Back in the 1980s and 90s, Zhang Yimou (Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern) was acclaimed as one of the most talented directors to emerge from China’s “fifth generation”, film-makers whose work broke with the socialist realist style of their predecessors. While still working within the establishment industry, the fifth generation – including Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang – were considered to varying degrees if not quite dissident, at least somewhat heterodox and anti-authoritarian. Either way, having started out as a cinematographer, Zhang quickly became an arthouse darling abroad, feted…
Tag: Zhang Yimou
One Second review – Zhang Yimou’s censored love letter to cinema reels you in
In 2019, this film from Chinese director Zhang Yimou was pulled from the Berlin film festival because of, ahem, technical problems. The real reason, widely speculated at the time, was likely to have been politically motivated: the Chinese Communist party’s displeasure with the film’s portrait of the Cultural Revolution. Now, re-edited and partially reshot, it’s finally getting a release. And with all the tinkering and tweaks, what censors haven’t been able to expunge is the torment and suffering on the face of Zhang Yi’s political prisoner; this is a deeply…