Film Alert 101: Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6(47) - China

Saturday, 31 January 2026

Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6(47) - China - Part 1: Mapping Chinese Cinema -

Jason McGrath has brought a new perspective to Chinese cinema history in “Chinese Film” published in 2022 subtitled “Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age,” its origin in an observation made to him by Tom Gunning that such a study had never been done. As McGrath observes in the introduction, this neglect was despite the fact that it had been widely acknowledged “that realism was the master signifier of modern Chinese aesthetics for most of the last century with several landmark studies of realism in modern Chinese literature” (p.3). While McGrath explains that the plan for the book changed greatly over time he further acknowledges that what remained constant is “the conviction that questions of, or claims for, realism constitute a conceptual thread along which one can string together a cogent and useful, though obviously not, comprehensive history of mainland Chinese cinema” (ibid).

“The power of realism in the cinema is variable and unpredictable, residing as much in the viewer and the viewing situation as in the film, as much in the context as in the text […] Realism is thus literally a credo of inscribing the real, where credo can indicate anything from a set of techniques or conventions to a full-fledged aesthetic ideology.” (ibid). McGrath adds that “for Chinese artists, realism was intimately linked to modernity itself, in particular to the concepts of a modern nation and its citizenry.” Chinese intellectuals of the early 20th century, in response to the imperialist aggression of the West, believed that “a modern realist style had to replace the more stylized aesthetics of traditional Chinese literature, drama and visual art.

Cinematic Realisms “Inscribing the Real”

The categories sketched in what follows are meant to be neither exhaustive nor neat divisions; they are intended to categorize not necessarily films themselves but rather theoretical or analytical takes on realism - divergent approaches that often can be applied to the same films. Given the slipperiness and historical variability of the term realism, the differentiation of a few different models […] in the case of cinema can help prevent category errors in which claims to one kind of realism are mistakenly refuted by reference to assumptions rooted in a very different under- standing of the term. - McGrath p.8

McGrath uses six categories of realism over 7 chapters in a preliminary mapping to show that realism is inseparable from the dynamic interplay of narrative and cinematic conventions punctuating the tumultuous history of Chinese cinema described as “ traditionally progressive and revolutionary” (Jenny Kwok Wah Lo 168).

Ontological realism refers to the notion that the technology of photography, combined in film with perceived movement on the screen, “provides a uniquely direct connection to material reality,” sometimes summarised as “indexical,” and in a way “contains” the other realisms listed here. “Film’s ability to capture real locations as well as actors’ bodily performances was said to give it a privileged position among the performance arts in the context of the overall shift toward realism as China underwent semi-colonial modernisation.” This sudden rise of realism in the arts “relates to a much broader discourse of scientism in Chinese intellectual life in the early twentieth century” (10). McGrath also examines in chapter 7 claims to ontological realism in the light of the rise of digital cinema including both low budget digital video (DV) film-making and ‘special effects blockbusters’ making extensive use of CGI, calling into question the film medium’s claim to ontological realism. He argues that “there remains a very important strain of Chinese digital cinema that continues to rely heavily on the viewer’s sense of ontological realism” (ibid).

The second category, which McGrath calls perceptual realism, also called phenomenological, experiential or virtual realism, “emphasises not the ontological relationship between the cinematic image and a preexisting profilmic reality but rather the capacity of the moving image, whether photographic or otherwise (animation, CGI), to engage our perceptual apparatus and seize our attention presenting itself to our senses as “real,” whether or not it is seen as representing something else that is ontologically real.” Any tendency to imitate what is seen on the screen such as laughing or crying, is enabled partly by perceptual realism which McGrath suggests can survive and even thrive when other, closely related types of realism (such as ontological and social realism), are abandoned. Both ontological realism and perceptual realism, as defined above, contribute to the more culturally dependant categories of fictional and social realism “because the apparent reality and immediacy of the moving image helps to facilitate audience absorption and promote plausibility of a film’s fictional world.”

The difference between ontological and perceptual realism can be grasped by the extreme example of dizziness induced by a shot from a camera on a moving roller coaster or the reflexive body flinching from a shock moment in a horror film. “The tension between the perceptual realism of the moving image and intellectual knowledge that it is “fake” - just flat images on a screen - has always been central to the fascination of cinema. What André Bazin called “the myth of total cinema” and crucial to perceptual realism, is the concept of immediacy elaborated by new media theorists (11).

Both ontological and perceptual realism contribute to fictional realism defined by the author as “the tendency of narrative film to encourage diegetic immersion, in which a fictional world (diegesis) is taken as provisionally “real” for the purpose of feeling (positively or negatively) for characters and for enjoying the story, whether or not the story actually resembles our own” (12). Classical fictional film narration, as pioneered by D.W. Griffith et al, standardised in Hollywood in the 1920s, and adopted in varying degrees by other entertainment cinemas throughout the world, “can be thought of largely as an effective system for producing fictional realism.”

