A retrospective look at the film industry shows its changing fortunes over the past seven decades of New China, Xu Fan reports.

In the early spring of 1949, Northeast Film Studio-the first movie production company established by the Communist Party of China-wrapped up the shooting of Bridge in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province.

Widely regarded as the first feature-length movie produced in the year of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the black-and-white movie opened a new chapter in Chinese cinema.

With painstaking effort from several generations of domestic filmmakers, China has produced more than 12,000 movies over seven decades, according to China Film News, an industry newspaper sponsored by the China Film Administration, the country's top movie regulator.

When the movie Bridge was shot, most of the cast and crew members were novices. But later, many involved in the production went on to become pioneers that shaped New China's cinematic landscape.

Among them were journalist-turned-scriptwriter Yu Min, who co-founded the Golden Rooster Awards-the mainland's top movie honor-in the early 1980s, and Chen Qiang, a veteran actor best known for playing villainous roles and as the father of household-name comedian Chen Peisi. Chen Qiang died at the age of 94 in a Beijing hospital in 2012, while Yu passed away at the age of 100 in 2014.

From starting almost from scratch, New China's film industry experienced many ups and downs for almost half a century, followed by an unprecedented period of expansion witnessed over the last two decades.

Now with more than 66,000 cinema screens, the highest number of any country in the world, China is also the world's second-largest movie market in terms of box-office revenue and the third-largest in terms of annual output.

"I feel so proud to be part of China's film industry in its golden era. In the past, China produced a limited number of films every year, making it difficult for a youngster to enter the film industry," top actor Huang Xiaoming tells China Daily.

"But in recent years, a number of excellent films have been released each year, providing more opportunities to newcomers … It's an incredible market, which is creating miracles," says Huang, whose latest effort, The Bravest, has become the highest-grossing film of his career spanning 21 years.

Somewhat a legacy of the formula formed and explored by the earliest filmmakers in New China, today's mainstream blockbusters of the likes of Wolf Warrior 2, Operation Red Sea and The Bravest have continued the long-held cinematic tradition of depicting Chinese heroes, which have now scaled new heights with more relatable characters and dazzling visual effects.

At a time when the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China is being marked, a retrospective look at how Chinese films have developed since 1949 is useful.

Early development

While the founding of New China marked the beginning of a new era, it also changed the course of Chinese cinema, according to The History of Chinese Cinema, a popular textbook used by domestic film academies.

For most students of cinema history, the years spanning from 1949 to 1966 are considered a significant period that gave rise to a number of screen heroes to arouse national pride and lift morale.

In the first decade of this period, domestic filmmakers were largely influenced by the cinematic output of the former Soviet Union.

Between 1949 and 1959, there were 468 Soviet films released in China-the majority of which were dubbed in Mandarin-which attracted nearly 1.5 billion admissions in halls, according to an academic paper written by Hong Hong, a professor at Nanjing University.

Tales of revolutionary heroes have dominated China's screens ever since, typified by hits from the era like Daughters of China, Dong Cunrui, Little Soldier Zhang Ga and The Song of Youth.

Films reflecting ethnic groups also achieved a breakthrough, with 47 such films about 18 ethnic groups produced over the course of 17 years, says Lu Hongshi, a cinematic history expert and deputy director of the China Movie Channel.

The best-known titles include Five Golden Flowers, a 1959 musical romance telling the story of a young man from the Bai ethnic group, searching for his true love, and Liu Sanjie, a 1961 musical depicting a Zhuang ethnic folk singer's struggle with a shrewd landlord.

While the new era saw changes in action movies, animated titles also hit new heights, thanks to devoted artists and their exploration of traditional art-such as puppetry and paper-cutting-to add appeal to animation films.

In April 1957, the Shanghai Animation Film Studio was founded, which gathered together some of the leading talents of the time, including the Wan brothers-the industry pioneers who produced China's first short animated flick Studio Scene (1926), and Asia's first feature-length animated film, Princess Iron Fan (1941).

Wan Laiming, one of the Wan brothers, alongside Tang Cheng, co-directed Havoc in Heaven (1961-1964), New China's first color animated feature consisting of two parts.

Revival period

With the inception of China's reform and opening-up in 1978, cinema revived from a decadelong stagnation caused by the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

With the production of 65 films-a remarkable rise from the recent past, which saw just eight films produced between 1966 and 1973-the year of 1979 was a watershed.

One of the most popular films released that year was Little Flower, which propelled actress Chen Chong to overnight stardom. She later emigrated to the United States, changing her name to Joan Chen and becoming well-known to a wider audience for her part in Italian master filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987).

Aside from Little Flower, most films in 1979-including Troubled Laugher, The Thrill of Life and Anxious to Return-showed a shift from previously stereotypical depictions of flawless heroes to in-depth examination of human nature, says Rao Shuguang, president of the China Film Critics Association.

"Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, television sets were still too expensive for ordinary families to afford. Watching films was the major entertainment for Chinese people back then," adds Rao.

In the following years, the country saw a stable rise in annual output with 82 films hitting theaters in 1980, 105 titles in 1981, 112 films in 1982 and 127 releases in 1983, according to The History of Chinese Cinema.

