicated to, especially in their early career, followed a similar mode of independent filmmaking as their Euro-American young counterparts. It is undeniable that there are outstanding works among the independent productions. What seems unusual is that lots of independent films, even coarser and weaker than The Days, are favored and highly regarded at Western film festivals.
Unsurprisingly, as a Time Asia article on Sixth Generation Cinema admits,

…there is a temptation for Western viewers to scrutinize these films with a Chinese censor’s eyes, looking for political criticism or social irony in every frame…Some of the festival prizes given to Sixth Generation films seem like citations awarded for valor in the face of institutional myopia, rather than for cinematic achievement. And sometimes, the story behind a Sixth Generation work is more compelling than the story in it (Corliss, par. 14).

Corliss’s supposition, if not condescension, reveals one crucial reason why even the title of “underground film” seems irresistible to the Western festival circuit and film circles.
If we refer to the two aforementioned fundamental reading strategies for festival-goers in terms of textual understanding as proposed by E. Ann. Kaplan, the aesthetic dimension exhibited in the Sixth Generation Cinema is definitely light-years away from those “poetic” or “gorgeous” works by their predecessors. When it comes to the political dimension, the West tends to highlight the controversial works and consider them gestures full of political implication.
Among the Western intelligentsia, the talk of China’s within-system/underground film production is essentially directed to the political reality that China is a socialist regime. Paul. G. Pickowicz develops Miklos Haraszti’s critique of “velvet prison” and asserts that “the cultural strategy of the more mature and self-confident state socialist regime (plagues with economic problems) amounted to gently placing artists in a comfortable ‘velvet prison’”. In such a prison, the regime prefers to “flatter and bribe” artists and give them the chance to “wield a bit of power” or even enjoy certain freedom. What the regime asks for is the artists’ “loyalty (passive or active) to the state” (Pickowicz, 194-5). Although Pickowicz’s article mainly dealt with Chinese filmmaking in the late 1980s, his argument about Chinese cultural scene in post-Mao and particularly post-Tiananmen era, reverberating the established Western ideology, could still lend us insight in perceiving the dilemma the Sixth Generation now is facing.
For Pickowicz, the remarkable works by the Fifth Generation filmmakers are essentially similar to the late state socialist films in Easter Europe because they both registered defiant attitude towards the current regime. However, he also expresses one of the great ironies of the Fifth Generation films is that “these spellbinding experiments in ‘fine art cinema’ could not have been made without massive state subsidies”, therefore, these filmmakers turn out to be only willing workers in the velvet prison (204-5).
Within the framework of Pickowicz’s argument, the emergence and flourishing of the Sixth Generation’s out-of-system production definitely has been considered the bold effort to “break away” from the “velvet prison” of the socialist state. The independence from the state subsidies prevents the new generation from repeating the “ironies” that occurred to their predecessors. Such “intransigence” in the new generation, long expected, will naturally be wholeheartedly upheld in the West. In particular, any friction between the “underground” filmmakers and the censors will further legitimize the Western supposition of their anti-system stance.
In a nutshell, the Sixth Generation still cannot escape being interpreted as the Other by the West. Such misinterpretation is no other than the updated version of Orientalism which supposes that Chinese intellectuals are rebels from the “velvet prison”, for whom every act has its political implication. What the independent filmmakers are opposed to and what they are fighting for both register the Western ideology of democracy, civil society, human rights, progress and liberty.
Nevertheless, Pickowicz may not foresee that the bureaucrats’ “oppression” has indirectly “promoted” those underground films at film festivals. A banned indie-film from the socialism China arouses appetite to explore the dissident implication behind the realistic depiction. For some new directors, making an underground film is “a convenient way to get a debut film made with a reduced number of hassles and hurdles”. As reminded by Jaffee, there are films “uninspiring from a cinematic and narrative perspective” but received warm welcome at international festivals largely because of the marketability of the phrase “Chinese underground”. Jaffee is insightful in her argument that “…the act of making an underground film, or marketing a banned film, may be functioning less as a statement of a form of resistance than as a strategy—in this case, a strategy for the entry of aspiring filmmakers into an increasingly competitive field” (2004a:par. 6). With the critical capital collected at film festivals, a young director could secure healthy funding for a second feature film. “Independent filmmaker” became a role worthy of imitating, and the label of “underground film” became a faddish new tag for Chinese films.
Meanwhile, gaps of misunderstanding also exist between the filmmakers and the domestic film scholars, critics and especially the common audience. The popularity of those underground films at film festivals leads to the oversimplified belief that the Sixth Generation also shoots films in order to appeal to the Westerners in exhibiting the negative and controversial aspects of contemporary China. While part of the rebuke may be true, such a tendency to “demonize” the underground films also runs the risk of bypassing the artistic reality and neglecting the multilayeredness of significance in those serious indie-works. Furthermore, such a partial perception also draws our attention to the challenges art films face in domestic market. From my point of view, the will to dispel the two-folded misinterpretation both from the West and at home acts as a basic factor when those artistically ambitious Sixth Generation filmmakers decide to make above-ground films. 

