Beijing's 11th Student Film Festival saw a range of art films showing alongside big-budget commercial hits like Warriors of Heaven and Earth and Cellphone. But despite the enthusiastic response of college students, Chinese art films are rapidly becoming a thing of the past as China's film industry becomes increasingly commercial.

The growth of China's cultural sector seems downright sluggish when compared to China's rapid economic take-off. Some of the most famous films of the 1980s, such One and Eight, Yellow Earth and Red sorghum, were all financed by state-owned studios. Working within the system, filmmakers had limited freedom to choose which film to make, but were guaranteed funding for state-approved projects. Although they found themselves ideologically constrained and artistically restricted, these filmmakers rarely had commercial worries.

A number of independent production companies have emerged since the early 1990s which have only just begun to challenge the old studio system. These young companies are flexible, and adapt quickly to new consumer demands and as a result have given the old state-run studio a good run for their money. And government funding, which was once taken for granted by the studios, has been falling since 1996. The growing commercialization has had profound effects on China's filmmaking industry.

When China's now world-famous 'fifth generation' started making films, they were inspired by the high modernist works of Western Europe. Chen Kaige dreamed about an avant-garde cinema that was philosophically profound and culturally reflexive. But he soon realized that such a dream could not be sustained amidst the increasing pressures of commercialization. Film has emerged as a mass-medium and Chinese film-makers and audiences are embracing Hollywood movies as cultural models.

The growing commercialization of culture has seen the emergence of four distinct groups of Chinese filmmakers. The first is a group of internationally well-established Chinese filmmakers who can easily raise money to make films. "If I want to, I can raise money from Europe, and I think some American companies also want do something in China" Chen Kaige once remarked.

The second group relies on the government to provide funding for propaganda films. Although the level of government funding for film has fallen drastically, there is still cash in the pot for well-known directors to produce films praising the government.

The third group consists of young commercial filmmakers who are plugged into contemporary fashion and make no attempt to hide the fact that their main concern is box-office returns. "The box office is my measure of success," says director Feng Xiaogang, who shot to fame in 1991 with his popular TV series Beijingers in NewYork and whose recent film Cellphone made mainland box-office history

The last group is made up of young artists who reject the growing trend towards commercialization and have to move mountains to get their films made. Innovative yet lacking the glamour of the establishment, they often find it hard to raise even a modest amount of money. There are those like Xu Jinglei, who believe that low budget films represent the only way for creative filmmakers to escape the pressures of the market. Her film My Father and I cost only US$240,000.

(CRI June 24, 2004)