The Generation, Transformation, and Dissipation of the “Sixth Generation” Cinema in China: The Entropy Change of a Concept

1 Introduction: The Labeling of the “Sixth Generation”

As the ancient Chinese proverb goes: each generation boasts outstanding talents. Ten years after the rise of the Beijing Film Academy (BFA) graduates of 1977 and 1978 (including Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and Tian Zhuangzhuang), the so-called Sixth Generation, also known as the New Generation or Urban Generation, quickly marked its coming-of-age. With the emergence of films by the BFA graduates of 1985 and 1987, a group of filmmakers assembled. These include Lu Xuechang, Wang Xiaoshuai, Hu Xueyang, Liu Bingjian, Tang Danian, Lou Ye, Zhang Yuan, as well as late-comers such as Guan Hu, Li Xin, and Wang Quan’an. The tricky thing is that history does not necessarily progress according to linear temporality, especially when it comes to the label “Six Generation,” which was coined with the method of backward induction and generational periodization (Dai 2006, 349). Some old members/classmates who were cursorily counted in at the very beginning gradually drifted away while some new members joined in one after another, regardless of their educational or professional background. These include Jia Zhangke, who majored in Film Literature; the actor-turned-director Jiang Wen; Wang Chao, who used to be Chen Kaige’s assistant; the Centre Academy of Drama graduates such as Zhang Yang, Zhang Yibai, Shi Renjiu, and Jin Chen; and even Wang Guangli, who never had received formal training in filmmaking. They were shoehorned into the same category and shared the title of “pioneer filmmakers born between 1961 and 1970”^[1] or generally labeled as the “New Generation.”

The insiders initially used the term “Fifth Generation” to address each other^[2] and soon brought about a profound revolution of cinematic aesthetics in the 1980s. In comparison, the Sixth Generation has never been very homogenous since its advent in the 1990s, for the delicate coherence among its members is maintained mainly in their cultural identities/brands. For most of them, the title “Sixth Generation,” empowered by the naming conventions specific to film culture, is a source of energy and beckons to a crop of young directors. They joined in successively and brought in their creative impulses, producing a vibrant cultural community and marketing momentum. On the one hand, the Sixth Generation continuously extends its boundaries as a motley crew with a mixed cultural image. On the other hand, the differences among their foci, themes, attitudes, marketing approaches, and the ontological understanding of film as an art form are magnified and presented as a multiplicity of aesthetic orientations.

This is comparable to what Arthur Eddington observed: time’s arrow is a property of entropy alone. In the last two decades, while the so-called Sixth Generation or New Generation films constantly caught the public’s attention, the creators of these films manifested the typical characteristics of entropic change: starting randomly and spontaneously with creative impulses, then gradually moving into a period of stable aesthetic identity and self-consciousness, only to be followed by a broader range of fortuitous development. The evolution of the Sixth Generation, just like the entropic change during a fissure in the world of energy, seems to be an irreversible process of dissipation, “As entropy increases, then, this means a decrease in ‘available’ energy … Since according to the first law, energy can neither be created nor destroyed but only transformed one way—toward a dissipated state” (Rifkin 1980/1987, 30).

The conceptualization of the term Sixth Generation and the group of filmmakers it refers to has undergone three phases of development in two decades—explosion, transformation, and dissipation—eventually ending up in a contradictory termination, just like the final arrival of heat death in a thermodynamic process. Specifically speaking, the labeling of the Sixth Generation in the early 1990s was spontaneous, and there was some originality and authenticity to the group it tried to categorize. However, on the threshold of the new century, the label was collectively exploited, and people tried to transform its energy by integrating commercial, mainstream, or even international orientations into art-house films. Then during the gusher era of the Chinese film market, the label of Sixth Generation soon decomposed and dissipated during the commercialization and mainstreaming of their films, demonstrating the Mammonesque character of the film industry and its submission to various powers of monopoly.

2 The Generation of the Concept: The Energetic Explosion of Authentic Experiences (1990–2003)

“Sixth Generation,” “independent filmmakers,” and similar labels,^[3] originating from commentaries on the crop of new prominent directors by international film critics, were echoed by some young directors in China. Hu Xueyang (1992) stated that the students from the five classes of the BFA who graduated in the year 1989 are sixth-generation filmmakers in the Chinese film industry,^[4] though he later denied this. In a small seminar held by the BFA in 1995, Han Xiaolei, on behalf of the young directors, called for resistance against the use of the generation divide as a marker or badge for it devalued young people’s artistic individuality. Nevertheless, most of the young directors present showed indifference. As Wang Xiaoshuai observed in a meeting, “I do not think it is important to define whether we belong to the same generation or not. The new wave representatives in China also refused to be labeled the Fifth Generation at first yet still became the Fifth Generation eventually. So I think it is pointless to deny it now. Nobody knows what the future holds” (Pan and Zhuang 1995). After that meeting, directors like Lou Ye, Wang Xiaoshuai, and Guan Hu were addressed as the Sixth Generation.

