Existence and Meaning: A Cultural Reinterpretation of the Image of Youth in Chinese Cinema in the Early Reform and Opening Up Period 1979–1989

In the early years of reform and opening up, especially the 1980s, the cultural production and aesthetic communication patterns of youth images in Chinese cinema changed markedly. The “aesthetic imagination” and “ideological discourse” carried by these domestic film images of youth were closely tied to the era’s enlightenment by Western humanism and existentialism. They were an inevitable response to contemporary China’s effort to integrate its own historical and humanistic traditions into the tides of globalisation and modernisation, and they formed a cultural self-reflection on the proposition of “human existence” during a specific period of social transformation in China. Building on existential psychology and phenomenology, and through close textual analysis of representative films from 1979 to 1989, this article reinterprets youth figures as cultural mediators of transition, bringing them into dialogue with scholarship on Fifth Generation cinema, national cinema, and post socialist modernity.