> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/sports/olympics/08guru.html?pagewan...
>
> Gritty Renegade Now Directs China’s Close-Up
>
> BEIJING — For much of the past quarter century, the Chinese director
> Zhang Yimou made films that showcased his country’s struggle against
> poverty, war and political misrule to the outside world — films that
> Chinese, for the most part, never saw.
>
> Time and again, Mr. Zhang’s terse, gritty epics were banned by
> government censors for portraying China’s ugly side. When he won an
> award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, the authorities stopped him
> from attending. Up for an Oscar one year, officials lobbied to have
> his film withdrawn from the competition.
>
> But when the Olympics kick off Friday at China’s new National Stadium,
> with President Hu Jintao of China, President Bush and other world
> leaders in attendance and perhaps one billion people watching live on
> television, Mr. Zhang will preside over the opening ceremonies.
>
> Nearly two years in the making, his spectacle is intended to present
> China’s new face to the world with stagecraft and pyrotechnics that
> organizers boast have no equal in the history of the Games. Whether or
> not it succeeds, it will underscore one reality of a rising China:
> many leading artists now work with, or at least not against, the
> ruling Communist Party.
>
> Rising nationalism and pride in China’s emergence as an economic
> power, and robust state support for artists who steer clear of
> political defiance, have transformed China’s cultural landscape since
> the early part of this decade. Today, directors, writers and painters
> who seek to expose the darker side of authoritarian rule not only
> enrage the censors, but also often find themselves shut out of the
> lucrative market for Chinese art, books and film. Many of those who
> find less political outlets for their talent, on the other hand, can
> get rich.
>
> “People really are selling their talent in a way that can make them
> money,” said Ai Weiwei, an internationally recognized artist based in
> Beijing. “They really know that if they work with the government,
> they’ll benefit.”
>
> The opening ceremonies will represent a particularly momentous
> conversion for Mr. Zhang, whose experience during the horrors of Mao’s
> Cultural Revolution appeared to inform several of his internationally
> acclaimed — and domestically banned — films, including “Ju Dou” and
> “To Live.”
>
> Mr. Zhang said in a recent interview that he never had political aims.
> His supporters say it is the Communist Party that has become more
> sophisticated, seeking to harness the country’s top talent and embrace
> a broader notion of national culture.
>
> But critics accuse Mr. Zhang of making a pact with a political
> leadership that has a long record of restricting artistic freedom,
> playing the role of favored court artist — a kind of Chinese Leni
> Riefenstahl, creating beautiful backdrops for iron-fisted rulers.
>
> “He went from being this renegade making films that were banned and an
> eyesore for the Chinese government to kind of being the pet of the
> government, in some people’s eyes,” said Michael Berry, who teaches
> contemporary Chinese culture at the University of California, Santa
> Barbara. “It’s almost a complete turnaround from his early days.”
>
> Other artists, including a few who fled into exile after the crackdown
> on Tiananmen Square in 1989, now seem to be searching for ways to
> partner with Beijing as well.
>
> The Academy Award-winning composer Tan Dun and the celebrated pianist
> Lang Lang perform for the country’s leaders at Beijing’s new National
> Theater and serve as cultural ambassadors overseas. Xu Bing, a painter
> and calligrapher whose work in the 1980s was viewed as subversive, is
> now a vice president at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. He
> recently created a huge installation piece for the new Chinese Embassy
> in Washington.
>
> Few artists, though, have embraced the government the way Mr. Zhang
> has. He has served as an artistic adviser to Beijing, promoted the
> nation’s image abroad and produced a short film to help China win the
> right to host the 2008 Olympics. He is now a member of the Chinese
> People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top
> political advisory body.
>
> Beijing’s Turnaround
>
> Beijing, in turn, has promoted Mr. Zhang, giving his recent films
> favorable opening dates that bolster box office returns. The country’s
> film authorities allowed one of his recent movies to open at the Great
> Hall of the People. Cultural authorities even lobbied Hollywood
> executives to get his big-budget martial arts film, “Hero,” an Oscar.
>
> Some Chinese critics panned “Hero” as an implicit homage to
> authoritarian rule. While it did not win an Oscar, it became one of
> the highest grossing foreign films in the American market.
>
> Time and again, Mr. Zhang’s terse, gritty epics were banned by
> government censors for portraying China’s ugly side. When he won an
> award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, the authorities stopped him
> from attending. Up for an Oscar one year, officials lobbied to have
> his film withdrawn from the competition.
>
> But when the Olympics kick off Friday at China’s new National Stadium,
> with President Hu Jintao of China, President Bush and other world
> leaders in attendance and perhaps one billion people watching live on
> television, Mr. Zhang will preside over the opening ceremonies.