Those young directors categorized by generation were characterized by its lack of a unified aesthetic canon^[5] ever since the day they were labeled. They were loosely bound and used to stand alone. Sixth Generation, as a title for them, was more like a “fake collar” (dickey) (Nie 2011) which they readily wear to various international film festivals. Ever since the coming out of Zhang Yuan’s Mom (Mama, 1990), the young filmmakers had gradually got used to this centrally distributed and easy-to-wear fake collar, which received their collective and tacit approval, later becoming a strategy to survive in the “cracks and fissures” (Hao 2005) opened up by the transformation of the Chinese film market.

The end of the twentieth century witnessed the collective outburst of spontaneous creativity of the Sixth Generation who drew their initial inspiration and energy from the accumulation of raw personal experiences. These outcast heroes remained estranged from the Chinese film apparatus during the transformation era. Determined to record and interpret their memories in their own way, they chose to present their lived reality with an autobiographical or semiautobiographical narrative. Films such as Dirt (Toufa luanle, 1994), Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong, 1993), In the Heat of the Sun (Yangguang canlan de rizi, 1994), The Days (Dongchun de rizi, 1993), and Quitting (Zuotian, 2001), based on the personal memories of a specific historical period, achieve deep emotional releases of offbeat adolescence through the presentation of raw and authentic experiences. The exhibition of marginal and fragmented bits of real life in Frozen (Jidu hanleng, 1996), Xiao Wu (Xiaowu, 1998), The Orphan of Anyang (Anyang ying’er, 2001), and Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao, 2002) undoubtedly boasts an overwhelming appeal of the time and avant-garde visuals. In terms of techniques, the Sixth Generation is marked by low budget production curbed by capital size, excessive direct shots taken indoors or in natural light due to inferior equipment, and the directors’ penchant for exceptional, long takes marred by artistic immaturity. The alternative and authentic outlook presented in the films of the Sixth Generation, distinctive from the grand and fictional narrative of the Fifth Generation, tore a hole in the then dreary cinematic aesthetics of the Chinese mainland. At the end of the 1990s, they took great joy in declaring the arrival of what Jia Zhangke called the “Era of Amateur Cinema.” With their toolkit upgrading from DV, DB to the HD video camera, the Sixth Generation quickly broke away from the tradition of elitist monopoly and footage fetish nurtured by the film academies and diligently practiced the freedom of speech dictated by Dogme 95 in order to gain an expressive space as broadly as possible in early Minor-Cinema spheres such as café or literary salons. From the spectator’s point of view, the Sixth Generation speaks to the multifaceted spiritual interests of the cultural communities of the young people in the reform era (Nie 2006). Their refreshing narratology differed from Hollywood’s conventional storytelling, while their artistic style was deeply influenced by the European avant-garde and neorealism, and their reflective camera work catered to the taste fostered by urban youth. These young filmmakers gathered under the banner of the Sixth Generation were uninterested in creating aesthetic spectacles with blockbusters. Instead, they dedicated themselves to pursuing China’s aesthetics of cinema verité while quenching the “spiritual thirst” yielded by an era of drastic transformation.

For the reasons discussed above, the film works of the Sixth Generation achieved a speedy accumulation of socio-cultural capital, which, despite not having been translated directly into box office receipts, did secure a distinctive and irreplaceable “authority endowed by social (mis)recognition” (Bourdieu 1986/1997, 196). Therefore, the Sixth Generation used to be upheld as the arrow of reform and innovation for Chinese cinematic aesthetics and acclaimed as rising stars at various international film festivals. Their filmmaking experiences are depicted as a legendary journey of the young generation, providing a vivid footnote to the internationally orientated record of the cultural transformation of Chinese society and marketization at the turn of the twenty-first century.

3 The Exploitation and Transformation of the Concept (2003–2008)

The overwhelming power of the early works of the Sixth Generation derives from the rawness and authenticity of individual experiences drawn out by the disorganized creative impulses. The cultural capital accumulated by the community of the Sixth Generation filmmakers neared its peak within a decade at the turn of the new century. Meanwhile, external forces shaped the creative work of Sixth Generation filmmakers with the invisible hand of the market. By the end of 2003, as “the ban was lifted,” these directors gradually outgrew the chaotic state in which each of them fought their own battles alone and entered a period of organized development when they consciously took advantage of mainstream market resources, cultural capital, and techniques. It is interesting to notice that by the time the Sixth Generation was officially embraced by the administrators, the dissolution of the “the generation rooted in the crack” also got started; the term Sixth Generation has since then begun to be used in the past tense, a historical concept which gives off “the anxiety of implications.” More young filmmakers swarmed into the domestic and international film market and branded themselves as the Sixth Generation, propelling its evolution into a hybrid concept. When the coherence within the generation is limited to the market value of a shared brand, the new era of Chinese film history characterized by the “generation-less” narrative came about in the new century (Jia 2006).

