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The Commentary of “Scene Sisters” Culture is inseparably connected with the political life of a country. The same thing happened in China: the end of Mao’s era provoked the cultural growth in the country and, as a result, introduced new forms and another thinking to the arts. Young filmmakers known as the fifth generation revolutionized film language and film styles in Chinese cinema (Zhang 226). The period of 1979-1989 brought many significant changes in Chinese National Cinema, such as the transition from social realism to humanism and the emergence of visual effects, which are the main argument of the article “The PRC: Humanism, the Avant-Garde and Commercialism”. There was a great difference between the Mao and the post-Mao eras in Chinese culture and, especially, art. The films of a famous Chinese director Xie Jin show the changes in cinematography after Mao’s death. Xie Jin’s films of the 1980s reflect the changing cinematic landscape in the post-Mao years (Zhang 229). The differences between two eras are evidently seen in Xie’s film “Stage Sisters” where the director through theater showed government’s attempts to hide problems, war consequences, and the impossibility of proper art developing. Moreover, the film clearly demonstrates the changes between the fourth and the fifth generations of directors. The main feature of the fifth generation was humanism that means the priority of humans over politics as well as individuality over collectivity (Zhang 235), while the fourth generation could not illustrate the real situation in the country, so the directors had to draw a veil over it. There were various types of films in these generations such as “films by literature people” in the fourth generation and “films by film people” (Zhang 237) in the fifth one. The first type upheld the supremacy of a film’s literary quality, whereas the second one preferred cinema’s visual qualities. In brief, political and social situation has a great influence on cultural life. Art requires some free space instead of authorities’ pressure and total control. During Mao Zedong's rule people could not tell the audience all the things they wanted to tell. Fortunately, everything changed and Chinese cinema flourished.
Works Cited
Zhang, Yingjin. “The PRC: Humanism, the Avant-Garde and Commercialism” In Chinese National Cinema. New York: Routlege, 2014. 226-240. Print.