(Xuelin Zhou (Auth.) ) Globalization and Contempora PDF

GLOBALIZATION AND
CONTEMPORARY
CHINESE CINEMA
Zhang Yimou’s
Genre Films
Xuelin Zhou
Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Xuelin Zhou
Globalization
and Contemporary
Chinese Cinema
Zhang Yimou’s Genre Films
Xuelin Zhou
University of Auckland
Auckland, New Zealand
ISBN 978-981-10-4327-7 ISBN 978-981-10-4328-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4328-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937484
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189721, Singapore
To my wife Grace, and our children Roger, Angel and Matthew
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Faculty of Arts and School of Social Sciences
of the University of Auckland for a Faculty Research Development Fund
in 2014 and a PBRF fund in 2016. I am also thankful to Prof. Laurence
Simmons, Prof. Paul Clark, Associate Professor Neal Curtis, Dr. Margaret
Henley, Prof. Simon Holdaway, Prof. Christine Arkinstall, Mr. Tim Signal
and Mr. Peter Simpson for their support to the project in their own ways.
I am particularly indebted to Prof. Roger Horrocks for his constructive
copy-editing of an earlier version of the book manuscript.
My deep gratitude goes to the anonymous reader for providing critical
comments and suggestions, and to Sara Crowley Vigneau and Connie Li
at Palgrave Macmillan. It is a great pleasure working with them.
I thank Prof. Lin Shaoxiong of Shanghai University and Mr. Jiao Jing
of United Entertainment Partners (Beijing) for helping pursue copyright
permissions. I am deeply grateful to Yimou Studio for permitting me to
use the director’s photos in the book although these photos were not
eventually used.
An earlier version of Chap. 3 was presented as “The Instrumentalization
of Action: Martial Arts, the Cultural Revolution, and Youthful Rebellion”
at the conference on “The Cultural Revolution Today: Literature, Film,
and Cultural Debates” organized by the French Centre for Research on
Contemporary China and the Department of Comparative Literature, Hong
Kong University, 2–3 June, 2016. I wish to give my thanks to the organiz-
ers, especially Prof. Gina Marchetti, for inviting me to attend the conference,
and to the audiences for their constructive feedback on my presentation.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Finally, I dedicate this book to my loving family. Without their under-

standing, support and encouragements, writing up of this book would
not have been possible.
Contents
1 Modernity and Globalization 1
2 Codename Cougar: Politics or Entertainment? 9
3 (Young) Heroes in a “Cursed” House 35
4 Between National and International 57
5 Staging China: The Art of Yijing

85
6 Conclusion 115
Appendix
123
Index
129
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 Impression Liu Sanjie (2003) 92

Fig. 5.2 Impression Lijiang (2006) 95
Fig. 5.3 Impression West Lake (2007) 98
Fig. 5.4 Impression Dahongpao (2010) 100
xi
List of Tables
Table 4.1 Narrative construction of The Flowers of War 68

Table 4.2 Close-ups in Saving Private Ryan and
The Flowers of War 69
Table 4.3 Technical norms in Saving Private Ryan and
Table 4.4 Aesthetic effects of Saving Private Ryan and
Table 4.5 Narrative elements of World War II combat films 72
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Modernity and Globalization
Abstract  This chapter introduces the most acclaimed but still under-

researched contemporary director in Chinese cinema, Zhang Yimou. It
examines Zhang’s early experiences—his rural life as a sent-down youth
during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) and his university campus life
at the Beijing Film Academy (1978–1982)—and emphasizes the impact
that this background will have on his later creative career. The chapter
suggests that a study of Zhang’s popular genre films from the late 1980s to
the present day can provide insights into the evolution of Chinese cinema,
from an inward-looking cultural activity to an expansive commercial indus-
try, albeit one that still struggles to define its identity within the pressures
of the global marketplace.
Keywords  Zhang Yimou · Chinese cinema · Globalization · Cultural

Revolution
When an outstanding creative figure was needed to design and direct the
opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics—a unique
opportunity to communicate a striking image of China to the global
audience—the choice was Zhang Yimou, the country’s most successful
but also most controversial filmmaker.
Both the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the 1988 Seoul Olympics had
boosted the host country’s prestige in the world and confirmed its pro-
gress towards modernization. In 2008, Zhang’s ceremonies were just
© The Author(s) 2017 1

X. Zhou, Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Cinema,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4328-4_1
2 1 MODERNITY AND GLOBALIZATION
as spectacular and attention-grabbing as the Chinese government had

hoped. They involved a huge cast, state-of-the-art visual and sound
effects, highly choreographed action, and an enormous budget—which
were characteristics shared by Zhang’s recent blockbuster films.
The ceremonies succeeded in projecting an image of China as united,
technologically advanced, and thoroughly contemporary, though also
enriched by allusions to its ancient cultural traditions. Yet some Western
observers, though they agreed that the events were spectacular, also saw
them as somewhat predictable. Modernity in this form has been a cen-
tral theme for Western countries at least since the start of the twentieth
century, and often it has elicited an ambivalent response. To take a film
example, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) opened with famous scenes of
human beings dwarfed by a landscape of machinery. Close-up shots of
moving pistons, turning wheels and winding gears, with tall skyscrap-
ers in the background, evoked an overwhelming industrial environment.
The image of a ten-hour clock was followed by columns of workers, “all
dressed in the same uniform”, shuffling in formation to their work shift.
“All had the same faces. And they all seemed 1000 years old… They
planted their feet forward but they did not walk.” (Lang 1973: 20) In
the same year Metropolis was premiered, Lang’s country fellow Siegfried
Kracauer published “The Mass Ornament” (1927), a seminal essay on
the ornamental characteristics of mass events within which “people
become fractions of a figure” and “clusters whose movements are dem-
onstrations of mathematics” (2005: 76). Using as an example the Tiller
Girls, a British dancing troupe known for a style of formation dancing
that owed much to military displays, Kracauer saw “the mass ornament”
as a powerful visual symbol of the capitalist mode of production. The
identically costumed legs of the Tiller Girls could be likened to the fast
moving hands of workers on the conveyor belt or their feet marching to
the factory in Metropolis.
From the beginning, such modernity has been seen by some as utopian
(as in the case of the mass entertainment provided by the Tiller girls) and
by others as dystopian (the crushing uniformity of modern society, espe-
cially in its high-tech forms). Zhang’s Olympic spectacle similarly had its
critics as well as its admirers. His drumming and printing-press sequences,
with their thousands of performers moving in unison, represented a “mass
ornament” (in Kracauer’s term) choreographed “to an almost unprec-
edented degree” (McGrath 2013: 63). In accepting the Olympics assign-
ment, Zhang was accused by some of his peers of having sold out to the
1 MODERNITY AND GLOBALIZATION 3
government. Yet others said: Wasn’t this spectacle exactly what the world
(as well as the government) was hoping to see on its television screens?
Such differences of opinion have also surrounded Zhang’s recent
films, with their growing budgets and attempts to reach international
as well as national audiences. They also reflect debates about the future
of the film industry, and more generally, the choices that China should
make as it “modernizes” its culture and engages with the contemporary
world. A study of Zhang’s career will enable us to explore these debates
because so many of his films have generated controversy on a national
and sometimes international scale. He earned a reputation as a dissent-
ing artist in his early creative career, but some now see him as seduced by
money, celebrity and government approval. On various occasions, he has
been called a “national hero” who singlehandedly rescued the Chinese
film industry from total collapse and as a “national teacher” (国师) who
has played an exemplary role in promoting Chinese culture to the out-
side world, while others insist he has become a dried-up talent.
To his admirers, Zhang is China’s most hard-working and innovative
film director, repeatedly tackling new challenges. His films have ranged
from avant-garde to action films, from comedy to crime, from martial
arts to melodrama, from long takes and traditional aesthetics (such as
wenyipian) to split-second editing and the latest special effects. He is
particularly noted for his internationalism. He started his career as a lead-
ing cinematographer of the experimental film movement that attracted
much overseas attention to Chinese film in the early-to-mid 1980s. He
was the first Chinese performer to win an award as best male actor at a
major international film festival (Tokyo) in 1987. His directorial debut
received the Golden Bear prize at the West Berlin International Film
Festival in 1988. He has directed not only feature films but also operas
and live action extravaganzas. He is the Chinese film director who has
won the most international film festival awards.
Not surprisingly, then, he has been a major target of academic as well
as public attention. He has been analysed, discussed and interpreted from
many perspectives—in terms of aesthetics, Chinese tradition, gender pol-
itics, modernism and post-modernism, post-colonialism, post-socialism,
Orientalism and globalization. Throughout his career, he has displayed a
number of contradictions, being by turns loquacious or reticent, friendly
or withdrawn, solemn or humorous, locally or globally oriented, tradi-
tional or modern, Chinese or Western. He is an extremist in the form
and style of his films but reserved in person.
Whatever their response to his films, most critics would agree with
Sheldon Lu’s judgement that he “has brought about a permanent
change in the pattern of Chinese national cinema. After Zhang Yimou,
the mechanisms of funding, production, marketing, distribution, and
consumption of Chinese cinema were forever changed” (Lu 1997: 109).
Also, he has transformed “the way the world visualizes China and helped
alter the course of Chinese cinema” (Wu 2001: 129).
Born in Xi’an, the capital city of Shanxi Province, in November 1950,
Zhang was the first in a family of three sons. His father was labelled
“historically counter-revolutionary” for being a Nationalist army officer
before 1949. Because of this family background, Zhang spent his child-
hood and teenage years as a social outcast isolated from mainstream
society. In 1968, Zhang, together with thousands of urban high school
students, was “sent down” to labour as a peasant in a rural village 50 km
northwest of Xi’an. In 1971, thanks in part to his basketball skills, he
was transferred to a textile mill in Xianyang, a city 25 km northwest of
the provincial capital. During his 7 years of working in the factory, he
became interested in photography. There are often-quoted anecdotes
about his saving up to buy a camera and copying from photography
books borrowed from friends.
When the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Chinese society began
to undergo changes in all walks of life. In 1977, the entrance examina-
tion system, which had been closed down for 10 years, was reinstated as
“a necessary way to check on the performance of students and teachers”
(as Deng Xiaoping declared). For many young and not so young people,
passing the examination and going to university was their one and only
means to change their fate and escape from rural life. Zhang decided to
register for the examination to the Beijing Film Academy, but his appli-
cation received forthright rejection because he was several years above
the age limit set by the institution’s admission policies. But Zhang was
very determined and after many efforts he gained entry to its cinematog-
raphy programme.
He began his study in this privileged film school on the outskirts of
Beijing in 1978. His university days coincided with one of the most excit-
ing, transformative eras in modern Chinese history. The 1980s produced
a burst of “cultural fever” or “cultural rebellion” among scholars, crea-
tive workers and the intelligentsia by large. The programme of reform
initiated by the government in the late 1970s brought a political, social
and cultural liberalism to Chinese society and the “open-door policy”
1 MODERNITY AND GLOBALIZATION 5
broadened not only the country’s economy but also the minds of its cit-
izens. Popular music, martial arts novels and romance stories began to
bombard mainland China from Hong Kong and Taiwan. This was fol-
lowed by an influx of high culture ideas and popular culture genres from
the West. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche,
alongside Sylvester Stallone, Alain Delon and Ken Takakura, found their
way in translation into the minds of millions of Chinese people. As stu-
dents majoring in screen studies in the country’s capital city, Zhang and
his peers gained the opportunity to access imported movies from many
different cultures and eras. His classmate Zhang Huijun, who is now
the President of the Beijing Film Academy, noted in his memoirs that
together they watched 514 films during their 4 years of study, includ-
ing classic Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s, Soviet “ideological
films” of the 1950s and 1960s, Italian Neo-Realism, the French New
Wave, and other European auteur films (2008: 107). The impact of this
flood of imports on young men and women who had grown up in an
extremely insulated environment can hardly be overstated. Many years
later, Zhang Yimou could still remember vividly the shock he experienced
when first exposed to such films (Fang 2012: 69–71).
These two experiences—his time as a sent-down youth during the
Cultural Revolution and his studies at the university in a very open, lib-
eral-minded era—complemented each other in shaping Zhang’s vision.
The former gave him an understanding and emotional attachment to
Chinese culture and society, while the latter endowed him with an inter-
national outlook. As we shall see in the following chapters, Zhang has
oscillated between these two poles—the national and the international—
throughout his creative career.
Although this book concentrates on the work of one director, I shall
try not to allow the study of film authorship to supplant the study of
genre. Scholars at home and overseas tend to emphasize Zhang Yimou’s
status as auteur, but the present book also seeks to situate his work in
relation to genre and to changes in Chinese society. (Genre study can tell
us a great deal about cultural, political, and historical contexts.) Zhang
has been a prolific filmmaker and this book does not attempt to inter-
rogate all his creative work. Rather, the study focuses on a representative
selection of films, from an early thriller, to his popular Impression series,
to his largest and most recent blockbuster (which reflects the increas-
ing pressures of globalization). The aim of this study is not to impose
a single theoretical framework but to approach this complex film-maker
and his diverse body of work from different angles, combining textual
analysis with the discussion of genre and theme, and drawing upon both
Chinese and English-language literature.
Among other concerns, the book develops the hypothesis that a
generic approach to Zhang’s work can shed light on some of the impor-
tant changes that the Chinese film industry has undergone since the
nation opened its doors to the outside world, evolving from a strictly
ideological censorship system to a new field of forces where politics
interacts with both artistic values and box office ambitions. It develops
from an inward-looking to a more outward-looking culture and from
a national to a trans-national industry. The study seeks also to offer
insights into other issues confronted by contemporary Chinese cinema
(and by East Asian cinemas in general), such as “How should local film-
makers use genres—and structure co-productions—in an increasingly
globalized industry?” And “What artistic principles should filmmak-
ers follow in mediating between local and global, national and interna-
tional?”
The book is broadly structured chronologically as it analyses films
from successive stages of Zhang’s career. Following a short introduction,
Chap. 2 focuses on Zhang’s early, and often overlooked, action thriller
Codename Cougar (1988). This chapter positions the film within the
high tide of entertainment that began to flow onto China’s screens in the
late 1980s, and argues that this pioneering but posturing action film in
many respects anticipates the director’s later shift to making large-budget
martial arts films.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on Zhang’s blockbusters. Chapter 3 exam-
ines his “martial arts trilogy”—Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers
(2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). It considers how Zhang
made these commercially viable movies to respond to increasing pres-
sures within the Chinese situation: the growth of the youth audience and
the influence of Hollywood. It also looks more closely at the director’s
family background and his experience during the Cultural Revolution
to see how they influenced the themes of the films. Chapter 4 examines
Zhang’s Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (2005) and The Flowers
of War (2011) as two important stages on the director’s cross-cultural
journey. It discusses the films’ style and themes, comparing them with
their foreign sources of inspiration.
Chapter 5 focuses on Zhang’s live action, light-and-sound spectacles,
assessing their stylistic features and socio-cultural meanings. It relates
REFERENCES 7
the performance of these shows by the side of “mountains and waters”

to the traditional Chinese artistic concept of yijing (meaning “poetic
state”), showing how Zhang combines classic aesthetics with modern
technology to appeal to domestic and overseas audiences. The conclud-
ing chapter begins with a brief discussion of Zhang’s latest film, The
Great Wall (2016), which is the director’s first English-language project,
created in association with Hollywood as a global blockbuster. The chap-
ter concludes by considering the implications of making a Chinese film
that draws so heavily on Hollywood formulas, and the general threats
and opportunities faced by Zhang—and by the Chinese industry—when
it undertakes such large-scale international co-productions.
References
Fang, X. 方希. (2012). Zhang Yimou’s homework [张艺谋的作业]. Beijing:
Beijing daxue chubanshe.
Kracauer, S. (2005). The mass ornament: Weimer essays. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Lang, F. (1973). Metropolis. London: Lorrimer Publishing.
Lu, S. H. (1997). National cinema, cultural critique, transnational capital: The
films of Zhang Yimou. In S. H. Lu (Ed.), Transnational Chinese cinemas:
Identity, nationhood, gender (pp. 105–136). Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press.
McGrath, J. (2013). Heroic human pixels: Mass ornaments and digital multi-
tudes in Zhang Yimou’s spectacles. Modern Chinese Literature and Culture,
25(2), 51–79.
Wu, C. (2001). Not one less. In F. Gateward (Ed.), Zhang Yimou interviews
(pp. 127–132). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Zhang, H. 张会军. (2008). A memoir of grade 1978 of Beijing Film Academy [北
京电影学院78班回忆录]. Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe.
CHAPTER 2
Codename Cougar: Politics

or Entertainment?
Abstract  This chapter interrogates Zhang Yimou’s early, often over-

looked, action thriller Codename Cougar (1987). It situates a textual
analysis of the film within the industrial context of the late 1980s, an era
that called for the development of “entertainment films” for Chinese
audiences. Zhang and many of his Fifth-Generation peers re-orient
their approach from making art to achieving commercial success. This
reflects the rising power of the market, as well as the growing influence
of imported popular culture. The chapter suggests that Zhang’s pioneer-
ing though posturing early action film anticipates the director’s later turn
to the making of martial arts blockbusters.
Keywords  Entertainment film · Foreign imports · Action thriller 

Masculinity · Cross-Taiwan Strait relation
The camera offers a close-up shot of a footbridge beside the train station,
then tilts down to reveal a middle-aged man in ragged clothes hiding in
the shadow. He cautiously peers out from the corner. Cut to a big clock
face that reads 7:33 am. The camera returns to the man, who now looks
more nervous and expectant. A train is roaring past below the bridge.
This scene, producing an atmosphere of mystery and suspense, is not
from an espionage film or an action thriller. It is from Zhang Yimou’s
Coming Home (归来), a 2014 artistically viable film (wenyipian) that tells
the story of family reunion during and in the immediate aftermath of the

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4328-4_2
10 2 CODENAME COUGAR: POLITICS OR ENTERTAINMENT?
Cultural Revolution. The scene shows the film’s protagonist escaping

from a labour camp in order to have a brief get-together with his wife
and daughter. His teenage daughter betrays him by informing a labour
camp officer of her father’s whereabouts. Zhang uses parallel editing in
the subsequent scene to intensify suspense. While the father becomes
more anxious, the mother is on a bus heading to the site, unaware that
her daughter is cycling behind the vehicle. At the same time, the labour
camp officer and his associates are rushing to the train station to capture
the escapee. Such a highly dramatic moment is rarely seen in a family
drama.
Could Zhang’s use of suspense and thriller elements be testing the
water for his forthcoming Great Wall (长城), a US–China monster thriller
starring Matt Damon, who plays the eponymous hero of The Bourne
Trilogy? But Zhang’s interest in the thriller generic elements did not
start with Coming Home or Great Wall. In 1988, 26 years before Coming
Home and still early in his career, Zhang directed Codename Cougar (also
known as Operation Cougar or Puma Operation; 代号美洲豹). This film
is widely seen as an “alternative work” or cul-de-sac in Zhang’s oeuvre;
it has been overlooked by scholars, reviewers and the director himself.
On multiple occasions, Zhang has explained that it was not his plan to
make this film, and he agreed to direct it simply to repay a friend’s favour
(Li 1998: 29; Berry 2005: 125; Zhang 2010: 134).1
This chapter revisits Codename Cougar because there is much to be
learned from it—not as a great film to be rediscovered but as evidence
of some major changes in the Chinese film industry. In the late 1970s a
desire for “entertainment films” (娱乐片) had emerged, and during the
1980s the industry went through a radical shift from being politically
centred to becoming commercially centred. This chapter argues that the
shift of emphasis for Zhang and many of his Fifth-Generation colleagues
from making art to making money reflects two broad changes, the ris-
ing power of the market in China and the influence of imported popular
culture. We will closely read Codename Cougar as a pioneering but only
partly successful action film that in many respects foreshadows the direc-
tor’s grandiose turn to martial arts blockbusters around the new millen-
nium. Its most original aspect is its attempt to address two important but
controversial political themes—terrorism and the relationship between
Taiwan and mainland China—by using an action film as the vehicle.
For many years after 1949, the Chinese film industry had remained
under the close control and censorship of the government. Films were
2 CODENAME COUGAR: POLITICS OR ENTERTAINMENT? 11
made to promote the standard ideology of the Communist Party and the
state. Over those years, all feature films from the 19 state-operated stu-
dios were distributed by the China Film Corporation, a monopoly com-
pany that decided on the number of copies to be distributed nationally.
A film’s box-office revenues were shared between this corporation, the
provincial distribution companies, the film studio that produced the film
and the processing laboratory. On average, the film studio would receive
about 15% of a film’s overall revenue (Tian 2013: 4).
Following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Chinese film, like
the society at large, entered a New Era. The emancipation of mind and the
open-door economic policy motivated Chinese people from many walks
of life to critically re-think established conventions. Within the film indus-
try, there was an increasing belief that film should not function purely as a
political tool but should also serve as an entertainment vehicle. As a result,
China’s cinema screen became more colourful, literally as well as metophor-
ically. The percentage of films shaped mainly by entertainment elements
grew, according to one survey, to 22, 10, 12 and 32% of the annual out-
put between 1977 and 1980 (Zhang and Shi 2007: 291). Those less politi-
cal and more intimate films, together with the “oldies” produced during
the “seventeen-year” period before the Cultural Revolution, were received
enthusiastically by local audiences. Cinema attendances rose from 13.2
billion in 1976 to 29.3 billion in 1979 (Zhang and Shi 2007: 293).
Entertainment films became even more conspicuous by the mid-to-
late 1980s, replacing propaganda and art films to become the dominant
form. In a 1986 round-table dialogue on entertainment films organized
by the editorial office of Contemporary Cinema, a bi-monthly film journal
based in Beijing, Chen Xihe noted that “in 1985, more entertainment
films were produced than in the entire decade of the New Era—more,
in fact, than since the founding of the [People’s] Republic” (quoted in
Semsel et al. 1993: 86). The surge reached its apogee in 1988, when over
60% of the annual output consisted of entertainment films. A generic
breakdown shows that, out of the year’s total of 152 films (including chil-
dren’s and opera movies), 28 were detective films, 24 costume drama/
martial arts and 16 youth films. Film-making on earlier mainstream sub-
jects lost momentum. The number of films on industry, agriculture, or
revolutionary or military history dropped to 2, 12 and 8 titles respec-
tively. Even these more conventional films incorporated some elements
of entertainment, as indicated by their film titles. For example, the 12
rural films included A Wild Mountain Inn (孤岭野店, dir. Xiang Ling),
A Woman from the Desert (被吞噬的女子, dir. Fan Mingren) and Ghost
Fairy Valley (鬼仙沟, dir. Xiao Guiyun); and the genre of revolutionary
history included Joyous Heroes (欢乐英雄) and Between Life and Death (阴
阳界), both of which were directed by the Fifth-Generation director Wu
Ziniu (China Film Yearbook 1989: 202–211).
From the start this entertainment wave was accompanied by criti-
cism and disapproval. When Mysterious Buddha (神秘的大佛, dir. Zhang
Huaxun 1980), the first martial arts/action movie made in mainland
China since 1949, was given a trial screening to film scholars and review-
ers, it was condemned as having a “vulgar” taste, a “bizarre” story and
a “fabricated” plot. The controversy over entertainment films became
nation-wide. The editorial office of Contemporary Cinema invited schol-
ars, critics, directors, screenwriters and administrators to address the
topic, and the first three issues of the journal in 1987 contained ener-
getic debate under the heading “Dialogues: Entertainment Films”. Many
issues were discussed, from stylistic features to aesthetic functions, from
entertainment “hooks” to generic codes. This debate also provided a
chance for film industry practitioners to pour out their grievances. Zhang
Huanxun complained that, after making Mysterious Buddha, he had been
criticized for going after box-office profits, for presenting graphic hor-
ror on screen and for catering to the vulgar and unhealthy taste of the
audience (Contemporary Cinema 1987: 22). Such censure was wide-
spread. Zhang Junzhao was the director of One and Eightt (一个和八个,
1983), a war film that, together with Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (黄土地,
1984), launched China New Wave cinema in the early 1980s; but in 1986
after he completed a costume martial arts drama, The Lonely Murderer (
孤独的谋杀者), his art was said to have “degenerated”. When Tian
Zhuangzhuang, another key Fifth-Generation director, who became inter-
nationally known for experimental films like On the Hunting Ground (猎
场扎撒, 1984) and Horse Thief (盗马贼, 1986), made the more commer-
cial feature Rock Kids (摇滚青年, 1988), critics described him as “disori-
ented”; and Teng Wenji, who built his reputation with art-house movies
like Awakening (苏醒, 1980) and At the Beach (海滩, 1984) was accused
of “shallowness” because he made the popular 1985 film Hurricane
Operation (飓风行动).
In December 1988, the editorial office of Contemporary Cinema
held a symposium on entertainment films “to further clarify their func-
tions and social effects, and elucidate the positive and negative role of
the craze for [such] entertainments in constructing the overall culture”
(Zhang 1989: 4). At this event, Chen Haosu, the editor-in-chief of

the journal, who was also Vice-Minister of the Broadcasting, Film and
Television Ministry in charge of the film business, delivered the opening
speech:
Our lives have been deprived of entertainment. This is not a sign of a civ-
ilized society. The advancement of society and civilization requires enter-
tainment. In the past, entertainment took a low status in people’s lives
because of economic deficiency and political turmoil. Now is the time
to change this. A film can educate people and make them concerned
[about society]. But this should not be the sole responsibility of film art.
A monotonous over-emphasis on propaganda or art may lead us to under-
estimate entertainment and entertainment films. (quoted in Zhang 1989: 4)
Chen’s speech struck the film industry like a lightning bolt, giving
encouragement to people like Zhang Huaxun and engendering fur-
ther debates among critics and reviewers. Film journals presented
arguments pro and con. Scholars in favour of Chen’s stance sought to
expand and theorize his ideas. In “A response to the issue of the con-
temporary entertainment film” (1989), Shao Mujun called for a better
understanding of audiences and a broader definition of entertainment.
The article examined a number of key issues, including genre conven-
tions and the negotiations between audiences, studios and the market
(13–14). Jia Leilei discussed entertainment films as melodramas that
aimed to maximize their commercial value by taking hold of the imagi-
nation of viewers and providing them with fantasy, escapism and pleas-
ure (1989: 23). Jia listed five rules for making entertainment films:
(1) The heroic protagonists should win the audience’s identification and
should not be ridiculed; (2) Characters should represent a polarization
between good and evil; (3) The narrative should have a clear cause-and-
effect logic; (4) Conflicts should be resolved through external factors;
and (5) Technically their style should be conventional (28–31). To Li
Yiming (1993a), the shift to producing entertainment films was nothing
but “an inevitable outcome of cultural transformation and [the] market
economy”. Drawing on political, psychological, cultural and industrial
perspectives, Li’s lengthy article offered charts and tables to analyse the
popularity of films (Li 1993b: 52–55). His essay concluded by point-
ing out that Chinese cinema was still no match for Hollywood, in
terms of concepts, production, technology and the star system. He saw
a compromise, or temporary solution, in the creation of entertainment

films with Chinese characteristics (61), although he did not specify what
those characteristics were.
There were critics who did not agree with Chen Haosu’s view. Mei
Duo, a former editor-in-chief of the popular film magazine Popular
Cinema and the influential compendium journal Wenhui Monthly,
believed that the minister was unrealistic in trying to win young people
back to the cinemas through entertainment films. This was because
going all the way to meet the demands of the audience would only lead
to further compromising the artistic and ideological quality of films
(Shi 1988: 6). Rui Rui (1989) related the entertainment surge to the rise
of “hooligan culture” (liumang wenhua 流氓文化) since both were anti-
elite, anti-intellectual and anti-aesthetic. His article rejected entertain-
ment films as disposable, immoral commodities, “superficially expressed
and recklessly narrated” (5).
Alongside commodification and marketization, another factor that
played a pivotal role in changing the look and function of Chinese films
in the 1980s was the popularity of imported products, including films
and television programmes. After 1949, Chinese society had been gov-
erned by a policy of relative isolation but this was abandoned with the
arrival of the economic reforms. As Chinese society began to open up,
overseas ideas and products began pouring in. Among those that arrived
first were popular music and television drama series. In 1980 the tele-
cast of two American television dramas scored a record high in audience
ratings. The first was Man from Atlantis (1977–1978), a 13-episode
science-fiction television series directed by Lee H. Katzin. With the
screening of the show on China Central Television (CCTV) in May, its
protagonist Mark Harris took hold of the imagination of Chinese viewers
with his extraordinary abilities, superhuman strength and unusual sun-
glasses. It became a fashion for Chinese youth to wear sunglasses in the
street, and such glasses were given the Chinese name maikejing, meaning
‘Mark’s glasses’. In October of the same year, CCTV began to broadcast
Garrison’s Guerrillas, a 26-episode ABC television series (1967–1968),
which also garnered a cult following across the country, and motivated
local television artists to produce China’s first television drama series, the
9-episode Eighteen Years in the Enemy’s Camp (敌营十八年, 1981).
The impact of imported products quickly expanded, including films,
publications, music and costumes. Paul Clark notes that the majority

of books sold in the 700 bookstores in Beijing in late 1988 “were
reportedly translations from Japanese, English and other foreign

languages” (2012: 83). Throughout the decade, foreign films were

dubbed into Chinese and introduced to Chinese audiences. Some of
the most influential included: Corazón salvaje (Wild at Heart; dir. Tito
Davison, 1968) and Yesenia (dir. Alfredo Crevenna, 1971) from Mexico;
Awara (dir. Nasir Hussain, 1971) from India; Notre-Dame de Paris
(The Hunchback of Notre Dame; dir. Jean Delannoy, 1956), Le Comte
de Monte Cristo (The Combat of Monte Cristo; dir. Claude Autant-Lara,
1961) and Zorro (dir. Duccio Tessari, 1975) from Italy and France;
Jane Eyre (dir. Robert Stevenson, 1943) and Tess (dir. Roman Polansky,
1979) from Britain, and Sandakan No. 8 (Ken Kumai, 1974), Manhunt
(Junya Satõ, 1976) and Proof of the Man (Seiichi Morimura, 1977) from
Japan.
Over this period, it was not uncommon to see a Chinese entertain-
ment film which borrowed stylistic and narrative effects from for-
eign melodramas, detective or suspense thrillers. Woman director Liu
Guoquan’s Desperate Songstress (疯狂歌女, 1988), starring a popular
female singer, was virtually a Chinese version of the Japanese Proof of the
Man. As early as 1980, Guo Baochang, later known for directing and
producing television melodramas, made Mist over Fairy Peak (神女峰
的迷雾), which was one of the first post-1949 mainland Chinese films
that featured an anti-hero as the central character. The movie portrayed a
mother who attempted to cover up the death of her juvenile delinquent
son in order to save her face as a high-profile official. Its melodramatic
twists were also clearly inspired by Proof of the Man.
The nationwide release of a Hollywood low-budget film with a break-
dancing theme caused a sensation in early 1988. When Breakin’ (also
known as Breakdance: The Movie, dir. Joel Silberg, 1984) first appeared
on China’s big screens, it immediately took hold of the hearts of Chinese
youth. Sixth-Generation director Jia Zhangke recalled that he had
watched this Hollywood product “ten, twenty times, and learned all the
[break-dance] moves from that movie” (Berry 2005: 195). That film,
plus music albums by Michael Jackson (whose “Thriller” was introduced
to his Chinese fans soon after its release in 1983), successfully created a
rock ’n’ roll dance craze, both on and off the screen (Clark 2012: 106).
A quick glimpse at late 1980s entertainment films would show that many
of them weaved into the narrative at least one dance scene. The dance
hall was usually dimly lit by a coloured, mirror-covered ball rotating
at the centre of the ceiling, under which young men and women were
performing breakdances (piliwu 霹雳舞), robotic (moonwalking) dances