On November 13, 2003, the representatives of the Sixth Generation had a round of face-to-face communication with the Chinese administrative departments of films. This interaction produced a certain degree of consensus between the two sides, marking the official return of the young filmmakers to the system of the Chinese film market and fixed cultural identities, thus the collective transformation in their film styles from the direct expression of individual experiences and memories to the intense concern of the realities of social issues. In early 2004, the film Beijing Bicycle (2001) changed its Chinese name from Shiqi sui de danche (bicycle of a seventeen-year-old) into Zixingche (bicycle), passed the censorship, and acquired a public release. After that, melodramatic films with “artistic” touches emerged in large numbers. These included Kekexili (2006), The World (Shijie, 2004), Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong, 2005), Little Red Flowers (Kan shangqu hen mei, 2006), Curiosity Kills the Cat (Haoqixin haisi mao, 2006), Tuya’s Marriage (Tuya de hunshi, 2006), Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006), The Longest Night in Shanghai (Ye, Shanghai, 2007), In Love We Trust (Zuo, you, 2007), Lost, Indulgence (Mi an, 2008), etc. Such films generally focus on various social problems such as environmental protection, migration, housing demolition/relocation, and urbanization. The delicate alteration of traditional social values triggered by the rapid development of China facilitates and legitimizes the acquisition of the mainstream cultural identity and the market for the otherwise marginal films listed above. As Still Life won the Golden Lion Award for Best Film in the 63rd Venice Film Festival and Tuya’s Marriage the Golden Bear Award in the 57th Berlin Film Festival, the Sixth Generation suddenly became the most eye-catching brand inside the circle of medium/low budget domestic productions and among the community of young directors.

The domestic box office has now become the most significant stakeholder for the Sixth Generation. To bring into existence a true big-screen masterpiece and seek sufficient film screenings from the domestic distribution lines to fulfill the “cinema complex” is the long-cherished and collective dream of Sixth Generation filmmakers, especially after they took off the mantle of being pioneers. The period between 2003 and 2008 was marked by the creative transformation of the Sixth Generation. During this period, these young filmmakers took an audacious dive into the domestic film market with features centered on themes regarding “the old, the young, the marginal, and the poor.” However, they found themselves besieged, on the one hand, by commercial blockbusters, and on the other hand, by the low-budget production of Shanzhai films (characterized by cheap copy and low quality) which seized upon the exploitation of the film market. In the face of a disordered domestic film market, the Sixth Generation, with the badges of “art cinema” and “independent production,” despised the practice of creating cheap parodies. With leverage from their existing cultural capital and public opinion platform, they were more apt to knead and shape themselves into a hybrid entity embodying the mixed impulses of rebellion, negotiation, cooperation, and competition. In 2006, Jia Zhangke made a unilateral declaration of war against Zhang Yimou’s blockbuster Curse of the Golden Flower (Mancheng jindai huangjin jia, 2006) with his Still life. He made a poignant, pun-intended comment, “Few would care for the good people (The Chinese name of Still life is Sanxia haoren which means good people from the Dam of Three Gorges) in an age of gold fetish.” Wang Xiaoshuai also criticized commercial cinema at the Shanghai International Film Festival. Jia and Wang pointed to the difficult situation of the Sixth Generation films in the domestic context. Meanwhile, the verbal challenge they posed did catch the attention of the media and the public, which helped them gain more leverage during negotiations in pursuit of market share and governmental support. After the initial rebellion and negotiation, cooperation and competition naturally follow. The Sixth Generation share other directors’ craving for the market, and it is necessary for them to make certain adjustments as well. On the one hand, they ought to remain sensitive to marginal issues and social reality; on the other hand, they must explore new and innovative styles that orient to market tastes. Their films should be an art form accessible to the masses instead of the venting of an individual’s emotions.

The law of entropy change indicates that energy decreases or even entirely dissipates as the object grows or develops. While an increasing number of young directors entering the film market quickly become skilled at exploiting the Sixth Generation brand, finding new energy supplies and focal points of box office value for sustainable development becomes urgent and pragmatic. When dealings with mainstream distribution lines reach a dead-end, the international film festival network, including the Three Continents Festival in France, the International Film Festival Rotterdam in Netherland, the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada, the Locarno International Film Festival in Belgium, the San Sebastian International Film Festival in Spain, and the Tribeca Film Festival in the US, etc., remain great options for many young directors with dreams of internationalization. Some established filmmakers even openly accepted offers from foreign film festivals or foundations and became “culturally adopted.” In addition, some international film studios, such as Fortissimo Film Sales, frequently cooperate with Sixth Generation directors and producers, becoming their overseas distributor and agent (Ma 2009). Having the whole process of fundraising, distribution, and cost recovery overseas may sound like a perfect plan in theory. The Sixth Generation, however, did not get very far with this approach of “extracorporeal circulation.” Faced with the less than satisfactory operational situation of the art-house cinemas in the west, the Sixth Generation generally struggles on the market.

Apart from running around from one international film festival to another, the Sixth Generation directors are also actively seeking domestic commercial sponsorships to complement the box office revenue. Relying on experience accumulated from years of shooting commercials, most of them are able to accomplish the tasks listed on the “order” from a sponsor. In exchange, the highly acclaimed rawness and authenticity of lived experiences in their films are held hostage by the market. For example, the producer of the film Useless (Wuyong, 2007), submitted by the master of the Sixth Generation, Jia Zhangke, to the 45th New York Film Festival for exhibition, is the owner of the fashion brand Useless depicted in the film. He hired Jia Zhangke as the second director to shoot a documentary recording the “grand occasion” of his wife Ma Ke, a fashion designer, being invited to attend Paris fashion week. The opening chapter of Useless provides a faithful account of the brand’s garment factories in Zhuhai and flagship stores in Guangzhou. Jia focused his lens on the scenes of workers laboring on the assembly line with medium shots with almost no dialogue at all. The second chapter recorded Ma Ke’s fashion show held at a gallery named Joyce in Paris. These are the scenes dictated by the “order.”

