Zhang Yimou

«we could say that Zhang Yimou himself is a son of China whose filmmaking gazes at past, present and future through the "son". In this sense, generation and gender are equally important in his films although the visual and often spectacular focus is on his female leads. Gong Li is his most famous star and his pictures with her are his most famous films. His propensity for visual display has been fiercely criticised in China for its exoticism and lack of historical authenticity. However, Zhang does not claim that his films document China or its people; he creates fictional worlds through moving images that often defamiliarise, shock, seduce, and subvert. He documents desire instead, circulating themes that have long haunted the national psyche and using seductive image-ideas that marry reality, dream and nightmare.»

«we could say that Zhang Yimou himself is a son of China whose filmmaking gazes at past, present and future through the "son". In this sense, generation and gender are equally important in his films although the visual and often spectacular focus is on his female leads. Gong Li is his most famous sta...» (show all)

«On November 14, 1950, Zhang Yimou was born in the Shaanxi region of China. His family suffered derision and exclusion because of their association with the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Army. His father had been an officer and an elder brother followed the Nationalist forces to Taiwan. As a child, Yimou was not immune from such treatment. His childhood was a difficult one. These difficulties were to set the stage for a lifetime of struggle against Chinese officials. Yimou was in secondary school when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. He abandoned school and worked as a laborer on a farm, and then in a textile mill (much like the one portrayed in Ju Dou). After the Cultural Revolution, Yimou became a photographer, buying his first camera in 1974. Many of his photos were published in local periodicals, including the Shaanxi Daily. In 1979, Yimou entered the Beijing Central Film Academy (China's only film school) after a long struggle to be admitted. His initial applications were summarily rejected because he was older than the regulation application age. He was accepted only after a personal appeal to the Minister of Culture, who accepted Yimou after viewing his portfolio of photographic work. Yimou studied at the Central Film Academy until 1982, focusing on cinematography. In 1982, Yimou graduated as a member of China's Fifth Generation of filmmakers. The fifth generation is the first to have studied western film forms, and to grow away from the standard communist use of film strictly as a propaganda tool. After graduation, Zhang was assigned to the Guangxi Film Studio in Southern China where he worked as a cameraman and a cinematographer. While there, he made contact with fellow fifth generation filmmakers Chen Kaige and Zhang Junzhao who later became his collaborators and supporters. An older filmmaker whom Yimou met while at Guangxi, Wu Tianming, also became a supporter of his work. After the Tiananmen Square protest the head of the Film Bureau charges that filmmakers are guilty of "national nihilism" and "blindly worship Western film theory and artistic genres." Many feared that this would place the work and the lives of the fifth generation in peril. Tiamanmen Square did usher in a new era of stricter scrutiny of the media in China. In 1989, Zhang Yimou made Ju Dou with Japanese funding. Zhang moved the time of the story (originally set in the 1940s in Liu Heng's novella) to the pre-communist 1920s in an attempt to avoid Chinese censorship. Ju Dou was banned in China when it came out, because the Chinese authorities deemed the movie unsuitable for a Chinese audience. However, it was submitted by China for Oscar nomination consiteration. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, making Zhang Yimou the first Chinese filmmaker to be nominated for an academy award. Yimou was not allowed to attend the award ceremony. Ju Dou wasn't controversial when the Chinese Film Bureau first submitted it for an Oscar. It became so only after the film bureau unsuccessfully sought to withdraw the film for consideration at the Academy Awards. In 1991 Yimou made Raise the Red Lantern with Taiwanese funding. Yimou's cooperation with the Taiwanese upset the Chinese government caused escalating tensions between Yimou and the Chinese government. Due to this, the film was initially banned in China, but was nominated (as a Hong Kong entry) for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. In 1992 Yimou made The Story of Qiu Ju, under the auspices of a Chinese owned company. Perhaps taking this as a gesture of reconciliation and cooperation, the Chinese authorities were pleased with the film, swamping it with awards, and at the same time 'unbanned' Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. In 1994 Zhang Yimou made To Live. To Live got Yimou into trouble again when it's Hong Kong based production company was criticized for allowing it's sale and distribution without Chinese censorship and approval. In 1997 Zhang made Keep Cool. The Chinese propaganda commissars made an attempt to keep it from Cannes' screens. Their efforts failed and it won the Grand Prix du Jury. On a more personal note, Zhang Yimou's long-term love affair with leading lady Gong Li definitively ended recently, with her marriage to a Singaporean-born businessman.»

«On November 14, 1950, Zhang Yimou was born in the Shaanxi region of China. His family suffered derision and exclusion because of their association with the Kuomintang (Nationalist) Army. His father had been an officer and an elder brother followed the Nationalist forces to Taiwan. As a child, Yimou ...» (show all)

«Zhang Yimou is a director known for having excellent work relations with his film crew. As he said, "They have a sixth sense on whether the movie is good or not. It happened many times that if they feel like it, it is a good one." Among the new crew members of Zhang Yimou's No one to be missed is cinematographer Hou Yong. As cinematographer Hou Yong holds a crucial role within the crew. Alongside new crew member Hou Yong, Yimou used first time actors as a realist element to supplement the film's documentary style. Hou Yong and Zhang Yimou are both from Xi'an, an ancient capital of eleven dynasties and the cradle of Chinese civilization. He and Zhang Yimou were classmates in Beijing Film Academy and graduates of the 1982 class that included such legendary figures of Chinese cinema as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou and Lu Yue. This is the first time that Hou has worked with Zhang Yimou. But the 38-year old cinematographer has worked on several masterpiece's of contemporary Chinese cinema, including Tian Zhuangzhuang's Lan Fengzheng (The Blue Kite), Dao Mazei (The Horse Thief, 1986), and Xie Jin's Opium War. Yimou's previous cinematographer was Lu Yue, who lensed Keep Cool (1997) and Shanghai Triad (1995), for which he received an Oscar nomination. With Yue's departure, Hou Yong is now in charge of giving visual shape to Zhang's ideas. The following interview with Hou Yong was conducted on location at Zhang Jiakou, a small city about a four-hour drive from Beijing. In the interview I try to discover a Zhang Yimou that is not known by media.»

«Zhang Yimou is a director known for having excellent work relations with his film crew. As he said, "They have a sixth sense on whether the movie is good or not. It happened many times that if they feel like it, it is a good one." Among the new crew members of Zhang Yimou's No one to be missed is ci...» (show all)