A mild-mannered screen kiss had a huge influence on the history of movies in China. Romance formed the basis of a typical love scenario in Chinese films: when the boyfriend was hesitant to kiss, the common line for the woman to say was, “You’re a fool.” But when the man was to kiss the woman, the woman would tell him, “You’re so bad.”

In 1986, Hibiscus Town, directed by Xie Jin, set a new record for the amount of kissing in a Chinese movie, with a total length of four minutes and 23 seconds. Although the movie created a fuss, in the end it was tolerated by a society that had become more open.

As a representative of the older generation of Chinese filmmakers, Xie Jin reached the peak of his career in the 1980s. Many times he created a sensation in China by his epic movies, which depicted arduous events in the country’s long history and attracted at least 170 million people to cinema.

“It is not an easy job to comment on Xie Jin and his works, as he has already become an important part of the history of the aesthetic perception of contemporary Chinese citizens,” said Yu Qiuyu, a renowned Chinese art critic and former president of the Shanghai Theater Academy.

However, when Xie Jin was in the full flush of success, a new generation of Chinese filmmakers were contemplating a stylistic revolution that would break the fixed formats of Chinese movies, including what they called the “Xie Jin format.” One of the cradles of this development was the Beijing Film Academy. “Our teachers encouraged us to go beyond [this format],” recalled Chen Kaige. Chen, along with other graduates from the academy in 1982, finally brought Chinese cinema to international attention. They are later known as China’s fifth generation filmmakers.

In 1984, the 32-year-old Chen released his maiden movie, Yellow Earth, which tells the story of a communist soldier sent to the countryside to gather folk songs for the revolution. The movie managed to convey the depths of traditional Chinese culture, and the characters deliberately spoke as little as possible. If audiences could endure the silence, heaviness and grittiness of the movie for more than an hour, they would be thrilled by the wildness of the waist-drum rhythm performed by hundreds of young men at the end. Since that film, the waist-drum beating scenario has become a core symbol of today’s China. Years later, this scenario appeared during the opening ceremony of the 11th Asian Games in Beijing in 1990, as well as on other “very Chinese” occasions.