One of McGrath’s central concerns is to examine how late silent and early sound cinema in China freely borrowed conventions from classical Hollywood and elsewhere in the West yet also frequently challenged the unifying function of the narration. While the constructed world of fiction film usually will have much overlap with the real world, McGrath refers to V.F. Perkins’ (Film as Film) emphasis we must take seriously, that a fiction film creates its own world sharing aspects of ours but still distinct, which we are encouraged through cinematic technique to imagine as a whole, “fictional realism resulting when film narration coaxes fragmentary representation to yield a cohesive world with the help of the viewer’s imagination (13).

Insofar as fictional realism relates metaphorically to our own world, it also invites the question of plausibility, or whether the world presented by a film corresponds to what a particular community takes to be the “real” world. Everyday discussion of the movies revolves around the degree of correspondence between the fictional world and the social reality of a given audience, building in turn on the effect of the three categories - ontological, perceptual, fictional - as outlined above. However social realism goes beyond those aspects to embrace, as well, complex sociological and cultural factors including, for example, its association with the classic nineteenth century realist novels of Europe which continued to wield an influence on realist aesthetics in the twentieth century including in China (17).

Realist art implicitly serves the function of social critique especially in literary studies and this results in social realism often being used interchangeably with critical realism. “The history of realism as a self-conscious practice in modern China, both in the cinema and the other arts, quite often has emphasised the potential of social realism for critique. The films of the 1930s left-wing Shanghai Film Movement became canonised as classics of critical realism although as, McGrath adds, that was far from all they were : “ films implicitly called for social reform, resistance, and even revolution. The tradition was renewed in the immediate postwar years”

In his typology of the various sorts of realism, McGrath uses the term prescriptive realism to refer to the idea that a film might seek to represent not just reality as it now appears, but a truer reality that lies beneath the surface or is yet to be fully realized (18). McGrath uses prescriptive realism as being most obviously represented by the cinema of the Mao era (1949-76) - China’s variant on the international phenomenon of Socialist Realism first formulated in the thirties in the Soviet Union.

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the trend of politicized realism continued but also morphed from critical social realism into China’s version of socialist realism. Later, in the post-Mao reform era, the phenomenon of post-socialist realism [ acclaimed as ‘a Chinese art cinema’] spanned several decades.

Post-socialist realism sought to deform the conventions of revolutionary prescriptive realism while also employing different methods to provoke a new, ostensibly less ideologically encumbered encounter through cinema [ibid 244].

McGrath introduces the concept of apophatic realism as the sixth realism that invokes the limits of representation in challenging unity and closure of the story world in the modernist ‘open work” by, e.g., the radical deployment of off-screen space to escape representation which “serves as a metaphor for a more generalised epistemological uncertainty” in the narrative central to art cinema.

In concluding his introduction to the cinematic realisms in Chinese cinema, McGrath has indicated as “a reminder that realism can mean so many different things as to become meaningless unless the distinctions are made, yet each historically situated film or critical claim, when examined in all its complexity, likely will bring into play multiple approaches to realism” (24).

Generations

Initially the term ‘Fifth Generation’ echoed various ‘new wave’ movements taking place in the early 1980s in Hong Kong and Taiwan, ‘generation’ then being used to designate the [uniquely?] distinct role that each decade’s filmmakers have played in the political and aesthetic construction of a national cinema in China (Reynaud 543). Tony Rayns is quoted as stating that Fifth Generation directors were simply ‘the fifth class’ to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy’s Directing Department while for Chris Berry the term highlights the stylistic breakthrough between Fifth Generation films and those that preceded them. The chapter headings used by Jason McGrath to mark each phase of Chinese cinema history have been inserted in italics below

The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple (1928)

Acting Real in Chinese Silent Cinema : the First Generation of Chinese filmmakers emerged in the discourses of realism and performance style in Chinese silent cinema, particularly the relationship of cinema to theatre - from the first short feature in 1913, the first feature in 1916 through to the “incredible plots and the narrative and sentimentality of the films of the 1920s.” Hollywood films accounted for 90% of the screen time until martial arts films drawing on national tradition made an impact in the late 20s with the first, The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple (1928), followed by 18 sequels.

