Home Cinema: Zhang Imou

Five (very beautiful!) Films of the world's most famous director from China

Every weekend in the “Home Cinema” section on Medusa, there are compilations of recommendations for everyone who wants to study the history of cinema. This issue is dedicated to Chinese cinema - namely one of the most famous directors of the country Zhang Imou. In addition to the world -famous “hero” and “Houses of flying daggers”, Imou shot many amazing copyright films, became the first Chinese nominee for Oscar and received awards of the most important European film festivals. The film critic of Medusa Anton Dolin tells more about his films.

Red Gaolyan

1988

If you choose from the whole history of the movie of China of one director - a figure that expressed the main contradictions of his era, and a person who has passed with his country a dramatic path - then you can’t find a better candidate than Zhang Imou. In it you can see the “Chinese Spielberg” and “Chinese Mikhalkov”. In his paintings, intimate notes were found, reminiscent of Soviet thaw cinema and Italian neorealism, but national gigantomania is also evident. Thanks to the films of Zhang Imou, many Chinese and international stars were born. He filmed the most important writers of the country, spoke about the key events of the past - from the construction of the Great Wall to the “Cultural Revolution”. Zhang Imou repeatedly set commercial records: shot the most expensive films in the history of China, and then they became cash champions. At the same time, it was he who brought China to the nomination for the Oscar, the Berlin Golden Bear, two Venetian Golden Leo and the Cannes Grand Prix. Zhang Imou suffered from censorship more than once, but he became the subject of national pride and set the opening and closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympiad.

The future director grew up in a family of doctors. His father, his uncle and older brother were supporters of the Kuomintan and fought in the army of Chan Kaisha. Zhang Imou paid a high price for this during the years of the “cultural revolution”: he was expelled from school and sent for forced labor in the village, and then to a textile factory. He dreamed of devoting himself to cinema and donated blood to accumulate money on the camera. In 1976, Mao Zedong died. In 1978, the Beijing Film Academy again opened a reception-from the first set of its students and a powerful movement of the Fifth Generation filmmakers formed a little later, one of the leaders of which was Zhang Imou. But then he was too adult - 27 years old - to enter a film school. Zhang Imou wrote a special appeal to the PRC Ministry of Culture, putting a portfolio with photographs, and for him they made an exception, accepting the faculty of the operator. Therefore, his first work in the cinema, along with the outstanding contemporary Chen Kayge (Yellow Earth, 1984, Big Parade, 1986) and other directors.

Red Gaolyan is a full -length directorial debut of Zhang Imou, who became a real breakthrough not only for a young author, but for all China. The picture was invited to the Berlinal contest and received the main prize there, and later was recognized as the best in the year by two Chinese film awards: “Golden Rooster” and “A Thousand flowers”. The epic canvas about love and fate is placed according to the famous novel by Mo Yan, in the future - the first Chinese Laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the center of the story is the grandparent of the narrator. The monumental and frank history of their meeting and love was presented as a modern myth - tragic and comic at the same time, deliberately grotesque and mysterious: a young porter falls in love with a girl given out of a leaked old man, and decides to achieve reciprocity.

Critics and spectators around the world were shocked by the visual component of the picture. As a photographer and operator in the past, Zhang Imou thoroughly worked with the flowers and the structure of the frame. The expressiveness of the visual series returned to Cinematographer a forgotten sensuality, recalling the best samples of Hollywood - but without its sterility. Starring Jiang Wen and Gun Lee, later the most famous stars of Chinese cinema.

Light a red lantern

1991

Another powerful drama of Zhang Imou, in the center of which was the theme of family violence - Zyu Dow (1990) - was banned in censorship in China, although it became the first Chinese film in history to receive a nomination for Oscar. In the title role, Gun Lee is again busy there, who was married to the director and who became his constant muse by this moment. Together they also made “lighting a red lantern” - a picture that instantly gained a cult status in their homeland (today the estate where the shooting took place is accepted by tourists), which received enthusiastic reviews at the Venice festival and collected both a record box office in China and a heap of international prizes.

This is a film adaptation of the sensational novel by Su Tun “Wife and concubines”. In the center of the plot, the action of which is placed in the 1920s, is a student who is forced to leave the university after the death of her father and sold. She becomes the fourth, youngest wife of an influential aristocrat and is forced from now on not only to endure humiliation from a man who owns her body, but also to resist the intrigues from three older wives. The red lantern from the name of the film is a signal, thanks to which the owner of the house understands which of the women will spend the next night. This work of Zhang Imou, continuing the topics of the previous two, today seems burning, before us is a terrible and at the same time extremely realistic picture of the patriarchal system that destroys the human dignity of a woman and turns her into an object. The owner of the house Zhang Imou intentionally shows only from a great distance, the viewer actually does not see his face. The geometry of the frame, drowned in different shades of red, makes an oppressive impression - people become in this ritualized world elements of the ornament. In the filmography of Gun, this picture remained one of its highest acting achievements.

At the beginning of the XXI century, based on the film, Zhang Imou created a ballet libretto, Chen Tsigan wrote music. “Light the Red Lantern” today is in the constant repertoire of the Chinese theater.