Suddenly after that, the focus of the lens makes an unexpected return to Jia Zhangke’s “postage stamp of Yoknapatawpha,” the small city of Fenyang in Shangxi Province, which is the cradle for Jia’s aesthetics and also the shooting location of the film Platform (Zhantai, 2000). The city of Fenyang, like the Yoknapatawpha County for Faulkner, has an eternal charm of vivid experiences over Jia. Maybe even Jia himself realized the absence of logic connection behind the jump cut, so a monologue of Ma Ke was inserted here, “These are exactly what I opted for, places very remote from the cities, places that are hard to get to … when you go to such places and see how the people live, it seems to me a bit like recovering a lost memory, you gradually start to remember things you once felt.” She was then driving on a dusty mountain road, wishing to glean new fashion ideas from the strangeness of country life. While showing how alienated she is from dominant materialistic values, this exploration did not get anywhere before the character disappeared from the film. Soon after that, inductive questions are addressed to the local people during an interview conducted at a tailor shop in the county by the director himself (with only voice on-camera), who tried to justify the unnatural switch to the scenes of the coal mines of Shanxi through the interviewee’s claim that he “used to be a tailor and now works in a coal mine.” With a structure of syllogism, this film tries to close the gap between the underclass and the capitalists by installing a mode of Jiaist thinking, which makes the symbolic gesture of seeking the global significance of the labor and sweat of Chinese workers and salvation in the form of universal humanist care. The friendly and warm interaction between the people on the two sides of the camera deliberately dilutes or even masks the exploitation and oppression that laborers at the bottom of the global industrial chain have to endure. They no longer accommodate the authentic and explicit attributes as they used to in the early films of Jia Zhangke.

The bundling of the label of the Sixth Generation to the “ordered movies” was first practiced by the film Useless and then 24 City (Ershisi cheng ji, 2008), with the former named after a sponsor’s clothing brand and the latter the name from a real estate building. The incredible power of capital does entitle the directors to more production opportunities. Nevertheless, without a fully developed understanding and reflection of the capital energy, the directors’ sneaky effort of patching fragments of personal effects into the film is hardly effective but seems paradoxical and artificial. At this point, the sentimental undertone of the directors only works as a narrative device to catch the eyes; some are even diagnosed as emotional selling points at the service of the sponsors.

It is proven by the fact that even though the strategy of overseas distribution and marketing, as well as customized filmmaking, seem to be the winning formula for the Sixth Generation who refused to be box office flops, it may well lead to the corruption of the Six Generation’s independent identity. At the preliminary stage of the industrialization of the Chinese film market, these young directors, on the way to becoming the true mainstays in the production of low/medium budget films, are in urgent need of a clear understanding of the interests and relations among the motley crew of investors. They have to mediate among the investors, the audiences, and governmental administrators for a sustainable future of filmmaking.

4 Energy Transformation and Genre Film Practice (2009–2010)

While exploiting the generational labels, the Sixth Generation is fully aware that mutual leverage and collaboration lead to the high road of energy transformation, resource sharing, and win–win development. We notice that Wang Xiaoshai guest-starred as an unscrupulous merchant in Jia Zhangke’s film The World while Jia himself made a guest appearance as a robber in Wang Guangli’s Karmic Mahjong (Xuezhan daodi, 2006), in which he was caught by a policeman played by Wang Xiaoshuai. Meanwhile, the protagonist in Wang’s early film The Days, Liu Xiaodong, a painter, also starred in Jia’s documentary film Dong (2006) and played himself. Later on, he even became Jia’s curator. Moreover, the opening scenes from Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (Suzhou he, 2000) were directly spliced into Jia’s documentary I Wish I Knew (Haishang chuanqi, 2010). The Sixth Generation filmmakers scratch each other’s back and form a loose-knit community of interests to confront the structural imbalance of the box office market in which blockbusters hold sway.

In the year 2009, when “Shanzhaiism” went rampant nationwide, the transformation of the Sixth Generation kicked off again. This time they were leaning on genre film and made “high copies” of the Hollywood commercial films and the mode of mainstream filmmaking. However, films such as Da Da’s Dance (Dada, 2008), Chongqing Blues (Rizhao Chongqing, 2010), I Wish I Knew, Driverless (Wuren jiashi, 2010), and Apart Together (Tuanyuan, 2010) were accused of “a halfway transformation and an unalterably stubborn temper.” As exemplified in the extreme case of Zhang Yuan’s new feature Da Da’s Dance, which constantly reflects the films of He Jianjun’s Postman (Youchai, 1995), Zhang Ming’s In Expectation (Wushan yunyu, 1996), and Wang Chao’s Luxury Car (Jiangcheng xiari, 2006). Da Da’s Dance is like a narrative and aesthetic return to the early works of the Sixth Generation focused on urban youth: featuring a predetermined fate of running away, a banal plot dominated by the salvation of the peeper, and an everlasting and depressing dream of adolescence. The sluggish pace, together with the lack of nondiegetic music and the stage manners of the nonprofessional actors, makes it difficult for the mass market to embrace and digest its aesthetics. The lack of experiences of the Sixth Generation directors was thus fully exposed, and the following question came naturally: why is it so difficult for the Sixth Generation directors to step out from the initial stereotype of coming-of-age stories based on their memories and experiences to stride into the new creative space and establish a more intimate aesthetic that could connect with a broader audience?

