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Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films.

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Reinventing China: A Generation and Its Films By Paul Clark Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2005 257 pp.: $20, paper; $39, cloth

The 1984 release of Chen Kaige's film Yellow Earth announced the emergence of a major new movement in world cinema. That movement, China's vaunted "fifth generation" of filmmakers--the title was assigned to them by critics and scholars based upon a retrospective re-examination of Chinese film history--is one of the cinema's most important "New Waves." Much as with German expressionism, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, and even the Hollywood "movie brats" of the 1970s, the fifth generation canon is comprised of the works of a group of young film artists with similar aesthetic and/or ideological concerns. The fifth generation, including such directors as Chen (Farewell My Concubine, The Emperor and the Assassin), Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, To Live, Hero) Tian Zhuangzhuang (Horse Thief Blue Kite), and several others less famous in the West, began (for the most part) as the first graduating class from the Beijing Film Academy after it re-opened in 1978 in the aftermath of the madness of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

However, as Paul Clark makes clear in his book, Re-Inventing China: A Generation and Its Films, much more united this group than a shared alma mater: "Most had been unable to complete their high-school educations during...

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