Zhang Yimou

ZHANG YIMOU

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Nationality: Chinese. Born: Xi'an, Shaanxi, China, 14 November 1950. Education: High School in Xi'an until interrupted by the Cultural Revolution, 1966; Beijing Film Academy, 1978–1982. Family: Married Xiao Hua (divorced), relationship with actress Gong Li, 1987 to 1995. Awards: Best Actor, Tokyo International Film Festival, for The Old Well, 1987, Golden Bear Award, Berlin Film Festival, and New York Film Festival Best Film Award, for Red Sorghum, 1988; Best Film Not in the English Language, BAFTA, Best Foreign Language Film, New York Film Critics, Best Foreign-Language Film, National Society of Film Critics, and Silver Lion, Venice Film Festival, all for Raise the Red Lantern, 1992; Best Foreign-Language Film, National Society of Film Critics, and Golden Lion, Venice Film Festival, both for The Story of Qiu Ju, 1993; Best Film Not in the English Language, BAFTA, and Grand Prize, Cannes Film Festival, both for To Live, 1995; Technical Grand Prize, Cannes Film Festival, 1995, and Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, 1996, for Shanghai Triad.

Films as Director:

1988

Hong gao liang (Red Sorghum ) (+ ro)

1989

Daihao meizhoubao (Operation Cougar ; The Puma Action )

1990

Ju Dou

1991

Da hong deng long gao gao gua (Raise the Red Lantern )

1992

Qiu Ju da guan si (The Story of Qiu Ju )

1994

Huozhe (To Live )

1995

Yao a yao yao dao waipo qiao (Shanghai Triad ); episode in Lumière et compagnie (Lumière and Company )

1997

You hua hao hao shuo (Keep Cool ) (+ ro)

1999

Yi ge dou bu neng shao (Not One Less ); Wo de fu qin mu qin (The Road Home ); Turandot—At the Forbidden City of Bejing (for TV)

Films as Cinematographer:

1983

Yi ge he ba ge (One and Eight ) (Zhang Junzhao)

1984

Huang tu di (Yellow Earth ) (Chen Kaige)

1986

Da yue bing (The Big Parade ) (Wu Tianming)

1987

Lao jing (The Old Well ) (Wu Tianming) (+ ro)

Other Films:

1989

Qin yong (A Terracotta Warrior ) (Siu-Tung Ching) (ro)

1993

Hua hun (Soul of a Painter ) (sc)

1997

Lung sing jing yuet (Dragon Town Story ) (pr)

Publications

By ZHANG YIMOU: article—

Ye, Tan, "From the Fifth to the Sixth Generation" interview in Film Quarterly, Winter 1999.

On ZHANG YIMOU: book—

Wang, Pin, Chang I-mou che ko jen, Beijing, 1998.

On ZHANG YIMOU: articles—

Chute, David, "Golden Hours (on the Set of Raise the Red Lantern )," in Film Comment, March-April 1991.

Chua, Lawrence, "Making Movies (or Trying To) in China," in Premiere, March 1992.

Pan, Lynn, "A Chinese Master," in The New York Times Magazine, 1 March 1992.

"Zhang Yimou," in Current Biography, August 1992.

Hoberman, J., "China's Revolutionary Director," in Vogue, April 1993.

Sutton, D.S., "Ritual, History, and the Films of Zhang Yimou," in East-West (Honolulu), no. 1295, 14 June 1995.

"In the Censors' Toils," in The Economist, 12 November 1994.

Zha, J., "Killing Chickens to Show the Monkey," in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 5, January 1995.

Klawans, Stuart, "Zhang Yimou: Local Hero," in Film Comment, September-October 1995.

"Special Section," in Cinemaya (New Delhi), no. 30, Autumn 1995.

Article in Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, edited by Sheldon Hsiao-Peng Lu, Honolulu, 1997.

Wei, Y., "Music and Femininity in Zhang Yimou's Family Melodrama," in CineAction (Toronto), no. 42, 1997.

* * *

Born in the thick of revolution, prolific Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou learned early about cataclysmic social change and deep personal secrets. The son of an officer of the Kuomintang, Zhang was born a suspicious character to his new government. Like many other children of privileged families swept up in the Cultural Revolution, his higher education was factory labor, and his entertainment consisted of government sponsored films and theatrical productions, usually simplistic, moralistic, and patriotic. Though Zhang was fascinated by film, and managed to buy his first camera while working in a textile factory, he would be forever influenced by his disgust with the overtly propagandistic films of his youth. Later he would recall, "When we were in film school, we swore to each other we would never make films like that."

By 1982, the Beijing Film Academy, which had been closed during the Cultural Revolution, was reopened, and Zhang was part of the first post-Mao graduating class. It was the fifth class to ever graduate the Academy, giving Zhang and his classmates their sobriquet, the "fifth generation" of Chinese filmmakers. The fifth generation were not establishment filmmakers, but they gained international notice because of the moral complexity and gritty realism of their films.

Though he was designated a cinematographer, Zhang soon began directing his own films, which would be characterized by their stark humanity and stunning visual imagery. Through 1995, they would also be characterized by the powerful performances of Gong Li, one of China's most famous actors and Zhang's longtime lover.

Zhang's first film was Red Sorghum, a lyrical folk tale of a film that presented viewers with a strong, even ruthless, heroine to challenge the traditional Chinese subjugation of women. Mostly set in the 1920s in the harsh countryside of rural China, Red Sorghum was at the forefront of a new breed of Chinese film that was beginning to express moral ambiguity and chafing under authority.

Zhang's next film, Codename Cougar, was fairly noncontroversial, a political action/thriller about an airplane hijacking, but he soon returned to the themes of societal repression and rebellion that would cause many of his films to be banned by the Chinese government. In Ju Dou, Zhang revisits his rural roots for a story of brutality and starvation, both literal and figurative, about the passion between a poor mill worker and the abused wife of the mill owner. Ju Dou was the first of Zhang's films to be banned.

Zhang's next films, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, and To Live, were all banned by the government of his homeland, and were all visually remarkable films of the passion and drama in simple country life and the struggle of the common people (often women) against a brutal power system. Raise the Red Lantern illustrates the position of concubines as property, The Story of Qiu Ju follows a young woman's struggle to gain justice from an unfeeling bureaucracy, and To Life documents the turbulent times of the Cultural Revolution. Audiences around the world flocked to peek through this keyhole into the emerging Chinese sensibility.

Zhang stayed on safer ground in his next film. Shanghai Triad is a lush gangster movie set in 1930s Shanghai that was widely admired, even by the Chinese government. Shanghai Triad was selected for the honor of opening the New York Film Festival, but politics prevailed. Even though Chinese authorities approved of Zhang's film, they did not approve of another documentary about China slated for the festival, and Zhang was virtually forbidden to attend his film's triumph.

Following his split with Gong Li, Zhang's films became less star-driven. Not One Less is the story of a substitute teacher in a remote village who becomes obsessed with preventing one of her students from dropping out of school. Zhang filmed the movie on location in a tiny rural village, using villagers as his cast. The result here, and in his subsequent films such as The Road Home, is a direct film that expresses, without grandiosity, the endless contradictions that comprise human life.

While many of Zhang's films offer a bleak picture of Chinese life, but they are never hopeless. Rather they reveal a sensual zest for life that survives the harshest conditions, and an underlying humor that sweetens despair. Audiences in China were hungry for the triumphant spirit of rebellion that pervades Zhang's films, and audiences around the world soon found that China was not so far removed from them after all.

—Tina Gianoulis