If we take a retrospective look at the early works of Sixth Generation directors, we can see that the style they adopted is out of their own choice and persistence, and their education prepared them enough for the pursuit of alternative genres of narrative, which can speak to their interests. Wang Xiaoshuai’s feature Beijing Bicycle shows his mastery of the Hollywood way of story-telling. However, Chongqing Blue, so far the most commercialized work of his, was dismissed from the 63rd Cannes Film Festival for being “too commercial.” Meanwhile, the investors raised their suspicion toward Wang’s transition into the business arena, “Is there anything commercial about this film?” After all these confusion and controversies, Wang then resorted to lobbying for the label of “film with a conscience.” From art cinema to commercial cinema, from “serious film” to “film with a conscience,” these directors have to be “transformers” and change their publicity gimmicks, artistic rhetoric, and moral arguments. Their history resembles adolescence, riddled with complaints and refusals.

Chongqing Blue absorbed much energy that commercial films usually boast, such as a star-studded cast, a cruel-youth model, and the emphasis on the depiction of psychologically thrilling elements or salvation narratives, etc. However, the energy was only shared by very few chapters while the rigid pace of the art-house films could not be wholly given up. As a result, the plots were not organized properly, and the logical connections were extremely far-fetched. Without any explanation of why he abandoned his family for 14 years, a father abruptly got affectionate after the unnatural death of his son and put on a show of Rashomon to reproduce the thrilling moment when his son kidnapped a hostage and was shot to death. In the flashbacks, we saw the son abducting his younger brother, whom he had never met before—but how did he find his father’s new home in a new city? How did he manage to abduct his little brother? There is no account of this uncommitted crime in the film. Like in stage plays, the dialogue-based narrative avoids the detailed description of the emotional struggle in the characters’ minds, while static and lyrical images break the flow of the shots. In the end, the father finds the hostage played by the star Fan Bingbing, and they begin to recall the memories of the last 5 hours of his son’s life. By then, his son, a vaguely outlined figure with a blurry existence, suddenly returns to the center of the narrative and finally completes the plot by turning into the captor in the fantasy of a female hostage with Stockholm syndrome. This artistic penchant for mystification significantly jeopardizes the market appeal that the genre-film elements endow. Indeed, it may not be the directors’ most significant commitment to pandering to the popular taste. Instead, the mission to create a space in which the audience can fill in the blanks, have reflections, and even nourish an oppositional ideology may well top a director’s agenda. The reality is that without an audience, a film may never be screened.

Some Sixth Generation directors embark on the path of “high copy” and take lessons from Hollywood blockbusters. Zhang Yang, director of Driverless, positions himself as a “cash-cow director” and declares his “rejection of artistic approaches.” In the film, he tackled a broad spectrum of hot issues in urban life with a Hollywood-style narrative structure with multiple storylines and parallel montage/crosscutting. All the characters and clues are eventually integrated with a very contingent scene, reaching a happy ending. From the quintuple construction of five parallel stories in Spicy Love Soup (Aiqing malatang, 1997) to the multiple narratives in Driverless copied from Paul Haggis’ Crash (2004), Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), and Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Zhang’s interests in imitating the multiple narrative structures of the Hollywood blockbusters persists, for it not only casts a reflection upon “the clashing of human nature” with the contingency and complex of paralleled plots (Puttnam and Watson 1997/2001), but also demonstrates a value that encourages vision, gumption, ambition, and development. As a high copy of the Hollywood films, Driverless does bring together all the characters from their separated stories. Unlike the logical correspondence and effective interaction between the theme and the plots in Hollywood productions, however, the assembly of the characters in Driverless was achieved merely by a static setting: a terrible traffic jam after snow on Chang’an Boulevard forced all the drivers to stop their cars and stepped out onto the snow-covered ground. Zhang’s way of winding up the stories by holding them on a big platter shows his clumsiness in imitating his Hollywood counterparts, not to mention accomplishing a localized refinement of their narrative skills in genre films.

Some directors try to attain creative transformation by recounting a widely-known history. City of Life and Death (Nanjing, Nanjing, 2009) and Cow (Dou niu, 2009) demonstrate the missions national history can confer to the films. As a remarkable synthesis of individual innovation and shared memory of national history, Guan Hu’s Cow serves as a riposte to the popular view that the Sixth Generation “is inept in presenting the grand history.” In A Thorough Understanding of Life excerpted from Chuang Tzu, a good craftsman is portrayed as one who pays no attention to rewards and gains, and refuses to be distracted by critics, so the match between his natural disposition and the natural disposition of the object can be achieved. In the same way, the director of Cow remains faithful to the raw experiences of individuals and locates the juncture that fits the pursuit of the authenticity of the national history into his spiritual agenda.

