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He is many things to many people. He’s been labeled a feminist, hailed as a rebel, and deemed a trouble-maker. Film critic Tony Rayns commented in a 1995 article that his “primary instincts are rebellious” while critic-filmmaker Evans Chan charged that with Hero, Zhang has now become – brace yourself for it – “the closest thing to being China’s Leni Riefenstahl”.
Now that you’ve picked your jaw up from the floor, it’s time to ask: So who is Zhang Yimou, really?
If you search the Net for a quote by the man, you will likely come up with just one: “To survive is to win.” These five spare words probably best sum up Zhang’s approach to his career and life.
The story of Zhang Yimou the director, spanning 22 years and 13 films, has been the story of a man who, until recently, has had a contentious relationship with the powers-that-be. His two early masterpieces Judou (1990) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), both films about cruel patriarchal figures, were initially banned from China’s theatres while 1994’s To Live, still Zhang’s boldest film by far today, reportedly earned him a ban from foreign funding and the humiliation of writing a Cultural Revolution-styled “self-criticism”.
When the writer Lynn Pan visited Zhang on location during the filming of The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), she asked if he was making the film to appease the authorities after Judou and Lantern. Zhang apparently neither answered in the affirmative nor negative. Instead, she said, he lifted his hands to his neck in mock strangulation.
“Do you know how difficult things have been for me?” he said.
If one were familiar with Zhang’s personal history (some say mythology), one would appreciate just how difficult it has been. Born in 1951 to parents of “bad” element, Zhang’s mother was a doctor (intellectuals and the bourgeoisie were not in favour back then) and his father an officer with the Nationalist Party, which had fought unsuccessfully against the Communists in the Chinese civil war.
During the Cultural Revolution, when he was a teenager, Zhang was sent to work in a farm and eventually ended up as a janitor in a factory in Shaanxi province. The story goes that Zhang sold his blood to buy a camera, the photos of which finally earned him a place in the Beijing Central Film Academy in 1979. This was twice after he had been rejected.
Asked during our 15-minute telephone interview if filmmaking had always been a calling, Zhang said no. It came about as a result of desperation.
“When I was accepted in 1979, university enrolment had just been resumed in 1978. At the time I was working in a factory. I enrolled for just one reason: to change my life. There were no other reasons. I just wanted to get out of my factory job.”
Observers have noted that unlike his fellow Fifth Generation filmmakers, Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang, who were born into prominent communist families and therefore had some leeway with the authorities, Zhang was resigned to living under a political cloud.
“Zhang Yimou has no leg to stand on when the authorities choose to object to something he has made or done . . . More than once, Zhang has been forced into the position of abasing himself,” observed Rayns.
Given his difficulties at home and his lionisation abroad, Zhang Yimou’s films are rarely free of politics whatever the director’s intentions may be. When he is seen to be trenchant, critics applaud and the authorities fume. When he is thought to be soft, critics talk of capitulation and the authorities beam.
To be sure, Zhang has received his share of flak from critics – for The Story of Qiu Ju (which was seen as an “appeasement”), Not One Less (a “long infomercial”), Hero (a “fascist project”), and even The Road Home (“the turmoil of a whole era is dislodged by the story of a young peasant woman’s romantic torment”). Not all of us agree with these harsh interpretations (see sidebar on page 17) but they are a baggage Zhang cannot escape. What many Western critics fail to grasp is that Zhang may be leery of being used as a rallying point for anti-China campaigns, that he is really the fierce individual the protagonists in his films so often are and nobody’s fool.
That today he has come full circle from being something of a dissident filmmaker to one who is officially endorsed has certainly helped add fuel to his critics’ fire.
When I asked what he thought of accusations that he had softened his political stance, Zhang shrugged them off, professing not to be political while also taking care not to dismiss politics entirely from his storytelling.
“I’m actually not keen to do political films,” he said in his still and deep voice.
“If you want to highlight these kinds of issues, there will be no end to it. This is not my focus. All along my interest has been to tell stories about the people, and politics has never been the main focus.