3.3.2 Legitimization: Future of the Sixth Generation Cinema?

The present trend of the Sixth Generation filmmaking is that most banned films have been “thawed” and thus were sanctioned to be distributed in China. Meanwhile, leading figures of the “underground” directors Jia Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai, after Zhang Yuan, have been actively seeking recognition from the national Film Bureau and began to make their first “aboveground” films. For example, Wang Xiaoshuai shot his sixth feature, also the first aboveground film Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong, 2005) under the auspices of Shanghai Film Studio after the Film Bureau held a debate on his project and finally agreed to give him the permission. Afterwards the film won the award of Prix Du Jury at Cannes Film Festival 2005 and is expected to be released in China in August .
Valerie Jaffee believes the transformation of these independent directors indicates their determination to experiment and explore the possibilities of Chinese national cinema. However, such a maneuver, according to Jaffee, “is not merely an aesthetic, commercial, or even patriotic one” but “has important implications for Chinese politics” (Jaffee, par 4). Western consensus doesn’t hold an optimistic vision about Jia Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai’s transition. It is believed that for Jia and Wang, compared to what they owned as underground directors, the legal identity would cost them even more. Such concern is basically two-folded: first of all, it is warned that to make legal films, these directors have to be cooperative with the censors and authorities, which will compromise their artistic freedom. Secondly, after obtaining the authorities’ permit, ex-independent filmmakers like Jia Zhangke will be put to the test about the artistic and commercial merit of their works on a larger scale. Especially, considering the domestic market and the distribution system fraught with inefficiency and confusion, even the survival of their above-ground art films seems full of pressure and unforeseen risks.
The worry is not unreasonable. Before giving any speculation on the future of the Sixth Generation filmmaking and the possibilities that directors like Jia Zhangke will concede and sacrifice their independent spirit, I’d like to say that the legitimization has essentially resulted from the modernization and industrialization of Chinese cinema. The homogenizing force of the free market brings together the previously isolated or separated, which makes it impossible for the underground filmmakers to keep turning blind eye to the impact of their production mode and the frictions with the censors on China’s film industry. The reconnection with the domestic market cannot bypass the censorship. Such a process needs mutual efforts, and I see in Jia Zhangke and Wang Xiaoshuai their determination as responsible filmmakers: they are responsible for their own film career with an eye to the future of the Chinese national cinema.
At the same time, the government’s new policies have promised a freer and more relaxed filmmaking environment for the Sixth Generation directors. This time, the Film Bureau’s open-mindedness towards the former outlaws is not impulse either. Rather it is the outcome of China’s more-than-twenty years’ modernization and more importantly, it relates closely to the artistic as well as the commercial feats those Sixth Generation filmmakers have achieved internationally. It also displays China’s will to advance its participation in the globalization process. The official’s maneuver hence makes the directors eager to become part of the transition.        
If they remain dependent on the Western festival circuit for funding and distribution and are not accessible to the domestic audience except through pirated DVDs, these independent films will be trapped in a vicious circle in which they will still surrender to the pigeonholed interpretation. The underground mode may “protect” a film from certain risks, but in the long run, such a “protection” will also widen the gap between the reality the filmmakers aim to reflect and the people who are part of the reality. In this way, these directors may never be able to answer the question for whom their films are made, and who is supposed to be their audience, only the festival-goers, or also the ordinary Chinese. Insightful scholars like Valerie Jaffee have already figured out that the so-called Chinese “underground film” has already become a reproducible brand to sell the imagined reality of China. Such a production mode, like the ethnographic film, doesn’t provide a long-term pattern for the Sixth Generation, taking into account the changing environment of mainland filmmaking and the climate of transnational film production. 
It is clear now that the most daunting test comes more from the commercial fare from both foreign and particularly the domestic than from the censors. The industrialization of Chinese cinema cannot be achieved overnight; the future of art films is yet to be known. However, such a try may full of obstacles and disappointment, but to bring these aboveground films to the domestic market will present the audience a variety of choices besides the mainstream melodramas. It will not only promote the new generation’s art film and solidify the emerging art-house audience within China, but also encourage the degree of openness and heterogeneity in domestic film market, which may in turn help to cultivate favorable environment for the filmmakers’ further projects.