Tsu Zyu goes to court

1992

Another triumph of Zhang Imou - for this film, he received the Golden Leo in Venice. The tonality is changing: before us is not a magnificent epic, from the beauty of which the viewer’s breath caught, but outwardly simple everyday history from rural life, filled with absurd humor and compassion for simple -minded characters. The beauty is unrecognizable and Lee Lee as a pregnant peasant woman, who decided to achieve the truth at all costs.

The plot, based on the story of Chen Yuanbin, “Learning of the Van family,” tells about the peasant, whom the village headman humiliated and beaten. The victim’s wife decides to achieve justice. She goes to the district center, and then to the city, hoping to find the council for Samodur. The official awards the headman’s fine, but Tsu does not want money - she requires an apology. The picture growing from a penny conflict is full of Kafkian details of the China bureaucratic system, although it does not go into the sphere of pure satire. It has more funny than a dramatic, but funny story, Zhang Imou leads to a hard finale. The central theme of the film is the human dignity, the wounded pride of the “little man” who does not want to consider himself small. Again, at the center of intrigue, Zhang Imou is a woman in a world controlled by men (and again the outstanding acting talent Gun Lee is visible).

Having abandoned the exquisite games with the construction of the frame and the transformation of individual episodes into picturesque canvases, Zhang Imou first relies on the documentation of the image. Some scenes were shot by a hidden camera, in most roles, unprofessional actors are occupied.

Not one less

1999

The second “Golden Leo” at the festival in Venice is the second film by Zhang Imou after “Tsu Juy goes to court” telling about a village woman going to a big city.

Before that, Zhang Imou manages to get a Grand Prix in Cannes for the monumental historical drama “Live” (1994) and to remove the more commercial paintings “Shanghai Triad” (1995) and “Keep Calm” (1997). Also during this time he diverges from the Gun Lee. “Not a single less” - its turn to a radical author’s cinema, connecting the emotionality and sincerity of his early work with a pseudo -documentary approach to choosing locations, casting and writing dialogs. There is not a single professional actor in the film, roles performers play about the same thing that they are doing in life (while the picture is still set according to the script). “Not one less” was compared with the ribbons of Wittorio de Siki and Abbas Kiarons, whose influence was recognized by the director himself. In addition, this is the first frankly modern, even topical film by Zhang Imou.

The main character is a thirteen -year -old girl who is forced to replace teachers in a rural school within a month. She has one main task: not to lose a single student during this time. Meanwhile, children do not strive for education and strive to slip away from school. After one of the boys still runs to the city in search of work, the teacher is forced to go in search of it.

“Not one less” is also the first film by Zhang Imou, who received official state support. This did not bring him joy. Censors demanded to reduce scenes in which one could see the squalor of Chinese villages, and forced to underestimate the number of students who escaped from schools in the final titer. On the other hand, Western criticism saw in the film an excuse for the official policy of the Chinese authorities, which caused the director’s protest. In any case, today “no less” looks like a touching and true story about the importance of each person in a giant state, not preoccupied with personality rights.

Hero

2002

Outside of China, this film became the most famous for Zhang Imou, his business card - which, of course, is insulting. Not because the “hero” with something is not good (this is a kind of perfect picture), but because the merits of Zhang Imou before copyright cinema are still more than to commercial; The antitotalitarian orientation of his early work seems to be obscured or even crossed out by the state pathos of the majestic “hero”.

Taking a crisis in his usual dramatic genre-the last success was the “Road Home” in 1999-the director turns to the national genre of Usya, a historical myth with martial arts. Despite the long -standing traditions, Zhang Imou manages to create a new standard of it; Together with the “stealing tiger, a hiding dragon”, the “hero” becomes a fashionable picture not only in Asia, but also in Europe, and even in the USA. Zhang Imou uses the latest special effects, but combines them with the usual methods of Chinese commercial cinema. He also returns to the color coding of the image, making the episodes of the film "sketches in different colors." The Australian Christopher Doyle, known for working with Hong Kong Karva, is responsible for virtuoic operator work, turning the scene of each battle into a separate work of art. The elevated music is written by Tan Dun. Cast of the stars: the master of martial arts Jet Lee, the legendary Tony Lun Chu Wi and Maggie Chun (who had played in a “love mood”), actor and director Donny Yen, as well as the director Zhang Ziya, a beauty with a ballet training.

The complex intrigue of the film is built on the system of “unreliable storytellers”, the script is written on the principle of “races”: we see the same story through the eyes of different characters. In the center is the nameless, who comes to the court of the ruler of the Earth Qin in order to receive a reward for the destruction of three enemies. Talking about the reprisal against them, he involuntarily makes it clear that he himself is a hired killer. The same historical legend about the unification of China into a single empire formed the basis of another epic - “Emperor and the killer” (1999), Chen Kayge, a longtime comrade Zhang Imou, by the way, who took the main role of Gun Lee there. But Zhang Imou in the “Hero” refuses realism, creating an extremely conditional and picturesque film award about self -denial in the name of the interests of the nation and the state. However, the director himself refused to recognize the political background of the picture.

Continuing to work in the Jush genre, later Zhang Imou shot such sensational paintings as “The House of Flying Daggers” (2004), “Curse of the Golden Flower” (2006), “The Great Wall” (2016) and “Shadow” (2018).

Anton Dolin