Business Description
The history of motion pictures in the last period of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st was shaped in part by new technologies and the expansion of media culture that such technologies fostered. In the 1980s, for example, the widespread adoption of the videocassette recorder (VCR) opened up new possibilities for the distribution of films as videocassettes, giving wider circulation and easier access to works made throughout the world. In the same manner, new cable and satellite television systems that delivered media directly to homes created additional markets for film distribution and income sources for film producers. With the availability of higher-quality video cameras, more filmmakers used video technology to lower production costs, later transferring the image to film stock for theatrical exhibition. In the following years, the spread and increasing capabilities of computer animation as well as digital video cameras and DVDs (digital video discs) accelerated these trends, with the computer emerging as a new production unit in filmmaking and the Internet as a site for film distribution and exhibition. One result of these changes was the appearance on the world stage of filmmakers—particularly Chinese-language ones—from places that had previously been little recognized within international film culture.
Filmmaking had become nearly moribund in China from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s during the Cultural Revolution. Under new leadership in the late 1970s, the ruling Chinese Communist Party sought to instigate economic development and open the country to international commerce and communication. Some veteran filmmakers resumed their careers, and one, Xie Jin, made a controversial work, Furong zhen (1986; Hibiscus Town), showing the deleterious effects of communist political dogma on a rural village. The Beijing Film Academy, closed for more than a decade, reopened in 1978 and graduated its first new class in 1982. From this group came several figures who began to make films in the 1980s and who became known collectively as China’s Fifth Generation of film directors (the previous four generations had been associated with specific decades beginning in the 1910s and early ’20s).
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