THE DISTRIBUTION PROBLEM
Chinese cinema spans a century of extraordinary formal achievement across profoundly different political and cultural conditions. The West's awareness of it is thin and heavily skewed toward the internationally distributed art house films - primarily the Fifth Generation filmmakers who reached European festivals in the 1980s and 90s - at the expense of the much larger tradition behind and around them. This list corrects for that distribution history.
Three distinct traditions require separate treatment: the Fifth Generation (filmmakers who emerged from the Beijing Film Academy in the 1980s after the Cultural Revolution), the Sixth Generation (the underground filmmakers of the 1990s), and the contemporary cinema navigating censorship and international co-production simultaneously. Each tradition is doing something formally distinct, and the historical conditions that shaped each are part of understanding what the films are.
THE FIFTH GENERATION - THE FORMAL FOUNDATION
Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984): The film that announced the Fifth Generation and demonstrated that Chinese cinema was thinking about landscape, ideology, and the costs of revolution in ways no other national cinema was approaching. A Communist soldier collecting folk songs in 1930s rural Shaanxi. The landscape - shot by Zhang Yimou before he became a director - dominates the frame in a way that feels less like photography and more like an argument about the relationship between the individual and the historical forces that contain them. The film that made Chinese cinema internationally visible.
Raise the Red Lantern (Zhang Yimou, 1991): A woman joins a household as one of four wives. The ritual of the red lanterns - hung outside the wife who will receive the master's attention that night - becomes the film's formal system. Zhang's visual grammar here is his most disciplined: the symmetrical compositions, the repeated rituals, the colour as social architecture. The formal precision is the political argument; the system of the household is the system of the state, formal and beautiful and suffocating.
To Live (Zhang Yimou, 1994): The most emotionally direct Fifth Generation film and the one most explicitly about the cost of Chinese history to ordinary families. A family surviving the Cultural Revolution. Banned in China for decades. The formal warmth of the approach - realist rather than the stylised compositions of Raise the Red Lantern - makes the historical argument more immediate. The Cannes Best Actor prize for Ge You was correct.
Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993): Two Peking Opera performers across fifty years of Chinese history. The most formally ambitious Fifth Generation film in its historical sweep - the Cultural Revolution, the Japanese occupation, the Communist victory - and the most concerned with the question of what art can survive and at what cost. Shared the Palme d'Or with The Piano. Still one of the few Chinese films to win the top Cannes prize.
THE SIXTH GENERATION - THE UNDERGROUND
Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000): A performing arts troupe in Shanxi province across the 1980s, as China opens to the West and the world they grew up in dissolves. Jia's formal method - long takes, real locations, non-professional actors, the camera at a remove from the action - is the formal opposite of the Fifth Generation's visual drama. The argument is about what China's economic modernisation cost the people who lived through it as an involuntary experience rather than a political project.
Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006): The Three Gorges Dam displacement. Real locations being demolished around the actors. A film that is formally inseparable from its moment - made while the displacement was happening, the landscapes in the film subsequently underwater. The Golden Lion at Venice was correct.
Beijing Bicycle (Wang Xiaoshuai, 2001): Two teenagers in Beijing - one a migrant worker, one a middle-class student - in conflict over the same bicycle. A class argument about the city's contradictions, formally direct and emotionally precise.
THE CONTEMPORARY THREAD
The contemporary Chinese cinema thread is complicated by censorship and the pressure of international co-production. The filmmakers who can work freely within China face content restrictions; the filmmakers who work outside formal state approval face distribution restrictions. Bi Gan (Long Day's Journey Into Night), Diao Yinan (Black Coal, Thin Ice), and the younger generation of formally ambitious Chinese filmmakers navigate this tension in different ways. MUBI has become the most reliable streaming home for this thread in the UK.
The formal precision is the political argument; the system of the household is the system of the state, formal and beautiful and suffocating.