(taikongwu 太空舞) or flexi-dances (rouziwu 柔姿舞).
An examination of Zhang Yimou’s Codename Cougar should be placed
in this general context, since he was by no means alone in departing from
an experimental art-house style which had brought him an international
reputation. Besides Zhang Junzhao and Tian Zhuangzhuang mentioned
earlier, other Fifth-Generation film-makers also plunged into this com-
mercial “river without buoys”.2 In the same year as Codename Cougar,
Huang Jianxin (The Black Cannon Incident 黑炮事件, 1985; Dislocation
错位, 1986) made Samsara (轮回); Hu Mei (Army Nurse 女儿楼, 1984)
directed A Gunman without Guns (无枪枪手); Zhou Xiaowen (In Their
Prime 他们正年轻, 1986) completed The Price of Frenzy (also known as
Obsession 疯狂的代价); Wu Ziniu (Secret Decree 喋血黑谷, 1984; Dove
Tree 鸽子树, 1985) completed Joyous Heroes and Between Life and Death.
This collective rush to join the market reveals the power and speed of the
commercial wave.
The thriller (惊险样式影片) was a particularly popular genre.
According to a survey conducted across the country during the period
March–July 1984, 60% of Chinese audiences in the 18–30 age group had
a penchant for thrillers (Wu 1985: 22). As film studios relied increasingly
on this genre, it attracted the attention of academia. The editorial office
of Film Art and Popular Film held symposiums on thriller films in 1985
and 1988 respectively. Journal articles were published to defend thriller
films (Yan 1985; Chang 1985, Situ 1985), to explore them (Xiao 1985;
Meng 1985;Yu 1985), to rethink them (Cao 1988) and to analyse them
(Zhang 1989). This genre in Chinese cinema was seen to encompass a
number of subgenres, including anti-spy (反特片), underground con-
flict (地下斗争片), military espionage (军事惊险片), and detective stories
(侦探片, or 推理片) (Meng 1988: 49). The common generic subject
matter included pre-1949 underground conflicts and the post-1949
suppression of spies, bandits and other criminals (Cao 1988: 35). The
subgenre of the detective thriller became especially prolific, with predict-
able ingredients in terms of plot (investigating crime, murder or the theft
of state secrets), characters (police officer or criminal/spy) and themes
(the victory of good over evil).
Codename Cougar is an action-thriller, though it has some dis-
tinctive features. Its story takes place within 24 h on 3 September
(presumably in 1988, the year of its production). A small group
of terrorists hijacks a private jet, with a Taiwanese political and
business leader on board, en route from Taipei to Seoul. The terror-

ists, belonging to the “Asia Black Special Operation Group” based in
Taiwan, demand the release of Liu Tingjun, their group leader, from a
Taiwanese prison. They want the plane to fly to Manila but they dam-
age the cockpit controls during the hijacking, and the plane is forced
to execute a crash landing in so-called “Zone 4” of mainland China.
The response from Beijing is rapid, with the dispatch of a counter-ter-
rorist unit to the site, led by Liang Zhuang. Meanwhile, a secret com-
munication channel is established between Beijing and Taipei. The two
sides of the Taiwan Strait, after 40 years of non-communication, agree
to cooperate on this humanitarian and counter-terrorist mission. A
special armed force from Taiwan, headed by Huang Jingru, arrives at
“Zone 4” in a civilian “Cougar” helicopter as the “Cougar Operation”.
The joint forces make multiple attempts to outwit the terrorists but all
their schemes are thwarted. In retaliation, the terrorists begin to kill
hostages. Eventually, the Taiwan administration agrees to release Liu
Tingjun to the hijackers. Upon Liu’s arrival, the terrorists head with
their hostages to a helicopter prepared for them to leave. Snipers open
fire and swiftly wipe out the terrorists. Liu Tingjun kills the main-
land’s Liang Zhuang before he is himself shot dead by Taiwan’s Huang
Jingru. The film concludes with Huang and others leaving “Zone 4” in
helicopters, lit by the first rays of dawn.
In world cinema since the 1960s, as Boggs and Polland note:
“[t]errorism has become a vital source of narratives, fantasies, and myths
that contribute so much to highly entertaining cinema, with its interna-
tional intrigue, exotic settings, graphic violence, and the putative con-
flict between good and evil” (2006: 335). Terrorism has, however, rarely
been seen in Chinese films. Presumably for reasons of political correct-
ness, the industry’s engagement with this “vital source” has been almost
non-existent. Codename Cougar is pioneering in that respect, though
the film failed to achieve either commercial or critical success. Interest
in the film both from academia and from the general public was as scarce
as the treatment of the theme itself in Chinese cinema. Major film jour-
nals like Film Art and Contemporary Cinema carried no reviews of the
film. Only Movie Review, a tabloid film journal run by a media corpora-
tion in remote Guizhou province, published three short half-page com-
ments (i.e. Wang 1989; Qiu 1989; Tian 1989).3 A search for Codename
Cougar in Google or Baidu in English or Chinese produces surprisingly
limited results.
Codename Cougar was Zhang’s second film as director. His directorial

debut Red Sorghum had won the Golden Bear Award at the 38th Berlin
International Film Festival in 1988. One difference between the two
films was the choice of period. Like most other entertainment films of
the late 1980s, Codename Cougar takes place in the present. But Zhang’s
film does not exploit the usual ingredients of contemporary entertain-
ment films such as bars, nightclubs, dance halls, beaches, bikinis or love
affairs. The film’s main setting, “Zone 4”, is an area physically open but
psychologically confined. The world beyond the “zone” serves only as a
foil, represented through snapshot images.
Before Codename Cougar, Zhang was said to have achieved a series
of “miracles” as cinematographer, actor and director (Wang 1998),
but in filmic terms Codename Cougar was viewed as a disappointment.
For example, Zhang Huijun, a former classmate and a fellow Fifth-
Generation filmmaker, saw a number of flaws in the film’s narrative and
characterization (2010: 135). What had Zhang Yimou tried to achieve?
In an interview in 1992, he offered this rationale for the film:
I was thinking about the lack of communication between the two sides
of the Taiwan Strait for 40 years. If an unexpected event occurred that
required cross-Strait communications and interactions, what would be the
response from each side? … But in reality, as I realized later, we cannot
deal with the subject this way. It would become a political film. Making a
political film in China is a difficult task and is subject to censorship from
many departments…The existing film…is more commercialized. But it
is not that commercial; so it is neither one thing nor another. (quoted in
Chen 1995: 71)
The director’s words offer useful background. From the very begin-
ning, this was not going to be an experimental project in the tradition of
New Wave cinema but a more commercial product that addressed con-
temporary issues. A distinctive aspect of the 1980s was a more relaxed
relationship between Taiwan and mainland China. An atmosphere of
militant and political hostility had hung over the Taiwan Strait since the
Civil War between the Nationalists and the Communists ended in 1949.
From the perspective of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Taiwan
was a province occupied by the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT), yet to
be “liberated”. All cross-Strait communications were prohibited for a
period of more than three decades. But Zhang’s father and two uncles
were graduates of the Nationalist Huangpu Military Academy, and all

had served in the Nationalist army before 1949. His elder uncle went to
Taiwan in 1948 and could not return to the Mainland until 1987. The
family’s reunion after 40 years’ separation deeply impressed the director
(Fang 2012: 135; Zhou 2015: 126). The uncle’s return to his mainland
relatives was made possible by some major political changes.
Soon after Chinese society opened its doors to the outside world in
1978, the CCP shifted its policies toward Taiwan from “liberation by
force” to “reunification through peaceful means”. This was first signalled
in January 1979 when “An Open Letter to Taiwan Compatriots” was
issued in the name of the Standing Committee of the National People’s
Congress. The letter “dropped the term ‘liberation’. It appealed to
the national sentiment of the people of Taiwan, expressed two hopes
on the Taiwan issue, and suggested talks between the two sides to end
the status of hostility” (Bo 2002: 5). To further elaborate the CCP’s
new policy toward Taiwan, Ye Jianying (叶剑英), the Chairman of the
National People’s Congress Standing Committee, expressed nine princi-
ples concerning “the return of Taiwan to the motherland for the reali-
zation of peaceful reunification” in September 1981. Later known as
“Ye’s Nine Principles”, they included a call for negotiations between the
CCP and the KMT on an equal basis, and the establishment of “three
links”—a direct air and shipping service, mail, and trade links. Ye’s points
were “the first systematic exposition of the CCP’s new policies toward
Taiwan” (Bo 2002: 7), later summed up by Deng Xiaoping (邓小平 in
January 1982) as the policy of “one country, two systems”. Although the
initial response from Taiwan to the CCP’s call for peaceful negotiations
and building up of cross-Strait links was a policy of “three noes”—no
contact, no negotiation, and no compromise—Taipei did gradually relax
its attitude towards mainland China. In January 1984, Taiwan residents
were allowed to contact mainland Chinese for international cultural and
artistic conferences and other events; and in July 1985 the restrictions
on indirect trade between Taiwan and mainland China were removed.
Two years later, in July 1987, the state of martial law—which had been
active since 1949—was lifted. In November of the same year, Taiwan res-
idents, with the exception of state functionaries and military personnel
on active service, were allowed to visit family members and relatives on
the mainland (Bo 2002: 13).4
In the words of a Chinese saying, “the duck knows first when the
river water becomes warm in spring”. As ice and snow were melting on
the political and military levels, artists from the two sides of the Strait
were among the first citizens to interact with each other. In 1984, the
Hong Kong Art Centre had two programmes of films from Taiwan and
mainland China which were screened together. This was the first time
films of the two territories were combined (Liang 1998: 333).5 In 1986,
a large-scale symposium on the three New Wave cinemas emerging in
Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China was held in Taiwan to discuss
the parallels and differences between them (Lin 1986).
People in Taiwan had come to know Zhang Yimou primarily through
his reputation as a film artist.6
The relaxation of political tensions, the interactions between the film
industries, the director’s personal connections with Taiwan and the art-
ist’s sensibility to the market all made Zhang Yimou confident that
Codename Cougar would be “an interesting and acceptable” project.
In the commercial wave pouring through the Chinese film industry at
that time, his film stood alone in not dealing with “pillows” (explicit sex-
related scenes) or “fists” (martial arts), but instead tackled the themes
of counter-terrorism and national reunification, which held profound
implications. There was originality in the director’s combination of nar-
rative, thematic and stylistic elements. It was not until ten years later that
South Korean filmmakers took a similar approach to explore the theme of
their own national reunification in the highly influential action films Shiri
(dir. Kang Je-gyu, 1999) and Joint Security Area (dir. Park Chan-wook,
2000).
The cross-Strait relationship had great potential to attract Chinese
audiences, but it was still a sensitive and challenging subject for the cin-
ema screen in the late 1980s. Zhang approached the subject cautiously.
His film acknowledged the complexity of the issue through the words of
the Taiwan business tycoon. At one point, when the terrorists become
impatient with the delay in getting responses from the Taiwan authori-
ties and threaten to kill hostages, the business leader delivers them a les-
son: “The Communists and Nationalists have had no direct contact for
so many years. How can the Communists inform Taipei of this? Even
when they manage to do so, why should Taipei believe them? Even when
Taipei believes them, the cooperation between the two sides will be con-
ditional. All this takes time.” In other respects, however, the film had
little to say about the long-term separation. The only cross-Strait differ-
ences likely to be noticed by mainland viewers were the connotations of
the names of the two Army officers in command: Huang Jingru (黄敬儒)
from Taiwan and Liang Zhuang (梁壮) from mainland China, meaning
respectively “admiring Confucianism” and “majestic/strong”.
Instead, the film concentrates on the idea that “Taiwan is part of
China”. Unfortunately it does not bring much subtlety to this theme.
The motif is expressed through the ties of kinship (such as the Taiwan
officer’s Beijing forebears) and by a symbolic use of cigarettes. After
the deputy head of the mainland counter-terrorism army unit is killed
while injecting gas into the cabin, his Taiwanese counterpart takes out
a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of the dead man’s green uniform
and later passes them on to his soldiers with the words: “These are good
cigarettes from Yunnan. Those of you from Yunnan may have one.”
Multiple hands are raised: “I’m from Yunnan!” “I’m also from Yunnan.
I want one!” “I also want one!” In Chinese films and television dramas,
cigarettes are frequently used to express homesickness. The nationalistic
theme is also emphasised at the end of the film in the words of an upbeat
theme song: “We say good-bye in the morning; our faces show suffering
from yesterday…. [But] we wave our hands, we forget the suffering from
yesterday.” This positive message is sung as the military helicopters take
off at dawn and fly across the rising sun.
Codename Cougar is a generic hybrid, making visual and verbal refer-
ences to documentary, political film and action thriller. The film strives
for a documentary sense of immediacy with quasi-vérité techniques such
as voice-over-narration and the use of still photographs. The images of
high-ranking politicians and military officers at meetings are reminis-
cent of the conclave of generals at the beginning of Costa-Gavras’ Z
(1970), a classic political thriller. As these still images change, attention
is drawn, to borrow Derry’s description of the similar sequence in Z,
to “their age, their ugly skin tones, their wrinkles, their moles”, their
moustaches, and their baldness (1988: 115). Is Zhang similarly portray-
ing the authority figures in a less than positive way? It is tempting to
think so, but it is by no means certain since he was constrained by cen-
sorship, and the nature of this project obviously required him to tread
carefully.
The entertainment offered by Codename Cougar comes largely from
the action scenes. The film has augmented its visual effects by taking
advantage of “what were then new techniques for staging gunfights,
explosions, and blood bursts” (Chi 2007: 67). These “new techniques”
are most apparent in the scene where the plane is hijacked. Accompanied
by the narrator’s account of the context, a montage sequence chronicles
the action with elliptical editing, de-centred framing, unusual angles and
handheld camerawork. All those elements seem to foreshadow the sus-
pense sequence 26 years later in Zhang’s Coming Home.
Codename Cougar exploits other elements in seeking to increase its
commercial interest. Robert Chi has argued in a discussion of the rep-
resentation of Taiwan in mainland Chinese cinema that the film reflects
Zhang’s ambition to seek a global audience, since the film’s plotline was
situated “within a broad international context” (Chi 2007: 67), with
scenes set in South Korea, the United States, Japan and Hong Kong,
as well as Taiwan and mainland China. The filmmaker has also used
soundtrack and casting to boost the film’s appeal. The composer who
scored Codename Cougar was 26-year-old Guo Feng. Guo had entered
the awareness of Chinese music listeners in 1986 when his song “Fill the
World with Love” (让世界充满爱) was performed by a hundred popular
musicians at a televised concert to mark the International Year of Peace.
The performance was a phenomenal success and gave the song a similar
status to Michael Jackson’s We Are the World or Taiwan rock godfather
Luo Dayou’s A Better Tomorrow.7 Fourth-Generation directors Teng
Wenji and Weng Luming had then used the name of Guo’s song as the
title of a detective thriller they made in 1987. Guo became one of the
country’s most sought-after musicians. He scored at least two other films
by Fifth-Generation directors at the time he was working for Zhang—
Hu Mei’s A Gunman without Guns (1988) and Zhou Xiaowen’s The
Last Frenzy (最后的疯狂, 1987).
One of the much talked-about aspects of Zhou’s The Last Frenzy is
the “hard body” masculinity of the male leading hero, played by actor
Liu Xiaoning. Zhou’s film, a somewhat Chinese blend of Dirty Harry
(Don Siegel, 1971) and Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939), has been seen as
a significant breakthrough in the Chinese thriller genre (Meng 1988).
The same actor, Liu Xiaoning, also appears in Codename Cougar as cen-
tral protagonist (playing the role of Liang Zhuang). Through this fig-
ure, the film highlights Chinese indigenous machismo, and women
play a much smaller part than in other films by Zhang. The film does
include Gong Li, star of Red Sorghum, as a nurse who inadvertently helps
the terrorists, but this is a minor role. The choice of Liu does match
the casting of Jiang Wen as the bandit hero in Red Sorghum, Zhang’s
1987 directorial debut; yet there is normally a complexity to Zhang’s
treatment of machismo, as Wang noted when he described Red Sorghum

as “a cinematic milestone that proposes a powerful Chinese version of
masculinity as a means of cultural critique” (Wang 1991: 87).
At this time, the concept of masculinity had just become a
topic of interest in Chinese popular and academic discussion. As a
counter-response to the “tall, big and perfect” (高大全) figures repre-
senting the Maoist revolutionary ethos, Chinese films in the late 1970s
had resumed the tradition of “ideal masculinity in pre-modern China”,
such as the image of “the fragile scholar” (Song 2004) which por-
trayed men as bookish and pedantic (shudaizi 书呆子), or handsome
but weak (naiyou xiaosheng 奶油小生). Chinese audiences were exposed
to more physical versions of masculinity in imported films, such as First
Blood (dir. Ted Kotcheff, 1982) and Man Hunt (aka Kimi yo Funne no
Kawa o Watare/When You Cross a River of Rage; dir. Jun’ya Satô,
1976). The former was publicly released in China in 1986 and the film’s
star, Sylvester Stallone, instantly became a household name. The lat-
ter was a Japanese commercial suspense thriller dubbed into Chinese
and released into the local market in 1979, which played a particularly
important role in stimulating a new Chinese interest in “masculinity”.
The film features Japanese legendary actor Ken Takakura as the central
protagonist Morioka, a Tokyo police prosecutor. At the start of the film,
Morioka has been framed for rape and robbery, and he has to run for his
life and attempt to clear his name. The masculine image of Ken Takakura
in the film, a quiet man in a trench coat with collar up, fighting a one-
man battle against both the police and the villains, had an enormous and
lasting impact in reshaping the image of masculinity in Chinese popular
culture (Pang 2012: 153).8 Following Takakura’s performance, Chinese
screens were filled with male figures of a cold and gloomy appearance
who believed in action more than words. Both Jiang Wen (star of Red
Sorghum) and Liu Xiaoning were actors of this type.
In the same year that Zhang made Codename Cougar, on the
other side of the Pacific Ocean John McTiernan directed Die Hard
for Twentieth Century Fox. McTiernan’s film stars Bruce Willis as
John McClane, a New York cop who comes to Los Angeles to visit his
estranged wife and two daughters at Christmas time. When he is in the
wife’s office building, he comes across a group of foreign terrorists who
take her hostage along with other employees. McClane has to fight sin-
glehandedly with the terrorists in order to save the hostages. The pro-
duction of Die Hard came at a time when American society was just
emerging from the shadow of what Robert Bly called the “fall of mas-
culinity” in the suburban post-war decades (Bly 1990).9 The film was
a huge success, inspiring a number of spinoffs, hard-boiled action films
such as Under Siege (dir. Andrew Davis, 1992), Speed (dir. Jan de Bont,
1994), The Rock (Michael Bay, 1996) and Air Force One (Wolfgang
Peterson, 1997) (Dodds 2008: 242).
On a surface level, Codename Cougar and Die Hard share simi-
larities of theme (counter-terrorism), spatial location (in an “enclosed”
Zone 4 and the Nakatomi Plaza Building respectively), time scale (hap-
pening within 24 h), and characterization (emphasizing male characters
and largely ignoring female ones). The chief terrorists in both films are
neurotic but intelligent, well-educated and ruthless. Hans Gruber in
Die Hard does not hesitate to show off his education (with wide read-
ing habits and knowledge of international terrorist politics) and his taste-
ful lifestyle (such as a handmade, bespoke suit from London). Zheng
Xianping in Codename Cougar is a Princeton graduate and a PhD in
Biology from Taipei University and likes to listen to “a bit of music”
when under pressure.
But Codename Cougar and Die Hard also display some conspicuous
differences in the way their stories are developed. China’s greatest twen-
tieth-century writer Lu Xun wrote in a poem over 80 years ago (1931)
that “A man without emotion is not necessarily a true hero; those
with a tender love for children can also be true men.” The message of
Lu Xun’s poem, that the essence of a “true man” was not undermined
by his association with domesticity, became surprisingly relevant to the
male protagonists of Hollywood action films from the 1980s onwards.
This coincided with a period of social change in the United States when
feminists criticized male dominance and women were encouraged to be
ambitious about careers. Hollywood came to see that films with more
detailed relationships between male and female characters could be more
effective in maintaining the involvement of both male and female view-
ers. As Susan Jeffords argues, in such films, “fathering became the vehi-
cle for portraying masculine emotions, ethics, and commitments”, and
for presenting “masculine characterizations” by blending “spectacular
achievement” with “domestic triumph” (1994: 166). Mark Gallagher
also points out that contemporary action film often revolves around a
combination of action and domesticity, increasingly constructing “sto-
ries around threats to domesticity, marriage and the nuclear family. By
presenting spectacular violence as the solution to domestic and familial
conflicts, the genre displays the ideological contradictions between ideal-

ized masculinity and familial responsibility under contemporary capital-
ism.” (2006: 45)
Die Hard combines a macho action narrative with a domestic situ-
ation. The film commences with John McClane in a family crisis. His
wife has pursued a business career in the transnational Nakatomi trad-
ing company, and he blames her for having destroyed their marriage
and alienated him from his daughters by serving the company rather
than the family. After the terrorists take over the company’s building,
his wife is taken hostage by the terrorists. McClane has to confront ten-
sions from two worlds—the collective, public world and the private,
personal world. In contrast, “familial conflicts” or “familial responsibil-
ity” are hardly addressed in Codename Cougar. Such elements were not
required in Chinese films at the time probably because gender politics
were not so much in the news. The only vague implication of a domes-
tic background is when Liang Zhuang tells his Taiwan counterpart
Huang Jingru that he will get married after the mission is completed.
Throughout the film, man’s feelings and emotions remain focused on
the collective conflict.
“Masculinity” in action films is “idealized” because it is represented
as “spectacle” (Neale 1993), “performance” and “multiple masquer-
ade” (Holmlund 1993), displaying the central male protagonist’s physi-
cality and spiritual perseverance. In Richard Sparks’ words, the “qualities
and virtues of masculinity” are defined by the celebration of the leading
man’s “suffering and striving” (1996: 348). Although Die Hard also con-
tains the obligatory relationship story, its commercial success, as Maurice
Yacowar sees it, is still “primarily due to its breakneck action” (1989: 2).
Yvonne Tasker thinks that “there’s not an inch of flab in its construction
or a loose end in sight: a genuinely muscular movie” (1993: 61). The film
was made in the tradition of classic Hollywood narrative cinema by show-
ing how the central male protagonist overcomes difficulties and hard-
ships in accomplishing his goals. For John McTiernan, what matters is
the effective presentation of “spectacle”, ranging from events beyond the
realm of everyday routines to technical effects that generate strong emo-
tions such as excitement, shock, wonder and exhilaration (Purse 2011:
28). McClane saves Holly and they end up together, but the film’s huge
box-office success worldwide is clearly derived from the extraordinary
qualities of the action hero. In order to present masculinity in excess, the
camera often focuses on his semi-naked body covered in blood and sweat.
If Die Hard is escapist and utopian, Codename Cougar is realistic and

understated. Codename Cougar has Liang Zhuang and Huang Jingru
as dual heroes dressed in army uniforms and Western-style suits respec-
tively (to show their different backgrounds). The generic qualities of
Codename Cougar as a hybrid of political film and action thriller offer
great potential for conflicts that test masculine prowess to the limit.
Those conflicts might have come not only from the battle with the ter-
rorists but also from political frustration and hierarchical bureaucracy,
from anti-establishment sentiment, and from cross-Strait differences as a
result of the four decades of separation. Nevertheless, as Zhang implied
in the interview quoted earlier, the film’s political context had to be
stripped down to a minimum because censorship ruled out the possi-
bility of incorporating political criticism or questioning of bureaucracy.
Chinese culture has traditionally endorsed collectivism more than indi-
vidualism and films tend to portray central characters, both male and
female, who are public heroes rather than anti-establishment loners. In
ideological terms, the primary aim of Codename Cougar is to express the
idea of “Taiwan as part of China”, so it is natural that it should empha-
size cooperation between the two territories rather than bureaucratic
obstacles.
The political constraints meant that the generic requirements of
Codename Cougar as an action film—such as “a propensity for spec-
tacular physical action, a narrative structure involving fights, chases and
explosions, and in addition to the deployment of state-of-the-art special
effects, an emphasis in performance on athletic feats and stunts” (Neale
2000: 52)—could only be generated from the strategic and physical
conflict with the terrorists. Zhang does not, however, develop such a
conflict as tightly or vigorously as the best examples of the genre suc-
ceed in doing. Codename Cougar relies more on dialogue than action
as each side (terrorism and counter-terrorism) attempts to outwit the
other. To heighten the narrative, the terrorists frequently get the bet-
ter of their opponents, but most of the time, the characters are waiting
rather than initiating action. Some 14 min of screen time lapse between
arrivals of the two central heroes at the siege, and there is little action in
the interim. Liang Zhuang repeatedly explains why it is taking so long
to get a response from the Taiwan administration. And this is not the
only time he is forced to wait. After his deputy is killed, Liang is twice
framed in a medium shot, sitting with rifle in hand and looking irritated.
He never has a chance to use the gun and his most heroic endeavour is
volunteering to be a hostage. Even in this role, he is only able to perform

a few angry stares, and his eventual death in attempting to save the
Taiwanese nurse (played by Gong Li) under machine-gun fire is neither
meaningful nor professional.10
The hijacking scene that commences the narrative forms the film’s
most spectacular moment. In contrast, the crash-landing of the plane at
a deserted airport is not very gripping or chaotic. When Liang and the
chief terrorist fail to negotiate an agreement, in the first instance the lat-
ter threatens to blow up the plane, but Liang simply offers the disdain-
ful response: “Don’t you forget that the plane is not ours.” Throughout
the film, violent action is limited and does not involve face-to-face con-
frontations, even in the final, climatic shoot-out. There are also narrative
disappointments at the end of the film. After Liu Tingjun, the released
head of the terrorist group, is strategically escorted to the site as bait,
the terrorists take the hostages out of the cabin and cautiously move
towards the helicopter prepared for them. Once their feet are on the
ground, they are targeted by snipers crouching in the grass. A series of
point-of-view close-up shots suggests that the snipers are having prob-
lems in securing their targets. Then the camera turns to Taiwan’s Huang
Jingru, who calls into headphones: “Attention, everyone! Listen to my
order! … Fire!” On his order, soldiers and snipers keep up a steady vol-
ley; all the terrorists are killed and all of the hostages are miraculously
saved. In an interview conducted in 1993, Zhang was asked: “What
do you think is the most important problem with Chinese film today?”
He replied: “They are so fake (xujia), they are overdramatic, and the
actors do not act like they are people living life but like they are play-
ing out a story. The acting is forced and staged.” (Gateward 2001: 45)
Yet Zhang’s attempt at an action film suffers from the same problems.
When the hijacked plane is forced to land in “Zone 4”, the location
looks artificial—the plane stands in the middle of an area of grass-land
surrounded by trees. There is no sign of fire or damage caused by the
crash landing. The interior of the plane looks spotless, with the chief ter-
rorist shown sitting in a swivel arm-chair in front of a table listening to
music to alleviate the pressure he feels.
If “spectacle” is the “soul” of the action genre, and the key to achiev-
ing “spectacle” is (as Gallagher said) a “display” of how “the ideological
contradictions between idealized masculinity and familial responsibil-
ity” are resolved through violence, then Codename Cougar lacks some
key ingredients. There is no “familial responsibility” to add an extra
dimension; the “masculinity” is not “idealized”; and the violence is

hardly “spectacular”. The film succeeds neither as action nor as drama,
which is perhaps what the director means when he admits that it is “nei-
ther one thing nor another”. Yet those who regard the machismo of
Hollywood heroes as excessive may see Zhang’s comparatively under-
stated approach in a more positive light. His casting of Liu, a star highly
popular for his male charisma, shows that Zhang was certainly interested
in the rethinking of masculinity that was currently happening in the cul-
ture; but the fact that Codename Cougar falls short of the hard-boiled
intensity provided by Hollywood action films shows that Zhang was not
altogether ready to embrace the macho ideal. His interest in question-
ing traditional conceptions of gender would continue in his next films,
Judou and Raise the Red Lantern, involving a shift of focus to women
characters.
Overall, Codename Cougar was an interesting and in some respects
original attempt to adapt the genre of action film to the political situ-
ation of “Taiwan as part of China”. It also gave Zhang the experience
of working within a more commercial environment. Discussing Zhang’s
motivation in making the film, Chen Mo speculates that “The film pro-
vides the director a good chance to move from the margins to the centre,
from history to the present, from a utopian portrayal of human spiritual
mentality to realistic reflection of the politics of national reunification”
(1995: 70). Had the film achieved these goals, the director’s creative
career might have developed along a different route. But the constraints
of censorship and the limitations in film-making experience, particu-
larly in mastering a popular genre, produced a film that fell between two
stools, being neither commercially nor critically successful. Nevertheless,
Zhang learned some lessons from it, and Codename Cougar serves to
illustrate the major shifts of interest that were occurring at this time in
Chinese cinema.
Notes
1. As Zhang Yimou’s confidence grew with success stories like Judou, Raise
the Red Lantern and To Live, he became critical of excuses of this kind.
In an interview in 1999, Zhang emphasized the importance of making
use of current opportunities and the possibility of making a commercial
film that had some unique features. He said: “in the history of [world]
cinema, a director was sometimes forced to make a film purely for the
NOTES 29
market or completely for the sake of a friend; but he made it meaningful”

(Guo 1999: 10).
2. River without Buoys (Meiyou hangbiao de heliu, 没有航标的河流, 1983)
is a film made by Wu Tianming, a leading Chinese Fourth-Generation
director and a mentor of the Fifth-Generation directors. Wu’s 1983 film
provides a criticism of the CCP for launching the Cultural Revolution,
implying that Chinese people at the time lived an aimless life, like rafting
down a river without buoys.
3. The Shanghai-based Film Story Monthly introduced Codename Cougar
with a brief synopsis and six stills of the film (no. 3, 1989).
4. As a response to the shift of the government official policy, Chinese cin-
ema began to represent Taiwan more favourably in such films as Romance
on Lushan Mountain (庐山恋, dir. Huang Zumu, 1980), Xi’an Incident
(西安事变, dir. Cheng Yin, 1981), My Memories of Old Beijing (城南旧
事, dir. Wu Yigong, 1982), and The Combat at Tai’erzhuang Village
(血战台儿庄, dir. Yuang Guangyuan and Zhai Junjie, 1986).
5. This includes the selection and exhibition of some mainland Chinese and
Taiwanese films together in international film festivals, such as Berlin,
Venice, Nantes and London.
6. By the time Zhang worked on Codename Cougar, he had drawn the
attention of some Taiwan film critics and industry practitioners by his
work as cinematographer (Yellow Earth), as actor (Old Well, dir. Wu
Tianming, 1986), and as director (Red Sorghum) (Chiao 1998: 36–38).
7. Another Chinese-language song that achieved mythical popularity during
that period was Heirs of the Dragon (龙的传人), written and composed by
Taiwan-based Hou Dejiang (Hau Dak-gin) in 1978. Hou performed the
song at the 1985 China Central Television New Year Gala; and the song
has since permeated countless Chinese households.
8. In 1986, the male Shanghai-based playwright Sha Yexin published Looking
for a Real Man (寻找男子汉), a drama revolving around a woman pro-
tagonist’s disappointment and frustration in her quest to find a “real”
man to be her future husband (Sha 1986). The performance of Sha’s play
generated a nationwide “looking-for-real-men” phenomenon in Chinese
society.
9. Die Hard also expresses concerns about Japanese economic superiority.
In the 1980s the Japanese economy was booming, and the presence of
Japanese companies in the USA generated concern: “Americans increasingly
saw Japan as international rival” (Neuman 2001: 337). Japanese economic
power is symbolized in the film by the Nakatomi Plaza Building where the
film’s action scenes take place. And the President of the Nakatomi Trading,
Joseph Takagi, is portrayed as a second-generation Japanese migrant who
speaks impeccable English but still maintains a distinctive Japanese outlook.
10. From a certain political point of view—the need for a united front—Liang

