The Postmodern Cultural Characteristics Of The Sixth Generation's Films

Postmodernism is a genre of art which regards"linguistics"as its breakthrough from the previous art forms. It has torn down"the Tower of Babel"built elaborately by mankind for thousands of years into"scattered tiles". Accordingly, postmodernism enables the contemporary culture to take on an intensive pluralism in term of trivialization and originalization. Despite a good many concepts within it cannot be qualified to be epoch-making, they yet manage effortlessly to shake off the geographic and anthropologic limitation, and to employ themselves as Zeitgeist in this globalized era. Since the 1990's, a tribe of young filmmakers in China has made a stand to guard this cultural frontier, taken over the mantle of and revolted to the so-called"the Red Classic"and"the Fifth Generation", subconsciously accomplishing the intercourse with and dyad to the western postmodernism. And consequently"the Sixth Generation"came into being.The works of"the Sixth Generation", a few loosely arranged comitadji, who has neither a uniform filmmaking style nor fire-new shooting techniques, couldn't be simply, and boastfully referred to be postmodern. Admittedly, during the Chinese history of motion pictures,"the Sixth Generation"is the most characteristic of postmodernism, whose main works break away from the mainstream framework of"grand narratives", and shift into"life-history"narratives and micro-politic subjects, which focus on the daily life and subtle sensibility of ordinary people, even the marginals. In form,"the Sixth Generation"quit the miraculous, dreamlike and dramatic beings of mainstream films so that they can widely represent their works with documentary style of narrating degree zero, trivialization, individualization and fragmentation. Traditional literary theory thinks of the distance between contents and forms as deepness; however,"the Sixth Generation"implodes the purlieus of them, namely non-deepness, which means forms per se are contents. Hence"the Sixth Generation"put their creed --"There is nothing outside of the text"into practice, displaying their experimental and exploratory spirits, and therefore increasing the gulf between their works and mainstream ones, and film viewers.