Essay On Sixth Generation

2980 Words12 Pages
Full Translation of Jia Zhangke’s Essay on Sixth Generation Cinema Now Available [pic] Film director Jia Zhangke Published as part of Dong Week at dGenerate Films, a series of articles on Jia Zhangke and the art world in China. Back in August, we published a summary and partial translation of Jia Zhangke’s essay reflecting on the Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, ”I Don’t Believe That You Can Predict Our Ending (Wo bu xiang xin ni neng cai dao wo men jie ju).” We have now translated the entire article, which can be found below. Thanks to Jia Zhangke and Zhu Wen for providing us with the full text. English translation by Isabella Tianzi Cai. Jia first delivered the essay on July 25 at the Beijing premiere of Sixth Generation director Wang Xiaoshuai’s new feature Chongqing Blues. An unsubtitled video of Jia’s address can be found on Youku.com. An abridged version of his remarks, titled ”I Don’t Believe That You Can Predict Our Ending (Wo bu xiang xin ni neng cai dao wo men jie ju)” had been published a week earlier in the Chinese newspaper The Southern Weekly. Speaking of “the Sixth Generation”: I Don’t Believe That You Can Predict Our Ending By Jia Zhangke I am not sure how one would define “the Sixth Generation.” In terms of age, I am seven years younger than Zhang Yuan, who directed Mama, and I am half a year older than Lu Chuan, who is believed to belong to “the Seventh Generation.” I made Xiao Wu when I was 28. From 1998 onwards people have thought of me as from “the Sixth Generation.” All along I have believed that there is no difference between desperately asserting oneself as belonging to a generation and desperately denying that fact. The reason that a film director does not want to categorize him or herself is either because that he or she wants to emphasize his or her uniqueness or that he or she wants to avoid having anything to do with the

More about Essay On Sixth Generation

Open Document