Zhuang’s death, like that of his deputy in the earlier scene, can perhaps
be read as mainland China’s good-will willingness to sacrifice for Taiwan.
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CHAPTER 3
(Young) Heroes in a “Cursed” House
Abstract  This chapter focuses on Zhang Yimous’s “martial arts trilogy”:

Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden
Flower (2006). It examines the ways in which Zhang was responding
to two increasingly powerful forces within the Chinese cinematic land-
scape—the growing youth audience and the appeal of Hollywood. It
also attempts to shed light on how the director’s family background and
his experience during the Cultural Revolution influenced the themes of
those films.
Keywords  Martial arts · Blockbusters · Cultural Revolution  

Youthful rebellion · Influence of Hollywood
It is early in the morning; the sun brightly shines through the golden
leaves of the forest. A young couple are about to go their separate ways.
“I must leave no matter whether your feeling [for me] is genuine or
not,” says the young woman, a martial arts warrior affiliated to a rebel
group opposed to the government. “Are you going alone?” asks the
young man, a police captain working for the authority. She replies: “For
once I also want to be like the wind.” “But where are you going?” “Who
knows the direction the wind blows?”
This is a scene from Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers, a mar-
tial arts romance produced in 2004. The genre, the casting (Zhang Ziyi
and Takeshi Kaneshiro), the action scenes and the exchanges between

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4328-4_3
36 3 (YOUNG) HEROES IN A “CURSED” HOUSE
the characters reflect the director’s attempt to appeal to a youth-oriented

market. By the turn of the new millennium, Chinese film, like world
cinema at large, has come to be driven by two powerful forces: youth
and action.
Focusing on Zhang Yimou’s so-called “martial arts trilogy”—Hero
(2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower
(2006)—this chapter will explore how these forces have been linked in
the attempt to rejuvenate Chinese film in the shadow of Hollywood-
ization. It will also show how the director’s family background and his
experience during the Cultural Revolution influenced the themes of his
films.
The immediate context for Zhang’s “marital arts trilogy” was the dra-
matic changes sweeping through Chinese cinema. The key change was
the return of Hollywood to the Chinese market. After 1949, Hollywood
had been excluded for ideological reasons. Even after China opened
up to the outside world in the late 1970s, Hollywood was not granted
full entry to the local market. Then, in 1994, the film authority agreed
to import 10 foreign blockbuster movies (mostly from Hollywood) on
a revenue-sharing basis—a policy that allowed foreign studios approxi-
mately 13% of the box office revenue after payment of taxes, fees and
duties. Most importantly, films imported through this official channel
were able to gain access to major cinema chains across the country. In
the next six years (1995–2001), 134 Hollywood films were allowed into
the Chinese market, with 61 of them on a revenue-sharing basis (Lau
2007, 3). These imports captured the heart and imagination of Chinese
audiences.
Chinese filmmakers responded initially with an air of resignation, not
eager for direct conflict with this “wolf at the door”. Zhang summed up
the situation in this way:
Honestly speaking, even if you put all the greatest filmmakers from the
world cinema together, they are still no match for Hollywood. This situ-
ation will remain unchanged within the next half century…. What we can
do is to avoid the powerful American films and make films we are famil-
iar with. If we pour out our genuine passion on the films we are making,
we can probably withhold the “native land”. Local films must combine
human nature (人性) with entertainment [values]; they must also contain
sustained philosophical meanings. This is an alternative road for Chinese
cinema. (quoted in Chen 1998: 16–17)
3 (YOUNG) HEROES IN A “CURSED” HOUSE 37
For Zhang, this strategy of “using small to confront big” (Huang and
Li 2000) led to the production of a number of small-budget, artistically-
slanted festival winners, such as Keep Cool (1997), Not One Less (1998)
and The Road Home (1999). But box-office results showed that such a
strategy was very limited. The Chinese film industry seemed about to
become another victim of “the wolf”. The small number of imported
blockbuster movies was now occupying a huge chunk of the market
(up to 70%). Over the same period of time, the local film industry was
severely hit by shrinking attendance and production figures. Looking
ahead, the vision was no more hopeful. China became a member of the
World Trade Organization in 2001, and to meet WTO obligations it
needed to increase imports to around 20 motion pictures per year. In the
words of Rao Shuguang: “It is not exaggerating to say that the Chinese
film industry reached its most difficult time then. Film studios, distribu-
tion and exhibition units were all heavily in debt. [The industry] hardly
had any capacity to carry out film production and marketing in any inno-
vative way, not to mention increase the production number and the mar-
ket share.” (2009: 497)
In this context, Zhang shifted to a strategy of “using big to confront
big”. Partly inspired and encouraged by the phenomenal success of Ang
Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (卧虎藏龙, 2000) in the global
market, Zhang directed Hero (2002), an epic martial arts costume drama,
which also achieved extraordinary box-office revenues, both locally (over
260 million RMB/US$35 million in the home market) and internation-
ally (over US$53 million in the North American market alone). Other
directors joined in and soon there was a wave of Chinese “big pictures”.
Chen Kaige directed The Promise (无极) an epic fantasy with a pan-Asian
star cast in 2005; and Feng Xiaogang made three films, The Banquet
(夜宴, 2006), an imperial drama loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Assembly (集结号, 2007), a war combat epic, and Aftershock
(唐山大地震, 2009), a generic hybrid of disaster and melodrama. Zhang
went on to make House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flowers and
The Flowers of War in 2004, 2006 and 2011 respectively. These Chinese-
style “big pictures” played a significant role in rejuvenating the Chinese
industry in terms of both production and reception. After a decade of
downturn, the sale of cinema tickets increased from 72 million in 2003
to 336 million in 2011; and the overall box-office revenues skyrocketed
from ¥0.95 billion in 2002 to ¥13.1 billion in 2011.1
Hero’s extraordinary commercial success was matched by the nation-

wide controversies it ignited. While it encouraged local audiences
to go back to the cinema to watch a local film and boosted the confi-
dence of film companies (both national and international) to invest in
Chinese projects, the director was severely criticized for his innova-
tive but subversive treatment of the spirit of the genre, its code of
chivalry. The concept of chivalry (侠) had existed in Chinese literature
and art for over 2000 years. Critics claimed that “the chivalric spirit of
traditional Chinese martial arts” was “buried” by Hero (Jia 2003: 47–49)
in a way which matched “the contemporary mainstream thinking of the
Chinese government and society in the new millennium” (Rawnsley and
Rawnsley 2010: 81) and expressed a fascist ideology by its support for a
brutal, historic dictator (Chan 2004).
The story of the film takes place over 2000 years ago in ancient
China in the Warring States period. A warrior called Nameless secretly
works with two other swordsmen (Long Sky and Broken Sword) and
one swordswoman (Flying Snow), in an attempt to kill the King of Qin
State, who is en route with his army to conquer the other six states.
Claiming that he has killed his three accomplices, and presenting their
weapons as evidence, Nameless is allowed to approach within ten paces
of the throne. He is asked to tell the King how he has managed to defeat
the other warriors. The King is not deceived by his account, but it now
seems too late for him to save himself as Nameless has spent the last ten
years practising a deadly martial arts technique of “killing within ten
paces”. Just as the King turns back, ready to die, Nameless abandons
his assassination, having decided that the man in front of him is truly
capable of unifying China. Nameless is then captured and executed, but
awarded a grand burial by the King. The film concludes with a wide shot
of the Great Wall on which are superimposed the words: “After the King
of Qin reunified China, he ended wars and decreed the building of the
Great Wall in order to defend the nation and its people. He became the
first emperor in Chinese history.”
Zhang identifies Hero as a “mainstream commercial martial arts film”
aimed squarely at the box-office (China Film Artist Association 2003: 118,
121). In the Chinese language, the word “mainstream” (主流) can mean
“conventional” and/or “accepted” and/or “dominant”. Critic Chen Mo
has asked an interesting question: “Shall we treat Hero as a ‘Zhang film’,
or a martial arts film?” (Chen 2003: 1) To see Hero as an auteur work of
art or as a genre film can produce different interpretations. Whereas auteur
films focus more on the director’s individual style and vision, genre films
tend to be discussed in terms of their conventions and acceptance by the
market. In the case of Hero, both approaches are relevant. Genre aspects
provide a more useful starting-point, but they will lead us to an apprecia-
tion of the auteur aspects.
A genre film needs to work within a particular set of codes and con-
ventions, with iconic characters, objects and events. There are many
types of convention—visual, stylistic, emotional, narrative and thematic.
Generic conventions are never rigid, however, because they need to
respond to changing times. The audience for the genre wants familiar
ingredients but it also expects some novelty, and genres must therefore
renew themselves periodically. If there is not enough innovation, the
film will disappoint the audience; but if the film is too revolutionary,
the audience will be uncomfortable. How did Zhang respond to these
expectations?
Hero is a martial arts film, a genre that is well-developed in Chinese
cinema, which originated and developed in Shanghai during the 1920s
and 1930s. Its generic codes include combat scenes involving weapons
(such as blades and swords) and/or the human body (as in kungfu). The
core of the genre is a clear polarization between good and evil, which
reinforces traditional values such as altruism, righteousness, self-sacrifice
and loyalty in friendship. An important means of advancing the narrative
and creating conflicts is “revenge”, usually taken by a younger charac-
ter to respond to the wrongs (e.g. death or accusation) suffered by an
older relative (such as father, master or elder brother). The climatic fight
produces a resolution of conflicts—the defeat of the evil figure(s) and
the restoration of social order and security. Like Hollywood Westerns,
Chinese martial arts films justify the use of violence meted out by posi-
tive characters against evil ones. As in Westerns, the righting of wrongs
in a martial arts film requires a great physical and spiritual effort by the
protagonist.2
At first sight, Hero incorporates many generic elements. The film
tells a revenge story and features chivalric, heroic protagonists. All of
the film’s leading characters—Long Sky, Broken Sword, Flying Snow
and Nameless—demonstrate the chivalric spirit of “altruism, personal
loyalty, truthfulness and mutual faith” (Hall 1999: 20–21). Their per-
sonalities are described by the King of Qin as “honourable (光明磊落),
gracious (气度不凡) and not narrow-minded.” As the director himself
has said, these male and female knights-errant live and die for justice,
righteousness and loyalty (舍身取义、肝胆相照、义薄云天).3 Yet Hero

subverts a central aspect of the spirit of chivalry by combining individ-
ual chivalric concerns with nationalism. For decades, the attraction and
sustainability of the martial arts genre has depended on its commitment
to portraying the distinctive world of jianghu (江湖), an imagined land-
scape which literally means “rivers” and “lakes”. This is separated from
and opposed to established, mainstream society. It is made up of indi-
viduals and their relationships, relationships that are not of a collective,
institutional or governmental kind, and exist outside the law or any
authority. In popular literary and artistic works (including films), people
with martial arts skills reside in this world where they are expected to fol-
low a special jianghu code of honour. For millennia, this imagined world
has provided the Chinese audience with a utopian realm of freedom, lib-
erty and individuality. Hero shakes up this tradition by adding a national
(and therefore collective, institutional and governmental) twist to the
martial arts genre.
In a response to the criticism of his directorial debut Red Sorghum
(1987) as a work of “hybridity”, Zhang replied:
I disagree to categorize films into mainstream, experimental and commer-

cial, which only reflects some stagnant traditional mentality…. I admit that
Red Sorghum is hybrid and marginal. But this is a kind of experiment. Art
and skill have no rule or regulation. A film can be made in whatever way
[you want]…. It is not like learning to practise specific forms of Chinese
martial arts, which are marked by a set of rules. (quoted in Luo 1988:
49–50)
Any overview of his prolific career over the past 30 or so years would
show that the director has been thoroughly consistent in following this
approach. Zhang always takes risks in experimenting with structure and
style rather than stay in the comfort zone and repeat previous work. He
has a deep fear of cliché and each of his films is different. One of his
associates has described a typical occasion when Zhang and his team
were discussing a new project. Its story raised the question: If a daughter
of the family did not have a blood relationship with the parents, which
family members should be allowed to be aware of this secret? Zhang’s
response was: “Grandma should know the truth. Father should know.
But mother should not know.” When he was reminded that this was
impossible or against common sense, he insisted: “We just can’t allow
the mother to know. If we do so, it will be too clichéd” (Zhou 2015:

260–261). In some people’s eyes, Zhang’s desire for innovation reaches
the level of perversity (Chen 2006: 330). Hero’s departure from the tra-
dition of martial arts films and from historical truth is another striking
example.
Two of Zhang’s Fifth-Generation colleagues had filmed the story of
the assassination of the King of Qin before him. Both Zhou Xiaowen’s
The Emperor’s Shadow (秦颂, 1996) and Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and
the Assassin (荆轲刺秦王, 1998) portray the King of Qin as a complex,
sophisticated human being. The two films respect history and the con-
ventions of the genre in emphasizing his brutality as he engages in kill-
ing and looting; but they also explore his personal transformation from
a man to a king. In both films, his ambition to unify the seven warring
states and to become the first emperor in Chinese history costs him
dearly. In The Emperor’s Shadow he loses the affection of his daugh-
ter and a childhood friend, the only two people he values; and in The
Emperor and the Assassin he loses the love of his mother and his child-
hood girlfriend. By depicting these losses, the films deliver a common
message: that violence and war may win over cities and states but they
cannot conquer minds and hearts.4
Zhang would never have made Hero if he was simply going to fol-
low the steps of his colleagues. Nearly all previous accounts of this
historical event moved along the same lines, and it was natural for Zhang
to seek a new twist. It seems clear that he was not unconscious of the
film’s historical inaccuracies or its challenge to the conventions of the
genre. The film starts with a title that reads: “From ancient to modern
times in Chinese history, numerous stories and legends about the assas-
sination of the King of Qin were created.” This implies that: “The story
you are going to watch is yet another legendary account of this histor-
ical event”—and the word “legend” leaves room for the creation of a
new myth. In a further attempt to counter possible criticism, the film’s
denouement emphasizes the idea that Nameless’s self-sacrifice is the price
for achieving “rule by law”. When the King is urged by his courtiers to
execute Nameless, the camera repeatedly gives us close-ups of his face,
showing his hesitation and uncertainty. He eventually orders the execu-
tion only after he is reminded of the importance of abiding by the rules
in order to accomplish the grand goal of unifying China.
A much criticized moment in the film is the turning-point when
Nameless is won over by the King’s ambition to unify the seven warring
states into one nation. For Nameless to abandon his mission is to betray
the trust of his fellow warriors who had given their lives to help him
gain the opportunity to get within ten paces of the King. Nameless leaps
towards his target but then withholds his sword, throws it to the ground
and turns back towards the palace gate. To many viewers, this act sym-
bolized surrender and submission to authority. Chris Berry has, however,
interpreted the scene differently, by relating it to the director’s own life.
He sees it as a reflection of the “survival strategy” that Zhang developed
while struggling in “an ideologically hostile environment” (Rawnsley
and Rawnsley 2010: xxiii). While the action in the film did not ensure
Nameless’s personal survival, the idea of linking it to the director’s own
life is an interesting one. Zhang is someone who is always very aware
of limits. His “counter-revolutionary” family background, and the “pride
and prejudice” he experienced when attempting to leave the rural vil-
lage for a local factory, or to leave the factory for the Beijing Film
Academy, taught him how to submit to insults, refrain from agitation,
and resign himself to adversity. As a teenager, he had already learned how
to make himself useful to others. In 1968, the 17-year-old Zhang, like
millions of other Chinese urban youth, was “sent down” to the coun-
tryside to be re-educated by the local peasants. Unlike many of his con-
temporaries who unwillingly participated in this rustication movement,
Zhang embraced it as an opportunity to obtain equality and respect in
a new environment (Xiao 1993: 39). On his arrival at the village, one
of the first things the teenager did was use his skills to draw a portrait of
Chairman Mao on the front door of every household.5 Looking back on
that period, Zhang admits: “I developed this consciousness at an early
stage; I wanted to make myself instantly instrumental. Once you become
useful to others, trouble will not trouble you and you will have space to
survive” (Fang 2012: 20).
Exactly 40 years later, the young man who had been sent down to the
countryside became the general director for the staging of the Opening
Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. On one occasion when he
and his creative team reported to China’s top leaders on their ideas for
the Ceremony, their plan was vetoed. Many of Zhang’s colleagues were
reluctant to accept the decision, seeing it as the result of miscommunica-
tion or misinterpretation. They urged Zhang to plead for another report,
but he refused to do so, believing that the leaders must have their rea-
sons for their decision. Instead, he started work on an alternative. Chen
Qigang, Zhang’s close ally and the chief composer for the Opening
Ceremony later commented in an interview: “Whatever the leader says,

he [Zhang] accepts unconditionally. He never questions [or] challenges
what the leader has to say. He has worked out an entire set of principles
to guide his work in China. And he strictly abides by them.”6
Zhang is frank about this “survival strategy”: “Acceptance is my big-
gest philosophy. All my innovative efforts are made on the grounds of
this premise…” (Fang 2012: 151). And: “When I receive a film script,
the first thing I think about is not whether there will be an investor for
the film, but how I can make the kind of film that I want [to make]
with the approval of the authorities” (quoted in Rawnsley and Rawnsley
2010: 90–91). In Hero, Broken Sword says to Nameless, “The individ-
ual suffering, when compared with that of ‘all under heaven’ (天下), is
no longer suffering; the hatred between the State of Zhao and the State
of Qin, when put into the context of ‘all under heaven’, is no longer
hatred.” This ethos of collectivism or nationalism was echoed by the sin-
gle slogan pinned high up on the wall of a conference room to guide
Zhang and his team during the years leading up to the night of the
Opening Ceremony of the Olympics: “The interest of the nation takes
priority over anything else.”
Nevertheless, Zhang would never have achieved what he has done if
he were merely clever at understanding and obeying obscure orders—
the kind of person sometimes called a “champollion” (after Jean-François
Champollion, the famous French Egyptologist who made his reputation
as the first person able to interpret the Rosetta Stone). Zhang’s personal-
ity has been shrewdly summed up as a combination of “champollion”
and “tiger” (Zhou 2015: 253). Attributes of the tiger relevant to Zhang
include solitude, energy and the desire to stand out from the rest (as
“the king of all beasts”). His humiliation during the Cultural Revolution
did not destroy the restless and rebellious elements in his personality.
Beneath the surface of humility was his craving for success by being dif-
ferent from whatever was old and established. He has kept his dream,
and his preoccupation with the experiences of his youth.
Once the opportunity arrived, he would give vent to his anger and
grief concerning that period of “sacrificed youth”—but he did not
become an “angry young man” until the political environment had
relaxed. Zhang enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, a time
when Chinese society was becoming more open and tolerant. As we have
seen in Chapter Two, the 1980s would be an exciting period in mod-
ern Chinese history, a decade that saw the influx of ideas and cultural
products from the West, and a period of dynamic literary and artistic
movements which sprung up like bamboo shoots after spring rain. As a
student majoring in cinematography, Zhang was deeply impressed by a
photo exhibition (1979) organized by the April Photo Society (四月影
会), the first unofficial photo club to be formed in China since 1949.
Many photos in the exhibition focused on social reality and on ordinary
people, in stark contrast to the idealized images demanded in works of
art during the revolutionary years. Zhang participated in the third (and
last) exhibition of the April Photo Society with a sequence of seven pho-
tos entitled “Ah, A Young Generation!” Each photograph was captioned
with a particular year, except for the last one—a blank whiteness marked
by an ellipsis of six periods. The sequence suggested the changed men-
tality of his generation from the start of the Cultural Revolution to the
approach of its end. The composition of each photo drastically violated
the rule off the “golden ratio” because of the way they were de-cen-
tred. A large, blank space occupied most of the frame, confining people
or objects to the top or bottom corners. To articulate the relationship
between young people and their surroundings in such an off-centre way
was comparable to some of the tilted framing shots in classic Hollywood
“young rebel” films of the 1950s, such as The Wild One (Laslo Benedek
1953) and Rebel without a Cause (Nichols Ray 1955). Zhang’s fore-
grounding of the dark environment threatening to overwhelm a young
generation was also a way of urging them to look closely at their unu-
sual situation. In doing so, his photographs seemed to visualize a famous
short poem of the period, Gu Cheng’s “A Generation” (1979): “Dark
nights gave me dark eyes/I use them to look for light”.
As China furthered its reform programme, Zhang had more scope to
express an independent point of view. Upon graduation from the Beijing
Film academy in 1982, he and three of his classmates were assigned to
the provincial Guangxi Film Studio in the country’s most Southern part.
The studio’s shortage of talents gave Zhang and his comrades the free-
dom to make their first feature films in a less-controlled environment.
The two films that Zhang shot as Director of Photography—One and
Eightt (一个和八个, dir. Zhang Junzhao 张军钊, 1983) and Yellow
Earth (dir. Chen Kaige 1984)—are universally acknowledged to have
inspired a New Wave of Chinese cinema in the early 1980s. Scholars
have noted the rebellious spirit of this important film movement,
calling it “the art of an offspring generation” (Dai 2000) attracted to “par
ricide” (Li 1989). In the notes on One and Eight, Zhang argued that “a
son should not do things as his father has done. Each generation should
have its own thought.” (Zhang and Xiao 1994: 92) He described Yellow
Earth in similar terms: “Young people of the 1980s are often called ‘con-
temporary youth’. ‘Contemporary’ means discarding tradition” (Zhang
2004: 27) He echoed this defiant spirit 30 years later: “Although I cited
extensively from classic and ancient works in the cinematography notes
[to these two films], I just wanted to make myself appear knowledge-
able. The point was really simple—[to be] as different as possible” (Fang
2012: 151).
When Zhang had the chance to direct a film of his own, he gave free
rein to imagination in creating his own “big field of rye” (J. D. Salinger).
The utopian world of youth constructed in Red Sorghum, his directo-
rial debut and the Golden Bear winner at the 38th Berlin International
Film Festival (1988), was embraced with great passion by Chinese youth
across the country.7 In its imagined world, young men and women
live and die by following their feelings and instincts, defying the rules
and regulations handed down from ancestors. In particular, the young
woman protagonist refuses to be bound by feminine duties and rejects
the marriage arranged for her. She dares to love and hate, to make love
with a man she hardly knows in the midst of a wild sorghum field. She
indeed offers an ancient Chinese version of a “rebel without a cause”.
In 1991, Zhang directed Raise the Red Lantern, a drama adapted
from writer Su Tong’s novella Concubines (妻妾成群). The direc-
tor explains that it was the story’s fresh approach that initially captured
his interest: “This youthful perspective presents many new things. The
film we made is for contemporary young people; we must offer them
an alternative interpretation about the life of that time” (quoted in
Zhang 2001: 78). One way to understand the “youthful perspective”
in Raise the Red Lantern and many of his other films is to see how the
relationship between the “father” and his “offspring” is set up. Nearly
all Zhang’s films feature an impaired “father”, who either remains
absent from the narrative, as in Red Sorghum (1987), Codename Cougar
(1988), Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and Keep Cool (1997), or has a
flawed presence, as in Ju Dou (1990), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), To Live
(1994) and Shanghai Triad (1995). This theme was temporarily inter-
rupted only between 1999 and 2002, possibly as a result of the death of
Zhang’s father, which occurred in 1998 while the director was overseas
staging Puccini’s opera Turandot, leaving him with feelings of guilt for
not having been with his father at the time.8 His next four films—Not
One Less (1999), The Road Home (1999), Happy Times (2000) and
Hero (2002)—maintain a respectful attitude to the father figure.9 This
attitude was reflected in the titles of two of the stories which were his
sources—Commemoration (纪念) by Bao Shi (鲍十) and My Master
Becomes More Humorous (师父越来越幽默) by Mo Yan (莫言). Hero
marks Zhang’s first attempt to move away from basing a film on a liter-
ary source by creating an original script. Although the film features vari-
ous chivalric martial artists as heroic characters, the title “Hero” focuses
on a single character—and presumably this central hero is not Nameless
but the King of Qin, who has (to borrow Mao Zedong’s phrase) “made
countless heroes bow in homage” with his grand vision to unify China.
The Road Home, originally titled Commemoration, was made to alert
contemporary young people to keep their distance from the “material-
ism” that “hallmarks the contemporary information society” (quoted
in Bao 1999: 1). The film’s motif of commemoration emerges most
strongly in the final scene, when the son from the city is struck by a sud-
den impulse to teach a lesson to his deceased father’s class. His voiceover
narration—“I think my father will hear my reading voice and that of his
students”—may well have expressed the director’s own wishes.
In 2004, Zhang resumed his youthful and more rebellious perspective
in House of Flying Daggers. The film relates a story of undercover activi-
ties that is hard to decipher. It is set in the year AD 895 in the late Tang
Dynasty. “House of Flying Daggers”, a powerful group in revolt against
the corrupt government, has recently gained a new leader. Leo and Jin
are two police captains and good friends who have been given just ten
days to discover the whereabouts of the new leader. Leo arrests Mei, a
blind dancer in a local brothel, because he suspects her of being a mem-
ber of the rebel group. Leo connives with Jin to attack the jail and set
Mei free. Now Jin and Mei are on the run, secretly followed by Leo and
his associates. They hope this strategy will lead them to the rebels’ head-
quarters. To make their scheme more realistic, Leo orders his soldiers to
ambush the couple on the way. A military officer senior to Leo becomes
involved and decides that real blood must be spilt in order to make the
event more convincing. So Jin and Mei must now fight for their lives. A
warm mutual trust develops between them, and by the time they reach
the rebels’ headquarters three days later, the two have fallen deeply for
each other. It is then revealed that Mei is not blind and that Leo is a
mole of the rebel group. Leo and Mei had been engaged to each other,
but Mei now loves Jin. Leo responds by killing her, and Jin and Leo
become fierce enemies. The conflict between them lasts “from golden
autumn to white winter”.
In comparison with Hero, House of Flying Daggers departs still further
from the codes of the martial arts genre. The film does not engage with
any of the genre’s core values such as “brotherhood”, “righteousness”
or even “revenge taking”. Neither does it set up the classic antithesis
between the world of jianghu and the Establishment. Instead, the direc-
tor merely uses subtitles at the beginning of the film to note the polariza-
tion between the government and the “house of flying daggers”:
Tang Dynasty, established in 618 A.D., is one of the most powerful

dynasties in Chinese history. By 859 A.D., it is in decline. The emperor
is incompetent and the government corrupt. Upheavals spread across the
country; many anti-government militaries have emerged. Out of them,
House of Flying Daggers is the biggest and the most mysterious. They rob
the rich for the poor, earning tremendous support from the people.
Curse of the Golden Flower lacks even a subtitle of that kind. No chiv-
alric context is established and the film takes place primarily within an
imperial family. In some respects, Curse of the Golden Flower is a sequel
to Hero, showing how the Emperor, who has presumably succeeded in
silencing the chivalric figures “under the heaven”, is now struggling to
teach his family to be obedient. The story takes place during the 24 h
that precede the Chrysanthemum Festival on September 9, a time for
worshipping ancestors. The Emperor and Empress have three sons: Wan,
Jai and Yu. Wan, the Crown Prince, and the child of the Emperor’s first
marriage, carries in his heart a deep fear of his father, not least because
Wan has had an affair with his stepmother, the Empress, as well as a
maid, who is later revealed to be his half-sister. This behaviour is too
much for the Emperor, who has begun secretly poisoning the Empress
by tampering with her medicine. He recalls Jai, who has been sent to the
frontier for experience, back to the palace to replace Wan; but Jai is an
obedient son of his mother, and when he learns that she is preparing a
coup d’état, he agrees to help her. Meanwhile Yu, the youngest son, who
looks like a naive teenager, is ambitious to usurp the throne. All three of
them die a tragic death before the film reaches its end.
As House of Flying Daggers is very different from Hero, so Curse of
the Golden Flower is in some respects the antithesis of House of Flying
Daggers. Whereas Hero has a Rashomon-like narrative, and is replete
with big issues concerning nation and nationality, House of Flying

