Zhang Yimou has released 22 features to date, in addition to a couple of shorts, two more features shot and ready to go (censors permitting), his grandiose made-for-TV pageants for the Beijing Olympics, opera stagings like Turandot at the Forbidden City, and, if we’re being charitable, the co-director’s label attached to the execrable 2015 Fan Bingbing vehicle Lady of the Dynasty. Like many directors of his generation from China, his earliest work arguably remains his strongest. His groundbreaking Fifth Generation dramas, spanning from Red Sorghum (1987) to To Live (1994), not only redefined what was artistically and politically possible in Chinese cinema (at least until the banning of the latter film), but also introduced world audiences to a cinema of powerfully dramatic chromaticism and tactile spectacularity that was both accessible and marketable, simultaneously satisfying, enriching, and complicating Western markets’ and viewers’ tendency to impose an orientalist mode of reception on China’s films and art.
At the same time, Zhang was also working in more local modes with a series of genre films and comedies that spoke to an emerging, ticket-buying Chinese public, including (1989), (1997), (2000), and (2009). As China’s domestic film market rapidly expanded and demand grew for blockbuster entertainments that could cater to ever-larger audiences and justify ever-higher ticket prices, Zhang obliged with celebrity-loaded (2002), (2004), (2006), and internationalized pastiches like (2011) and (2016). (The one potential outlier in this category is [2018], which points towards a thread of cryptic self-portraiture or disguised autobiography that haunts all of Zhang’s politically engaged films.)
