A Timeline of Notable Films from Mainland China Through the Years by the user Myra on MUBI

mubi.com/lists/chinese-cinema

※ In the twentieth century, as critics commonly assert, Chinese filmmaking has generated six chronological groups, or generations, of filmmakers. The First Generation refers to China’s film pioneers of the 1920s; the Second Generation, the leftist filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s (mostly working for various private film studios in Shanghai); the Third Generation, mostly Yan’an-trained filmmakers who became important in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) cinema of the 1950s (Yan’an, a rural town in northwest China, was the capital of the Communist revolution before the founding of the PRC); the Fourth Generation, those trained in the early 1960s but who had to wait until the post-Mao late 1970s to start making films; and the Fifth Generation, the first post-Mao graduating class from Beijing Film Academy and other young directors who joined them in the post-Mao cinematic wave. (Celluloid China: Cinematic Encounters with Culture and Society by Harry H. Kuoshu)

※ Another way of defining the different generations focuses on the filmmakers’ aims: the First Generation, described as May Fourth era filmmakers, were intellectuals concerned with social and cultural reform during the Republican era; the Second Generation, whose films are categorized as “socialist realism” (inspired by the Soviet Union), combined heroic celebration of the socialist state with condemnation of life in pre-revolutionary China; the Third and Fourth Generations primarily focused on melodrama and produced films consistent with or reinforcing state ideology; and the Fifth Generation, whose films were made after the Cultural Revolution, continued the May Fourth tradition of social commentary and national critique, albeit from the vantage point of a very different historical moment. (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture by Edward L. Davis)

※ In the mid-1990s, a new group of directors emerged – sometimes described as the Sixth Generation – who had graduated in the late 1980s and embarked on their careers at a time when the state studios could no longer afford experimental films in the wake of economic reform. In many ways, these directors intentionally challenge the aesthetics of the Fifth Generation. Instead of abstract reflection on or exhibitionist display of Chinese culture and history, the Sixth Generation prefers images and motifs expressive of their personal feelings of alienation, anguish, and anger at the status quo. Apart from emphasizing youth subculture, a relatively new subject in Chinese cinema, the Sixth Generation pursues the kind of screen images they perceived as more realistic, more “truthful” to everyday life than the films of the previous generations.
(A Centennial Review of Chinese Cinema by Yingjin Zhang)