Within contemporary Chinese cinema, independent cinema contrasts sharply with the state-sponsored ‘main-melody’ (zhuxuanlü) films and commercial cinema, which mainly consists of state-ordered productions on communist leaders and major historical events in accordance with official interpretations. Additionally, relying on star appeal, this also consists of investment in popular genres, such as romantic comedies and martial arts films that generally lack concern for history not as taught ‘facts’ or as a decorative background for fiction, but as a serious category for epistemological and ethical investigation. Two most recent and prominent examples combining these two sides of the mainstream – the official and the commercial, the epic genre and a dizzying star-studded cast, including Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, John Woo and Zhang Ziyi (four of the many starry extras) – are the blockbuster sequels celebrating the anniversaries of the founding of the Party and the state: The Founding of a Republic (Jianguo daye, 2009) and Beginning of the Great Revival (Jiandang weiye, 2011). Both co-directed by Huang Jianxin, a Fifth Generation director, and Han Sanping, President of the China Film Group Corporation, the country's biggest state-run film enterprise, the two official commercial epics are about the events leading up to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and that of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. Huang Jianxin's blockbuster epics, while perfectly fitting with both official guidelines and commercial calculations, drastically contrast with his earlier works – the most famous being The Black Cannon Incident (Heipao shijian, 1986), which, according to Paul G. Pickowicz, is a pessimistic indictment of the socialist political system.

Placed in the context of our discussion of cultural and generational (dis)conti-nuity, the change in Huang's directorial vision also reveals itself in the careers of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, arguably the two most renowned representatives of the Fifth Generation. Though in varied manners and genres, the cinema of the Fifth Generation as a whole takes up China's recent past of socialist revolution and presents its generationally branded vision of history and subjectivity. How exactly does that vision feature in their films about the past, the knowledge of which might help us better understand the seemingly drastic – even disappointing – change at a later stage of their career?