Talk Next Tuesday by Journalist Karen Ma On China's Fifth Generation Filmmakers

Chinese filmmaking has traditionally been divided into generations – with the so-called “Fifth Generation” that emerged in the 1980s being perhaps the most well known to foreigners.

The title was given to those directors like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, who were among the 153 students to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy, China’s national film school, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.

Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) began a movement that his classmates, including Zhang helped push along. Films like Chen’s Farewell My Concubine and Zhang’s Red Sorghum swept top prizes at coveted film festivals and catapulted them into international renown.

Even though they are still active today – Chen is currently shooting the Legend of the Cat Demon (妖猫传) and Zhang's The Great Wall (长城) starring Matt Damon comes out soon, they are generally considered to be past their prime.

Nowadays, even the People’s Daily is pining for the heydays of the Fifth Generation filmmakers while deriding the woeful quality of today’s films which they see as subpar and too crassly commercial.

To explain all of this, Chinese-American author and journalist Karen Ma is giving a talk next Tuesday at the Courtyard Institute at 7.30pm on the Fifth Generation filmmakers who she dubs "China's Accidental Filmmakers.”

Ma’s talk will cover how many of that generation stumbled into filmmaking largely by chance  and explains how their background and experience informed their early filmmaking. She will also talk about why their films attracted so much international acclaim at the time and why they seem to have lost their edge lately.

A longtime film critic for the Asahi Evening News, Ma is also the author of Excess Baggage, a novel about a Chinese family's struggle in Tokyo during the 1990s. She currently works as a lecturer of film and culture at The Beijing Center.  

Tickets for "Accidental Filmmakers: China's Fifth Generation and Their Avant-garde Artistic Movement" cost RMB 50 or RMB 30 for RASBJ members. Email events@rasbj.org and write "Karen Ma talk" in the subject header to reserve your spot.

Image: danielgarber.files.wordpress.com (still from Yellow Earth)