Comments of the Fifth Generation Directors

The directors of the fifth generation have created a generation of brilliance of China films. It not only completely changed the historical features of China's film tradition, but also fulfilled the decades-long dream of China filmmakers, realized the synchronous integration of China's films with the world, and achieved the early dreams of the film ancestors who "stood among the nations of the world". Their rise predicted the future and hope of China's films. It is they who make China films go to the world and the market, and create a new artistic atmosphere for China films. I believe that as long as the film directors in China are constantly striving for their own ideals and the film industry in China, one day we can integrate the elite cultural factors of films into the mainstream of mass culture, and China's "Hollywood" is not far away!

When Chen Kaige's The Promise was fooled by Hu Ge's nonsense, we couldn't help thinking of the pride of China film industry-the fifth generation director.

in may p>1978, Beijing film academy resumed enrollment. In September, 153 freshmen of grade 78 entered the director department, performance department, photography department, fine arts department and recording department of the Film Academy respectively. In July 1982, "Class 78" graduated. In 1983, "One and Eight" was finished. In 1984, Yellow Land was published. The "fifth generation film" thus made a grand appearance. The fifth generation of directors is a generation that grew up in troubled times. It can be said that they are the "products" of the Cultural Revolution, and their teenage years were deeply branded with the Cultural Revolution for ten years. It is also this experience that caused them to express their worries about the history and reality of China in the first 1 years and 15 years. For a long time before the new period, as a political tool or vassal, the film paid no attention to its special artistic laws such as form and language, and the artist's independent aesthetic personality was in a state of being restrained, and Chen Xiangyin became accustomed to it and was almost numb. Starting in 1983, in just four or five years, this group of new people of the fifth generation, with a spirit of breaking through the rigid artistic model, created "new movies" that once attracted world attention, such as Yellow Land, horse thief, black cannon incident, Red Sorghum and Late Bell. On the basis of their predecessors' artistic innovation, they further explored the performance potential of the film itself, forming a brand-new film form with sound and painting as the main expression. They have broad vision, open mind, emphasize the individualization of creation, and use unique film modeling language to express the complicated phenomena and deep philosophy in reality and historical life, trying to make the film achieve greater cognitive value and artistic charm, and hope that the audience can agree with their aesthetics and enter a deeper field of speculation. They have unique artistic ideas and styles: symbolism, fable, folk ritual, Yellow River, Loess Plateau and thinking about national character, and their films are also branded with strong emotional experience and humanistic color.

It seems that the fifth-generation directors have not gone smoothly on the road of commercial films, and some film critics have even begun to accuse them of being unable to lead the development of contemporary films in China. Their early films, such as Yellow Land, Red Sorghum, Farewell My Concubine, etc., all won awards at the World Film Festival and achieved good results. However, in the transition to commercialization, it is rare for their films to win awards again. For example, the works in recent years, such as Hero, House of Flying Daggers, Stabbing in Qin, etc., have pursued scenes and effects, invested a lot of money and added a lot of film special effects, but their effects always seem to make people feel "fly in the ointment". This may be a strange circle of directors in Chinese mainland today: there is no "depth" when there is a box office, but there is no guarantee of box office when there is "depth". Until the ambitious "Promise" of Kaige was smashed by a "blood steamed bread" of Hugo, the contradiction between personality thinking and box office pressure reached a peak! The director's filming is restricted by all aspects, and he should consider not only how to tell stories, but also how to form his own style, not only how to control the cost budget, but also whether he can cater to the tastes of the public and achieve better box office results. Although there is a more or less "gap" between their own personality style and business operation, the fifth-generation film directors in China have never given up their pursuit and exploration of the film. They use their own thoughts and efforts to continuously promote the progress of the film industry in China. In the new artistic exploration, directors not only maintain their previous artistic individuality, but also break the narrative style of traditional films, and express the artist's feelings and understanding of life by shaping typical images. At the same time, he tried to get out of the way of doggedly pursuing personal thoughts and emotional experiences in his early creation, which reflected the transfer and reconstruction of values of this generation of directors and showed new artistic creation trends. These "exploration films" broke through the boundary between high-level culture and low-level culture; It has absorbed some advantages of traditional realism and retained the merits of modernism. Dragged back the commercialization of the film, sublated the simplicity and shallowness of the traditional film and the difficulty and obscurity of the modernist film. Make "domestic" movies constantly rise to a new height and be accepted by the world.