Daggers tells the tale of a Chiung Yao-style love triangle10 and focuses on
the elusiveness and unpredictability of youthful romance. To foreground
this youthful perspective, the protagonists’ family background and insti-
tutional attachments remain in the background. The shift from repre-
senting “chivalry” and “righteousness” on a collective level in Hero to
exploring individual love and hatred in House of Flying Daggers is subtly
reflected in the scene where Jin and Leo are engaged in a fierce battle for
the sake of Mei. The camera shifts to a long-shot of government soldiers
advancing upon the “house of flying daggers” in the bamboo forest. This
reduces the larger political background to a brief long-shot, and chal-
lenges the ideal on “all under heaven” presented in Hero. In House of
Flying Daggers, righting wrongs and fighting for a justified cause or sacri-
ficing for the country are worth nothing in the eyes of the young charac-
ters, in comparison to their own individual feelings and emotions.
Made to appeal to a youthful audience, House of Flying Daggers is less
interested in “substance, depth, and characterization” which “are ruth-
lessly stripped down in favour of a succession of instantly readable icons”
(Dixon 2001: 357). The film’s generic “icons” include the extended,
stylized duels. In those choreographed scenes of sword-wielding inside
the Peony Pavilion, arrow-shooting and dagger-throwing in the field of
wild flowers, and flying over the top of a bamboo grove, what is empha-
sized is the dazzling spectacle, heightened for its own sake rather than as
a display of chivalric spirit.
As if attempting to echo Red Sorghum, House of Flying Daggers
devotes the first two thirds of its narrative to building a youthful world
devoid of adult supervision. Following the young couple on the run, the
camera creates a kind of Chinese version of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur
Penn 1967) or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill
1969). The parallels arise not from the details of the narrative but from
the basic situation of young protagonists running away from mainstream
constraints. As suggested earlier, Zhang uses the image of the wind to
reflect this youthful sentiment. The wind in the film is flirtatious and
playful (随处风流); it is also random and carefree (随意的风). The young
couple desire to wander “lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales
and hills” (Wordsworth). This mood is reinforced towards the end of the
film, when Jin attempts to persuade Mei to sever her connection with the
“house of flying daggers”:
Jin: Let’s go together to roam the world and live a life like wind
Mei: Neither official nor civilian; no school, no institution; invisible
and untraceable – like a playful wind
Jin: This time, it is a carefree wind – just you and me
Predictably, their desire to be free as the wind is not tolerated by the

adult world or the establishment. As in so many other Chinese youth
films (and those made in other countries), the adult perspective that has
been in suspension will sooner or later come crashing down. Once that
happens, the youthful world is crushed and the young protagonists lose
their independence. The head of the House orders Mei to kill Jin per-
sonally as he is of no further use to their cause, and she threatens Mei
with “the House rule”. Mei’s eventual death is the inevitable outcome of
her desire to “live a life like the wind”. In the film, the government and
the “house of flying daggers” are equally ruthless when it comes to con-
straining and suppressing youthful energy and rebellion.
Unlike House of Flying Daggers, Curse of the Golden Flower emphasizes
the power of the “patriarchal stick”—the rules that must be obeyed. The
film begins with the Emperor visiting Prince Jai’s camp and saying to his
son, “I came to remind you of your past mistakes. I want you to remem-
ber: nothing in this world is yours unless I choose to give it to you. If
I don’t, you must not take it by force.” The following morning, the
Imperial family ascends to the top of the chrysanthemum terrace inside
the palace. Once everyone is seated, the Emperor asks a rhetorical ques-
tion: “Why are the terrace round and the table square?” The answer he
gives is: “Heaven is round and earth is square. The rule of the Heaven
dictates the rule of the earthly life. Under the circle and within the
square, each of you has your own placement. This is the rule. Emperor,
subject, father and son—loyalty, filial piety, ritual and righteousness—all
these relationships must not be violated.”
What propel the narrative are the conflicts between the Emperor and
the other members of the imperial family. It is soon revealed that not
only the three princes but also the Empress have violated the rules and
relationships “dictated by Heaven”—that is, by the Emperor—though
each has done so in their own way. Inside the vast, golden palace lounge,
the Imperial family is about to celebrate the Chrysanthemum Festival.
The Empress reveals her plan for a coup d’état. As she confronts her hus-
band, Yu stabs Wan to death and demands that his father should abdicate
and give him the throne. The Emperor then takes off his belt and lashes
Yu to death. Meanwhile, Jai is leading his rebel army to storm the palace,
only to fall into a trap set by the well-prepared Emperor. Jai’s soldiers
are smashed by mammoth iron shields and the entire palace courtyard
becomes a slaughterhouse. The intensity of drama, emotion and violence
presented here has been rarely equalled by any Chinese-language film.
Traditionally the saying “Even a vicious tiger does not eat its cubs”
has been used to describe the boundary of the relationships between the
members of a Chinese family. But this traditional principle was reduced
to ashes during the Cultural Revolution, along with other “old thoughts,
old culture, old rituals and old habits”.11 In those chaotic years, it was
not uncommon to see family members betraying one another under the
pressure of political correctness.12 Director Chen Kaige has recounted
a personal experience in his autobiography. Chen’s father was labelled
a “nationalist spy and a historical counter-revolutionary” when the
Cultural Revolution started in 1966, and at a class struggle gathering
organized by the Red Guards, the 14-year-old Chen was asked to come
forward to criticize his father. Chen not only did what he was told, he
also gave his father a hard push. Many years later, he remembers the vul-
nerability of his father and the looks of satisfaction on the faces of the
crowd at that moment (Chen 1991, 1997: 76). Chen later included a
similar experience in Farewell My Concubine (霸王别姬, 1993), an epic
drama partly set during those revolutionary years. One scene showed a
public gathering where Red Guards were denouncing people as “coun-
ter-revolutionaries”.The film’s protagonists, two Peking Opera art-
ists who have been life-long friends, are told to criticize each other. A
medium-shot frames them with their arms tied, forced to kneel in front
of a bonfire of burning books. Neither can withstand the pressure of the
situation and each accuses the other, which leads to the suicide of one
of their wives. During the Cultural Revolution, Zhang suffered public
humiliation because of his father’s past.13 Such situations in Curse of the
Golden Flower and Farewell My Concubine reflect the profound impact of
this period on later films. As Chen has said, “I always believe that my life
experience mostly comes from that era. The most important thing is that
[the Cultural Revolution] helps me to know myself.” (1991, 1997: 18)
As someone who is now at the top of the pantheon of Chinese cinema
but is also deeply schooled in Chinese culture, Zhang knows well that
a tall tree attracts the wind. Coming Home was the third film in which
he directly explored the impact of the Cultural Revolution.14 Following
its public release in May 2014, an article published on a website admin-

istered by the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department
labelled the film “a bugle from Western Society to deconstruct the
Chinese Communist Party’s ideology”.15 Much of the film’s power is
concealed in the ending, the “homecoming” of “the father”, with its
long-shot of the father and mother waiting in the snow. The camera is
positioned inside the exit gate of the train station so that the iron bars
of the gate make it look as though the two figures are behind bars. The
camera slightly zooms towards them; then the screen fades to black.
To further heighten the symbolic meaning of this behind-bars image,
the filmmaker has added to the soundtrack the sound of a gate closing,
recorded in a prison. To protect this powerful ending from the censors’
scissors, Zhang used the same camera angle with the same sound effect
on two previous occasions in the film so it would not be too conspicuous
(Zhou 2015: 265).
Thematically, Curse of the Golden Flowers echoes Fifth-Generation
films discussed earlier in the chapter—Zhou Xiaowen’s The Emperor’s
Shadow and Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and The Assassin—in portray-
ing an isolated emperor whose ruthless pursuit of power costs him
dearly (the loss of his wife’s affection and the death of his three sons).
Like Zhou’s and Chen’s films, Curse of the Golden Flower is a critique of
authoritarianism. Its condemnation of tyranny and patriarchal hierarchy
seems opposite in spirit to Hero’s “pro-totalitarianism”. Granted, criti-
cism of the patriarchal system is not something new in Zhang’s works, as
it represents a recurring theme from Judou (1990) onwards. While each
of his three “martial arts” films is unique, all seem to draw upon experi-
ences in his own life, such as a disadvantaged family background and the
experience of situations in which individuals have to deal with pressure
from a group or powerful authority figures.
Where Curse of the Golden Flower differs distinctively from The
Emperor’s Shadow and The Emperor and The Assassin is its strong appeal
to the youth market. As we have seen, Zhang’s three “martial arts” films
all have youthful rebellion as a theme. Invariably, these “young rebels”
are either turned around (as in Hero) or meet a tragic end (as in House
of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower). This seemingly para-
doxical blend of youthful rebellion and obedience, subversion and sub-
mission, reflects a fundamental truth about the nature of Chinese youth
culture. For thousands of years, China was a Confucian society, and a
central concern of Confucianism was respect for tradition, propriety and
social order. As the Emperor proclaims in Curse of the Golden Flower,

“Let ruler be ruler, subject be subject, father be father, and son be son”.
The relationship between young people and their elders involved submis-
sion to the family or clan. And the notion of youth (in so far as there was
one) was always associated with the need to learn from one’s elders.
This bundle of contradictions finds expression particularly in the
casting of Jay Chou to play the role of Prince Jai in Curse of the Golden
Flower.16 Born in 1978 in Taiwan, Jay Chou (aka Chou Chieh-lun
周杰伦) is one of the most popular singers in the three Chinese socie-
ties across the Taiwan Strait (Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China).
Described as “Asia’s hottest pop star” by Time Asia magazine in 2003,
Jay Chou has a tremendous following among young people. Zhang is
not the first director to capitalize on Chou’s appeal, for one year earlier,
two Hong Kong directors cast Chou as the leading character in Initial
D (头文字D, dir. Andrew Lau and Allan Mark 2005), a Chinese version
of The Fast and the Furious, adapted from a Japanese manga series of the
same title. Chou’s attraction to youth is based on his songs and the man-
ner in which he delivers them, using contemporary rhythm-and-blues
and rap to express his “revolt against officialdom” and non-conformist
attitude towards “the stifling formalities and disciplines for a sophisti-
cated society” (Lin 2013: 213).17 Coincidentally or not, Chou’s philos-
ophy of individualism matches his screen image in Curse of the Golden
Flower. Though the film never specifies the mistakes he has made in the
past, they presumably fall into the “anomie” and “wrongdoing” of an
“angry young man”. As Chou sings in “My Territory” (我的地盘):
In my territory
You must listen to me
The rhythm is infuriating
To accompany my street dancing
I irrigate principles
To cultivate uniqueness of a kind
Except for unconventional notions
Everything else is rubbish
Yet Jay Chou’s persona of the rebellious individual is very different from
his real-life relationship with his parents. While he appears to have a
NOTES 53
complex attitude towards his father (as in his 2003 song “In the Name
of the Father”), his feeling about his mother is clearly framed by tra-
ditional forms of piety, and his respectful attitude is well known to the
public. A year before Curse of the Golden Flowers, he named his fourth
album after his mother (“Ye Hui Mei”); and in 2006 he wrote and
performed “Listen to Mum’s Words” which includes the dutiful lines:
“Listen to Mum’s words/Don’t let her get hurt/Grow up quickly/To
provide her protection.”
To conclude, Zhang’s “marital arts trilogy” represents the direc-
tor’s efforts to shape a way forward for the Chinese film industry dur-
ing a period when the local market was being taken over by Hollywood
imports. But Zhang’s films were not traditional examples of the martial
arts genre because of the way he transformed the rules of “chivalry”
or avoided them altogether. In the course of his career, he has oscil-
lated between art and commerce, attempting to combine the individu-
alism of the auteur with the requirements of genre. Seeking to appeal
to a younger audience, he has incorporated elements of rebellious youth
culture, yet he has always shown this rebellion ending in tragedy. This
awareness of the limits of independence is very understandable for Zhang
and the film-makers of his generation because—strongly drawn as they
are to individualism—the “house” in which these young people have
grown up seems “cursed”—weighed down by centuries of cultural tradi-
tion, and haunted by the traumatic experience of the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution.
Notes
1. The Chinese filmmakers’ strategy of “using big to confront big” was con-
troversial and somewhat short-lived. Chapter 4 will discuss this phenom-
enon in more details with a close and critical reference to Zhang’s The
Flowers of War (2011).
2. From the perspective of youth culture, the young protagonist’s coming of
age in martial arts films is not necessarily completed through “rebellion”
but often through “obedience” (i.e. serving and showing filial piety to
their elders by avenging their death or wrongs). The chapter will explore
this fundamental nature of Chinese youth culture in more details in the
pages to follow.
3. See documentary Cause: A Record on the Birth of Hero (缘起: 记录张艺谋
《英雄》的诞生), directed by Gan Lu (甘露) in 2002.
4. This motif is echoed in Hero, when a master calligrapher teaches his
pupils to remain calm and strong under the attack of Qin’s army. On that
occasion, the scene is retold by Nameless to the King of Qin in order

to move him emotionally. It is a side episode that contradicts the central
theme of the film.
5. Ni Zhen, a former professor of Beijing Film Academy confirms this in
his Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy. Zhang’s ex-wife also recalls
in her memoir that when she first visited Zhang’s house on a day in
November 1968, she was impressed by the extraordinary portraits of
Chairman Mao on every single glass frame of the front door. See Xiao
1993: 34.
6. The information in this paragraph derives from Zhang Yimou and His
2008 (张艺谋的 2008), an 8-episode documentary that records Zhang’s
preparation for the show within a period of four years from the 8-min
performance at the Closing Ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics to
the night of August 8, 2008 when the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing
Olympics was performed.
7. For a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the extensive identification
Red Sorghum generated by young audiences following its public release in
1988, see Clark (2012): 58–63.
8. Zhang has expressed his remorse in multiple interviews. See for example,
E. Li (2002): 216.
9. Traditionally, after an elder’s death in China, the offspring should have a
three-year period of mourning. All forms of entertainment and celebra-
tion are prohibited during this period. Zhang’s four films which show
more respect for the father figure may perhaps be read as his own period
of mourning.
10. Chiung Yao (琼瑶) is a woman writer of popular novels in Taiwan.
Between 1965 and 1983, 50 films were adapted from her novels and
short stories in Taiwan (three of them produced by the Shaw Brothers
in Hong Kong). These films are highly formulaic, primarily revolving
around a dramatic and emotionalized treatment of heterosexual romance
between a young woman and two young men, or vice versa.
11. These are the so-called “four olds” coined by an editorial published by the
Communist Party’s flagship newspaper People’s Daily on June 1, 1966.
“Destroying the four olds” was a major mission of the Red Guards in the
early stage of the Cultural Revolution.
12. One of the few Chinese films that directly reflects this kind of inhu-
man tragedy is Maple Leaves (枫) directed by Zhang Yi (张一) in 1980.
Describing how a young couple belonging to two cliques of Red Guards
end up literally killing each other, the film poses the key question: Why
did the Cultural Revolution turn the school campus into a battlefield and
transform lovers into enemies?
13. Zhang Yimou describes “putting political correctness above family loy-
alty” (大义灭亲) during the Cultural Revolution more bluntly in Coming
REFERENCES 55
Home (2014). A teenager Red Guard of a “black” family background

betrays her parents in order to regain the leading role in a Revolutionary
Model Performance. The outcome of her “righteous behaviour” is the
capture of her father, a university professor just escaped from a labour
camp in order to have a glimpse of his wife and daughter.
14. Zhang Yimou is probably the Chinese director who has made the most
films on the Cultural Revolution. His other two films on the subject are
To Live (1994) and Under the Hawthorn Tree (山楂树之恋, 2010).
15. Liu Haofeng 刘浩峰 (2014), “Coming Home: A film that promotes
ugliness and destroys mainstream values in the name of disclosure”

(电影《归来》: 以揭露的名义宣扬丑恶摧毁主流价值) http://dailynews.
sina.com/bg/chn/chnpolitics/phoenixtv/20140605/02205783669.html
(accessed February 4, 2016).
16. The choice of Jay Chou for the role also reflects the filmmaker’s inten-
tion to appeal to the youth-driven audience. Chow was recommended
to Zhang by his producer at the last minute out of box-office considera-
tions. His role was added to a script that had already been drafted. See
X. Zhou (2015): 180.
17. In addition to a “young rebel” image, another major factor contributing
to Chou’s success is his integration of ancient Chinese literary and artistic
elements into his songs.
References
Bao, S. 鲍十. (1999). Zhang Yimou and I [我和张艺谋]. In My father and my
mother [我的父亲母亲]. Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi.
Chan, E. (2004). Zhang’s Hero—The temptation of fascism. Film International,
2(2), 14–23.
Chen, K. 陈凯歌. (1991, 1997). Teenager Kaige [少年凯歌]. Taibei: Yuanliu
chuban shiye gufeng youxian gongsi.
Chen, M. 陈墨. (1998). Pour out genuine passion to sustain the home mar-
ket—An interview with Zhang Yimou [倾注真情,守住‘本土’—张艺谋访谈
录]. Popular Film [大众电影)], 12, 14–17.
Chen, M. 陈墨. (2003). Hero and Hero phenomenon in my eyes [我看《英雄》
与《英雄》现象]. In Debates on Hero [笑论《英雄》], ed. China Film Artist
Association, pp. 1–12. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe.
Chen, M. 陈墨. (2006). Youthful cry: The cinematic world of Zhang Yimou [青
春的呼喊:张艺谋的电影世界]. Taibei: Fengyun shidai chuban gufeng youjian
gongsi.
China Film Artist Association. (Ed.). (2003). Debates on Hero (笑论《英雄》), Beijing:
Dai, J. 戴锦华. (2000). Scenes in fog: Chinese film culture, 1978–1998 [雾中风景:
中国电影文化, 1978–1998]. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe.
Dixon, W. W. (2001). Twenty-five reasons why it’s all over. In J. Lewis (Ed.),
The end of cinema as we know it: American film in the nineties (pp. 356–366).
New York: New York University Press.
Fang, X. 方希. (2012). Zhang Yimou’s homework [张艺谋的作业]. Beijing:
Hall, K. E. (1999). John Woo: The films (pp. 20–21). Jefferson: McFarland.
Huang, S. 黄式宪, & Li E. 李尔葳. (2000). Using ‘small’ to confront ‘big’ and
sustaining a piece of pure land: An interview with Zhang Yimou [以小博大:坚
守一方净土——张艺谋访谈录]. Film Art [电影艺术], 1, 36–43.
Jia, L. 贾磊磊. (2003). When the wind blows over people, the soul of Hero dies
[风掠苍生魂断《英雄》]. In Debates on Hero [笑论《英雄》], ed. China
Film Artist Association, pp. 28–49.
Lau, J. K. W. (2007). Hero: China’s response to Hollywood globalization. Jump
Cut: A review of contemporary media 49.
Li, Y. 李奕明. (1989). In the aftermath of parricide: The absence and redemp-
tion of family in contemporary film [弑父行为之后: 当代电影中的家庭缺失与
补偿]. Film Art [电影艺术], 6, 9–18.
Lin, W.-H. (2013). Jay Chou’s music and the shaping of popular culture
in China. In L. Fitzsimmons & J. A. Lent (Eds.), Popular culture in Asia:
Memory, city, celebrity (pp. 206–219). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Liu, H. 刘浩峰. (2014). Coming home: A film that promotes ugliness and destroys
mainstream values in the name of disclosure [电影《归来》: 以揭露的名义宣
扬丑恶摧毁主流价值]. Retrieved February 4, 2016, from http://dailynews.
sina.com/bg/chn/chnpolitics/phoenixtv/20140605/02205783669.html.
Luo, X. 罗雪莹. (1988). Red Sorghum: A short portrayal of Zhang Yimou [红高
粱:张艺谋写真]. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe.
Ni, Z. (2002). Memoirs from the Beijing Film Academy, trans by Chris Berry.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rao, S. 饶曙光. (2009). A development history of Chinese film market [中国电影
市场发展史]. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe.
Rawnsley, G. D., & Rawnsley, M. Y. T. (Eds.) (2010). Global Chinese cinema:
The culture and politics of Hero, London & New York: Routledge.
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Zhang, J. 张久英. (2001). Remake Zhang Yimou (翻拍张艺谋), Beijing: Zhongguo
mangwen chubanshe.
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Eight [《一个和八个》摄影阐述]. In On Zhang Yimou [论张艺谋], ed. The edi-
torial office of Chinese film art, 92–99. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe.
Zhang, Y. 张艺谋. (2004). Cinematography notes on Yellow Earth [《黄土地》摄影
阐述]. In M. Zhang 张明 ed., Dialogues with Zhang Yimou [与张艺谋对话],
23–27. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying chubanshe.
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Beijing: Changjiang wenyi chubanshe.
CHAPTER 4
Between National and International
Abstract  This Chapter explores Zhang Yimou’s oscillation between the

national and the international, by means of an analysis of his feature films
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (2005) and The Flowers of War, seen
as two important stages in the director’s cross-cultural journey. By com-
paring them with their foreign sources of inspiration—the films Man
Hunt (1976) and Saving Private Ryan (1998)—we can better under-
stand why and in what ways the Chinese film industry has changed. Also,
a trans-national perspective can clarify the directions that the Chinese film
industry is likely to take in the future as global co-productions become
increasingly common.
Keywords  Sino-Japan · Sino-U.S. · Blockbuster · High concept film 

Globalisation · International co-production
On a night in September 1998, conductor Zubin Mehta walked

out onto a newly built stage in the Ancestral Temple adjacent to the
Forbidden City, to give the first performance in China of Giacomo
Puccini’s Turandot which had its premiere in Italy 72 years earlier. This
was an opera that told a Chinese tale in a very un-Chinese way, vulner-
able to being called ‘Orientalist’ (to use Edward W. Said’s term for the
West’s exotic fantasies of the East). To provide balance, Mehta invited
Zhang Yimou to serve as artistic director. Zhang gave Mehta exactly

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4328-4_4
58 4 BETWEEN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL
what he needed. Although he did not change the plot of Puccini’s opera,
he replaced previous blue and grey hues with bright colours and strong
lighting that enhanced the Chinese flavour; and for authenticity he
added martial arts movements, Peking Opera costumes, imagery of the
Great Wall and terracotta soldiers.
The performance at the Ancestral Temple was such a success that
Zhang was invited in October 2009 to direct Turandot in the National
Stadium, as part of a series of cultural events to celebrate the 60th anni-
versary of the People’s Republic of China. This production drew interna-
tional attention. Comparing the performances of 1998 and 2009, Zhang
said, “The previous Turandot show at the Ancestral Temple highlighted
an archaic style, to go well with the style of the place. This time, the
stage, being the Bird’s Nest, is a symbol of new China. It’s a fashionable
cultural symbol of modern China, so we’ve used many modern, fashion-
able elements, including multimedia technology to forge a modern feel-
ing [for] Turandot. It is a combination of traditional Chinese culture,
the modern feel of China, and the western operatic tradition …”.1
In many respects, Zhang’s engagement with the staging of Turandot
illustrates, both physically and metaphorically, his endeavour to reshape
international perceptions of China, and Chinese perceptions of inter-
national culture. As we saw in Chapter Two, Zhang had been attempt-
ing to integrate regional and trans-national elements even at a very early
stage of his career in the action thriller Codename Cougar. The present
chapter seeks to explore his oscillation between the national and the
international by focusing on his two more recent feature films, Riding
Alone for Thousands of Miles (千里走单骑, 2005) and The Flowers of War
(金陵十三钗, 2011). These were two key signposts in the director’s
cross-cultural journey; and by comparing them with their foreign sources
of inspiration, we can gain insights into the radical transformation of the
Chinese film industry during the twenty-first century.2 To study them
from a trans-national perspective also helps to clarify the directions that
the industry seems likely to take in the future as global co-productions
become increasingly common.
Despite claims on numerous occasions that he is a Chinese director
deeply rooted in Chinese soil (e.g. Cardullo 2008: 137, 145), Zhang
has always kept a door open for international cooperation. This is illus-
trated by the fact that some of his early films, such as Judou and Raise the
Red Lantern, were jointly financed by Japanese and Taiwanese investors.
Obviously co-production can enlarge a budget and assist the overseas
4 BETWEEN NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL 59
distribution of a film, but Zhang’s interest also comes from his early
experience in a society greatly isolated from the outside world. Again,
it reflects his sensitivity to his society’s rapid transformation in terms of
modernization and urbanization.
At almost the same time (September 1978) that Zhang was travel-
ling to the capital city to begin his tertiary education at the Beijing Film
Academy, Deng Xiaoping, then the Vice-Premier of China, was paying
an official visit to Japan to attend a ceremony to ratify the Sino-Japanese
Treaty of Peace and Friendship which the two countries had signed ear-
lier that year. Deng was allegedly shocked by the modernity of Japan and
put forward his famous saying “Backwardness leads to defeat and humili-
ation” (落后就要挨打). This visit to Japan was significant in furthering
China’s reform programme and open-door policy. To commemorate the
success of the visit, a “Japanese film week” was held in eight cities across
China.3 Three films were screened—Kei Mumai’s Sandakan 8 (1974),
Jun’ya Satô’s When You Cross a River of Rage (1976) and the documen-
tary film Fox Story (1976). When the dubbed version of Satô’s action
thriller was released in China, its title was changed to the catchy Man
Hunt. It gained immediate and immense popularity among Chinese audi-
ences, as did the other Japanese films. The people of China, who were
only just emerging from the bleakness of the Cultural Revolution, were
dazzled to see a metropolitan capitalist society on the silver screen—the
glamour of fashion (the costumes of the characters), the metropolitan
splendour (Tokyo skyscrapers and star hotels) and the luxury lifestyle
(large mansions and private planes). Chinese audiences (and Chinese
filmmakers in particular) were also amazed by the film-making methods
of Man Hunt, with its extensive use of rapid camera movement, fast edit-
ing, electronic music score and generic, Hollywood-style, story-telling.
Following the codes and conventions of the Hollywood action
thriller, the plotline of Man Hunt revolved around the single male hero
Morioka (played by Ken Takakura), as a quiet but determined police
investigator. Because he is exposing corruption, he is framed by guilty
politicians and by the underworld. He must hide from both the police
and the criminals. While on the run, Morioka enters into a relationship
with Tonami Mariko (played by Ryoko Nakano), the daughter of a rich
Hokkaido businessman. With her assistance, Morioka manages to infil-
trate a psychiatric hospital that is linked with a series of murders and
conspiracies. The film’s exciting climax takes place on the rooftop of a
building where the villains’ evil is finally exposed to the daylight.
Along with many other members of his generation, Zhang was

impressed by this and other Japanese films imported into China from the
late 1970s. The films were striking not only for their fast editing but also
for their occasional, dramatic use of static long takes. Zhang spoke in a
later interview about how the long takes used by Kōhei Oguri in Muddy
River (1981) had influenced the manner in which he filmed the gul-
lies and ravines of the Loess Plateau in Yellow Earth (1984) (Liu 2015:
180–181). Zhang has also expressed a deep interest in the Japanese
director Akira Kurosawa. After Zhang’s Red Sorghum (1987) was warmly
received in the Japanese market, a local critic noticed the film’s parallel
with Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon (1950) in terms of its dynamic
cinematography and intense soundtrack (Liu 2015: 184).4
Following the phenomenal success of Man Hunt, other Japanese
films starring Ken Takakura, such as The Yellow Handkerchief (幸福
的黄手帕, Yoji Yamada, 1977), A Distant Cry from Spring (远山的
呼唤, Yoji Yamada, 1980) and Kaikyô (海峡, Shirô Moritani, 1982),
were introduced into the Chinese market. The character he portrayed
in those films—an honourable man of few words—captured the hearts
of millions of Chinese viewers and turned Takakura into a household
name. On multiple occasions, Zhang acknowledged that he was deeply
impressed by Takakura’s extraordinary performance in Man Hunt. The
Chinese director and the Japanese actor eventually met in 1991, through
Yasuyoshi Tokuma, at a film festival in Beijing. When Zhang’s The Road
Home was premiered in Tokyo in 2000, Takakura attended the event
and was so touched by the movie that he agreed to cooperate on a film
with Zhang (Qiu 2006: 177–178). The outcome was Riding Alone for
Thousands of Miles (hereafter Riding Alone).
The production of Riding Alone was in line with a tradition of por-
traying Sino-Japanese friendship in Chinese and Japanese cinema since
the early 1980s, as represented by films such as Cherries (樱, Zhan
Xiangchi and Han Xiaolei, 1980), An Ocean to Cross (天平之甍, Takeo
Kimura, 1980), The Go Masters (一盘没下完的棋, Duan Jishun and
Junya Satô, 1982) and The Silk Road (敦煌, Junya Satô, 1988).
The narrative of Zhang’s film centres simply on an aged Japanese
fisherman’s adventures in China. When the film begins, Gouichi Takata
(played by Takakura) has been alienated from his son Kenichi for 10
years and lives alone in a fishing village in Akita. One day he is informed
by his daughter-in-law Rie that his son has been in hospital and is dying
from cancer. Takata travels to Tokyo to see his son but is rejected by
him. Rie gives Takata a videotape copy of a television programme about

Kenichi. From the tape, Takata learns that his son has developed a strong
interest in a traditional opera group in a remote place in the mountains.
Kenichi told the interviewer that he wanted to return there to film a
performance based on the folklore tale “Riding Alone for Thousands
of Miles”, a traditional story about chivalry and loyalty; but his illness
appears to have prevented him from realizing the project. Takata decides
to go to China to film the opera for Kenichi, and thus begins his lonely
journey in a foreign country.
Riding Alone and Man Hunt are different genres of film. The lat-
ter fits the criteria of the innocent-on-the-run thriller genre, defined by
Derry as an innocent victim coincidentally finding himself in the midst
of global intrigue; having to flee from both the villains and the police;
going through a series of adventures; and along the way, developing a
love interest (Derry 1988: 270). Riding Alone, on the other hand, is a
wenyipian, a Chinese form of melodrama that focuses “on the depiction
of human feelings and family relationship” (Cai 1985: 1); it shares the
standard elements such as “highly schematic characters, plots punctu-
ated by fortuitous events and coincidences, extreme emotions and con-
flicts” (Li 1986: 7). At the same time, Riding Alone pays homage to Ken
Takakura as well as to Man Hunt by placing the male protagonist in an
unfamiliar situation, highlighting his isolation, reinforcing male vulnera-
bility, and showing how today’s commodity culture can have a traumatic
effect on inter-personal relationships.
In Man Hunt, the male protagonist is pursued by—and later pur-
sues—a ring of evil conspirators and murderers, from metropolitan
Tokyo to rural Hokkaido and back to the capital city. The establishing
shot of the Shinjuku intersection crowded with pedestrians is reminiscent
of the opening image of Hitchcock’s classic thriller North by Northwest
(1959). The use of verbal interpolation (to fix the time and place) adds
a sense of realism and contemporaneity. The film’s conflicts arise from
the obstinate protagonist’s investigation of his suspicions about collusion
between politicians and business people, followed by his desperate strug-
gle to clear his name and expose the villains. The conflicts are shown
to arise from distorted communication (either careless or deliberate)
between the individual and his society. Man Hunt reveals conspiratorial
evil at the heart of the political and corporate establishments, a theme
fuelled by disillusionment with the Japanese economy in the mid-1970s.5
As an innocent-on-the-run, Morioka eventually finds moral meaning in
his adventures. He says to the chief inspector after he is cleared, “While

