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The Story of Zhang Yimou
| Article
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10889 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
1,527 Words |
| Author
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Scarlet Cheng
Scarlet Cheng, based in Los Angeles, is a contributing editor
to the arts section of The World & I. |
Last year was more than a very good year for Chinese director Zhang Yimou. It was, needed, a fabulous year, draped with honors, flush with recognition.
In January he was saluted with a retrospective at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. His 1991 feature Raise the Red Lantern netted him his second Best Foreign Film nomination from the American Academy Awards. And this time, unlike the previous year when Ju Dou was nominated, the Chinese government allowed him to attend the awards ceremony. He did not win, but he arrived and left Los Angeles in high spirits.
Raise the Red Lantern had garnered high critical marks. Variety magazine wrote, "In the creation of ravishing images, few filmmakers in the world today can complete with Zhang Yimou." The Los Angeles Times found it "a film of astonishing beauty and terror that has the impact of a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. Not even Red Sorghum and Ju Dou, the two previous films that have established Zhang as China's most daring and exciting director, prepare us fully for this calmly shattering film."
Furthermore, Red Lantern was a box office success. It played unexpectedly long runs in cities across the United States. At year's end Variety named it the most successful foreign language film of 1992.
As for his newest film, The Story of Qiuju, to be released in the United States this spring, it won the Changchun Film Festival Gold Cup of China in August. In September the movie captured the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and was featured at the prestigious New York Film Festival.
A cinematographer, actor, and director, Zhang has become an acknowledged master of Chinese cinema.
Manual Labor
Born in 1950 in Xian, Zhang was in high school when the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) broke out, and like millions of other Chinese youths, he was sent to work in the countryside. Late he toiled in a spinning mill, which perhaps colored the scenes of cloth dyeing in his film Ju Dou.
From an early age he had dabbled in drawing and in photography, and the story goes that he sold his blood to buy his first camera, an expensive piece of equipment equal to several month's wages at the time.
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