>
> Nearly two years in the making, his spectacle is intended to present
> China’s new face to the world with stagecraft and pyrotechnics that
> organizers boast have no equal in the history of the Games. Whether or
> not it succeeds, it will underscore one reality of a rising China:
> many leading artists now work with, or at least not against, the
> ruling Communist Party.
>
> Rising nationalism and pride in China’s emergence as an economic
> power, and robust state support for artists who steer clear of
> political defiance, have transformed China’s cultural landscape since
> the early part of this decade. Today, directors, writers and painters
> who seek to expose the darker side of authoritarian rule not only
> enrage the censors, but also often find themselves shut out of the
> lucrative market for Chinese art, books and film. Many of those who
> find less political outlets for their talent, on the other hand, can
> get rich.
>
> “People really are selling their talent in a way that can make them
> money,” said Ai Weiwei, an internationally recognized artist based in
> Beijing. “They really know that if they work with the government,
> they’ll benefit.”
>
> The opening ceremonies will represent a particularly momentous
> conversion for Mr. Zhang, whose experience during the horrors of Mao’s
> Cultural Revolution appeared to inform several of his internationally
> acclaimed — and domestically banned — films, including “Ju Dou” and
> “To Live.”
>
> Mr. Zhang said in a recent interview that he never had political aims.
> His supporters say it is the Communist Party that has become more
> sophisticated, seeking to harness the country’s top talent and embrace
> a broader notion of national culture.
>
> But critics accuse Mr. Zhang of making a pact with a political
> leadership that has a long record of restricting artistic freedom,
> playing the role of favored court artist — a kind of Chinese Leni
> Riefenstahl, creating beautiful backdrops for iron-fisted rulers.
>
> “He went from being this renegade making films that were banned and an
> eyesore for the Chinese government to kind of being the pet of the
> government, in some people’s eyes,” said Michael Berry, who teaches
> contemporary Chinese culture at the University of California, Santa
> Barbara. “It’s almost a complete turnaround from his early days.”
>
> Other artists, including a few who fled into exile after the crackdown
> on Tiananmen Square in 1989, now seem to be searching for ways to
> partner with Beijing as well.
>
> The Academy Award-winning composer Tan Dun and the celebrated pianist
> Lang Lang perform for the country’s leaders at Beijing’s new National
> Theater and serve as cultural ambassadors overseas. Xu Bing, a painter
> and calligrapher whose work in the 1980s was viewed as subversive, is
> now a vice president at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. He
> recently created a huge installation piece for the new Chinese Embassy
> in Washington.
>
> Few artists, though, have embraced the government the way Mr. Zhang
> has. He has served as an artistic adviser to Beijing, promoted the
> nation’s image abroad and produced a short film to help China win the
> right to host the 2008 Olympics. He is now a member of the Chinese
> People’s Political Consultative Conference, the country’s top
> political advisory body.
>
> Beijing’s Turnaround
>
> Beijing, in turn, has promoted Mr. Zhang, giving his recent films
> favorable opening dates that bolster box office returns. The country’s
> film authorities allowed one of his recent movies to open at the Great
> Hall of the People. Cultural authorities even lobbied Hollywood
> executives to get his big-budget martial arts film, “Hero,” an Oscar.
>
> Some Chinese critics panned “Hero” as an implicit homage to
> authoritarian rule. While it did not win an Oscar, it became one of
> the highest grossing foreign films in the American market.
>
> Its success gave rise to the rapid commercialization — and
> depoliticization — of Chinese art. China’s cultural landscape is now
> filled with big-budget historical dramas, multimillion dollar art
> auctions, government-backed opera and dance extravaganzas, and bold
> new state-financed entertainment venues that suggest a melding of art,
> culture, power and national pride.
>
> Like Mr. Zhang, the director Feng Xiaogang said he tired of battling
> censors long ago and switched to making more entertaining films that
> could deliver box-office riches. Chen Kaige, another prominent
> director with a history of provocative and rebellious films, has also
> been embraced by Beijing, which a few years ago allowed him use of one
> of the country’s most important government buildings for the premiere
> of his big-budget film “The Promise.”
>
> “Now, the government wants directors to promote the country’s economic
> development,” said Wu Tianming, a well-known producer and director.
> “And the directors need money and fame and they can earn even more
> money with government support.”
>
> For months, Mr. Zhang and his crew have been closeted in a secure
> Olympics compound, preparing the opening and closing ceremonies of the
> Olympics. The three-and-a-half-hour show is still shrouded in secrecy,
> though some highlights have been leaked. Mr. Zhang will use more than
> 15,000 performers and fireworks by the renowned artist Cai Guoqiang.