I was being hunted, I came to understand that a law enforcer should not
always consider things from the perspective of a hunter. A law enforcer
should also consider things from the perspective of the hunted.”6 The
film ends with a philosophical exchange between Morioka and his love
interest Tonami. She says: “When on earth will this end? Where is the
destination?” He replies: “There is no destination.”
Riding Alone opens with a long shot of Takata, an old fisherman liv-
ing by himself in a remote village, sitting on a rock by the sea, lost in
deep contemplation. A voice-over reveals his inner world: “For inexpli-
cable reasons, my son Kenichi and I have been estranged for 10 years.
There is a profound chasm between us, which hurts me deeply. I want us
to be close again.” The sense of estrangement is heightened by wide land-
scape shots that emphasize the lonely figure dominated by the wild envi-
ronment—bleak, snow-covered mountains and rocks lashed by waves in
deep winter. Unlike the conflicts of Man Hunt, those of Riding Alone are
emotional and spiritual, and more individual than socio-cultural. During
the journey that then unfolds, a set of conflicts are established between
the Japanese father and the Chinese people he encounters. Those con-
flicts are linguistic and cultural, as well as emotional and spiritual, and
they allow the film, like Man Hunt, to reflect on the impact that contem-
porary consumer society is having on individuals and the communication
between them.
As Schatz has said, the resolution of conflicts is the means through
which “the genre film finally realizes its ritualistic social function”
(Schatz 1976, 1983: 134). The resolution in Man Hunt is physical and
external, involving death and violence. That 1976 Japanese film explored
social conflict between a citizen and his society, between the integration
of the individual and the corruption of culture, between order and anar-
chy. The central hero functions as an individual agent of morality and
integrity. By incorporating his struggles into the context of contem-
porary capitalism, the film addresses such issues as “the ills of capitalist
excess” and the way that materialism can undermine human values and
“gradually chip away at society’s fabric” (Desjardins 2005: 74). Riding
Alone, on the other hand, focuses on individual conflicts between father
and son and on opposing attitudes. The central individual in this case is
a transformed agent of tradition, and in its own way the film questions
capitalism and materialism by demonstrating alternative values. Through
a trans-national story, the film dramatizes the threats to traditional values
posed by the affluence and materialism of contemporary society.
China in 2005 was similar to Japan in 1976 in the sense that an

economy-oriented policy has been in full swing for thirty years—in
Japan since the end of World War II (1945) and in China since the end
of the Cultural Revolution (1976). A Chinese wenyipian in 2005 and a
Japanese action thriller in 1976 speak to their historical moments in their
critique of a materialist society and their emphasis on the importance of
trust and genuine communication.
If Riding Alone showed Zhang Yimou’s attempt to take advantage of
the popularity of a foreign movie star to cater to combined Chinese and
Japanese audiences, his 2011 war combat epic The Flowers of War showed
him taking a further step on his cross-cultural journey by making a block-
buster movie with a larger budget aimed at a global audience. As such, it
reflected some major changes that had swept through the Chinese indus-
try during the first decade of the twenty-first century. To boost the vigour
of the industry, the film authorities had carried out a series of institutional
reforms in distribution, exhibition and production. Three regulations were
issued in the year 2003: “Regulations on Sino-Foreign Jointly Produced
Films” (“中外合作摄制电影片管理规定”), “Temporary Regulations on
Market Access of Film Production, Distribution and Exhibition” (“电影
制片、发行、放映经营资格准入暂行规定”) and “Temporary Rules on
Establishing Film Script (Synopsis) and Film Censorship” (“电影剧本(梗
概)立项、电影片审查暂行规定”). Their purpose was to further marketize
and privatize the industry, expanding the number of films produced and
increasing box-office revenues in the domestic market.7
In the year (2011) when The Flowers of War was released, the total
number of Chinese films reached 791, including 558 feature films. And
the box-office earnings totalled 13.115 billion yuan, marking a 29%
increase of 10.172 billion yuan in 2010 and turning the country into
the world’s third-largest territory in box-office terms. 803 new cinemas
were built and 3030 new screens opened, bringing the national total to
9200 screens (Yin and Chen 2012: 5). In the context of a vigorous film
industry and a thriving market, and presumably inspired by Hollywood’s
success in disseminating American values and lifestyles worldwide, the
Chinese government sought to use films and other creative industries to
promote the soft power of the country internationally, urging Chinese
cinema to adopt a “go-abroad” strategy (走出去).8
Riding on the wave of prestige produced by the Opening and Closing
Ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Zhang Yimou seemed to appre-
ciate the idea of further integration with international cinema. The Flowers
of War marked his first serious engagement with Hollywood. Like Riding
Alone, it engaged with Sino-Japanese relationships but in a very different

way, returning to the mainstream tradition of anti-Japanese war films, which
had been produced in the People’s Republic of China since the 1950s. War
films were an enduring Chinese genre even during the most politicized peri-
ods. This was partly because the cinematic treatment of war provided the
opportunity to present spectacular scenes, to feature legendary characters,
and to create dramatic narrative conflicts (Zhou 2016). The restaging of
large historical events was a complex business but it could produce “audio-
visual impact and serve up thrills, pleasure, and catharsis for mass audiences”
(B. Wang 2013: 251). Also, the depiction of victory helped “to legitimate
the Communist Party and to build a ‘New China’” (Zhu 2013: 86).
Although many films dealt with the subject of the anti-Japanese war,
the event known as the Nanjing Massacre (or the Rape of Nanjing) tended
to be avoided for political reasons.9 This terrible massacre took place dur-
ing the six weeks after December 13, 1937 when the Japanese army had
occupied Nanjing, then the capital city of the Republic of China. It is
estimated that over 300,000 Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were
slaughtered by the Japanese. The obstacle to making a film about such
an event was the fact that the Chinese Communist Party’s priority during
the socialist revolutionary years was to showcase its great wisdom in lead-
ing the Chinese people to win the war and to build a “new China”. War
films were meant to be morale-builders, and to revisit the mass slaughter in
Nanjing as a “national humiliation” was likely to impair the revolutionary
ethos. It was not until the end of the Cultural Revolution and the Party’s
decision to open the door of the nation to the outside world that a col-
lective memory of this “national humiliation” came to be seen in a more
positive light, as an opportunity to promote “national unity” (Zhu 2013:
86), and to remind Chinese people of the principle expressed by Deng
Xiaoping after his visit to Japan in 1978, that “Backwardness leads to
defeat and humiliation”. In this new environment, filmmakers began tack-
ling the subject of the worst massacre in modern Chinese history, through
influential films such as Bloody Testimony to Massacring Nanking (屠城血
证, Luo Guanqun, 1987), Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (黑太阳:南
京大屠杀, Mou Tun-fei 1995), Nanking 1937 (南京大屠杀, Wu Ziniu,
1996), Qixia Temple 1937 (栖霞寺1937, Zheng Fangnan, 2005) and City
of Life and Death (南京!南京!, Lu Chuan, 2008).
The Flowers of War is a more recent treatment of this historical event.
Like Riding Alone, the film opens with images accompanied by voice-
over narration, this time from a 13-year-old teenage girl, a witness to the
heart-rending crimes committed against Chinese civilians. In thick fog,

several small groups of Chinese people are running for their lives after
Nanjing has been captured. Among them are girls from a local Roman
Catholic school, prostitutes from the city’s red-light district, retreat-
ing National Army soldiers led by a Major Li and an American morti-
cian named John Miller. Seeing that the schoolgirls are about to become
the enemy’s target, the Chinese soldiers stop to hold off the Japanese,
but in doing so they are nearly all killed. The schoolgirls get safely to the
Catholic cathedral where they are soon joined by the prostitutes and the
American. In due course, the Japanese assault the church and find the
schoolgirls, but not the prostitutes hidden in the cellar. With the inno-
cent girls in danger of being raped, John Miller has a pang of conscience
and pretends that he is the head priest. For the time being he is able to
protect the girls, but a Japanese colonel named Hasegawa comes to the
church and asks the girls to sing a chorus for him, then returns to invite
them to sing at a Japanese Army celebration to be held next day. The
event has sinister implications and Miller tries to decline it, but Hasegawa
says this is not an “invitation” but an “order”. The prostitutes hiding in
the cathedral volunteer to take the place of the girls at the Japanese party.
In the concluding scenes, the prostitutes are taken away by the Japanese
who do not yet realize that a swap has occurred, and Miller is able to
conceal the schoolgirls in a truck and drive them out of the city to safety.
Like the director’s other films, The Flowers of War reveals Zhang’s
ambition to challenge established conventions, but this is not a film
completely isolated from its tradition. Familiar themes and narrative
devices of earlier films on the Nanjing Massacre are woven into Zhang’s
work in one way or another, such as hiding people in a cellar (Bloody
Testimony to Massacring Nanking and Nanking 1937), helping children
escape from the city (Nanking 1937) and examining the war from a reli-
gious context (Qixia Temple 1937). The cinematography and mise-en-
scene used to portray the heroic death of Major Li on the rooftop of
a paper store recall an aesthetic principle from the days of the Cultural
Revolution—the principle of “three stresses”, which calls for all aspects
of the filming—framing, composition, camera angle, shot size, light-
ing and colour—to be used to favour the heroes, particularly the lead-
ing character.10 Outnumbered by dozens of Japanese soldiers, Major Li
fights a one-man battle, killing many enemy soldiers before he is severely
wounded. As a small group of Japanese walk cautiously to the rooftop,
a shot-reverse-shot pattern is used to articulate the power relationship
between the two sides. A shot tilted up (from the Japanese point of view)
reveals the empty-handed Chinese major lying on his back amongst
the ruins. He struggles to raise his head in order to stare and sneer at
the enemy. This is followed by a close-up shot looking down at a very
frightened Japanese officer; then a reverse shot back to the heroic Major
Li, before the Japanese open fire. Here, the Chinese lying on his back
is more impressive, in both moral and physical terms, than his Japanese
opponents. Above all, The Flowers of War echoes Lu Chuan’s equally
controversial City of Life and Death in showing a small band of Chinese
soldiers heroically fighting a losing battle at an early stage of the narra-
tive, including the theme of Japanese “comfort women”, with a noble
sacrifice being made by one or more prostitutes, and representing the
Nanjing Massacre from a multiple and alternative perspective.
Despite these precedents, The Flowers of War differs from all the previ-
ous films on the Nanjing Massacre. It not only features Hollywood actor
Christian Bale as the central protagonist but also has 40% of its dialogue in
the English language. During the months of the film’s production and the
media-saturated marketing campaign leading to the premiere, The Flowers
of War was often described as paying homage to Steven Spielberg’s Saving
Private Ryan (1998). The parallels are presumably based on the following:
(1) both films belong to the World War II combat genre; (2) both incor-
porate spectacular battle scenes designed by the British Joss Williams team;
(3) both tell a “salvation” story from a complex perspective, as it happens
and also in retrospect; and (4) both have a white man as the male protago-
nist with exactly the same name, John Miller. On a more personal level, the
list may be extended to include the close ties between the two directors,
Spielberg’s recommendation of actor Christian Bale to Zhang, and Bale’s
appearance in Spielberg’s Empire of the Son (1987), which was also a World
War II story unfolded from the point of view of a teenager (played by Bale).
The remaining part of this chapter will look more closely at these two
films, in order to clarify the ways in which Zhang’s Chinese version of a
blockbuster matched the Spielberg-style Hollywood model, and also the
culturally specific ways in which the two films differed.
In studying Chinese “big pictures” (大片), scholars like to use
Hollywood “high concept” movies as benchmarks (Rao 2009; Yan 2011;
Chen 2012). As a production and promotion mode developed from
Hollywood in the 1970s, the “high concept” blockbuster calls for an
extraordinary budget, cast, spectacle and marketing campaign. In these
respects, Chinese “big pictures” are compatible, but there are significant
differences in methods of narrative construction. As Justin Wyatt notes

in his influential work on contemporary Hollywood, the proposal for
a multi-million dollar “high concept” film invariably starts with a sin-
gle “tagline” or brief description of the story, which has the poten-
tial to appeal to the widest possible audience (Wyatt 1994). To quote
Spielberg, the essence of “high concept” film lies in its condensability:
“I like movie ideas that you can hold in your hand. If a person can tell
me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it’s going to make a pretty good
movie” (quoted in Schatz 1993: 33). This punchy, unified story-line
needs a clearly set goal and a series of impeccably calculated cause-and-
effect events which will carry us to the goal in a linear and transparent
way. To a large extent, this kind of story-telling is derived from the clas-
sic traditions of Hollywood narrative. As Bordwell and Thompson sum
up this approach, the narrative needs “causality, consequence, psycho-
logical motivations, the drive toward overcoming obstacles and achieving
goals” (1985: 13). One permitted deviation is an opening retrospec-
tive scene to establish the story, plus a scene at the end of the film to
complete this present-day “frame”. Saving Private Ryan begins with a
“set-up” of that kind, but everything that follows observes a clear, cause-
and-effect progression:
• Set-up scene (in the 1990s)

An emotional visit to a cemetery in Normandy
↓
• 1944 D-Day brings the deaths of three of four brothers in the Ryan Family.
Miller receives orders to find and save the surviving son
↓
• He goes to Neuville (but finds the wrong Ryan)
↓
• He goes to Vierville
↓
• He goes to Ramelle and finds and saves Ryan
↓
• Back to the set-up scene
It is now revealed that the veteran who is visiting the cemetery is Ryan
and the grave is Miller's
Such “transparency” and “straightforwardness” are absent from

The Flowers of War. The film’s finely crafted, symmetrical but complex
Table 4.1 Narrative construction of The  Flowers of War
Chinese Japanese
Exterior Interior Exterior Interior
• Battlefield • Cathedral • Battlefield • Cathedral

• Masculinity • Femininity • Soldiers in uniform • Colonel Hasegawa
• “Hard body” • “Soft body” • “Hard” weapons •“ Soft” weapons
• Soldiers • Prostitutes (cannons and tanks) (music and food)
• Courage • Courage • Brutality • Pretence
• Bravery • Self-sacrifice • Ruthlessness • Hypocrisy
• Death-defying • Death-defying • Death-causing • Death-causing
narrative is composed of a primary opposition between the Chinese and

the Japanese, which can then be broken down into a number of elements
(Table 4.1).
In addition to setting people from two different nations against
each other, the story is complicated by adding a third party, a white
American, as the central hero. The narrative spends much time trac-
ing the American man’s transformation from an alcoholic mortician to
an honourable “priest”, who eventually saves some members of China’s
younger generation by taking them out of the captured city.11
Differences are not confined to the narrative level; “big films” made
in China and in the USA also utilize film language differently to serve
their own aesthetic priorities. A close shot-by-shot reading of an excerpt
taken from the two films is revealing in this respect. Forty-five minutes
into the narrative of Saving Private Ryan, John Miller and his team reach
the German-occupied town of Neuville and come across a local family.
The French parents ask American soldiers to take their daughter to a safe
place. Private Caparzo disobeys Miller’s orders by agreeing to take the
little girl. He explains that she “reminds me of my niece” and it is an
act of decency to save her. Caparzo is soon shot by an enemy sniper and
bleeds to death. Captain Miller then delivers a lesson to his troops before
they go into battle with the Germans: “We’re not here to do the decent
thing. We’re here to follow orders!” In The Flowers of War, the first com-
bat scene happens within the first ten minutes. Seeing that a group of
teenage girls are about to be assaulted by the Japanese soldiers, Major Li
orders his men to fire. A fierce battle ensues. Although the Chinese sol-
diers have the upper hand at first they are all killed, except for Major Li,
by reinforced Japanese troops. Their self-sacrificing act has succeeded in
saving the girls who escape into the cathedral.
Table 4.2 Close-ups in Saving Private Ryan and The Flowers of War
Shot no Saving Private Ryan The Flowers of War
1 Raindrops starting to fall on bush A frightened girl’s suitcase thrown

leaves high in the air
2 Raindrops starting to fall on the sur- (Major Li’s) finger holding the trigger
face of a river
3 Raindrops starting to fall on dusty Major Li taking aim
ground
4 Rain becoming stronger; the soldiers’ Fire coming out of the muzzle of the
boots rapidly and heavily falling; rifle
muddy water spouting out
5 (MS) fully armed Miller marching Falling suitcase blocking Japanese sol-
forward in the rain dier’s face; bullet hitting the suitcase
6 Profile of suitcase and Japanese
soldier’s face; bullet penetrating the
suitcase and the soldier’s throat
7 (ECU) suitcase hitting soldier’s face
heavily; blood spouting out
8 Major Li firing at the second target
(cut to another Japanese soldier falling
down)
The above two set-up scenes leading to the combat starts with a series
of close-up shots (Table 4.2).
In the case of Saving Private Ryan, four close-up shots of raindrops
on bush leaves, the river surface and the ground quietly but vividly set
the scene and suggest the hard weather condition for the incoming bat-
tle with the enemy. Spielberg also uses a long-held close-up shot of the
soldiers’ boots treading mud, effectively building up suspense in the prel-
ude to the approaching combat. Comparatively, the use of close-up shots
in The Flowers of War is both more extensive and more dramatic. Zhang
uses eight close-up shots in a row to depict one single action. This clus-
ter of close-ups picks out Major Li’s dusty and determined face (while
long shots punctuate the sequence, highlighting the environmental dan-
gers to the Chinese soldiers). This “big emphatic, rapidly-edited close-
up approach” (King 2000: 96) is popular in Asian action films. David
Bordwell describes a similar example of this style as producing effects of
“expressive amplification” (Bordwell 2000: 232) in Hong Kong action
films. One is also reminded of the fragmented, expressionistic editing in a
classic Russian film such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925).
Table 4.3 Technical norms in Saving Private Ryan and The Flowers of War
Saving Private Ryan The Flowers of War
Cinematography • Handheld and shaky • Handheld and shaky

• Fast pan • Fast pan
• Dynamic angles • Dynamic angles
• Frequent LS (intersected by MS • Mixed use of LS, MS and CU
and CUS) • Mixture of long and short takes
• More frequent use of long take • De-centralized framing
• De-centralized framing • Absence of enemy’s
• POV of both sides • Use of slow-motion
• No slow motion
Editing • Rapid editing style • Rapid editing style
• Fast-cutting • Fast-cutting
Mise en scène • On the stree • On the street
• In rain • In fog
• Ruins (broken walls and burnt •R uins (broken walls and burnt
beams, etc.) beams, etc.)
• In uniform • In uniform
Soundtrack • Diegetic • Diegetic and non-diegetic
• Loud explosions • Loud explosions
• Lots of exchanges • Occasional exchanges
• No “silent” shots • “Silent” shots
Once the scene and atmosphere are set up, the two directors apply
similar technical resources to dramatize the combat (Table 4.3).
Despite these similarities, Spielberg has different priorities. He is
totally focused on story-telling and characterization. He is never tempted
to heighten a scene merely for the sake of adding visual intensity. In this
battle scene, the theme already established is the importance of obeying
orders: “We are not here to do the decent thing. We are here to follow
orders!” We therefore watch (close-up) how the soldiers respond. We
see them pause in the midst of an action, in order to receive instructions
from Miller, to exchange ideas, to size up the situation or to adjust strat-
egy. Wider shots and longer takes are then used to show what happens
once an order has been clarified. This is tight story-telling, and it has the
effect of giving a clear, convincing sense of the brutal reality of warfare.
We see why the life of a severely injured fellow soldier cannot be saved
because of the presence of an enemy sniper, or why civilian concerns can-
not be allowed to complicate military actions.
In the combat scene in The Flowers of War, more attention is focused

on the individual, on facial expressions such as determined eyes and
expressive tears, and on the individual’s heroic acts. The extensive use
of close shots is sometimes reminiscent of the Hong Kong urban action
films of the 1980s—for example, an acrobatic somersault and the flames
of an ammunition explosion lighting up the sky. There is a symbolic or
poster quality to some of the shots. A striking example is the shooting
of eight soldiers in a line, one after another, their bodies used as human
shields in approaching an enemy tank. The telephoto shot shows, in slow
motion and accompanied by an emotional, non-diegetic soundtrack, the
dance-like movements of each of the soldiers when he is hit by cannon
bullets. Such stylized, choreographed action does not aim to re-present
an accurate memory of history but rather to be visually striking and por-
tray a “national image of historical values” (Jia 2012: 44). Therefore,
despite the fact that the two sequences display the “intensified continu-
ity” that David Bordwell identifies as the “dominant style of American
mass-audience films today”—namely “rapid editing, bipolar extremes
of lens lengths, reliance on close shots, and wide-ranging camera move-
ments” (Bordwell 2006: 120–121)—Spielberg and Zhang are using such
effects in very different ways (Table 4.4).
Films are complex constructions, and of course one can find some
exceptions to these generalizations, swapping items from one side to
the other; but we can nevertheless identify a strong, overall difference of
emphasis between the approaches taken by the two films.
In her anatomy of Hollywood World War II combat films of the
1940s and the 1950s, Jeanine Basinger identifies a number of stereo-
typical narrative elements that make up the genre (Basinger 1986: 66).
Table 4.5 shows the extent to which Saving Private Ryan and The
Flowers of War match the elements identified by Basinger:
Table 4.4 Aesthetic effects of Saving Private Ryan and The Flowers of War
Saving Private Ryan The Flowers of War
• Realistic, naturalistic • Expressionist

• Physical • Visual, aesthetic, symbolic
• Brutal • Romanticized
• Focuses on story and character • Intense moments, more fragmented
• Aims for historical precision • Mythic as well as historical
Table 4.5 Narrative elements of World War II combat films
Narrative elements Saving Private Ryan The Flowers of War
Burial or funeral ✓ ✓
Death ✓ ✓
Combat ✓ ✓
Enemy deception ✓ ✓
Outnumbered heroes ✓ ✓
Nature as enemy ✓ ×
Humour among heroes ✓ ×
Roll call of living or dead at end ✓ ×
Need to maintain equipment ✓ ×
Talk of wives and home ✓ ×
Minority sacrifice ✓ ✓
Discussion of why we fight ✓ ×
Journey/last stand ✓ ×
Music other than score ✓ ✓
Mail to or from home ✓ ×
Big combat finale ✓ ×
As the Table shows, the matching rate of Saving Private Ryan

is 100%, while that of The Flowers of War is less than a half. Given
that Basinger’s formula is based on the textual analysis of dozens of
Hollywood World War II combat films, we seem to be in a position to
say that regardless of its striking special effects (particularly in the first
26-min-long combat spectacle at Omaha Beach), Saving Private Ryan
tells a conventional (patriotic) war story in a well-rounded and detailed
way. The film therefore produced a strong “reality effect” for numer-
ous audiences and critics worldwide. On multiple occasions, Spielberg
recounted that he had been told by some World War II veterans that
there were two wars, “Hollywood’s and ours… Can you find it in your
heart to tell the story of our war?” (cited in Hammono 2004: 158) In
order to “tell the story of our war”, Spielberg worked to “create a kin-
ship between the audience and the citizen soldier” (Hammond 2004:
156) by extensive research, and at the same time drawing upon virtually
all of the aesthetic and narrative conventions of Hollywood war films.
Of course, any artistic work is not simple reality but its representa-
tion. The effect of realism always involves subjective factors. An attempt
at realism can become convincing if there is a wealth of naturalistic detail
and the artistic creator seems to express a clear, consistent and sincere
attitude to the subject—an approach with which viewers are able to

identify. The realism Spielberg pursued and achieved in making Saving
Private Ryan was based partly on the clarity and strength of its story-tell-
ing methods, and partly on the fact that he kept to familiar ingredients
(which is not to deny the notable skill with which the director shaped
them).
Spielberg’s realism is clearly an American version, informed by
American values and traditions. Yet the film was able to engage inter-
national audiences because the popularity of Hollywood films over the
decades had made American values so familiar to everyone. That Saving
Private Ryan was going to be about national (American) pride and iden-
tity was made obvious by the opening close-up of the “Stars and Stripes”
fluttering in the wind.12 In fact, as van Ginneken notes, “family values”
and “patriotism” have been favoured themes of Hollywood high concept
films (van Ginneken 2007: 10). Spielberg simply followed those ideolog-
ical norms in Saving Private Ryan. Yet by creating a story that involved
audiences emotionally, and by maintaining a strict focus, narrative logic
and emphasis on the brutality of war, he was able to win viewers over to
some alarming ideas—that American soldiers could be forgiven for abus-
ing and killing surrendered enemies, and that there were times it was not
possible to give priority to protecting children during a battle. Overseas
viewers might recognize and be irritated by bursts of jingoism, but they
were still likely to feel involved and carried along by the drama.
The Flowers of War has big, ambitious aims in telling a moving story
about how, during the Sino-Japanese war, a foreign (American) thug-
cum-hero ends up saving the lives of thirteen Chinese school girls,
with the help of a young boy and twelve prostitutes who voluntar-
ily sacrifice their lives. The film’s scale (described as the most expensive
Chinese film to date) calls for an equally grand theme. Zhang has had
much experience in drawing upon Chinese literary and artistic tradi-
tion for his themes. The principle of 文以载道 calls for the use of words
and images to convey moral messages. Zhang has embodied this doc-
trine in the films he has shot or directed, from “carrying a national cross
on the back” in Yellow Earth (1984) to promoting “world peace” in
Hero (2002). The Flowers of War can similarly be seen as a “big film”
in Chinese terms. Chris Berry notes that “the discourse of [Chinese]
‘big film’” derives from “an earlier discourse of the ‘epic’ or ‘giant film’
(巨片)” (Berry 2003: 223) introduced by the late Chinese director Xie Jin
(1923–2008). According to Xie, a “giant film”, or “historical giant film”
(历史巨片), was not simply characterized by big settings, well-developed

characters and refined narrative devices, but more importantly, it needed
to have profound thematic meanings that could reveal the characters’
fate and expose their souls. Such a film would help people to interpret
reality and understand history at a more profound level than mere story-
telling (Wang 1997: 142–143).
On the same day that The Flowers of War was premiered in the domes-
tic market, the country’s influential Southern Weekly (南方周末) car-
ried a lengthy interview with Zhang. He argued in this interview that
The Flowers of War was different from any other films on the Nanjing
Massacre. Firstly, the film’s narrative unfolded through the perspective
of women. Secondly, the film set out to portray the “beauty” rather than
the “ugliness” of human nature during wartime. Thirdly, the film pro-
moted “love” rather than “hatred” among people affected by the war.
Fourthly, the purpose of the film was to beautify, poeticize and roman-
ticize positive memories from the war. And fifthly, the film aimed ulti-
mately to produce a symphony of humanity and a mix of “stunning
pictures and beautiful mind” (Zhang and Zhang 2011). Zhang’s advo-
cacy of the film is certainly in line with Xie’s aesthetics in its emphasis on
big ideas and on moral instruction.
In Meilicke’s words, “The Flowers of War is a film about appearances
and surfaces, in short: it is all about spectacle” (Meilicke 2012: 60). The
“spectacle” of “beauty” portrayed in the film is in a sense symbolized by
a single image—a telephoto shot of the prostitutes seen through a bul-
let hole in the stained glass window of the cathedral from the point-of-
view of the 13-year-old girl narrator. At this moment the prostitutes are
dressed in tailor-made cheongsam of dynamic colours, walking in grace
and glory, and with charming facial expressions. Not only does the film
conclude with this image but also, as Zhang explained, the entire narra-
tive culminates in it.
The film has given a recurring emphasis to the lead prostitute, show-
ing how she uses her sex appeal to lure the American to take her and her
colleagues out of the occupied city. On many occasions, the camera has
focused on aspects of her body such as the rhythm of her swaying hips as
she strides through the church, sensual and manipulating. The dynamic
colours associated with the prostitutes are reminiscent of the director’s
earlier works such as Judou (1990) and Raise the Red Lanterns (1991),
which were marked by what Cousins described as “Asian aesthetics”:
“highly decorated, tapestry-like, with an emphasis on detail, visual
surface, color and patterning, and centered on a woman, or feminized

men” (Cousins 2004).
What is then the film’s “big” theme behind its “beauty”, its sur-
face spectacle? Many of Zhang’s films, like those by Quentin Tarantino
(a more idiosyncratic American director than Spielberg), construct an
enclosed domain isolated from the surrounding social or military situ-
ation, a space with its own, self-contained logic. But substantial differ-
ences exist between Zhang and Tarantino. The filmic world of Tarantino
has been criticized for a lack of rationality, social responsibility or broader
cultural relevance. Watching Tarantino, audiences are concerned primar-
ily with spectacle and emotion. For example, watching Kill Bill (2003),
audiences do not question why The Bride was allowed to take a deadly
samurai sword on board a plane. In a similar vein, they do not blame
the director for having Hitler burnt to death in a cinema theatre in Paris
when viewing Inglorious Bastards (2009). The logic and morality of
Tarantino’s world are self-sufficient. Zhang, however, comes from a dif-
ferent tradition so far as morality is concerned. The world of The Flowers
of War also offers handsome cinematography, masterful articulation of
mise en scène, and splendid colours. All the characters have a role to play:
advancing the narrative, generating conflicts, creating laughter, height-
ening emotion or atmosphere—but there is an equal focus on matters
of ethics. On one occasion, John Miller goes out to look for the two
women who have left the church. The street is almost empty of living
people, but Miller encounters Terry, a former acquaintance. Terry has
secured a boat to leave Nanjing and asks Miller to go with him, but the
invitation is declined because Miller has taken on the role of guardian to
the Chinese women and children in the church. Terry’s fleeting appear-
ance serves the purpose of reinforcing Miller’s moral transformation.
To a large extent, the theme of The Flowers of War is implied by the
title that the Southern Weekly gave to its interview with Zhang: “We
don’t want to become narrow-minded nationalists”. The director argues
that it is wrong for a film on an historical subject to promote hatred
between nations. “America has made so many Nazi horror movies. Do
they let you hate Germans? They are not that parochial. In telling sto-
ries of history, we should all try to extract humanity from the subject
of war and disasters and present their glories, which are represented
through love and benevolence” (Zhang and Zhang 2011). Thematically,
the film aims to transcend national (and individual) limits, to tell its story
from a universal, humanist perspective. Zhang’s broad-minded approach
to treating a national trauma was evidently shaped on the one hand by

the idea of making a “big film” for trans-national audiences, and on
the other hand by principles deeply rooted in traditional culture such as
“repaying brutality with benevolence” (以德报怨) and “oneness among
all the human beings in the world” (世界大同).
Unfortunately the director’s ambition to “go big” was unsuccessful
as the film was a box-office flop in the United States. It received a low
(43%) rating on the American website Rotten Tomatoes, which collects
American and British reviews.13 Critics’ comments such as “a florid, mel-
odramatic tear-jerker of questionable taste” were common. Despite the
use of an American central character, a number of viewers appear to have
seen the film as a type of Chinese propaganda. What went wrong? To
attempt to highlight “beauty” and “love and benevolence” while simul-
taneously depicting the most inhuman atrocities suffered by Chinese
civilians during the most humiliating period in modern Chinese history
may have created an emotional mismatch. Spielberg’s more naturalistic,
cause-and-effect style and emphasis on the brutality of war enabled him
to deal with disturbing material more successfully (as in his 1993 film
Schindler’s List). Zhang strives so hard to create beautiful or spectacu-
lar images that the story sometimes loses momentum. Some Chinese as
well as American critics have questioned the narrative logic of his film (Li
2012; Zhao 2012).
The Flowers of War and Saving Private Ryan are thus marked by sub-
stantial differences. The reasons are complicated, involving different
industrial and cultural traditions and the priorities of the individual direc-
tors. It should also be acknowledged that Spielberg, unlike Zhang, has
not had to walk a tightrope between the official censorship system and
the demands of the marketplace.
The refinement of imagery woven into The Flowers of War is not
exceptional but has a universal significance in Chinese cinema. The analy-
sis of the film in this chapter is also relevant to other Chinese “big films”.
As we saw in Chapter Three, the commercial success of Zhang’s Hero
in the international market encouraged colleagues such as Chen Kaige
and Feng Xiaogang to make their own blockbusters. These Chinese-
style “big pictures” all share huge budgets and lavish production val-
ues (by the standards of Chinese films), all-star casts, elaborate sets and
costumes, spectacular camerawork, extensive digital special effects, huge
marketing campaigns and concerted efforts to reach a large audience,
not only at home but also overseas. More often than not, they have
explored (or exploited) the thematic concerns of redemption and sacri-

fice, conspiracy and deception. The directors made some bold choices.
Feng Xiaogang’s The Banquet was based on Shakespeare’s famous play
Hamlet, but the characters and themes proved too much for the Chinese
adaptation to handle clearly. Zhang’s Curse of the Golden Flowers was also
based on a literary classic, a Chinese play written in the 1930s, and it
was loaded with complex moral themes of greed, murder, conspiracy and
incest. Following their release in the home market, the two films were
severely criticized for displaying an inadequate sense of history and a lack
of “cultural responsibility”. Their scenes of action and violence were seen
as mere spectacle, “a visual expression” purely for box office purposes
(Gao 2009: 119).
The international experience of Chen Kaige’s The Promise (2005) typ-
ifies the general treatment received by Chinese “big pictures” in over-
seas markets. A trans-national product (casting actors from Japan, South
Korea, Hong Kong and mainland China) and a hybrid of fantasy, martial
arts and costume epic, the film boasted the biggest budget in Chinese
cinema up to the time of its production. Chen gained his reputation in
international film circles for his early stylish, experimental works such as
Yellow Earth (1984), King of the Children (孩子王, 1987) and Life on a
String (边走边唱, 1991). He became known as the most philosophical
Chinese filmmaker. He continued this legacy in developing The Promise
as a means to reflect upon the meaning of life (or lack of it). The film’s
narrative was replete with abstract concepts related to time and mem-
ory, trust and betrayal. Writing about Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express
(重庆森林, 1994), Andrew Brown summed up the film’s thematic con-
cerns as “an exploration of personal isolation in urban society, the impos-
sibility of love and the effects of time and memory” (Brown 2003: 228),
and that description applies equally well to The Promise. It was philo-
sophically profound, ideologically complex and stylistically innovative.
Yet unlike Chen’s earlier works that were received with enthusiasm in
international film festivals, The Promise met with a cold reception both
at home and abroad. The New York-based Weinstein Company initially
purchased the film’s distribution rights for the North American market,
but after viewing a trial rough-cut, the Company decided to cancel the
release and resold the rights to Warner Independent Pictures. The can-
cellation was not only seen as a Waterloo for Chen’s creative career but
also left other Chinese “big film” projects in an awkward situation, par-
ticularly in terms of overseas release.14
This sense of awkwardness is succinctly summed up by Yin Hong