Guan Hu rose to fame with his feature Dirt which glows with the rebellious energy of young rockers. Eight years later, he took the order and shot a customized propaganda film, Eyes of a Beauty (Xishi yan, 2002), for the city of Zhuji in Zhejiang Province. Though shot as an ordered production, the film still maintains a certain artistic standard. However, the director seemed to disappear from the domestic film circuit and switched to the field of TV dramas and the production of television movies. As a by-product of the TV drama series Yimeng (2009), Cow revived the long-abandoned theme of the Anti-Japanese War and gained an unrivaled reputation among all the Chinese films from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the mainland. It sets a great example of the representation of the national history for the Sixth Generation filmmakers. Like the search for the inner soul of an individual, Guan Hu dug deeply into the villages of northern China. The cultural and spiritual essence of traditional China that circulates in the remote mountain areas courses through the vessels of the film, laying the groundwork for characters’ personality, behavior, and detailed plots, becoming what Hegel called “a unity perfused with vigor.”

Among the outward market practices of the Sixth Generation, Jia Zhangke, the pioneer in the troupe, is undoubtedly the most active one. He has hunted for overseas funds and turned to domestic investors; after taking orders and producing customized films for them, he collaborated with the mainstream power and tried to take the safe path of making a customized film for official apparatus in order to accumulate resources for the shooting of the blockbuster Zai Qing Chao; His resume as a filmmaker includes almost all the possibilities that the Sixth Generation directors have ever explored so far. Even before the shooting started, his documentary I Wish I Knew had gained unparalleled privileges, such as the sponsors of state-owned enterprises, promises of screening made by the main cinemas in Shanghai, and a contract that enables the film to run continuously in Shanghai Expo. Nevertheless, the box office receipt was still bleak. The 18 interviews in I Wish I Knew converge into big cinematic disarray while two of them themed on the enormous historical transition in 1949 manifest the speculative nature of the film. In order to present the old Shanghai before the regime of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the director first interviewed the daughter of the legendary gang leader Du Yuesheng and got a recount of how Du fled from Shanghai on the eve of the national victory; the next interviewee, martyr Wang Xiaohe’s daughter recalled the heroic sacrifice of her father as a brave soldier right before the big day of liberation. This is Jia’s clever gimmick to accommodate both the dissolute and the mainstream: on the one hand, the dissolute was captured since the anecdotes of the sinister gangsters in the upheaval of old Shanghai contributes to the mysterious atmosphere; on the other, the mainstream orientation remains, and the narrative always leans toward the ideology of the final winner. Meanwhile, there is an actress who “time travels” through the different settings like an “ultrasymbolic Ulysses” (Mao 2010), confusing and pointless. Bearing no name or relevance to the 18 interviewees, she walks silently in the sun and the rain. When she stands still in front of the camera in a plunging neckline and thin blouse, all wet from the rain, this no-less-than erotic performance surpasses what the narrative necessitates. The director is undoubtedly the most confident interpreter of his thoughts and ideas on filming; perhaps Jia was only imitating/paying tribute to the classic combination of Federico Fellini and Giulietta Masina, Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Bellucci, as well as Yasujiro Ozu and Setsuko Hara. No matter how bewildering and complicated his film is, he does not seem to be bothered by the fact that “a crop of so-called film critics who are not mentally or intellectually prepared will be scared off” (Yaolingyao 2010). To this point, the creative space that the mainstream yields to directors has finally dissolved in the blind confidence of the master style.

The evolution of the Sixth Generation resembles the entropy change in thermodynamics. After the dissipation of creative energy and the over-exploitation of generational labels, these young directors find it impossible to go back to the rawness and authenticity that once characterized their creation. However, in the process of entropy change, the dissipated energy does not just vanish; it turns into radiance, undergoes a transformation, and becomes regenerated in another form. So do the directors. Ten years into the new century, the Sixth Generation, though faced with the dire reality of a market that has been torn apart, has converted into an important cultural radiation source, exerting a persistent and effective influence on various derivative films, such as People Mountain People Sea (Ren shan ren hai, 2011), the prize-winner of the Venice film festival in 2011, Walking on the Wild Side (Lai xiaozi, 2006), which was awarded in the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2006, and Mr. Tree (Hello! Shu xiansheng, 2011), the winner in the Shanghai International Festival in 2011.

Strictly speaking, Cai Shangjun, the director of People Mountain People Sea, does not necessarily belong to the Sixth Generation, but for many years he had been a screenwriter/collaborator of the established Sixth Generation director Zhang Yang. Besides, the film has maintained a “family resemblance” to the Sixth Generation’s filmmaking in plot and characterization. For example, the atrocious contractor’s evil scheme under the coal mine is a dead ringer of the violence under the shaft in Blind shaft (Mang jing, 2003). What’s more, the characterization and camera language used to portray Lao Tie, the protagonist, is almost identical to that of the role of Han Sanming in Still Life, especially in the costumes and motion shots of the characters. Even the stereotypes of the Sixth Generation held by the International Film Festival circuit during the film selection—the low light shooting, low audiovisual quality, and the dearth of dialogue—was intentional replicated: “a slow-paced film of fixed shots, presenting the sad lives of dying people, with very bad audio quality and obscure subtitles” (Zhang 2010, 79).

