Abstract:

Abstract： Since the early 1990s the landscape of film culture in Mainland China has been radically reshaped. While the stateowned studios have been faced with the dire reality of financial and ideological constraints exacerbated by the topdown institutional reforms of the middecade, there has emerged both within and outside of the studio walls an alternative or "minor cinema". This cinema is largely represented by what the author and other critics call the "Urban Generation" filmmakers and their supporters, followers, and fans. The actual far from "minor" significance of this urban cinema stems not so much from its recent arrival as from its singular preoccupation with the destruction and reconstruction of the social fabric and urban identities of post1989 China. The badge of independence, with its troubled baggage, is perhaps the single most important attribute of the Urban Generation. Many younger filmmakers, however, have identified themselves at the outset as institutionally and financially independent. They have resigned from assigned jobs in stateowned studios, engaged in underground lowbudget productions, and participated in international film festivals without official sanction. In this sense, the key difference between the Urban Generation and the earlier generations of filmmakers, who were trained and employed by the state is defined by their different social and professional identities as well as by their aesthetic outlooks. The advent of the "amateur cinema" as a significant ramification of the Urban Generation cannot be separated from a decadelong struggle of the new documentary movement, which has run a parallel, at times intersecting, course alongside the experimental narrative film. In terms of technology and method, instead of the bulky film camera it is the video camera and, more recently, digital video and editing software that has served as the critical catalyst for the conception and dissemination of "amateur cinema" as a democratic form of film practice. Finally, the author makes a sketch of a fastemerging cineclub community and alternative film spectatorship around the turn of the century in part to underscore the broad empirical range as well as conceptual possibility of the Urban Generation cinema as both a descriptive and analytical category. As forces that are dispersed yet increasingly joining together through the Internet and touring programs, these localized small groups are coalescing into an informal grassroots movement. The intimate movie bars, the nomadic style of the cineclub operations, and the diversity of the chosen film forms and formats (especially the shorts and DV film) encapsulate this grassroots movement as a "minor cinema" that potentially can reshape the structure of film knowledge and practice.

Key words: Key words：  the era of the social transformation; Chinese urban cinema; minor cinema; independence cinema; Urban Generation