and Sun Yanbin as “three more and three less” (三多三少)—more films
sold overseas but less revenue earned; more public service but fewer
commercial screenings; more art house theatres but fewer mainstream
cinemas (2016: 16). Despite official data that the global copyrights of
more and more Chinese films are being sold, they are reaching only a
small overseas audience confined mostly to diasporic Chinese com-
munities (Kurlantzick 2007: 119–120). In 2010, the box-office rev-
enues generated by Chinese films from the overseas market reached an
apogee of 3.517 billion Chinese yuan, an 86% increase from 1.89 bil-
lion yuan in 2009; but the next two years saw a continuous drop to
2.024 billion yuan in 2011 and 1.083 billion yuan in 2012 (He 2013:
54). In 2014, the box-office performance of Chinese films in the North
American market fell behind that of films from India, Mexico, South
Korea, Poland and France (Yin and Feng 2015: 24). In this context,
when we look at the global market performance of The Flowers of War
and Saving Private Ryan, we should not be surprised by the difference.
With a budget of $90 million, an unprecedented figure in Chinese cin-
ema, Zhang’s film only garnered half of the expected ¥1 billion in the
domestic market, and its total box-office return in the USA was a mere
$311,434.15 Comparatively, Spielberg’s war epic was made with a budget
of $70 million. The film’s straightforward (some would say “narrow”)
vision of the war and classic Hollywood style was a hit both in its home
country (grossing $216,540,909) and around the world (an additional
$265,300,000).16 In other words, its global gross was almost seven times
greater than its production budget (and that is to count only theatrical
returns and not subsequent television and DVD sales).
To conclude, like the film Codename Cougar produced twenty-three
years earlier, The Flowers of War appears to represent the best of what
Chinese filmmakers can do in making commercially viable genre films,
but it also illustrates the problems that such films still face in competing
with Hollywood in the global marketplace. The difficulty is to reconcile
the richness of Chinese cultural traditions, and the strength of political
concerns (which may influence which projects get the “green light” and
do not attract censorship) with international appeal. A film with a small
budget can potentially be more profitable and can afford to take more
risks artistically; but some Chinese film-makers remain drawn to the chal-
lenge of choosing stories and finding methods of telling them that will
NOTES 79
have widespread success. Zhang has been particularly concerned with

this question of how to convey Chinese tales to an international audi-
ence more effectively. In that respect, The Flowers of War would appear
to offer valuable lessons to the Chinese film industry in terms of how to
foster strengths and avoid weaknesses. As China’s economy continues to
grow and its film market continues to expand, its film industry will surely
need to become more fully integrated with world cinema.
Notes
1. “Zhang Yimou brings ‘Turandot’ to Bird’s Nest”, http://www.china.org.
cn/video/2009-09/14/content_18567773_2.htm (accessed October
21, 2016).
2. In 2009 Zhang directed A Woman, A Gun and A Noodle Shop (三枪拍案
惊奇) as a remake of the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984). As a cos-
tume comedy it raises somewhat different issues from the two films dis-
cussed in this chapter.
3. From the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Japanese films provided an impor-
tant source of inspiration to Chinese audiences in general and Chinese
filmmakers in particular, influencing and changing their views on enter-
tainment and lifestyle. Japanese Film Week (日本电影周) played a key
role in the process. Co-organized by the Chinese Film Company and
the Japanese Filmmaker Association, the event was held annually in vari-
ous cities across China between 1978 and 1991. The important figure
responsible for selecting films was Yasuyoshi Tokuma (1921–2000) of the
Tokuma Shoten Publishing Company Ltd, a Japanese company that also
co-produced Zhang’s Judou (Zhang 1990).
4. Red Sorghum also has parallels with Onibaba (aka Demon Hag, dir. Kaneto
Shindo), a 1964 Japanese historical costume horror film, in the way it
presents an endless field of wild sorghum and depicts an untamed, desir-
able young woman. The influence of Rashomon on Zhang’s films can also
be seen in his martial arts epic Hero (2002).
5. By the mid-1970s, the Japanese economy had reached its lowest point in the
post-war period. Numerous businesses declared bankruptcy and unemploy-
ment was over one million. Another of Sato’s films of this period, Bullet
Train (Shinkansen Daibakuha, 1975), shared this subtext of economics.
6. This translation is from the film’s Chinese dubbed version. The Chinese
subtitle in the Japanese original version translates the comment as “There
are some crimes that cannot be judged only according to law. Also,
there’s evil that cannot be judged according to law.”
7. “China’s marketization”, however, “is not a path to liberalism or unbri-

dled openness that might pose a challenge to the authority of the party”
(Davis 2010). Instead, “a stringent censorship system” exists alongside
the thriving film market, which “is neither useful to encourage creativity
nor helpful for Chinese cinema to make an impact on the world stage”
(Zhou 2015).
8. In terms of its national economy, China overtook Japan as the world’s sec-
ond largest economy in mid-2010. The author remembers a film confer-
ence at Peking University in late 2012 at which a high-ranking official
from the Beijing Municipal Government repeatedly called, during the
opening ceremony, for the production of “quality works” (精品) that
could convey Chinese tales to international audiences. He went on to
explain that “quality works” were those that both promoted socialist val-
ues and achieved extraordinary box-office receipts in the world market.
In the same speech, he said he was disappointed that he had not yet seen
any “quality work” of this kind.
9. While the Allies fought Nazi Germans on European battlegrounds, the
Chinese army fought the Japanese in the Asia-Pacific theatre during the
Second World War. In the Chinese context, World War II is thus more
often called “the anti-Japanese war” or “the War of Resistance against
Japan”.
10. “The three stresses” (“三突出”) refer to: (1) a stress on the good charac-
ters out of all the characters; (2) a stress on the most heroic characters;
and (3) a stress on the central heroic character. When the doctrine was
transposed to the screen, a distinctive film language was used—distant
shots of the enemy versus close-up shots of the heroes; dim-lighting of
the enemy versus bright-lighting of the heroes; the enemy shown small
and the heroes shown large; and high-angle shots of the enemy versus
low-angle shots of the heroes.
11. The narrative device of a white hero’s rescue of Chinese women and
children is not only a Hollywood cliché but has also “provided inspi-
ration for Chinese filmmakers” as a way to add global appeal to a num-
ber of local products “on the eve of China’s entry into the World Trade
Organization”. Some examples include A Time to Remember (红樱桃, Ye
Daying, 1995), Red River Valley (红河谷, Feng Xiaoning, 1996) and Grief
Over the Yellow River (黄河绝恋, Feng Xiaoning, 1999) (Yang 2014: 1).
12. For a critique of Spielberg’s attempted equation between American sol-
diers and the Allied forces in this film, see Frank Tomasulo, “Empire of
the gun: Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan and American chauvin-
ism”, in Lewis (2001: 30).
13. h ttps://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_flowers_of_war/reviews/
(accessed January 13, 2017).
REFERENCES 81
14. “The Promise met its waterloo overseas and drove costume action moves into
an awkward position” 《无极》海外遭滑铁卢带来古装动作片海外尴尬);
(
http://ent.sina.com.cn/m/c/2006-04-23/11311061741.html (accessed
December 18, 2016).
15. Source: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=flowersofwar.htm
(accessed September 24, 2016). Released on December 15, 2011,
The Flowers of War raked in 467 million Chinese yuan, making it
the highest-grossing Chinese-made film of the year.
16. Source: http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=savingprivateryan.htm
(accessed September 24, 2016).
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CHAPTER 5
Staging China: The Art of Yijing
Abstract  This Chapter discusses Zhang Yimou’s series of live, light-and-

sound spectacles which have been performed to large audiences across
China. It explores their stylistic features and socio-cultural significance.
Performed by the side of “mountains and/or waters”, these shows
conform to Chinese landscape art theory and can thus provide a wide-
ranging introduction to traditional Chinese aesthetics. In particular, the
chapter considers the director’s attempt to integrate the classic artistic
concept of yijing (meaning “poetic state”) with modern technology in
order to tell Chinese stories in a way that can appeal to both domestic
and international audiences.
Keywords  Impression series · Light-and-sound spectacle 

Mountain-and-river landscape · Yijing
When the night fell on September 4, 2016, an evening gala was performed
for the visiting leaders of the 11th G20 Summit held in Hangzhou,
a provincial capital city in east China. Titled “Enduring memories of
Hangzhou”, which derived from a famous line in an ancient Chinese
poem, the gala boasted a light-and-shadow spectacle. Combining tradi-
tional pieces of Chinese music such as “High Mountain Flowing Water”
and “Moonlit Night on Spring River” with European classical music such
as Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, the gala
endeavoured to evoke a poetic and painterly atmosphere (诗情画意).

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4328-4_5
86 5 STAGING CHINA: THE ART OF YIJING
The show’s outstanding features lay, however, in the location and the
director. The entire performance took place a few centimetres below the
surface of West Lake, China’s most renowned lake. The director, Zhang
Yimou, is famous both for his films and for his live outdoor perfor-
mances. He had prepared this gala event by drawing elements from his
performance Impression West Lake, which had become a “must-see” for
tourists visiting Hangzhou since its premiere in 2007. In association with
Wang Chaoge and Fan Yue, he had already created a series of similar per-
formances starting with Impression Liu Sanjie at the Li River, Guangxi
Province, in 2003, and Impression Lijiang in Lijiang, Yunnan Province,
in 2006. These were extremely popular and the team went on to launch
Impression Hainan at Sanya of Hainan Province in 2009 and Impression
Dahongpao at Mount Wuyi in Fujian Province in 2010.
This chapter will discuss these shows, exploring their stylistic features
and sociocultural meanings. The various performances will be referred to
simply by their locations (such as West Lake). What is primarily of inter-
est here is the way these shows, which were performed by the side of
“mountains or/and waters”, conformed to Chinese landscape art theory,
so they provide a wide-ranging introduction to traditional Chinese aes-
thetics. In particular, this chapter will consider the attempt to integrate
the classic artistic concept of yijing with modern technology in order to
tell Chinese stories which can appeal to both domestic and international
audiences. The attempt highlights both the continuities and the differ-
ences between China’s traditional culture and its contemporary situation.
Comprising the Chinese characters yi (standing for qingyi, feelings and
affections) and jing (standing for jingwu, scenes and objects), yijing rep-
resents a quintessential ingredient of Chinese traditional aesthetics. It is
a time-honoured practice to use external objects to evoke spiritual states
of mind (Li 1983). An accurate translation of yijing is problematic as
its connotations can often only be sensed and not explained precisely. A
much-discussed definition from Li Zehou interprets yijing as “the unity
of yi and jing, where the former (yi) is the fusion of qing (the emotional
aspect) with li (the intellectual aspect), and the latter (jing) is the fusion
of xing (resemblance in form) and shen (likeness in spirit). In other words,
yijing is … [the] unifying [of] objective scenes or events with subjective
feelings and interest” (Li 1983: 162 as translated in Wang 2002: 46). For
another scholar, Gary Xu, yijing simply refers to “ideascape” (2006: 36).
Such definitions imply that in setting up yijing, artists strive to create
a kind of poetic state that transcends any specific object, event or scene,
5 STAGING CHINA: THE ART OF YIJING 87
and reaches beyond spatial and temporal limits. This poetic state is pow-
erful enough to evoke a profoundly philosophical feeling and inspiration
(Ye 1998: 19). “The construction of poetic state”, in Zong Baihua’s
view, involves “a subjective interpretation of objective scenery” which is
“not measured by a physical framework. The energy (linggan) and reso-
nance (qiyun) of yijing only find their expression in the mountains and
valleys, clouds and smoke in … wild nature” (2009: 192–193). In short,
what yijing aims to convey is “mental and emotional presence beyond
the physical form” (Hay 1972: 297).
First used by Tang Dynasty poet Wang Changling (698–756),
yijing represents the highest aesthetic ideal in ancient Chinese art.
Its significance for art and literature reached a pinnacle in the “con-
vertibility” of painting and poetry among the circle of literati led by
scholar-artist Su Shi (1037–1101) in the Northern Song Dynasty
of the eleventh century. Su made an often-quoted comment on a
painting and its inscription reputedly created by Tang Dynasty poet
Wang Wei (699–761): “I savour Wang Wei’s poem within painting;
I view Wang Wei’s painting within poem.”1 Su originated the phrases
“painting within poetry” and “poetry within painting”, which have
remained popular ever since. Painter Li Gonglin (1049–1106), a con-
temporary of Su, responded with the comment: “I make paintings
as a poet composes poems, simply to recite my feelings and nature”
(quoted in Cahill 1996: 8–9).
In the evolution of Chinese art and literature, the poetry of the
Tang Dynasty (618–907) and the ci, or lyric verse, of the Song Dynasty
(960–1779) represent twin peaks but they differ in format, content and
mood. Both follow formal rules but the poetry of the ci tradition has more
variation. Seeking a “surplus” and “overflow” of poetry (诗馀) (Soong
1980: 2), ci is concerned with “a still more elusive and refined level of sub-
tlety, a still greater delicacy of nuance, that cannot find expression in the
regular poetic forms” (Miao 1980: 28). An archetypal ci, frequently used to
illustrate its generic style, content and yijing, is Qin Guan’s (1047–1100)
lyric verse composed to the tune of Wanxishan (Wash Creek Sand):
A misty light chill ascends the small tower.

The morning sky, cloudy, with a touch of ennui, reminds one of late
autumn.
Pale smoke, flowing water – the painted screen looks gloomy;
Free and easy, the flying petals are light as a dream.
From the vast sky falls a drizzle, fine as sorrow.
From the precious curtain, restfully hangs a tiny silver hook.
(Translation in Wong 1980: 266)
Instead of telling a story in a narrative and linear manner, this lyric verse
constructs a yijing of seclusion and “ennui” by depicting the sporadic
feelings of the ci poet on a rainy day as he looks around his surround-
ings. Unrelated images are juxtaposed in a stream-of-consciousness way
in order to create an atmosphere. To translate this description into a pic-
ture, the image would probably show a tiny human figure looking out
from a small room, positioned in the bottom corner of a composition
that included some large, empty, rain-drenched spaces. In the far dis-
tance, a few, barely visible, topmost peaks of mountains would pierce the
“great void” (taixu). In Ni Zhen’s words, the emphasis given to “emp-
tiness” and “vastness” (boda) in the construction of yijing suggests the
union of nature and humanity, a principle deriving from Buddhist and
Taoist thought. It is through this play with spatial qualities that a painter
can convey subtle feelings. Paintings are permeated with vital energy by
the inclusion of “blank whiteness” (Ni 1994: 68).
Zhang has repeatedly claimed that his creative career is deeply rooted
in the rich soil of Chinese literary and artistic thought (Li 1998: 163).
His interest in the spatial composition and spiritual implications of clas-
sical Chinese art theory can be traced back to the very start of his career.
As a cinematographer, he consciously utilized classic aesthetic principles
in shooting two films that would go on to launch a “new wave” cin-
ema in mainland China. In One and Eight (1983), Zhang created “vast
emptiness”, framing a disproportionally profound sky in order “to cap-
ture the meaning beyond words and the music beyond notes” and to
express “the subtle meaning that defies confinement” (Zhang and Xiao
1994: 99). In filming Yellow Earth (1984), he similarly maintained an
unbalanced ratio between empty space and the area occupied by people.
He said that his use of “high sky and thick earth” (gaotian houtu) was
to reflect the historical serenity (and stagnation) of traditional Chinese
culture, and added that this was inspired by Taoist propositions: “The
perfect square has no corners” (大方无隅), “Great talents ripen late”
(大器晚成), “The highest notes are hard to hear” (大音希声) and “The
5 STAGING CHINA: THE ART OF YIJING 89
greatest form has no shape” (大象无形) (Zhang 2004: 27). The interac-
tion between “form” and “void”, between “limited” and “unlimited”,
fired the imagination, reverberating with the paradoxical philosophy of
Taoism. The cinematographer’s reliance on these ancient aesthetic prin-
ciples contributed significantly to the ambiguity and complexity of the
film’s narrative, characterization and thematic concerns.
When Zhang became a director a few years later, he continued to dem-
onstrate an interest in ancient artistic principles and a penchant for set-
ting up yijing. His “Red Trilogy” (i.e. Red Sorghum, Judou and Raise
the Red Lantern) made much use of traditional customs and rituals, and
the films’ poetics came from “nostalgia for a pre-modern rurality” (Chan
2007: 101). A particularly revealing example was his later film The Road
Home (1999), a story of delicate feelings of grief associated with love—the
longing for love, love sickness and the loss of love. Rather than narrating
the story in full detail, the film touched only on the beginning and end in
order to construct a “great void” for viewers to fill with their imagination
(see Zhang 2004: 170). The director himself commented: “We shoot an
extraordinary love story through maximizing ‘vast blankness’. This is very
different from Titanic. American people would never shoot a love story
this way; they would thoroughly get everything through before [the] start.
Our way of telling the story is very oriental, distinctively marked by ‘yijing’
and ‘void’, which can only be sensed but not explained” (Huang and Li
2000: 38).
Yijing is expressed even in Zhang’s more commercial martial arts epic
Hero, as he explained:
I insist on the colour of Chinese culture in this film – zither, chess, cal-
ligraphy and painting. Even the soundtrack of combat scenes is in the tune
of Peking Opera. All these are important elements of Chinese traditional
culture…. We attempted to present it in a more poetic way, making it
acquire a sense of yijing and flavour. When we were subtitling the film,
many words such as yijing, yunwei (resonance韵味) and jingjie (spiritual
state 境界) are untranslatable. We racked out brains but we still could not
find their English equivalents. (Li 2003: 438–439)
In the Impression series, the director has found a very appropriate plat-
form for the creative treatment of yijing. The very brand “Impression”
suggests its poetic and sporadic nature, its affinities with lyric verse. As
we shall see, Zhang’s live landscape performances utilize yijing as a major
principle in terms of the scenery, the general mood, and the blending of
subjective and objective.
Common to Zhang’s live performances is the fact that they have been
located in popular tourist destinations with beautiful scenery and/or
rich cultural heritage.2 For example, the stage of Liu Sanjie is situated
by the Li River in Yangshuo, Guilin of Guangxi Province. The spectacu-
lar karst geographical features of Guilin have earned the city the repu-
tation for “having the best mountains and waters under heaven”. The
old Town of Lijiang, where Lijiang was performed, was listed as a World
Heritage Site as early as 1997 “because of its unique urban fabric and
residential buildings and its vernacular landscape of custom, religion,
music, and pictographic written language” (Zhu 2015: 83). The site of
West Lake in Hangzhou City is another “paradise on earth”. The lake
and its surrounding hills were added to the World Heritage list in 2011
for bearing “exceptional testimony to the cultural tradition of improv-
ing landscapes to create a series of vistas reflecting an idealised fusion
between humans and nature”.3 Mount Wuyi, the setting of Dahongpao,
joined both the Cultural and the Natural World Heritage lists in 1999.
The UNESCO homepage describes Mount Wuyi as the most outstand-
ing area for biodiversity conservation in south–east China and “a refuge
for an important number of ancient, relict plant species, many of them
endemic to China…. The serene beauty of the dramatic gorges of the
Nine-Bend River…[with its] numerous temples and monasteries, many
now in ruins,…provided the setting for the development and spread of
neo-Confucianism,…which has been very influential in the cultures of
East Asia since the 11th century”.4
Zhang’s light-and-shadow spectacles display his signature style of
group callisthenics. Each performance features several hundred actors,
the majority of whom are non-professional local inhabitants. Liu Sanjie
had a cast of 600 performers, mostly farmers and fishermen of various
ethnic groups from neighbouring villages. These people were engaged in
farming and fishing during the daytime and became actors and actresses
during show-time. In the case of Lijiang, over 500 minority perform-
ers were recruited from 16 neighbouring villages and small towns, rep-
resenting eleven ethnic groups; and over 95% of the actors in Dahongpao
were attendants, bamboo rafters and tourist guides recruited from the
local areas. This casting of local residents as major performers gave the
events an extra sense of authenticity.
LIU SANJIE AND LIJIANG: “SMALLNESS” AND “LARGENESS” 91
The parallels between these shows are, however, only partial. Zhang’s
unrelenting pursuit of variety and innovation is reflected in the chore-
ography of each “mountain-and-water” performance, particularly in the
variety of ways the poetic state of yijing has been created. Those differ-
ences deserve close examination.
Liu Sanjie and Lijiang: “Smallness” and “Largeness”

Both Liu Sanjie and Lijiang are set in the “exotic” southwest minority
areas and feature performers of multiple ethnic groups as “happy, smiling
natives” (Clark 1987: 21). Since 1949, Chinese filmmakers have adopted
a well-established approach to the representation of minority people on
the screen. In films such as Five Golden Flowers (五朵金花, 1959) and
Ashima (阿诗玛, 1964), members of various ethnic minority groups are
portrayed in a conventional way with their identity highlighted by their
capacity to sing, dance and smile.5 Liu Sanjie and Lijiang conform to
the mainstream representations of minorities in Chinese films during
the 17-year period from 1949 to 1966, though they downplay the overt
political tone of previous decades. Instead of “idealizing the present and
vilifying the past to legitimate the party-state” (Baranovitch 2001: 367),
Zhang’s two landscape performances celebrate the past and draw inspira-
tions from its legends, folklores, mythologies and aesthetic principles.
Late Qing Dynasty Scholar Wang Guowei, in his Poetic Remarks in the
Human World first published in 1908, defines yijing in terms of “small-
ness” and “largeness”, which are respectively wan-yue (婉约, subtle and
refined) and hao-fang (豪放, powerful and free) (Wong 1980: 266). As
Wang explained:
Why cannot [the poetic state] in lines such as “Little fish jump in the fine
rain; swallows dip their wings in the faint breeze” stand in comparison
with that in the lines “The large banners glow in the setting sun; horses
neigh in the rustling wind?” Why is not [the poetic state] in lines such as
“The pearled curtain idly hangs on the little silver hook” as impressive as
that in the lines “Mist enfolds the tower and pavilion; the moon shines
dimly on the ferry”? (Wang 1997: 143 as translated in Rickett 1977:
42–43)
Despite the fact that the setting of Liu Sanjie consists of the 2 km-long
Li River and the surrounding 12 mountains, the focus of the show is
“water”. The picturesque mountains, known for their graceful and ele-
gant contours, form the backdrop in the distance. On the other hand,
Lijiang is performed 3100 m above sea level at the base of the 5600 m
high Jade Dragon Snow Mountain (玉龙雪山). The presence of the
mountain is dominant throughout the performance. Water is to moun-
tain as moon is to sun, as femininity is to masculinity, and as “smallness”
is to “largeness” (in Wang Guowei’s terms).
The narrative of Liu Sanjie is loosely based on the legend of Liu
Sanjie, a goddess in the folksongs of the Zhuang minority, a character
existing in the popular mass media of the area for several hundred years
(Loh 1984). Stories about Liu Sanjie (literally “Third Sister Liu”) have
been adapted for provincial operas, musicals and singing-and-dancing
dramas as well as feature films. The filmic adaption of Liu Sanjie by
Changchun Film Studio in 1961 was particularly influential, garnering
critical and commercial success at home and overseas, and turning the
name of Liu Sanjie into a brand name of Guilin and a cultural icon of
Guangxi Province (Fig. 5.1).
Fig. 5.1 Impression Liu Sanjie (2003)

Impression Liu Sanjie is stamped by Zhang’s signature use of col-

ours, with a different colour for each section—a Red Impression of Folk
Songs, a Green Impression of the Home Village, a Blue Impression of
Love Songs, a Golden Impression of Lighting from Fishing Rafts, and a
Silver Impression of Customs and Rituals. The performance begins with
a few local residents introducing themselves in accented Mandarin, fol-
lowed by footage on a huge LED screen documenting the daily routines
of local life (including scenes from the 1961 musical film). The open-
ing “red” section displays a strong nostalgia for old classic culture, with
the soundtrack drawing heavily on the popular folksongs featured in
the musical film. A spectacular “red ribbon” choreography performed
by men—the only sequence of “masculinity” in the show—concludes
the first part. Then dozens of young men and women, fully dressed in
minority clothing, come to sing songs in the local dialect to praise their
home village, as a lead-into the “green” section. In its portrayal of local
life, the show uses classic imagery—fishing rafts, fishermen, coir rain-
coats, fish hawks, cowherd, a water buffalo and meandering banks—to
evoke a kind of yijing. Such images evoke rural beauty and tranquillity,
with echoes of the iconic “cowherd’s flute” (牧童短笛) and “evening
song from a fishing boat” (渔舟唱晚).
“The Cowherd’s Flute” was a piece of piano music by the Chinese
composer He Luting (1903–1999). It conveyed a poetic state of peace
and harmony by describing a country boy playing his flute on the back
of a water buffalo. It has been popular ever since its first performance
in 1934, and was adapted in 1963 into a 20 min animation film with
the same title, Cowherd’s Flute (牧笛, dir. Te Wei). In keeping with the
tone of the music, the film was shot in a distinctively Chinese style. “The
innocent cowherd, babbling brooks and swaying bamboo always convey
the delicate and subtle feelings of Chinese aesthetics” (Giesen 2015: 46).
The theme of “evening song from a fishing boat” can be traced back
much further, to the famous “Preface to the Pavilion of Prince Teng”
(滕王阁序) by Wang Bo (650–676) of the Tang Dynasty.6 The poetic
mood of the writing was translated in the 1930s into a piece of Chinese
instrumental music with the same title. This zither music also became
famous, earning the phrase “oriental angel”. Numerous programmes
have been created for this piece of music based on its depiction of “the
fishing boats sailing and the fishermen’s happy work in the dusk on the
vast blue lake water” (Han 1978: 32).
Drawing on these traditional associations, Impression Liu Sanjie pre-

sents the minority areas along the Li River (漓江) as a “Land of Peach
Blossoms” where people “pluck chrysanthemums by the east fence, [and]
far distant appear the southern mountains”.7 In James Hilton’s words, it is
a utopian Shangri-La of “great beauty and spiritual wisdom” and “of reli-
gious and inter-ethnic peace and harmony” (Hillman 2010: 176–177).8
In contrast to these more delicate aspects, Lijiang is a show of “large-
ness” in Wang Guowei’s sense. The performance is staged against a 12 m
hillside built of concrete and crimson soil bricks. A serpentine trail, sym-
bolizing the Ancient Tea Horse Road (茶马古道), connects the stage to
the top of the hillside and extends into the distant horizon. The stage
and the audience floor are surrounded by a 360 degree horse track sus-
pended from above, which gives a forceful and grandiose touch to the
overall design.
The Ancient Tea Horse Road is one of the two major trading and cul-
tural network routes in ancient China.9 The Road to the south winds
through the mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, and the Tibet
Autonomous Region, allowing horse and mule caravans (马帮) to trans-
port salt, tea and other commodities from Yunnan to communities inac-
cessible by other transport. One of the major routes that constituted
the Ancient Tea Horse Road was the 3000 km tea-trading caravan path
between Pu’er of Yunnan and Lahsa of Tibet. It is a steep and rough
road, in places cutting through sheer cliff faces. Muleteers and other car-
avan drivers who had to routinely traverse the road to make a living have
had to confront many dangers and hardships (Fig. 5.2).
Sikong Tu (837–908), a poet and critic of the late Tang Dynasty,
listed twenty-four different poetic states in his influential Twenty-Four
Styles of Poetry (二十四诗品). He described the “powerful and free” style
in this way:
The winds from sky sweep wide
The hills out at sea loom wild
Great Strength permeates the world
All creation spread between heaven and earth10
Sikong Tu’s description offers a way of understanding the poetic state

established in the performance. In comparison with the three other shows
Fig. 5.2 Impression Lijiang (2006)
discussed in this chapter, Lijiang is the only one performed during day-
time. Its central focus is to demonstrate the “great strength” of “masculin-
ity” standing tall among “the winds from sky” and “the hills out at sea”.
The central characters of the performance are the galloping horses
of the vast land and the caravan drivers of the Ancient Tea Horse Road
below the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, closely linked to the soil under
their feet and the sky over their heads because they are thought to be
“the children of sky and siblings of nature”. A male voice-over intones:
“Their soul is the soul of nature; their breath is the breath of nature.
They, forever, live their life happily and they carry with them a myste-
rious power.” Like the wine breeders in Red Sorghum (1987), these
ethnic young men are thought to have a generous and straightforward
temperament, accepting danger and hardship, and eating and drinking
unrestrainedly. Their laughter, and even their disputes, have a loud and
reverberant sonority, creating a stirring, masculine atmosphere. What
is highlighted is the effect of primitive passion and vehemence. The
show’s treatment of these characters conforms to Gladney’s observations
on the stereotyping of nationalities in China: “When minority men are
portrayed … they are generally exoticized as strong and virile, practis-

ing strange and humorous customs, or possessing extraordinary physi-
cal abilities in sport, work, or the capacity to consume large amounts of
alcohol” (1994: 97).
This is not merely a land where nature and humanity are in unison.
It is also “a magic place, where [you can] call heaven and heaven will
answer, and call earth and earth will answer”. Not surprisingly, Zhang’s
2005 motion picture Riding Alone on Thousands of Miles, a story of a
Japanese father’s estranged relationship and eventual reconciliation with
his dying son, is set in this magic piece of land at the foot of the Jade
Dragon Snow Mountain.11
This is indeed an area worth celebration. A big part of the show
revels in local rituals and customs, amplifying their mysterious history,
their inward richness and religious beliefs. The performers of different
groups, wearing ethnic dress and holding region-specific musical instru-
ments decorated with mysterious patterns, dance their way up and down
the hillside track. Their movement is more spontaneous than organized,
and more forceful than graceful. On one occasion, dozens of young male
minority performers beat wooden tables to celebrate a harvest. Their
energy and vitality is reminiscent of the fou drummers who began the
Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games. The shifting of the
tables into various patterns, operated by performers on the side, cor-
responds to the synchronized arrangement of blocks in movable-type
printing. On that occasion, the blocks are made to form three varia-
tions of the Chinese character “harmony” before projecting an image of
the Great Wall, which then fades into a field of peach blossoms, clearly
embodying the idea of the Land of Peach Blossoms.
In short, if Liu Sanjie constructs a yijing of “smallness” by exploring
feminized imagery, Lijiang creates a yijing of “largeness” by masculin-
ized images. There is no suggestion that one of these categories is supe-
rior, for both are appealing and expressive. One represents “the beauty of
subtlety” (优美) and the other “the beauty of sublimity” (壮美).
West Lake and Dahongpao: “Implicitness”

and “Explicitness”
West Lake and Dahongpao differ in subject and style. The former is more
like a ci verse, concerned with the expression of “emotion”, while the
latter is a narrative poem, focusing on the theme of Chinese tea. As the
WEST LAKE AND DAHONGPAO: “IMPLICITNESS” AND “EXPLICITNESS” 97
aesthetician Zhu Guangqian observes, the quintessential spirit of the

