RSSThe origin of Chinese film making can be traced back to early 20th century, starting with black and white silent movies. China always had very active opera and stage performance even before movies were introduced. At the beginning, film making concentrated around Shanghai and the first Chinese movie started in Shanghai.
Motion pictures were introduced in China as early as 1896. The first attempt at filmmaking was Conquering Jun Mountain in the year 1905. The Chinese film industry did not begin until 1913 when Zheng Zhengqiu and Zhang Shichuan made the first Chinese movie “The Difficult Couple” in 1913. During the 1920s, Chinese film technicians in Shanghai were trained by the skilled United States trainers. China's first talkie was "The Songstress", "Red Peony" released in the year 1931. During 1933 and 1935, the left-wing movement in filmmaking was introduced to Shanghai.
Many of these movies were appreciated by the Chinese people and they became household names. But the World War II came up and Chinese movie making industry grinded to a halt and war movies were started making their place in Chinese film industry. With the end of World War II, China film industry began its journey afresh.
During the year 1960-1970, China was in the hands of the communists. By that time many people in the movie-making industry had escaped to Hong Kong during and after the war. This led to the birth of Hong Kong movie industry that produced outstanding artists like Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. At that time, these movie making talents were also strongly influenced by the class struggles going on in China and many movie had been made that based on socio-cultural struggles of the Chinese society.
The period obetween 1970 to 1980 was the golden era for Chinese film industry. Large film studios and movie-making companies began and came in force in the area of movie making. With the death of Bruce Lee in 1973, Chinese movie industry went into a mild decline. During the year 1980-1990 there was a flow of Chinese movies specially movies related to martial arts, love stories and comedies.
China provides ample opportunity to learn movie making and acting through its institutes. The most famous one is the Beijing Film Academy. It is the only one of its kind institution, which devoted to the cultivating of film professionals in China. With a history of about 55 years, Beijing Film Academy is being provided the teaching on vast subjects like film-making, acting, production, teaching and research. Gifted with its excellent teaching tradition, Beijing Film Academy offers most advanced techniques of film making for the 21st century.
In the late 90’s to the present century, the inundation of Chinese film and movie artists started moving to Hollywood for a better exposure. These included acclaimed directors such as John Woo, Lee Ang, actor Chow Yuen Fatt, actress Zhang Zhi Yi, actor-director Jacky Chan and many others.
Today, Chinese film talents have been appreciated in whole world for their acting skills. But it is not like that Chinese movies are is only involve in typical Kung-Fu or martial arts movies but also produced number of science-fiction movies as well.However, we can term the present day Chinese film industry as the era of amateur filmmakers. There are number of independent post-Sixth Generation filmmakers making films for extremely low budgets and using digital equipment. Now most of the Chinese movies are made outside of the Chinese film industry.
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