Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy: the genesis of China's fifth generation

Abstract

Memoirs from Beijing Film Academy: The Genesis of China's Fifth Generation, by Ni Zhen (translated by Chris Berry). Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. xviii + 233 pp. US$18.95 (paperback). The decision to translate a work is always an act of intervention-of filling gaps in scholarship and providing new contexts for debate. This translation by Chris Berry of Ni Zhen's recent book-length account of early formation of China's Fifth Generation filmmakers highlights questions not only of knowledgeoffering material and a perspective unknown to those beyond boundaries of Beijing Film Academy-but also very narrative through which this gets conveyed. Ni Zhen's approach toward his subject matter is as a legend that must be uncovered through a variety of stories detailing everyday negotiations, personalities and memories behind output of Beijing Film Academy. This approach facilitates an account that, while it remains focused on appeal of Fifth Generation filmmaking, also sits at centre of debates of, in Berry's phrasing, the way all history narrativizes factual data, as well as role that this process plays in deciding what and who gets spotlight (ix). hi its status as only book-length study of Fifth Generation filmmakers as they attained prominence in early and mid 1980s, it is interesting to observe how its particular reliance on generational memoir as both a narrative and research resource might influence our understanding of trends, changes and even ruptures of recent Chinese production. Ni Zhen is well aware of ways in which Fifth Generation filmmaking has been imagined as a narrative of great (or, for some, problematic) films focused around directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. As a former teacher at Beijing Film Academy, Ni bases his comments on both personal knowledge and extensive interviews with members of academy's 1982 graduating class that came to be known as core of Fifth Generation filmmaking. Such first-hand resources enliven this accessible and entertaining account of backgrounds of these young filmmakers whose lives were altered by Cultural Revolution. There are descriptions of circumstances surrounding their 1978 admission into newly reopened academy, variety of domestic and international modes (and conflicts) through which they were introduced to their craft, and materials and locations to which they had access in creation of their early projects-including production processes for two prominent early films of movement, One and Eight and Yellow Earth. Ni Zhen perceives Fifth Generation as a film movement whose source (p. 190) he seeks to unveil in a comparison with Italian Neo-Realism. Like auteurist theories that defined Italian directors as a coherent historical, aesthetic and cultural group, Memoirs from Beijing Film Academy sets its focus on a parallel group of individual filmmakers. …