“emotional poem” (言情诗) is “implicitness” and the essence of the
“prose poem” (写景/咏物诗) is “explicitness” (Zhu 1983: 86). Wang
Guowei contrasts the two types as “veiled” and “unveiled”.
Impression West Lake is performed on the West Lake of Hangzhou,
a city with arguably the most charming natural and cultural landscapes
in China. Marco Polo in his The Travels calls Hangzhou “the finest and
most splendid city in the world” and “a slice of heaven on earth”. In a
similar vein, West Lake boasts the most poetic scenery and atmosphere.
The lake’s two landmark causeways are named after two great poets of
ancient China: Bai Juyi of the Tang Dynasty and Su Shi of the Song
Dynasty. Each of them composed several hundred poems and ci verses
on the lake. In one of his most famous poems, Su Shi likened the lake
to Xi Shi, one of the four classic beauties, who always looked her best
regardless of light or heavy make-up.12
The narrative of West Lake is vaguely based on a local folklore story
over 1000 years old. A white snake is transformed into a beautiful
woman, who encounters a young scholar on the Broken Bridge over the
West Lake. Their happy life together is interrupted by secular forces and
the two are parted from each other. Stories around the White Snake, like
the legend of Liu Sanjie, have taken many artistic forms. The live stage
show does not tell the tale in a linear way but splits it into five segments:
“Encounter”, “Love”, “Parting”, “Memory”, and “Impression”.
Sikong Tu in his “Twenty-Four Styles of Poetry” defined “the implicit
style” in this way:
Without a single word
The essence is conveyed.
Without speaking of misery
A passionate sadness comes through.13
Of all the series of live mountain-and-water performances, West Lake

sets up a poetic state most closely resembling ancient lyric verse. The
performers in this 60 min show stand 3 cm below the surface of the
water, which heightens the sense of elegance and romance. The
entire show conjures up a rarefied poetic world in the region-specific
“Jiangnan style” with its misty rain, sentimental mood, melancholy
obsession and sense of quiet desolation.14
The “Memory” part of the show is exemplary in capturing “the

meaning beyond words” and “meaning penetrated in an imaginative
way” (Lin 1985: 190). After departing his beloved, the young scholar
returns (or imagines himself returning) to the Broken Bridge over the
lake where he first met the White Snake Lady in a long white robe
and with a green silk umbrella. “He recalls the rain that brought them
together; he looks for the boat that witnessed their exchange of love
vows. But his lover cannot be touched but only felt in his heart…. His
memory emblemizes a mix of beauty, regret, grief and helplessness.”15
As he is absorbed in his memories, a pyramid-like structure emerges from
beneath the water, ascending slowly to form what looks like a Broken
Bridge. Smoky water drizzles down in fine threads, like misty rain lit up
by rainbow-coloured lighting, as if in response to Bai Juyi’s famous line
“the fading rainbow reflects a broken bridge in the water”.16 The misty,
multi-coloured rain is also reminiscent of some famous lines by Qin
Guan: “carefree catkins flying as light as dreams/silken threads of rain
drizzling as endless as melancholy”.17 Or as Hans Frankel has described
a poem by the English writer William Browne in his seminal essay on the
“convertibility” of poetry and painting, “One notes here not only the
rich variety of colors but also their constant shifting from one shade to
another, and their intermingling and blending into an artfully arranged,
harmonious whole” (1957: 301) (Fig. 5.3).
This extended scene offers a key moment in the show, where poetic
lyricism is taken to an extreme in order to express the feelings of the
young couple destined to be separated, sharing a profound misery
that surrounds and penetrates them, hardly “leaving their eyes when
Fig. 5.3 Impression
West Lake (2007)
entering their hearts”.18 Natural scenery and human emotion enhance

each other to convey their sorrowful parting, creating an overwhelming
sense of subtle melancholy. This is more than rain because “a closer look
sees not rain but drops and drops of parted lovers’ tears”.19 A famous
French poet once wrote: “It weeps in my heart/as it rains on the town”.
The Chinese director may not have had Paul Verlaine’s (1844–1896)
lines in mind, but the convertibility between poetry, painting and music
links these refined artistic works created in different cultures and periods
of time.
The sequence is characterized by exquisite imagery and elusive mean-
ing. There is a lingering charm to this world with its moist atmosphere
mixed with the mist and rain over the lake. The mood is enhanced by the
show’s theme song: “The rain continues dropping down, producing a
lakeful of mist/A silky umbrella over the broken bridge, and my longing
faded into black and white.” Composed by the renowned Japanese “New
Age” musician Kitarȏ (Masanori Takahashi), the music gives a spiritual
and philosophical dimension to this elusive “poetic state” and adds a
contemporary touch to an ancient aesthetic tradition.
As the fifth (and last) instalment of Zhang’s Impression series,
Dahongpao boasts the most technologically innovative performance.
Situated by a tea garden at the base of the two most famous peaks of
Mount Wuyi, the King (大王峰) and the Fair Lady (玉女峰), the stage
is attached to a 360 degree, pivoting stand which provides audiences
with a stretched field of vision 12,000 metres long. The rotating stage
design makes Dahongpao the most “painterly” of the series. Traditional
Chinese painting is “an art of time as well as of space” (Rowley 1947:
61), expressed particularly in the creation of landscape handscrolls. The
“mountains and waters” style of scroll (山水长卷) is an important cre-
ative form that combines poetry and painting. A handscroll painting is
not drawn from a fixed one-point perspective but embodies “the princi-
ple of moving focus, by which the eye could wander while the spectator
also wandered in imagination through the landscape. By this device, one
might travel through miles of landscape, might scale the mountain peaks
or descend into the depths of the valley, might follow streams to their
course or move with the waterfall in its plunge” (Rowley 1947: 62). In
appreciating a handscroll painting, the picture is not viewed in full at
any one time, since the connoisseur takes in one vista at a time (approxi-
mately one metre in length) as the painting is unrolled from right to left
(Fig. 5.4).
Fig. 5.4 Impression Dahongpao (2010)
Dahongpao presents the audience with a fresco-style landscape of Wuyi

mountain-and-water. In addition to green hills and blue waters, the area
is known for growing tea. The cultivation of tea in the Wuyi area was a
major development in the evolution of tea culture in China (Benn 2015:
8); and the “dahongpao” tea (literally meaning “grand red robe”) is con-
sidered the king of Chinese tea. Not surprisingly, the Dahongpao perfor-
mance focuses on this kind of tea.
Tea is known as China’s national drink, and tea culture has had a long
and eventful history. In the world’s first book on the subject, The Classic
of Tea (茶经), Lu Yu (733–804; 陆羽) not only described the cultivation,
processing and consumption of tea but also commented on its distinc-
tive aesthetic and philosophical value. Tea was seen as an expression of
“spirit” and a mode of “self-cultivation”. In this way, Chinese tea culture
was infused with the principles of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism
(Wang 1997: 48). Not surprisingly, then, tea has been a favoured sub-
ject in Chinese art and literature. Thousands of poems and ci verses on
the subject were composed in the Tang and Song dynasties alone. The
poetic literature on tea described its colour and shape, its growth and
processing, its rituals and ceremonies, and its spiritual and/or aesthetic
values. A representative tea poem is “Joy at seeing tea growing in the
garden” by Wei Yingwu (737–791):
Its pure nature cannot be sullied
When drunk it cleanses dust and worries
This plant has a truly divine taste
And originates in the mountains20
In such poems, drinking tea not only slakes thirst and nurtures the body
but also purifies the spirit and washes away the pressure of worldly cares.
The narrative construction of the Dahongpao performance is based on
another often-quoted tea poem, “Seven cups of tea” by Lu Tong (759–835):
The first bowl moistens my lips and throat.
The second bowl banishes my loneliness and melancholy.
The third bowl penetrates my withered entrails,
Finding nothing there except five thousand scrolls of writing.
The fourth bowl raises a light perspiration,
As all the inequities I have suffered in my life,
Are flushed out through my pores.
The fifth bowl purifies my flesh and bones.
The sixth bowl allows me to communicate with immortals.
The seventh bowl I need not drink,
I am only aware of a pure wind rising beneath my two arms.21
Dahongpao starts with a dance scene of the Tang dynasty, echoing the
famous Peony Pavilion sequence in the Zhang’s film House of Flying
Daggers. The scene concludes with a man standing alone on the rooftop
as if inviting the moon to drink with him.22 The stage rotates—like a
film transition or a folding-and-unfolding Chinese handscroll—to what
looks like the bamboo forest combat scene from the same House of Flying
Daggers. A group of men in ancient costumes, each with a long bam-

boo pole in their hands, dances to the forceful rhythm of the soundtrack.
Among them are two white-attired immortals who are performing mar-
tial arts. In one of the most spectacular moments of the show, an immor-
tal spins by holding the tip of a bamboo pole. As the lights go off, these
figures leave a cup of tea for the descendant, which starts the tale of tea.
This first cup of tea is picked up by a villager in the present time and
dedicated to the audience. He then makes another cup of tea to dedi-
cate to the ancestor, which leads the narrative back to the past. The sub-
sequent telling of a story between a King and a Fair Lady is the most
sophisticated technical aspect of the show. Their romance is told on 15
giant LED screens planted in the landscape, laying out an extensive vista
within which the play of light and shadow, the holographic images and
the non-linear presentation create a utopian dreamland.
The show concentrates on a succession of cups, crisscrossing time and
space, the worldly and the otherworldly. Along the way, it explores vari-
ous aspects of tea and tea drinking, including its medicinal aspects and its
power to heal emotional distress and purify the mind. The show also pre-
sents tea drinking as an important ceremonial event, demonstrating the
civilized process of utilizing tea pots of different colours, sizes, shapes
and qualities. These ceremonies are presented as very solemn, involving
the washing of hands, taking of baths and changing of clothes. On one
occasion, the show seeks the origin of dahongpao tea in folklore. A young
scholar travels day and night to the capital city for the imperial exam-
inations. He is very sick when passing through the Mount Wuyi area.
A local villager climbs to the cliff edge to pluck magical tea leaves which
cure the patient. The young man is successful in the exams the following
year and is bestowed a red robe (dahongpao) by the emperor. He pleads
to transfer the imperial honour to the magical tea that has saved his
life. The story emphasizes the medicinal qualities and effects of tea and
the associated values of Confucianism (the social hierarchy), Buddhism
(benevolence) and Taoism (the simplicity of the rustic lifestyle).
Dahongpao thus presents tea drinking as an idea, an attitude and a life-
style, able to evoke the idealized vision of a peaceful, leisured existence.
Co-director Wang Chaoge has spoken of tea as an elixir in many inter-
views. She has said, for example, “Tea is the essential aspect of the spec-
tacle. What we wish to tell people is that the quality of tea and the way
we drink it is not important at all. What matters is the mood we have
when we drink. If you have the appropriate feeling, you are able to enter
the space of zen and dispel the hustle and bustle [of] urban life. Through
the performance, we ask people to pursue peace and enjoy life.”23
In comparison with Zhang’s other live shows, Dahongpao is more
striking for its content than its style. It is less concerned with articu-
lating a poetic state than with monologue-driven story-telling. This
could reflect the director’s liking for “being different from the past”,
but it could also be the challenge of dealing with new subject-matter.
Regardless, the show fails to achieve much of the elegance and sub-
tlety that have contributed to the critical acclaim earned by the previous
events. By this time, his Impression series had started to ignite debates
and criticism in China’s popular media. When his co-directors Wang
Chaoge and Fan Yue started to work on their next project, Impression
Putuo, in a renowned Buddhist site 255 km away from Hangzhou,
Zhang decided to step back from the partnership, although his name
continued to be used for publicity purposes.24
Broadly speaking, despite their disparities, the Impression shows
have developed similar thematic concerns. A central message, deliv-
ered emphatically, is fangxia (the need to let go), in sharp contrast to
the appreciation of tianxia (all things under heaven), a moral imperative
expressed in Zhang’s feature films such as Hero. This theme of fangxia
is made particularly explicit at the start of Dahongpao as a male narrator
makes a lengthy speech of welcome:
“Stranger, where are you from? Beijing, Shanghai, or Fujian? You must be
busy! You must have lots of goals to achieve! You must live a fast life! Are
you tired? Are you worried? Are you nervous? Are you under pressure? For
how long you haven’t appreciated the natural landscape? For how long you
haven’t listened to the sound of wind and birds? For how long you haven’t
walked in the mountains and waters? For how long you haven’t sat down,
quietly and carelessly, like what you are doing at this moment? … Dear
stranger, please stop for a while, for one night – below the Wuyi Mountain
and beside the nine-song stream. Take a deep breath, look up at the stars in
the sky and gently tell yourself to ‘let go’ – to let go of mundane chores; to
travel into the mountains and waters, into the legend, into the fantasies.”
Just before the performance concludes, the narrator returns with the fol-
lowing words:
“When you leave this stage in a while, you’ll return to the mundane real-
ity. But I think you will remember this extraordinary night, a night when
you imagine you can let go…. My dear friend, let us stand up and call out:
‘mountains – waters’, ‘grasses – trees’, ‘home – land’, ‘I will let go’, ‘I will
be happy’.”
Three points are important. First, the performance promises to let view-
ers embark on a journey to an imagined utopia, seeking mental heal-
ing and spiritual transcendence. The artistic doctrines and principles of
ancient China are invoked through lighting, sound and other staging
effects facilitated by modern technology. Like the big-budget, action-ori-
ented motion pictures of the present time, these live shows value “spec-
tacle” more than “plot”, and celebrate high-tech visual effects more than
spoken dialogue (except for a few key speeches).25 The song-and-dance
nature of the performances makes them a hybrid of the action film and
the musical (though the visual experience of the real scenery creates a
special immediacy). To borrow Richard Dyer’s comments on Hollywood
musicals, the Impression series offers spectators a “utopian sensibility”,
that is, “the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we
want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide” (2002: 20).
The second point is that by urging viewers to “let go”, these per-
formances identify them as victims lost in the millennial desert of com-
modity and high pressure. To a large extent, the popularity of Zhang’s
live sound-and-light spectacles (and their spin-offs across the country) is
closely tied to the rise of a commodity culture and increasing popular-
ity of tourism linked with China’s market liberalization and accelerated
industrialization.26 By the 1990s, following two decades of rapid eco-
nomic growth, the Chinese tourism industry had shifted from a political
to an economic emphasis, becoming market-driven rather than govern-
ment-led. The three “golden week” (黄金周) national holidays, intro-
duced in 1999 and implemented in the following year, further stimulated
domestic tourism.27 Today the society that is called “socialist” with
Chinese characteristics indulges in the desire to travel with an enthusiasm
for consumer-style activities far greater than ever before.28
In the next few years, the tourism industry grew and diversified,
which, in due course, led to the introduction of artistic and cultural
elements. The potential boost to profit was developed as an expanded
policy, expressed in the popular slogan “vitalizing economy through
art” (艺术搭台, 经济唱戏). In Frederic Jameson’s words, the pro-
cess implies the transformation of commodities into images and images
into commodities (1998: 69). In the case of the Impression series, the
performance helps to turn the surrounding real estate into a tourism

district, with the opportunity for profitable adjuncts such as hotels, res-
taurants and region-specific products. The live shows have become a
linchpin not only of the tourist industry but also the general local econ-
omy.
The third point is that the performance of the Impression series is
encouraged by the local authorities and the national government not
only because this novel form of cultural tourism is a cash cow but also
because the social and political implications are approved. The artistic
experience of blending the natural landscape with the nation’s glorious
past echoes the state’s cultural policy in the new millennium. In 2006
the Chinese government announced plans to build a nation that was
innovation-oriented, and “cultural creative industries” (wenhua chuangyi
change 文化创意产业) were subsequently drafted into the Eleventh Five-
Year Plans. In 2007, General Secretary Hu Jintao, in his speech at the
17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, described
the particular kind of “culture” being sought – “a culture of harmony”
which would help to build a “common spiritual home for the Chinese
nation”. He added:
Chinese culture has been an unfailing driving force for the Chinese nation
to keep its unity and make progress from generation to generation. We
must have a comprehensive understanding of traditional Chinese culture,
keep its essence and discard its dross to enable it to fit in with present-day
society, stay in harmony with modern civilization, keep its national charac-
ter and reflect changes of the times. We will further publicize the fine tradi-
tions of Chinese culture and use modern means of science and technology
to exploit the rich resources of our national culture.29
The concept of “harmony”, which is believed to be what China can

contribute to the world in the present age of cultural diversification and
globalization, is fundamental to traditional Chinese culture. As we have
seen, the Impression series works hard to integrate the aesthetic values
of the past with the technologies of the present, promoting harmony
between men, and between humanity and nature.
Nevertheless, the shows have sometimes failed to produce harmony
between audiences and critics. Like Zhang’s feature films, his live events
have ignited debate and controversy. As early as 2005, a Guilin-based writer
posted his critique “Why [we] should say ‘No’ to Impression Liu Sanjie”
at Sina Blog.30 The author raised two major concerns: environmental pol-
lution and a failure to honour the “spirit” of Lijiang (漓江). Lijiang River
is known for its crystal water and the elegantly-shaped mountains on either
side, whereas Zhang’s signature style aims for grandiose extravagance. The
author believes what the performance brought to the local environment is
like introducing Yellow River water into a clear stream. Again, in 2010, a
Vice- Mayor of a provincial city in Hunan Province of central China posted
a long blog critique of Zhang’s Impression series.31 This influential text,
which has generated many responses online as well as in the print media,
gave four reasons why the director should be denounced: (1) All his events
involve big-budget investment in the search for quick financial return. (2)
The director “fans the fire” since he encourages many others to follow suit,
leading to a huge waste of resources. (3) The staging techniques are cli-
chéd, and the contents and style of the various Impressions are mostly iden-
tical, with only minor differences. (4) The events are “loud” and “noisy”,
with their casts of hundreds of extras.
Another issue worth consideration is the extent to which the spirit
of yijing, has been convincingly achieved. Yijing involves an imagina-
tive presentation of something true or genuine. As Zhang Bennan says:
“Only when ‘sincere feelings and emotions’, as the soul, are blown
into the fine imagery of ‘true scenes and objects’, as the body, can the
unique charm of the poetic state be fully displayed. Hence ‘sincere feel-
ings and emotions’ can be conceived of as the life of the poetic state
[and] ‘true scenes and objects’ as the manifestation and symbolisation of
this life” (1992: 231–232 as translated in Wang 2002: 49). This chap-
ter has shown how “the past” is used to serve “the present” in Zhang’s
Impression series, but arguably their parallels with ancient lyrical poetry
operate more on the level of “likeliness” (xing 形) than on the deeper
level of “spirit” (shen 神). The series works hard to present picturesque
“scenes” (jing 景), but the spectacle does not always produce “emo-
tions” (qing 情) that seem genuine. As explained above, the primary
aim of ancient lyrical poetry was to succeed in integrating “scenes” with
“emotions”.
Also, the live shows encourage tourists or other viewers to “let go”
by providing them with a utopian spectacle. While this may reflect the
creators’ view of the world, the GDP of the local region was clearly also
in mind even before the project started. Remarks by co-director Wang
Chaoge reveal the contradictions between the “letting-go” message

of the shows and the commercial impulse behind them. Talking about
Impression Dahongpao, Wang said: “As our society gets more developed,
people start to use shares, houses and salaries to measure one’s suc-
cess. But we feel confused at the same time – what joy does the suc-
cess bring us? We believe there should be alternative criteria to be made.
How many worries and concerns do you let go? Only when you can let
go these your life will come back to you. Maybe this is what you really
need. As artists of social consciousness, we hope to reflect social reality in
our works.”32 But she then adds: “I want to make Impression Dahongpao
the biggest advertisement for dahongpao tea. We have also developed a
special tea as the spinoff … and promote it nationwide”. In the same
interview, she expresses her pleasure at seeing that the neighbouring area
has become more commercialized and the real estate market has devel-
oped.33 Thus, the naturalness and simplicity celebrated in the Impression
series are something of an illusion. This was unintentionally revealed
in Dahongpao by traffic lights visible in the distance as the fifteen LED
screens presented the soul-stirring love story between the King and Fair
Lady at the foot of the two peaks named after them.
To conclude, Zhang’s Impression series has served to illustrate tradi-
tional Chinese aesthetics and its continuing appeal, but at the same time
to highlight the difficulty involved in attempts to harmonize the past
with the present. The open-door policy and the reform programme of
the late 1970s have brought unprecedented urbanization and industri-
alization to China. Its people, like those of other countries, have been
immersed, wittingly or not, in a new commodity culture. Zhang’s series
communicates a sense of exoticism and escapism, providing both “a
cup of tea” and “a touch of Zen”. The celebration of ancient aesthetic
and philosophical principles marks a departure from the critical attitude
towards Chinese traditional values in the director’s earlier works such as
Judou and Raise the Red Lantern. But like those feature films, his big-
budget live events mediate between national traditions and the global
momentum toward consumer society, necessarily occupying an ambigu-
ous position between the creation of art and the production of modern-
style commodities. His live performances appropriate ancient aesthetics
and legends in an attempt to assert authentic forms of Chinese-ness in an
age of national and international tourism.
Notes
1. Wang Wei’s painting is titled Picture of the Misty and Rainy Blue Brook (藍
田煙雨图) and the painting inscription reads: “White rocks protrude in
Blue Brook/Red leaves are sparse on the Jade River/No rain falls on the
mountain path/Yet the greenness moistens one’s attire.” (藍田白石出,玉川
紅葉稀,山路元無雨,空翠濕人衣。).
2. My study of these live performances excludes Impression Hainan Island,
the performance of which was terminated in the wake of a thunderstorm
in 2014. The performance has not resumed since.
3. http://whc.unesco.org/en/news/767 (accessed 6 July 2016).
4. http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/911 (accessed 16 August 2016) “Relict”
is a biological term for “a surviving remnant”.
5. For some critical discussion on the orthodox objectifying representations
of ethnic minorities in Chinese media, see Brown (1996 and Baranovitch
(2001).
6. Wang Bo writes “Sunset auroral cirruses scud in unison with a forlorn
duck; autumn waters mingle in one color with the immense sky. The fish-
ing boats sing in the evening; the sound reverberating from the banks
of Lake Pengli. The wild geese in formation are startled by the chill,
their cries are cut off at the banks of Hengyang.” (落霞与孤鹜齐飞,秋
水共长天一色。渔舟唱晚,响穷彭蠡之滨;雁阵惊寒,声断衡阳之浦。) The
English translation is from Chan (2002: 247).
7. Both the “Land of Peach Blossoms” and the poetic quotation are from
Tao Yuanming (365–427), an ancient Chinese counterpart of William
Wordsworth. Tao is a poet and essayist of “fields and gardens” (田园),
who celebrates inward seclusion and an ideal existence in harmony with
nature. His teachings represent a significant way of life and a state of
mind in the evolution of ancient Chinese art. “Peach blossom”, “chry-
santhemum”, “east fence” and “southern mountains” have all been
given rich and dynamic connotations in Chinese culture. For example,
see Nelson (2001) for an insightful discussion on the uses of chrysanthe-
mums as a theme and motif in Chinese art.
8. Shangri-La is a fictional paradise in Tibet first described in British author
James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon (1933). The novel later served as the
basis for a Hollywood film of the same name in 1937, adapted for the
screen by Columbia Pictures and directed by Frank Capra. Starting from
the mid-1990s, and out of a desire to develop local tourist industries,
a number of places in different parts of China claimed that they were
the “authentic” Shangri-La and applied to have their name changed to
Shangri-La. In late 2001, following years of lobbying, a Tibetan county,
150 km away from the Old Town of Lijang (丽江), where Zhang’s live
NOTES 109
performance Impression Lijiang is staged, succeeded in getting their

application approved by the State Council. This ethnic town, 3200 m
above sea level, has since become a popular destination for domestic and
international tourists. For a comprehensive account of the name-chang-
ing process and its effects on the local tourism industry, see Hillman
(2010).
9. The other route is the Silky Road (丝绸之路) to the north, cover-
ing Ninxia Hui Autonomous Region, Gansu Province and Xinjiang
Autonomous Region within the national border.
10. i.e. 天风浪浪海山苍苍真力弥漫万象在旁.
11. Zhang’s Film Academy classmate and Fifth-Generation colleague Tian
Zhuangzhuang made Delamu (德拉姆, 2003), an award-winning docu-
mentary on the past and present of the Ancient Tea Horse Road, docu-
ments the place and the people living along the road in a different way.
While the beauty of Tian’s work lies in its poetic depiction of the grandi-
ose (and perilous) landscape and its inhabitants’ unremitting tenacity, the
camera does not soften the bleak reality. Among those interviewed, for
example, are a 19-year-old young man who shares a wife with his elder
brother, a caravan driver who cries over the death of a horse and a vil-
lage head whose wife fled from the family—all because of poverty. Tony
Rayns’s comment on Tian’s earlier feature film On the Hunting Ground
(猎场扎撒, 1985) applies here: “a devastating critique of China’s tradi-
tional ‘national minority’ films” (1991: 108).
12. Su’s poem contains the following four lines: “The shimmer of light on
the water is the play of sunny skies/The blur of colour across the hills
is richer still in rain/If you wish to compare the lake in the West to the
Lady of the West/Lightly powdered or thickly smeared the fancy is just as
apt.” (Translation in A. C. Graham’s Poems of the West Lake: Translations
from the Chinese, London: Wellsweep, 1990, p. 23.)
13. i.e. 不着一字尽得风流语不涉己若不堪忧 (Translation in Tony
Barnstone & Chow Ping (2005) (eds.), The Anchor Book of Chinese
Poetry: From Ancient to Contemporary, The Full 3000-Year Tradition,
New York: Anchor Books, p. 218.)
14. Jiangnan, literally meaning “the south of Yangtze River”, which includes
such cities as Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, represents some highly
cultivated aspects of Chinese culture. As a renowned tourist retreat, the
area features temperate weather, a rain-soaked lake, riverbanks with weep-
ing willows, a pagoda-dotted landscape, ancient arched bridges and culti-
vated gardens, etc.
15. From the official printed brochure of Impression West Lake by Hangzhou
Impression West Lake Culture Development Co. Ltd.
16. i.e. 虹残水照断桥梁.
17. i.e. 自在飞花轻似梦无边丝雨细如愁.

18. The poetic state of “leaving one’s eyes but entering one’s heart” was set
up in a lyric verse composed to the tune of Yi Jian Mei (A Spring of Plum
Blossom) by Li Qingzhao (1084–1151), a woman ci poet of the Song
Dynasty. The second stanza of the verse is “Flowers naturally wither and
scatter/Water naturally flows/Separation brings the sadness/Of mutual
longing/Such feelings cannot be dispelled/Leaving my eyes they enter
my heart.” (Translation in Pannam 2009: 78.)
19. This derives from Shu Shi’s lyric verse composed to the tune of Shui Long
Yin (The Song of Water Dragon). The poem continues: “I do not regret
that the catkins have all fallen/I only regret that/All the fallen red petals
in the Western Garden cannot be gathered anymore/The rain ceases with
the approach of dawn/Where have they left their traces?/A pond full of
broken duckweeds/Ah, of all the colours of spring/Two parts have gone
to the dust/One to the flowing water –/As I look closer/I see not cat-
kins/But drops and drops of parted lovers’ tears”. (Translation in Soong
1980: 169).
20. i.e. 洁性不可污为饮涤尘烦此物信灵味本自出山原 (Translation in Benn
2015: 76).
21. i.e. 一碗喉吻润。二碗破孤闷。三碗搜枯肠,惟有文字五千卷。四碗发轻
汗,平生不平事,尽向毛孔散。五碗肌骨清。六碗通仙灵。七碗吃不得也,
惟觉两腋习习清风生。(Translation in Benn 2015: 91–2).
22. This seems to re-present the mood of a poem by Li Bai (李白, 701–762),
“Drinking alone by moonlight”: “Among the flowers a pot of wine/I
drink alone; no friend is by/I raise my cup, invite the moon/And my
shadow; now we are three.” (Translation in Yang and Yang 1984: 34).
23. Cultural China, “Impression Dahongpao” (印象大红袍) http://arts.cul-
tural-china.com/en/93Arts13806.html (accessed 23 August 2016).
24. For example, Zhang’s picture is on the poster and on the billboard inside
and outside the stage site.
25. These shows do not, however, focus as blockbuster action films do on
a single heroic figure whose charisma and physical prowess are dem-
onstrated through a series of extreme situations. Rather, they present
anonymous characters collectively as “the mass ornaments” (in Siegfried
Kracauer’s term).
26. See, for example, Linda K. Richter, “Political implications of Chinese
tourism policy”, Annals of Tourism Research, vol. 10 (1983), pp. 395–
413.
27. The three “Golden Week” national holidays are the Spring Festival of
January/February, the International Labour Day of early May and the
National Holiday of early October. The Labour Day “Golden Week” was
abolished in 2007 “to make way for a number of traditional festivals to
become official holidays” (Sigley 2010: 543).
REFERENCES 111
28. Compare Siegfried Kracauer’s observation: “Today the society that

is called ‘bourgeois’ indulges in the desire to travel and dance with an
enthusiasm far greater than that shown in any previous epoch for these
sorts of profane activities” (1995: 65).
29. “Full text of Hu Jintao’s report at 17th Party Congress”, http://news.
xinhuanet.com/english/2007-10/24/content_6938749_6.htm
(accessed 7 July 2016).
30. See Shen Dongzi 沈东子 “Why [we] should say ‘No’ to Impression Liu
Sanje” (为什么要抵制《印象刘三姐》), http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/
blog_471dfc46010000bc.html (accessed 30 August 2016).
31. See Jiang Zongfu 姜宗福, “Zhang Yimou is not a savour; do not clone
Impressions blindly” (张艺谋不是救世主, 不要盲目造印象); http://
www.360doc.com/content/10/0422/09/919228_24301107.shtml
(accessed 30 August 2016).
32. See “Impression series is a success” (“印象”这条路,走得很成功) http://
www.wuyishantea.com/007/Html/wuyichaweng/1026026135092.htm
(accessed 31 August 2016).
33.
““Letting go” is a kind of happiness: Wang Chaoge on Impression
Dahongpao” (“放下”是幸福 – 王潮歌谈《印象大红袍》) http://www.fjte-
anews.com/newsshow.asp?id=8027&page=2 (accessed 1 September 2016).
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CHAPTER 6
Conclusion
Abstract  This Chapter offers a brief discussion of Zhang Yimou’s

English-language blockbuster film The Great Wall (2016) which is
Chinese cinema’s most thorough-going example of dialogue with
Hollywood. This monster film represents his latest endeavor to cross
the borders between art and market, style and content, tradition and
modernity, local and global, East and West. The success of this attempt
at crossing borders is likely to have a strong influence on the future of
the Chinese film industry.
Keywords  Influence of hollywood · Blockbuster · Genre film 

Local and global
In an interview Zhang Yimou gave in the press conference to promote

his latest film on 15 November, 2016, he summed up the goal of his
film in this way: “We use this global blockbuster movie (全球大片) as
a means to disseminate Chinese culture and to transmit the image and
values of Chinese people.”1 The “global blockbuster movie” that the
director referred to is The Great Wall (长城), an English-language action
adventure movie co-produced by Legendary Pictures (now owned by
Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda), Atlas Entertainment, Le Vision
Pictures and the China Film Group.
In general terms, the relationship between Hollywood and Chinese
cinema has tended to be motivated more by economics than by ideology.

