Celebrity Biographies
Zhang yimou
The stylized, delicate and impressive images of his films are the hallmark of Zhang Yimou, the most illustrious representative of the so-called Fifth Generation of Chinese directors. He is also the one with a style closest to Western sensibility, which explains why he has been the greatest ambassador of cinema in his country for many years. Until he turned to spectacular action films, such as “Hero”, his specialty was historical or contemporary drama with a social content, almost always with female leads. He grabs more prizes than anyone at prestigious festivals, and his bookshelves must look like a zoo, because they are full of Bears (from Berlin) and Lions (from Venice).
Born in the city of Xi’an, in northern China, on November 14, 1951, Zhang Yimou is the son of a military man. He always dreamed of being a filmmaker, but it was not easy to dedicate himself to this profession in the hardest days of Mao Zedong’s communist regime, when the film school was closed. During the Cultural Revolution, the young Zhang abandoned his studies and worked first as a shepherd and later as a textile worker, in a work center for 10 years, although he never gave up his vocation. After Mao’s death, in 1976, a timid openness took place, which among other effects produced the reopening of the film school, so that Yimou could finally enroll in photography. There he has as a partner another of the great directors of his country, Chen Kaige ( Farewell to my concubine), which Yimou embraces as a cinematographer in his film debut, Tierra amarilla , from 1984.
It didn’t take long for Zhang himself to make his debut as a director, with Red Sorghum , from 1987, one of the most promising debuts known, which earned him the Golden Bear in Berlin. In this rural drama that takes place in the 1930s, a woman is sent by her father to a winery to become the wife of her owner, who is sick with leprosy. But she falls in love with another. The central character was played by Gong Li , with whom the director began a sentimental relationship, and who would become his fetish actress. Gong herself also stars in a film with a very similar theme, Ju Dou, Chrysanthemum Seed.–Espiga de Oro in Valladolid, in 1990 and nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film–, in which an older man buys a young peasant woman so that she gives him a son. The excellent The Red Lantern was also nominated for an Oscar , with which Zhang also won the Silver Lion for best director. The title alludes to the lantern with which the lord of a powerful family indicates to any of his concubines that they have been chosen to spend the night with him. One of them is Songlian, a 19-year-old girl forced to marry this man, after the death of her father. This character is played, how could it be otherwise, by Gong Li. This trilogy of films that take place at the beginning of the 20th century renewed interest in Chinese cinema throughout the world.
Zhang Yimou maintained the level in her subsequent films with Gong Li, as Qiu ju, a Chinese woman , where she played a pregnant peasant girl who for the first time was not a beauty like her previous characters, but rather an ordinary woman. This explains why she was awarded the Volpi Cup for best actress in Venice, where Zhang also took the director’s award. To live! It is one of the filmmaker’s best films, which follows the footsteps of a family over four decades, since the communist revolution.
After the gangster thriller The Jewel of Shanghai , from 1995, less round than other of his films, Zhang Yimou breaks up sentimentally with Gong Li, who would stop being the protagonist of his films. This causes a creative crisis for the filmmaker, who tries not to panic, with a film with a revealing title, Keep Cool (Keep calm) , set in the present day. But the filmmaker fully recovered form in 1999, when he released Not One Less , a Golden Lion in Venice, about a teacher who loses one of her students. Even better is The Way Home –Silver Bear for directing in Berlin–, an emotional romantic drama, the love story of a girl and a young teacher. It marked the brilliant debut ofZhang Ziyi , who became Gong Li’s artistic replacement for Yimou, soon became a star thanks to Tiger & Dragon . This film by Ang Lee was to have a great influence on Yimou’s cinema, because it made ‘wuxia’ fashionable, a genre originating in Taiwan and Hong Kong that is distinguished by its action scenes, and its historical settings. After the memorable Happy Times , Yimou embraces this genre with Hero , with overwhelming photography, which is a great success. Conscious that he reaches a wider audience in this way than with his dramas, Yimou has not abandoned it. He directed House of Flying Daggers and The Curse of the Golden Flower., which are in the same line. He only allowed himself to return to his usual dramas with The Search (2005) , which, despite its quality, went unnoticed.