Shanghaied Hollywood in the Thirties : The Second Generation peaked with 'the first golden age,’ in 1932-7, of progressive feature films with sound, extending into the Japanese invasion and occupation of Shanghai, linked to the more western-influenced early republican China. Young radicals later moved into the studios with the intention of leavening the output of escapist entertainment. They had their ideological formation in the 1919 ‘May 4th Movement’ of the 1920s founded on the massive student demonstrations against terms of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The conventions of classical Hollywood were redeployed in Shanghai’s early sound cinema to create left-wing films both politically progressive and formally radical. Chris Berry notes that “the leftist films did not replace populist entertainments, but supplemented them,” the latter being written out of retrospectives, the former having more in common with pure entertainment than has generally been acknowledged. (411)

New Women (Dir: Cai Cusheng, 1934)

Realism and Event in Postwar Chinese Cinema : The reformist literary culture standing in uneasy relation to the Chinese folk tradition modified to conform with Party ideology, forming an alternative strain at Party headquarters in the remote interior town of Yan’an during the war. The other cultural inspiration centred in Shanghai, in contrast was to a large extent foreign, politically reformist or revolutionary but not necessarily Marxist. This ‘second golden age’ of leftish features is attributed to filmmakers in the postwar period 1947-9, production being resumed in Shanghai.

Spring in a Small Town (Fei Mu, 1948)

Prescriptive Realism in a Revolutionary Cause of the Seventeen Years : Following the Revolution, the 17 year period (1949-66) of the Third Generation is subdivided between the ‘Seventeen Years’ and the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ (GPCR) in the Mao era from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 until the death of Mao in1976 and the subsequent fall of the Gang of Four. Partly under the influence of Soviet socialist realism in the transition to the nationalisation of the film industry by the Communist government in the mid-50s the period of the Seventeen Years (1949-66), in practice followed the rules of Eastern bloc socialist realism, which is to say, they employed classical Hollywood narration, often in melodramatic mode but with occasional formal flourishes reminiscent of Soviet montage cinema. The 'Hundred Flowers’ based relaxation of control (1956-7), ended by the Anti-Rightist campaign (1958-9) in which a large number of writers and directors were identified as ‘rightists’ and publicly attacked for ‘bourgeois thinking,’ was then followed by a strong if brief revival of film production in the early sixties.

Two Stage Sisters (Xie Jin, 1964)

Chinese cultural history and filmmaking during the Mao era was dominated by the new expansion of mass culture. Film as the most popular form of mass communication was targeted by the Party determined to gain and control not only what was created but ensuring it reached as wider audience as possible, not just the urban educated but the predominantly peasant and minority populations in the interior. “Artists, many of whose attitudes owed more to Shanghai and May the Fourth than to Yan’an and the war, might not satisfy Party or perceived audience demands if not carefully directed” (Clark 3).

Socialist Formalism and the End(s) of Revolutionary Cinema : The early chaotic stages of the GPRC resulted in the complete cessation of feature film production from 1966-72 except for a small number of “approved’” revolutionary operas will be returned to in part 3.

Rickshaw Boy (Ling Zifeng, 1982)

The Fourth Generation is mainly composed of graduates from the film academies in the 1960s whose talents were brought into play immediately after the Cultural Revolution and beyond, as well as self-taught talents who were not given opportunities until the late 70s. The Fourth Generation, more humanist in outlook, proposed “throwing away the walking stick of operas” while making so-called “scar dramas”/shanghén jù : emotional scars left by the traumas of the period setting, the stage for a more radical transition on display. “Melodramatic scar literature and cinema critiqued the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and aired the resentment of its victims, but also served implicitly to support the political ideology of the New Era” (McGrath 241).

A Long Take in Post Socialist Realism : The Fifth Generation rejected western film schemas and the dictates of both Maoism and Confucianism in a uniquely Chinese naturalistic art cinema visually growing out of Taoism (Cousins 419-20); the seminal film was Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth/Huáng Tudi (1984). There is no question of the deliberate intent of Chen and cinematographer Zhang Yimou, and other Fifth Generation directors such as Tián Zhuangzhuang, Huáng Jianxin, and Hú Méi, to self-consciously differentiate all aspects of their films from character types to plot structures, themes and locations, to actively distance themselves from the socialist-realist model dominant in the Mao era. At the same time “it cannot be argued that their work constituted a unified paradigm” in the sense of a revolutionary break, but rather a number of radical moves away from socialist realism without establishing a new orthodoxy, for which the term “post-socialist” has been applied. (Berry and Farquhar 84).

King of the Children (Chen Kaige, 1988)

There are intimations of post-socialism in some Sixth Generation films which looked to take on the difficulties of independent financing, post-Tiananmen Square. An “anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign” was launched with little result (Yau 703). A documentary movement gained 'quiet momentum' (ibid).

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Previous entries in this series can be found if you click the following links

Sixty Years of International Art Cinema: 1960-2020 - Tables and Directors Lists to Accompany Bruce Hodsdon's Series

Notes on canons, methods, national cinemas and more

Part One - Introduction

Part Two - Defining Art Cinema

Part Three - From Classicism to Modernism

Part Four - Authorship and Narrative

Part Five - International Film Guide Directors of the Year, The Sight and Sound World Poll, Art-Horror

Part Six (1) - The Sixties, the United States and Orson Welles

Part Six (2) - Hitchcock, Romero and Art Horror

Part Six (3) - New York Film-makers - Elia Kazan & Shirley Clarke