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4328-4_6
116 6 CONCLUSION
Ever since the mid-1990s when Hollywood was officially reintroduced

into the Chinese market, the American industry has made continu-
ous efforts to adjust to the Chinese situation, seeking to maximize the
opportunities provided by this huge and growing market. The making of
overseas co-productions (合拍片), or “runaway films” as they are known
in the industry, promised to become a way to benefit from cheap labour
and location costs, local tax breaks and less stringent censorship control
than had previously been the case (Cooke 2007: 6). In “dialogues” of
this kind between Hollywood and Chinese cinema, it is the former that
has done most of the talking and has led the way in virtually all aspects,
including casting, financing and directing. “Chinese elements” have
merely served a decorative function in order to meet the co-production
criteria set by the authorities. On the other hand, from the perspective of
the local film industry, there are still advantages in having a few Chinese
faces appear in minor roles and a few samples of the language inserted in
the dialogue; and more importantly, members of the Chinese industry
hope to learn some new filmmaking skills and marketing strategies from
Hollywood.
The Great Wall represents a new type of co-production between
Hollywood and China. The film has a Chinese director and crew,
though the lead role, like that in The Flowers of War, is played by a white
American. In production, narrative, editing, scriptwriting and market-
ing, it corresponds completely to the Hollywood model. With a budget
of $135 million, The Great Wall is the most expensive film ever made
entirely in China. Unlike other US–Sino co-productions, the target audi-
ence is not confined to the home market or diasporic Chinese communi-
ties but aims for global consumption. The film has been hailed as the first
substantial co-production of its kind, and many people see it as a block-
buster that tests the waters to see if such a partnership can be mutually
beneficial, a win-win for the two industries. Zhang characterized the pro-
ject as “navigating on a borrowed ship” (借船出海), steering Hollywood
skills and resources to serve a dual purpose: to provide new experiences
for local filmmakers, particularly young ones, and to promote Chinese
culture overseas.
As its title indicates, the film’s narrative revolves around China’s
most iconic architecture, the Great Wall. The story takes place during
the Song Dynasty of ancient China. An elite imperial army is stationed
atop the wall to ward off the attack of Taotie, a demoniac creature of
Chinese mythological origin. They eventually manage to defeat the
6 CONCLUSION 117
monster but only with the help of a European mercenary soldier (played
by Hollywood actor Matt Damon). In a sense, Damon’s character is sim-
ilar to Christian Bale’s in The Flowers of War in that both go through a
transformation from being a foreign opportunist to becoming a heroic
warrior. To alleviate the film’s “whitewashing” effect, Damon and his
two white peers are portrayed as characters who cheat, steal and trick
each other.2 In many interviews with Zhang, both before and after the
film’s release, he gave a frank description of The Great Wall as a generic
Hollywood movie which followed the old formula of “monster appears
and threatens human beings; hero appears and wins the battle against the
monster”. He made it clear that the measure of the film’s success would
be purely its performance in the market-place.3 Thematically, the film
was not weighed down with abstract concepts but was based upon com-
monly shared values of trust, commitment and sacrifice.
At the same time, this “purely” market-centred, Hollywood-style,
global blockbuster had an extra mission—“to disseminate Chinese cul-
ture” to an international audience. The film represented Zhang’s con-
certed effort to position China as a nation with a long historical, cultural
and technological legacy. To a certain extent, The Great Wall shared
a narrative and stylistic continuity with the 2008 Beijing Olympics
Opening Ceremony. Justice’s observation on the 2008 opening event in
Bird’s Nest Stadium could well be applied to this 2016 film: “The intri-
cate costumes, drumming patterns, displays of technology, and sheer
mass of performers showed China at its finest hour” (2012: 1).
The Great Wall is a film that combines past and future. The historical
context has been given a futuristic look, achieved through state-of-the-art
digital images by the world’s leading visual effects companies, Industrial
Light & Magic and Weta Workshop. Zhang wove traces of the glorious
past into the fabric of a fantasy story, both to stimulate nostalgia and to
illuminate the future. What the film has avoided, however, is any obvious
reference to the present.
An interesting comparison is provided by another Asian monster film
made ten years earlier. Directed by Bong Joon-ho in 2006, The Host out-
performed all domestic and imported products to become the biggest
box office success up to that time in South Korean film history. Set in the
capital city of Seoul, the film offered a critical and comprehensive picture
of contemporary Korean society, tackling such issues as economic cri-
sis, social bureaucracy, political corruption and loss of traditional family
values. A third of the country’s population went to the cinema to watch
118 6 CONCLUSION
The Host in order to share an experience that was highly imaginative but
also had resonance for them in social and historical ways.
In contrast, despite the director’s concerted effort, The Great Wall
has so far aroused only limited nationalistic sentiment or cultural identi-
fication from local audiences. With the film’s release in the United States
scheduled for February 2017 by Universal Pictures, it is not yet possible
to measure its box-office success in the international market-place. But the
film’s domestic box-office revenues failed to reach the optimistic targets
that had been set, garnering $143.9 million by the end of 2016. A big dif-
ference between The Host and The Great Wall is that the Korean film did
not thoroughly embrace a Hollywood model. It created a hybrid mixture
of Hollywood genre codes, real events and local politics. Bong Joon-ho
used Hollywood generic language to tell a culture-specific Korean story,
for the purpose of localization rather than globalization. It could be
argued, therefore, that this was an “ideal work” (or “quality film” in the
eyes of Chinese authorities) that managed to “find the perfect balance
between…local specificity and transnational appeal” (Wang 2009: 172).
In an age when transnational production is in vogue, “the question is no
longer whether to emulate foreign blockbusters but rather how” (Braester
2015: 38); and Zhang’s approach is clearly not the only solution.
Ten days prior to its premiere, The Great Wall team held a press
conference entitled “It’s Finally Our Turn”.4 That slogan conveyed
a sense of self-confidence with little subtlety. It appeared to imply that
it was now the turn for Chinese monsters to pose a threat to humanity
and for Chinese heroes (alongside Matt Damon) to save the world on
the big screen. More soberly, the press conference implied that it was
finally the turn for Chinese film to lead an international crew and use
state-of-the-art technology to make its own “global blockbuster movie”.
It was repeatedly emphasized at the press conference that the film’s
crew consisted of over 1000 professional staff from 37 countries; and it
was finally the turn for a (mainland) Chinese film-maker to direct an all
English-language blockbuster movie in China (and for Hollywood).
On a personal level, this may indeed be a welcome sign of
Hollywood’s recognition of the director’s talent and appeal; but what
does recognition of this kind mean to Chinese cinema in general?
A quick look at some of the cinema traditions that have previously had
their “turn” can be revealing. On the road to becoming the global
leader, Hollywood has snapped up countless filmmakers from around
the world. Talented people have been head-hunted from many local
6 CONCLUSION 119
traditions, including the German, British, Italian, French, Japanese,

Hong Kong and Taiwanese industries. For Hollywood this strategy has
had many benefits: popular and talented filmmakers can serve its inter-
ests; some exotic or foreign elements are added to increase a film’s
marketability, both in local and global markets; and potential competi-
tion by overseas industries is avoided.
As the present enquiry began with a German blockbuster movie of
the 1920s, we may conclude the study by referring to it. As a film made
to outdo Hollywood in scale and production values, Metropolis was a
monumental product of the German cinema of the Weimar Republic,
the most powerful of the European national cinemas and arguably the
most industrially and artistically advanced after Hollywood. Backed by
the giant, state-supported Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA)
founded in 1917 and largely responsible for the nation’s cinematic suc-
cess, German cinema produced films that were highly ambitious in their
creativity, scale and production values. Hollywood’s response to the rise
of this European national cinema was to seek to lure its leading film-
making talents to Los Angeles. The state of German politics made this a
timely endeavour, and Lang was happy that the success of his films (such
as Metropolis) had attracted the attention of Hollywood. Lang was only
one of many German film-makers to benefit from the international popu-
larity of German Expressionist cinema. Hollywood offered both a more
promising political situation and the hope of greater financial rewards.
Other émigré directors included Ernst Lubitch (1892–1947), Friedrich
Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931) Robert Siodmak (1900–1973) and Curt
Siodmak (1902–2000), to name just a few. Their arrival contributed
significantly to American filmmaking. A bleak and unsettled American
society in the pre- and post-war eras was able to find expression in the
Hollywood films of Lang, Siodmark and others, as the Expressionist
motifs informed the horror and gangster movies of the 1930s and the
noir films of the 1940s and 1950s.
At the same time, while this “talent drain” had helped to consoli-
date Hollywood’s global dominance and brought it stylistic innovations,
German cinema was never fully able to recover its former power and
vitality. Also, the directors who came to work in Hollywood were often
frustrated by the fact that it tended to give priority to profit rather than
art, and to popular culture rather than high culture. Furthermore, there
were definite limits to American interest in other cultures so that foreign
stories needed basically to be Americanized.
120 6 CONCLUSION
The German exodus has been matched by other national traditions,

whose leading directors have been attracted to Hollywood by its money,
celebrity and technological resources. Today, we can see Zhang and
other popular Chinese directors faced with the same difficult decisions.
Are there ways to tap the benefits of the huge Hollywood machine with-
out weakening one’s own local industry, or seeing one’s own culture
transformed into an Americanized conception of what is ‘universal’ or
‘global’?
British India-born poet Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) once wrote
the following well-known lines: “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and
never the twain shall meet/Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s
great Judgment Seat/But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor
Breed, nor Birth/When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they
come from the ends of the earth!” As the two biggest cinema industries
stand face to face, are they “more familiar than conventionally thought”
(as the Chinese woman general told the heroic American solider in The
Great Wall)? Can they, as Kipling described in “The Ballad of East and
West”, put aside their differences of geography and nationality and appre-
ciate each other’s values and thoughts? Will new forms of co-production
develop which can serve both cultures? Or will only one side ultimately
prosper from these joint ventures?
In the evening gala prepared for the world leaders of the 2016 G20
Hangzhou Summit, Zhang Yimou combined ancient Chinese zither and
Western cello for the performance of the classic, traditional, Chinese
composition “High Mountain Flowing Water”, a music piece that
embodies the highest ideal of friendship and mutual understanding. As
this book has attempted to show, throughout his prolific creative career,
this Chinese director has endeavored to find ways of crossing borders—
borders between art and commerce, style and content, tradition and
modernity, the national and the international, and East and West.
Notes
1. “The Great Wall’s Five Corps Press Conference” (电影《长城》五军sim
布会全程); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d50i0B98EFg (accessed
December 11, 2016).
2. Zhang also seems to have picked up a lesson from The Flowers of War, since
The Great Wall does not allow a romantic relationship to develop between
the white hero and the Chinese heroine. The two are instead linked by
REFERENCES 121
mutual respect and appreciation between them as two heroic warriors

(战士的惺惺相惜, 英雄的心心相印).
3. E.g. “Zhang Yimou’s Hollywood: Did The Great Wall screw up or play big”
(张艺谋的好莱坞:《长城》玩砸了还是玩大了), http://ent.sina.com.cn/
zl/discuss/2016-12-16/doc-ifxytqav9460677.shtml (accessed December
18, 2016).
4. “The Great Wall’s ‘It’s finally our turn’ Beijing press conference”
(电影《长城》“终于轮到我们了”北京发布会); https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=fn5-NeQdQ3k (accessed December 27, 2016).
References
Braester, Y. (2015). The spectral return of cinema: Globalization and cinephilia
in contemporary Chinese film. Cinema Journal, 55(1), 29–51.
Cooke, P. (Ed.). (2007). World cinema’s “dialogues” with Hollywood. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Justice, L. (2012). China’s design revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wang, Y. (2009). Made in China, sold in the United States, and vice versa –
transnational ‘Chinese’ cinema between media capitals. Journal of Chinese
Cinemas, 3(2), 163–176.
Appendix
Zhang Yimou’s Filmography
As Cinematographer
1983 One and Eight
• China Best Cinematography Award
1984 Yellow Earth
• Best Cinematography Award in the 5th China Golden Rooster Film

Awards
• Best Cinematography Award in the 7th Film Festival des Trois
Continents
• Oriental Kodak Best Production Technique Award in the 5th
Hawaii International Film Festival
1986 The Big Parade
As Actor
1987 Old Well
• Best Actor Award in the 2nd Tokyo International Film Festival

• Best Actor in the 8th Golden Rooster Awards
• Best Actor in the 11th Hundred Flowers Awards
1989 Fight and Love with a Terracotta Warrior
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 123

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4328-4
124 Appendix Zhang Yimou’s Filmography
As Director
1987 Red Sorghum
• Best Feature Film Golden Bear Prize at the 38th West Berlin
International Film Festival
• Best Feature Film Award in the 8th China Golden Rooster Film
Awards
• Best Feature Film Award in the 11th Hundred Flowers Film Awards
• Government Prize from Radio, Film and Television Ministry
• Top Ten Chinese Language Film at the 8th Hong Kong
• Great Atlas Gold Prize for Directors at the 1st Morocco Marrakech
International Film and Television Festival
• Radio Broadcast Station Young Audience Committee Best Picture
Award at 16th Brussels International Film Festival
• Silver Panda Prize at the 5th Montpellier International Film Festival
in France
• Democratic Germany Film Association Annual Nomination Prize
1988 Codename Cougar (co-directed with Yang Fengliang)

1990 Ju Dou (co-directed with Yang Fengliang)
• 1st Luis Bunuel Special Award of the 43rd Cannes Film Festival
• Nominated by the 63rd Academy Awards as the Best Foreign
Language Film
• Golden Fringe Award and the Audience Choice Best Picture Award
of the 35th Valladolid International Film Festival in Spain
• Golden Hugo Award at the Chicago International Film Festival
• Top Ten Chinese Language Film in the 9th Hong Kong Film
Awards
1991 Raise the Red Lantern
Awards
• Nominated by the 64th Academy Awards as the Best Foreign
Language Film; Silver Lion Award; International Critics Association
Award; Catholic Critics Association Award; Kingery Styling Special
Appendix Zhang Yimou’s Filmography 125
Award; Avila Notalia Special Award at the 48th Venice International

Film Festival
• Best Foreign Picture Award in the Italy National Oscar Award
(David Award)
• First Prize in the Milan Film Association’s Audience Choice Best
Foreign Language Film of the Year
• Best Foreign Picture Award in the British National Film Oscar Award
1992 The Story of Qiu Ju
• Golden Lion Award at the 49th Venice International Film Festival

• Best Picture Award in the 15th Hundred Flowers Film Awards
• Golden Deer Winner at the 1st Changchun Film Festival
• Best Picture in the 13th Golden Rooster Awards
• Government Prize from Radio, Film and Television Ministry
Awards
1994 To Live
• Jury Prize and Humanitarian Award at the 47th Cannes Film

Festival
• Best Foreign Picture Award from the American Critics Association
• Best Foreign Picture Award from the Los Angeles Critics
Association
• Best Foreign Picture nomination from the American Golden Globe
Awards
• Best Foreign Picture from the British National Oscar Awards
Awards
1995 Shanghai Triad
• Best Technique Award at the 48th Cannes Film Festival

• Best Foreign Picture Award from the American Critics Association
• Best Foreign Picture nomination from the American Golden Globe
Awards
• Number 1 in the World’s Best Ten Films (of the year) voted by the
New York Film Magazine
1997 Keep Cool

1998 Not One Less
• Golden Lion at the 56th Venice Film Festival

• Best “Children and Film” Film Award from Catholic Critics
• Best Picture Award from UNESCO
• Best Picture Award from the Italian magazine Cinema
• Best Feature Film Award and Best Director Award from the 5th
China Government Awards
• Best Director Award from the 19th China Golden Rooster Film
Awards
• Best Feature Film Award from the 22nd Hundred Flowers Film
Awards
• Best Feature Film Award from the 6th Beijing University Students
Film Festival
• Best Picture from the 23rd Brazil St. Paul International Film
Festival (Audience Choice)
• Best Foreign Picture nomination from the 1999 European Film Awards
• Best International Film from the US Film Organization of Young
Artist Awards
1999 The Road Home
• Jury Prize—Silver Bear Prize and Humanitarian Award from the

Catholic and Christian at the 50th Berlin International Film Festival
• Buck Prize from the Italian Film Critics Association and Italian
Journalist Association
• Best Picture Award in the 6th Chinese Government Awards
• Best Feature Film Award and Best Director Award in the 20th
Golden Rooster Film Awards
• Best Feature Film Award in the 23rd Hundred Flowers Film
Awards
• World Audience Choice Award at the 2001 America Sundance Film
Festival
• Best Picture Award at the 19th Iran International Film Festival
2000 Happy Times
• Jury Prize and Silver Prize at the Valladolid International Film

Festival in Spain
Appendix Zhang Yimou’s Filmography 127
2002 Hero
• Alfred Bault Special Innovation Award at the 53rd Berlin

• Best Foreign Picture nomination in the 60th American Golden
Globe Awards
• Best Foreign Picture nomination in the 75th Academy Awards
• Special Value Film by the German FBW
• Best Feature Film Award in the 26th Hundred Flowers Film Awards
• Best Achievement and Best Visual Effect at the China College
Student Film Festival
• Best Co-Production Award and Special Achievement Award in the
9th Chinese Government Awards
• Best Co-Production Award and Best Director Award in the 23rd
Golden Rooster Film Awards
• Best Foreign-Language Film in the Seattle Film Critics Awards
• TIME’s best film of the year
• BBC’s ten best film of the year
2004 House of Flying Daggers
• Market Initiation Award and Excellent Film Technique Award from

the 11th China Government Awards
• Outstanding Contribution Award from American Art Directors
Association
• Best Director Award from the American Critics Association
• Best Foreign Picture nomination from the 62nd American Golden
Globe Awards
• Nine nominations from the British Academy Awards
• Best Foreign Language Film in the 30th Los Angeles Film Critics
Association Awards
• Best Foreign Language Film (nominated) in the Gold Derby Awards
• Best Director in the Boston Society of Film Critics Awards
• Top Ten Film of 2004 by film critics of Associated Press
• TIME’s Best Film of the year
• Best Foreign-Language Film in the American Broadcast Film Critics
Association Awards
• Nominations for Best Film of the Year, Best Director of the Year,
and Best Foreign language film of the Year by London Critics'
Circle Film Awards
• BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language

• Best Visual Effects in the Satellite Awards
2005 Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
• Excellent Feature Film Award in the 12th China Government

Awards
• Best Asian Film in the 26th Hong Kong Film Awards
2006 Curse of the Golden Flower
• Nominations of Best Film and Best Director from the 26th Hong
Kong Film Awards
2009 A Simple Noodle Story
• Ranked 3rd on the 1st Best Chinese-Language Film Golden List
2010 Under the Hawthorn Tree
• Best Feature Film Award in the 14th China Government Awards

• Nomination of Best Asian Film in the 30th Hong Kong Film
Awards
2011 The Flowers of War
• Best film of the year in the 1st Vision Awards

• Nomination of Best Foreign Language Film in the 69th Golden
Globe Awards
• Nominated by Denver Film Critics Society as the Best Foreign
Language Film
• Best Feature Film and Best Director in the Asian Film Awards
2014 Coming Home
• Best Director at the FIRST Youth Film Exhibition

• Best Picture at the 6th Macau International Movie Festival
2016 The Great Wall

Index
A Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

Aftershock (2009), 37 (1969), 48
Ancient Tea Horse Road, 94, 95, 109
Ashima (1964), 91
Asian aesthetics, 57, 74. See also C
Orientalist Chen Haosu, 13, 14
Assembly (2007), 37 Chen Kaige, 37, 41, 44, 50, 51, 76,
77
“Chinese elements”, 116
B Chiung Yao (Qiong Yao), 48
Bale, Cristian, 66, 117 City of Life and Death (2008), 64,
Banquet, The (2006), 37, 77 66
Battleship Potemkin (1925), 69 Classic Hollywood narrative, 25
Beijing Film Academy, 1, 4, 5, 42–44, Codename Cougar (1988)
59 (absence of) familial conflicts in, 25
2008 Beijing Olympic Opening action in, 26
Ceremony, 42 as a generic hybrid, 21
“Big pictures”, 37, 66, 76, 77 big context of, 9
Bird’s Nest Stadium, 117 masculinity in, 23, 25
Black Sun: nationalism in, 43
The Nanking Massacre (1995), 64 plotline of, 22
Bloody Testimony to Massacring soundtrack of, 22
Nanking (1987), 64, 65 Zhang Yimou on, 5, 9, 16, 18
Bong Joon-ho, 117, 118 Coming Home (2014), 9, 10, 22, 50
Bonnie and Clyde (1967), 48 Co-production, 6, 7, 57, 58, 116,
Breakin’ (1984), 15 120.See also Runaway film
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 129

DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4328-4
130 Index
Cowherd’s Flute (animation film, Fifth Generation, 9, 10, 12, 16, 18,
1963), 93 22, 29, 41, 51, 109
Cowherd’s Flute, The (piano music, First Blood (1982), 23
1934), 93 Five Golden Flowers (1959), 91
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon Flowers of the War (2011)
(2000), 37 aesthetic style of, 7, 65, 71, 74
Cultural Revolution, 43, 44, 50, 53, narrative construction of, 68
59, 63–65 plotline of
Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) theme of, 66, 70, 75
plotline of, 6
theme of, 35, 36, 51, 77
G
Garrison’s Guerrillas (1967–1968), 14
D “Global blockbuster movie”, 115, 118
Damon, Matt, 10, 117, 118 Gong Li, 22, 27
Delamu (2003), 109 Great Wall, The (2016), 38, 58, 96,
Deng Xiaoping, 4, 19, 59, 64 115–118, 120
Desperate Songstress (1988), 15 G 20 Summit Evening Gala (2016), 85
Die Hard (1988), action spectacle in
familial conflicts in, 24, 25
plotline of, 25 H
Dirty Harry (1971), 22 Happy Times (2000), 46
“Heirs of the Dragon” (song), 29
Hero (2002)
E box-office success of, 25, 118
Eighteen Years in the Enemy’s Camp plotline of, 59
(1981), 14 spirit of chivalry in, 40
Emperor and the Assassin, The (1998), “High concept” (movies), 66, 73
41, 51 Hollywood
Emperor’s Shadow, The (1996), 41, 51 influence on Chinese film, 15, 25,
Empire of the Son (1987), 66 27, 36, 53, 59, 63, 78, 79, 115
“entertainment films” Hollywood model, 66, 116
controversy over, 12 Host, The (2006), 1, 117, 118
dialogues on, 12 House of Flying Daggers (2004)
“evening song from a fishing boat”, 93 plotline of, 6
youthful rebellion in, 51
youthful romance in, 48
F Hu Jintao, 105, 111
Fan Yue, 86, 103 Hu Mei, 16, 22
Farewell My Concubine (1993), 50 Huang Jianxin, 16
Feng Xiaogang, 76, 77
Index 131
I M
Impression Dahongpao, 86, 100, 107 Man Hunt (aka When You Cross a
Impression Hainan Island, 108 River of Rage 1976), 23, 57, 59,
Impression Lijiang, 86, 95 61, 62. See also Takakura Ken
Impression Liu Sanjie, 86, 92, 94, 105 Man from Atlantis (1977–1978), 14
Impression Putuo, 103 “Mark’s Glasses”, 14
Impression West Lake, 86, 97, 98 Martial arts film, 6, 38, 39, 41
Industrial Light & Magic, 117 “Mass ornament”, the, 2
Inglorious Bastards (2009), 75 Mehta, Zubin, 57
Initial D (2005), 52 Metropolis (1927), 2, 119
Mist over Fairy Peak (1980), 15
“Mountain-and-water” performance,
J 91
Jackson, Michael, 15, 22 Mo Yan, 46
Jay Chou (Zhou Jielun), 52, 55 Muddy River (1981), 60
“Jiangnan Style”, 97 Mysterious Buddha, 12. See also Zhang
Jia Zhangke, 15. See also Breakin Huaxun
Joint Security Area (2000), 20
Judou (1990), 28, 51, 58, 74, 89, 107
N
Nanjing Massacre, 64–66, 74
K Nanking 1937 (1996), 65
Keep Cool (1997), 37, 45 New Era, 11
Kill Bill (2003), 75 North by Northwest (1959), 61
King of the Children (1987), 77 Not One Less (1998), 37
Kipling, Rudyard, 120
Kitarȏ (Masanori Takahashi), 99
Kracauer, Siegfried, 2, 110, 111 O
One and Eight (1983), 12, 44, 88
Orientalist, 57. See also Asian aesthetics
L
Lang, Fritz, 2. See also Metropolis
Last Frenzy (1987), 22.See also Zhou P
Xiaowen Painting with poetry, 87. See also
Last Frenzy, 22 Poetry within painting
Life on a String (1991), 77 Poetic Remarks in the Human World,
Liu Sanjie (film, 1961), 92 91. See also Wang Guowei
Liu Sanjie (the legend), 97 Poetry within painting, 87.See also
Looking for a Real Man (1986), 29 Painting with poetry
Lu Xun, 24 Popular Cinema (journal), 14
Luo Dayou, 22 Promise, The (2005), 37, 77
132 Index
Q Tian Zhuangzhuang, 12, 16, 109

Qixia Temple 1937 (2005), 64, 65 Tiller Girls, the, 2
To Live (1994), 45, 55
Turandot (opera), 45, 57, 58, 79
R
Raise the Red Lantern (1991), 74, 89,
107 U
Rashomon (1950), 60, 79 Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft
Rebel without a Cause (1955), 44, 45 (UFA), 119
Red Sorghum (1987), 18, 22, 23, 40,
45, 48, 60, 89, 95
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles W
(2006) Wang Chaoge, 86, 102, 103, 106–107,
narrative conflicts of, 6 111
plotline of, 6 Wang Guowei, 91, 92, 94, 97
Road Home, The (1999), 37, 46, 60, 89 Wenyipian, 3, 9, 61, 63
“Runaway film”, 116 Weta Workshop, 117
“Whitewashing”, 117
Wild One, The (1953), 44
S Wong Karwai, 77, 91
Sandakan 8 (1974), 15, 59 World Trade Organization, 37, 80
Saving Private Ryan (1998) Wu Ziniu, 12, 16, 64
aesthetic style of, 68
narrative construction of, 67
Shanghai Triad (1995), 45 Y
Shangri-la, 94, 108 Ye Jianying, 19
Shao Mujun, 13 Yellow Earth (1984), 12, 44, 45, 60,
Shiri (1999), 20 73, 77, 88. See also Chen Kaige
Spielberg, Steven, 66, 80 Yijing
Stagecoach (1939), 22 definition of, 86
Stallone, Sylvester, 5, 23. See also First
Blood
Story of Qiu Ju, The (1992), 45 Z
Zhang Huaxun, 12, 13
Zhang Huijun, 5, 18
T Zhang Junzhao, 12, 16, 44
Takakura, Ken, 5, 23, 59–61 Zhang Yimou
Taotie (Chinese monster), 116 and light-and-sound spectacle, 85
Tarantino, Quentin, 75 as sent-down youth, 1, 5
Teng Wenji, 12, 22 at Beijing Film Academy, 1
“Three links” (between mainland Zhou Xiaowen, 16, 22, 41, 51
China and Taiwan), 19

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GLOBALIZATION AND

ISBN 978-981-10-4327-7 ISBN 978-981-10-4328-4 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017937484

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: © Stephen Bonk/Fotolia.co.uk

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

Finally, I dedicate this book to my loving family. Without their under-

1 Modernity and Globalization 1

2 Codename Cougar: Politics or Entertainment? 9

3 (Young) Heroes in a “Cursed” House 35

4 Between National and International 57

5 Staging China: The Art of Yijing

Fig. 5.1 Impression Liu Sanjie (2003) 92

Table 4.1 Narrative construction of The Flowers of War 68

Abstract This chapter introduces the most acclaimed but still under-

Keywords Zhang Yimou · Chinese cinema · Globalization · Cultural

© The Author(s) 2017 1

as spectacular and attention-grabbing as the Chinese government had

the performance of these shows by the side of “mountains and waters”

Codename Cougar: Politics

Abstract This chapter interrogates Zhang Yimou’s early, often over-

Keywords Entertainment film · Foreign imports · Action thriller

© The Author(s) 2017 9

Cultural Revolution. The scene shows the film’s protagonist escaping

(Zhang 1989: 4). At this event, Chen Haosu, the editor-in-chief of

a compromise, or temporary solution, in the creation of entertainment

reportedly translations from Japanese, English and other foreign

performing breakdances (piliwu 霹雳舞), robotic (moonwalking) dances

business leader on board, en route from Taipei to Seoul. The terror-

Codename Cougar was Zhang’s second film as director. His directorial

were graduates of the Nationalist Huangpu Military Academy, and all

treatment of machismo, as Wang noted when he described Red Sorghum

conflicts, the genre displays the ideological contradictions between ideal-

If Die Hard is escapist and utopian, Codename Cougar is realistic and

volunteering to be a hostage. Even in this role, he is only able to perform

dimension; the “masculinity” is not “idealized”; and the violence is

market or completely for the sake of a friend; but he made it meaningful”

10. From a certain political point of view—the need for a united front—Liang

Gateward, F. (2001). (Ed.), Zhang Yimou interviews. Jackson: University Press

Purse, L. (2011). Contemporary action cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh

(Young) Heroes in a “Cursed” House

Abstract This chapter focuses on Zhang Yimous’s “martial arts trilogy”:

Keywords Martial arts · Blockbusters · Cultural Revolution

© The Author(s) 2017 35

the characters reflect the director’s attempt to appeal to a youth-oriented

Hero’s extraordinary commercial success was matched by the nation-

righteousness and loyalty (舍身取义、肝胆相照、义薄云天).3 Yet Hero

I disagree to categorize films into mainstream, experimental and commer-

the mother to know. If we do so, it will be too clichéd” (Zhou 2015:

Ceremony later commented in an interview: “Whatever the leader says,

Tang Dynasty, established in 618 A.D., is one of the most powerful

with big issues concerning nation and nationality, House of Flying

Predictably, their desire to be free as the wind is not tolerated by the

its public release in May 2014, an article published on a website admin-

social order. As the Emperor proclaims in Curse of the Golden Flower,

You must listen to me

The rhythm is infuriating

To accompany my street dancing

To cultivate uniqueness of a kind

Except for unconventional notions

Everything else is rubbish

occasion, the scene is retold by Nameless to the King of Qin in order

Fig. 5.1 Impression Liu Sanjie (2003) 92

Table 4.1 Narrative construction of The Flowers of War 68

Abstract  This chapter introduces the most acclaimed but still under-

Keywords  Zhang Yimou · Chinese cinema · Globalization · Cultural

Abstract  This chapter interrogates Zhang Yimou’s early, often over-

Keywords  Entertainment film · Foreign imports · Action thriller 

10. From a certain political point of view—the need for a united front—Liang

(Young) Heroes in a “Cursed” House

Abstract  This chapter focuses on Zhang Yimous’s “martial arts trilogy”:

Keywords  Martial arts · Blockbusters · Cultural Revolution  

Between National and International

Abstract  This Chapter explores Zhang Yimou’s oscillation between the

Keywords  Sino-Japan · Sino-U.S. · Blockbuster · High concept film 

Table 4.1 Narrative construction of The  Flowers of War

Table 4.2 Close-ups in Saving Private Ryan and The Flowers of War

Table 4.5 Narrative elements of World War II combat films

7. “China’s marketization”, however, “is not a path to liberalism or unbri-

Staging China: The Art of Yijing

Abstract  This Chapter discusses Zhang Yimou’s series of live, light-and-

Keywords  Impression series · Light-and-sound spectacle 

Liu Sanjie and Lijiang: “Smallness” and “Largeness”

Fig. 5.1 Impression Liu Sanjie (2003)

Fig. 5.2 Impression Lijiang (2006)

West Lake and Dahongpao: “Implicitness”

Fig. 5.4 Impression Dahongpao (2010)