Runaway hits became national talking points, exemplified by Romance on Lushan Mountain (1980)-which featured the first kissing scene shown on the silver screen since the founding of New China-and the inwardly-reflective nature of prolific director Xie Jin's Legend of Tianyun Mountain (1981).

Meanwhile, the rise of the so-called "fifth-generation directors", referring to graduates of Beijing Film Academy in the early 1980s, gave further recognition to Chinese films among overseas viewers.

Among them were leading figures such as Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Tian Zhuangzhuang and Huang Jianxin, all award-winning directors who are still active and remain as influential today.

Although Zhang's Red Sorghum and Chen's Farewell My Concubine both caused a sensation overseas, with the former winning a Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1988 and the latter scooping a Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993, domestic filmmakers soon encountered a big challenge outside the Chinese mainland.

Amid China's shift from a planned economy to a market economy, in 1994, the Chinese movie authority decided to import 10 blockbusters each year, mainly from Hollywood, and based on a box-office sharing system-whereby the local distributor secured a percentage of the film's takings. The quota was expanded to 20 imported movies in 2001 and was further raised to 34 since 2012.

Harrison Ford's action thriller The Fugitive was the first movie imported into the Chinese mainland, paving the way for other box-office hits of the period like Arnold Schwarzenegger's True Lies in 1995 and James Cameron's Titanic in 1998.

Gao Jun, a film industry expert, says, since then, Hollywood blockbusters forced domestic filmmakers to raise their commercial awareness, and have even had a big impact on the business model of Chinese films.

"Hollywood became an eye-opener and something of a 'teacher', prompting domestic filmmakers to learn how to leverage their stars and create visual spectacles for drawing box office returns," says Jiang Yong, a Beijing-based analyst.

New millennium

Interestingly, the world of martial artists and swordsmen-almost a Chinese pop-culture equivalent to the gunslingers of American western films-drew back the curtain on the new millennium of Chinese cinema.

The film Shaolin Temple produced in 1982, starring Jet Li, precipitated an almost feverish trend for learning kung fu in China. Hong Kong director Hark Tsui's 1991 effort, Once Upon a Time in China, also helped to build the popularity of the genre.

Following the success of Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)-the first Chinese film to win an Oscar for best foreign language film-Zhang Yimou directed the martial arts epic, Hero, which grossed 250 million yuan ($35.1 million) to become the box-office champion of 2002.

To date, the two films displaying Asian aesthetics are still the two highest-grossing Chinese films in North America, says Miao Xiaotian, general manager of the China Film Coproduction Corp.

Hero is widely considered by researchers as a milestone that ushered in a new era of domestic blockbusters. For instance, Chen Kaige's 2005 fantasy epic The Promise, and Feng Xiaogang's 2006 film, The Banquet, a loose adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy Hamlet set in an ancient Chinese royal court, are all big-budget films with stellar casts.

"But with more movies such as these shown in theaters, Chinese directors were seemingly exposing their lack of ability to handle grand themes as well as storytelling skills," says Yu Ji, a professor at Southwest University.

However, the Chinese movie market-with its substantial audience-was yearning for big movies, boosting a construction spree that saw the rise of bigger screens and better cinemas.

Statistics from Imax show that since its first screen was installed in 2003, the number of cinemas with Imax capability has expanded to 662 across the Chinese mainland as of June 30.

With internet behemoths becoming part of China's growing movie landscape since 2014, Chinese films have become more diversified, breaking a string of box-office records and generating a number of success stories.

Latest technologies, like big data and virtual reality, have been exploited by the cinema sector to calculate the needs of audiences or create a more immersive movie-watching experience.

A greater number of non-Hollywood films have garnered popularity, demonstrated by the successes of Indian hit Dangal, Lebanese movie Capernaum and Spanish crime thriller The Invisible Guest, all of which performed well at the Chinese box office.

With the rapid expansion of streaming sites and China's young internet users making up a huge demographic, numerous online films-mostly running no more than one hour in length-have been produced, making China a global front-runner in that sector.

Additionally, filmmaking is no longer a privilege limited to a small group of professionals, thanks to a considerable number of youngsters studying filmmaking domestically and overseas, and the establishment of thousands of privately-owned movie companies in recent years.

Top actress Zhang Ziyi, who recently attended a retrospective event covering her work over the last 20 years, says the filmmaking threshold has become lower in recent years.

"I have grown up with the development of the Chinese film industry. When I was shooting My Father and Mother (her first lead-role feature film released in 1999), the photographers used film in their cameras. Now everything is digital. Newcomers to the industry have more opportunities to shoot or join the crew of a movie," she says, adding that it's a promising era.

Apropos of that is the fact that the three all-time highest-grossing films in China were made by non-veteran directors.

Wolf Warrior 2, the top-ranked release, is directed by action actor-turned-filmmaker, Wu Jing. Number two on the list, the recent surprise phenomenon, Ne Zha, is the directorial debut feature of Yang Yu, a self-made animator who graduated with a medicine major.

Before unexpectedly seeing his sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth make history, the director of the third biggest-earning movie in China, Guo Fan, was struggling to draw investors as his prior experience extended to just two small-budget, youth-themed movies.

For most Chinese film industry insiders, it's a golden era.

"Personally, I've sensed that the Chinese film industry is developing very rapidly, and I believe the domestic market will only continue to get bigger and better," says actor Huang Xiaoming.