“How people perceive my films I’m not sure, but in making a film I’m very clear that you have to tell stories about people. That’s the most important thing. You don’t have to worry about the political issues. We are artists; politics is not what we specialise in. My new movie Shi Mian Mai Fu (literally “Ambush from 10 Directions” a.k.a. House of Flying Daggers) is different too. It has nothing to do with my political views, neither does it reflect whether I have changed my political views.
“I have always been the same,” Zhang insisted.
Zhang’s contention – as I read it – is that an artist is not a political activist, which is a restricting tag, but neither does he stand outside of the ebbs and flows of society. In other words, politics is not life but life can be political. A sensible maxim, surely?
Writing in the Boston Review (Oct-Nov 2001), Harvard law professor Alan A. Stone suggested that “a compelling argument can be made that Zhang does not intend to criticise or protest the Chinese government but is simply pursuing his own personal sense of artistic truth.”
“To be sure, one can see all sorts of political messages in any story that seriously explores the moral adventures of life . . . But that exploration – not a specifically political ambition – provides the most fundamental impulse in Zhang Yimou’s films,” he argued.
Rayns made a similar observation, saying that Zhang has spent his life fighting to succeed on his own terms and that he is merely describing China as he experienced it, and in images that don’t necessarily flatter.
“When Zhang disavows any political intent behind his work, he’s not being cagey or coy. His visions of China as a country doomed to tragedy or as a feudal household in the process of destroying itself are not ‘political’ in the sense understood by China’s Communists but simply accurate reflections of the ‘system’ as he knows, loves and hates.”
If Zhang Yimou is an artist whose personal vision sometimes gets him into trouble, he has also, conversely, always been a filmmaker who is savvy about both commercial and censorship concerns. His latest film’s period setting and love triangle steer it from controversy, just as its star-studded cast guarantees people will flock to see it. Zhang Ziyi is well-known internationally, Andy Lau’s popularity in Hong Kong is unquestioned, and heartthrob Takeshi Kaneshiro’s Taiwanese-Japanese heritage will surely take care of both those markets.
When asked about the pan-Asian cast, Zhang began by saying, “I think they are excellent actors and I am very happy to have been able to work with them.” Then he admitted, chuckling, “Besides their skills in acting and their presence, they have a big following, so it’s an advantage to have them.”
“Yimou has always been pretty savvy about the need to market a film,” remarked Barbara Robinson managing director of HK’s Columbia Pictures in a June 2000 article (Guardian). “For him it has always been more than, ‘This is my art, love it or loathe it’.”
Zhang has to be flexible if he is to continue working in China, which he sees as inseparable from his art. We’ve seen Chen Kaige’s English film, Killing Me Softly, and really, the only notable thing about it is Heather Graham’s assets . . . and this from a man who gave us Farewell, My Concubine.
In a 1995 interview, Zhang declared: “My roots are in China, and I can only make Chinese films in Chinese. My sole ambition is to make different films in different styles and to reach even larger audiences around the world.”
Are the films about the Cultural Revolution over and done with now that he’s making more commercial films, I asked.
“The chaos of the time is very interesting and make good movie subjects. But you can’t make this kind of movie anymore in the present environment,” he replied, because neither the market nor the state approves.
As he told Time magazine after making Hero, “You gradually start to feel that audiences don’t want to see certain kind of films. I’ve made adjustments to accommodate the spirit of the times.”
Accommodation. Compromises. The question everyone is still debating right now is: Has Zhang Yimou sold out in the process?
Evans Chan seems to think so. For him Hero is a “powerful summation of the apologist streak in Zhang’s work”, and Zhang’s career is careening ever more towards conformism. Certainly, a straightforward reading of Zhang’s more recent films will suggest this is the case. But Zhang’s great strength is his ambiguity and the capacity of his films to contain and defy interpretations. The theme of the individual-vs-the-collective is, however, virtually a constant in all of his films, and this is true even in House of Flying Daggers’ love triangle premise.
Here’s Tony Rayn’s assessment of Zhang way back in 1995, and one that I think still holds true: “Whenever his visions have given offence . . . he has retreated with practised ease into a project designed to buy himself some time or space, and then launched into another ‘quiet’ rebellion . . . It is the strategy of a man who stands outside the ‘system’ but refuses to bang his head against its wall in a futile gesture of self-destruction.
“It is the strategy of a seasoned survivor.”
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