The director of Walking on the Wild Side and Mr. Tree, Han Jie, is a member of Jia Zhangke’s team and used to be the assistant director in Jia’s films such as The World, Still Life, Useless, and 24 City. The artistic positioning of Jiaist films enables him to shun the narrative structure of the traditional commercial films, though his brand has been fully commercialized. The problem is that the Jiaist operation of the “extracorporeal circulation” can hardly be replicated; thus, it has little reference for the other directors. With the role of producer instead of director in Walking on the Wild Side and Mr. Tree, however, Jia managed to share his brand effect with his team. Jia initiated a series of activities aiming to support the younger directors and named it the “Add Wings” project, from the Yulu (means “the journey of words”) campaign sponsored by a Scottish whiskey brand Johnnie Walker in 2010 to the “Add Wings” project launched by Xstream Pictures, it is easy to tell Jia’s hope, just from the names of the project, of breaking through the confinement of “a film of one’s own” and building a system of film production around himself. The “Jiaist thinking,” though it has a humble start, may well be the Archimedean point in gaining leverage for the Chinese art-house production.

5 The “Micro-era” and “Micro Reality” of the Film (2011 and Later)

Just as Oswald Spengler’s historical insight indicates, “The history of each civilization runs its cycle consisting of birth, maturity, and perishment, just like life itself” (Rifkin 1980/1987, 55). The evolution of the concepts and labels generated around the Sixth Generation has the same trajectory. With reference to the knowledge of “entropy change,” we can map the logic connections among the different periods in the Six Generation’s filmmaking history and delineate their dissipational way of creation based on the rawness of experiences in the 1990s, as well as their burgeoning interactions with the mainstream market, commercial capital, and international film festival after the cultural “ban-lifting” at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The Sixth Generation filmmakers, subject to the conflict between art and commerce, fell victim to the structural contradictions in the current film market of China. Confronted with a market ecology dominated by the box office receipt and the monopoly of mainstream distribution lines, the term “Sixth Generation” in its traditional sense as a label for a particular group of homogeneous filmmakers has reached its end by self-dissolution. Situated in an age marked by the historical divide between the planned economy and the market economy and the radical shift from the former to the latter, and standing in the hallway leading to the overall transition to new media or even the new media of the global culture, the Sixth Generation, together with every detail of its existence has formed a unique scenery in the era of social transformation, both as a flag and as a millstone bidding farewell to the past.

Nevertheless, termination does not necessarily come in the form of heat death. This group of young directors who have found themselves in a unique position in the history of Chinese film may well be capable of converting their energy with a new platform of streaming media; hence a distinctive “micro-era” of film ensues in the context of the new media.

There seems to be an innate affiliation between the new media and the Sixth Generation film works, which, ever since the early days of big-screen and celluloid film has been acknowledged as having “Small-Screen Syndrome” (Ma 2009). That is to say, they are more ready to spread via small screens and streaming media. When the majority of the Sixth Generation filmmakers are frustrated by the mainstream distribution system, the streaming media technology is developing at a stunning speed. The prevalence of the technology of P2P file-sharing and downloading quickly rules out the pirate market. The online sharing of audiovisual files without copyright offers a cheap and popular alternative to consumption in cinemas. In 2005, Zonbo Media marched into the new business areas featuring new media in the form of internet, mobile phone, and mobile platforms. The company produced Focus: This Moment (Zhe Yike, 2015) as the first mobile film collection in China and originated the concept of “Bokee Film.” The ensuing year of 2006 was named “Year One of the P2P Based Stream Media” with an array of mainstream Internet video service providers basing themselves on the P2P technology, joined to the distribution system one by one. This enriches and challenges the traditional marketing approaches at the same time.

It is relatively more probable that the major breakthrough that truly shakes the ontological status of the big-screen aesthetics and the traditional industrial structure derives from the forceful intervention into content production by the online economic entities. In September 2008, one of the top-ranking online video-streaming companies Tudou launched its HD channel “Heidou” in addition to the basic video-sharing service, marking its official entry into the field of licensed and professional content to which it has full copyright. Suppose the High Definition strategy deployed by Heidou foregrounds the exclusiveness of the video resources and the company’s image as a high-caliber and legal distributor. In that case, it is about time that the top video websites grew tired of standing at the end of the queue as the traditional powers of the film industries dole out the soup. They would like to lay their hands on the source of the industry and join in the competition of every phase. A decade into the new century, the two biggest video streaming companies of China, Tudou and Youku, both declared their plans of collaboration with mainstream institutions of film culture, such as Central Picture Cooperation. The branch of which signed a contract for the “Young Directors Film Production Project” and promised to select talents from the Paike (shutterbugs who shoot videos and share them on video websites) of Tudou and provide them with both financial support and guidance on scriptwriting. It also established a “strategic partnership” with Youku while announcing its future plan of investing tens of millions of RMB to coshoot a blockbuster consisting of 10 shorts, which is expected to be shown online and in cinemas simultaneously (Wu 2010). On May 27 in 2011, the first microfilm festival was launched in Beijing by NetEase. “The Era of Video” is dawning. It showcases the “brand new power of the originality of the Chinese online entities” and brings out more story themes and aesthetic experiences. The model of traditional film or TV production will be profoundly altered. Meanwhile, all the rising powers of video websites take great interest in enlisting the established directors of the Sixth Generation to be the mentors for the “Video Generation” and inviting them to participate in the selection and training of young directors within various campaigns. This enables the Sixth Generation to act upon the cinematic ecology in another way.^[6]

The reality is so ironic: as soon as the Sixth Generation of the big screen fully disassembled, they were given a route of retreat from this doomed battle by becoming mentors for the “Video Generation.” Given the hurried wrap-up of the Celluloid Era marked by Eastman Kodak, the 131-year-old film pioneer’s filing for bankruptcy protection on January 19, 2012, the Sixth Generation directors seem to be visionary in making this choice. If the cinematic aesthetics of the first to five generations of Chinese filmmakers joined a canon via the big screen, then the way for the Sixth generation to become classic may depend on the omnipotence of the new media.