> Acrobats will dance through the air as in Mr. Zhang’s martial arts
> films. Lang Lang will headline a program that will include dance
> performances and the Peking Opera.
>
> To help create China’s cultural moment, Mr. Zhang initially tapped
> Steven Spielberg to work as artistic adviser on the opening
> ceremonies.
>
> But under pressure to sever ties because of China’s role in Sudan, Mr.
> Spielberg resigned in February, saying that his conscience troubled
> him and that China should do more to stop genocide in the Darfur
> region of Sudan.
>
> The resignation was an embarrassment for China and Mr. Zhang, and it
> served to demonstrate the kind of pressures that artists in the West
> can come under when they work for the government. In China, though,
> Mr. Zhang sidestepped the matter with what has become his standard
> line, “I have no interest in politics.”
>
> A Troubled History
>
> Politics, in the past, was not easy to dodge.
>
> Mr. Zhang’s father, an accountant, had served as an officer in the
> Nationalist army fighting the Communists during the country’s
> protracted civil war. His uncle fled with the Nationalists to Taiwan.
> Mr. Zhang grew up in northern Shaanxi Province in the 1950s on the
> wrong side of history.
>
> The family’s problems intensified when the Cultural Revolution got
> under way in 1966, touching off a decade-long period of political
> madness. Mr. Zhang’s home was ransacked and his father was labeled a
> “double counter-revolutionary.”
>
> At 18, he was sent to labor in the countryside, tilling fields with
> peasants. Mr. Zhang recalled a youth filled with despair in a 2005
> interview with Mr. Berry of the University of California, Santa
> Barbara.
>
> “Most enemies of the people during that time fell into the category of
> the ‘five bad elements,’ ” he said. “Well, people like me were called
> ‘the worst element.’ So those 10 years, from 1966 until 1976, I lived
> under the shadow of tragedy and hopelessness.”
>
> In 1971, though, he was assigned to work as a machine technician at
> the No. 8 Cotton Mill in Xianyang, in Shaanxi Province. It was there
> that he fell in love with art and photography.
>
> “He showed no interest in politics,” said Lei Peiyun, who worked with
> Mr. Zhang in the factory’s propaganda department. “But he once told me
> that people are shackled by politics.”
>
> With Mao’s death in 1976, Mr. Zhang gained admission to China’s only
> film school, the Beijing Film Academy. Initially he made his mark as a
> cinematographer, working on “Yellow Earth,” the 1984 film of a
> classmate, Chen Kaige.
>
> But he soon began making his own films. In visually striking features
> like “Red Sorghum,” “Ju Dou” and “Raise the Red Lantern,” he explored
> the country’s feudalist past, the plight of women and the conflicted
> lives of the Chinese people.
>
> “At that time the whole culture was destroyed,” said Mr. Wu, the
> producer and director who helped finance several of Mr. Zhang’s early
> films. “They tasted the ugliness but less of the beauty.”
>
> Although his early films won critical acclaim in the West, they were
> often banned in China as dark and even poisonous.
>
> Some officials even accused him of pandering to Western tastes by
> stereotyping the Chinese character, an accusation he strongly denied.
> Others viewed his films as veiled critiques of the leadership, buried
> in the subtext of films set in pre-revolutionary China.
>
> Wang Bin, his longtime literary adviser, said this happened in 1989
> during preparation for shooting “Ju Dou,” the tale of a woman forced
> into an arranged marriage with an impotent old textile mill owner.
>
> That summer, after the military fired on pro-democracy activists
> occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Mr. Zhang and some co-workers
> ventured outside and witnessed the aftermath of the killings.
>
> “We saw burned vehicles, bloody students,” Mr. Wang recalled. “I don’t
> want to say much now. But we spent the whole night sleepless. Because
> of that event, I trusted Zhang Yimou. I felt he cared for his
> nation.”
>
> Distraught by what they saw, Mr. Wang said Mr. Zhang and the staff
> altered the screenplay, and the film’s final scene.
>
> “At the end of the film, Ju Dou has a huge fire, and that represents
> our emotion,” he said. “That is June 4.”
>
> He was bolder when he made the film “To Live,” which traces one
> family’s tragic journey over the course of four decades, ending with
> the Cultural Revolution, a subject that to this day remains taboo.
>
> Colleagues said Mr. Zhang’s team submitted a fake script to the
> censors for pre-approval, promising to make a film about China’s
> bright future, and then secretly began filming “To Live.”
>
> When the film was released to critical acclaim overseas, government
> censors were infuriated. Mr. Zhang was banned for five years from
> making films in China with foreign funds.
>
> It was the last time he seriously challenged government censors.