From the online video, podcast to the trendy microfilm, the “micro-era” media context seems to be nourishing for the multifaceted extension of the Sixth generation in its grass-roots narrative and “Aesthetics of the People.” However, it remains to be seen how much intellectual energy it boasts. “Computer technology, in other words, has not yet come close to the printing press in its power to generate radical and substantive social, political, and religious thought. If the press was, as David Riesman called it, ‘the gunpowder of the mind’ the computer, in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind” (Postman 1992/2007, 67). From the perspective of Genesis, online videos and audio blogs thrive on the spontaneous impulses of audiovisual creativity and alluding to the free expression and idea-sharing, that is, the UGC (User Generated Content). While microfilm entails more commercial commitments from the capital market, microfilms such as Kan Qiu Ji (2011, directed by Jiang Wen), Shi Nian (2010, directed by Jiang Zhangke), Shao Sheng Liao Liang (2011, directed by Wang Xiaoshuai), Lenovo for Love (Ai de lianxiang, 2011, produced by Jia Zhangke), Gan Bu Gan (2012, produced by Zhang Yibai), Zui Mei Hao De Shi Guang (2011, produced by Lu Chuan), Soul of the Ultimate Nation (Qiji shijie, 2007, directed by Ning Hao) are all disseminating hidden commercial messages to the benefits of the respective economic entities^[7] like Canon DV, Modern Weekly, The Football Association of the People’s Republic of China, Lenovo, the Happy Girls show, Tencent Video and The 9 limited. Ever since its advent, or even when it was just conceived as an idea, microfilm is primarily deemed as the gold mine for the media to kick off another round of the capital game.^[8]

Even so, the Sixth Generation directors are still racing to acclaim and celebrating the coming era of microfilm in the 10th year of the twenty-first century, just like their warm embrace of DV in the 1990s. Compared to traditional film, microfilm bears the advantages of lower budget, richer themes, fewer limitations, faster spreading, and a more casual mood of the creators (Sun 2011). This gives the new media overflow effects in its value (Levinson 2009/2011). After tens of millions of online sharing, forwarding, or comments, the production process has already created a huge crowd of onlookers in the virtual world. While the reform of the film rating system is still indefinitely delayed within the current traditional film apparatus and the segmentation of the market greatly boosts a burgeoning business, the directors do count on microfilm, as the virtual imagined community, to promote the effective development and collective sharing of the video market of new media.

Accordingly, the Sixth Generation directors who used to be attached to lengthy drama or documentaries together with the “Derivative Generation,” try to use microfilm to reapproach the “micro reality” of contemporary Chinese society. These micro and detailed realities are usually represented with a youthful or nostalgic touch, such as the sentimental reminiscence about youth and love of the people born in the 1970s in Cry Me a River (He shang de aiqing, 2008) and Old Boys (Lao nanhai, 2010), or the preach like “a bad student at the school, a big villain in the world” imposed with the twisted value of the post-80s generation in Red Scarf (Hong ling jin, 2011); The aspirations that Jiang Laiyou (a homophone of promising future) and Zheng Qianhua (a homophone of making money) have for the future was sometimes disturbed by their resentments and envy towards the “promiscuous rich princelings” in I Wanna Get Married (Wo yao jiehun, 2011); while a long take that lasts for several minutes in Hold there! Mortgage Slave (Hold zhu! Fangnu, 2011) foregrounds the confusion of urban youth towards intimidating housing prices. The movies listed above give us a timely update on the sporadic recounts marked by the grass-root discourse (Ch’iao 2007, 14). They also repeatedly verify Jia Zhangke’s view of “an age of changes.”^[9] With a toolkit endowed by the new media, countless “migrant-worker filmmakers” try to register the delicate alterations in epictime with their “vagrant film” (Han 2006). While seeking beyond the grand discourse to find the most comfortable form of audiovisual expression, they accomplish narratology from what Benjamin acknowledged as the “interior space.” The microfilms that populate virtual communities on the internet cultivate the defensive posture and try to create a space temporarily cut off from the world. However, as Benjamin put it, “the space disguises itself,” though it maintains “unconscious retention of a posture of struggle and defense” (Gunning 2003), ultimately the interior cannot withstand the exterior; it can only transform the nature of its looming invasion optically.

In this context, whether the still-shallow conceptual integration of the Sixth Generation directors (and the latecomers) and microfilm could give rise to a new screen/video aesthetics of the “micro-era” is overdetermined. It depends not only on the development of boundless video-sharing and interactive technologies but also on whether the directors, as the creative subjects, can hold on to the “realistic lightning” (Zhan and Yu 2003, 118) that used to be their hallmark.