The Beijing Olympics opening ceremony was directed by the world-famous, Oscar nominated Chinese film director Zhang Yimou. His exquisitely shot films show young brides, concubines, and peasant women consumed by the monolithic forces that these women (and it is often women) find themselves in.
The films’ storylines are often bewildering to Western viewers. Are we to sympathize with the characters, is Yimou agreeing with the forces of authority, is he so fatalistic that he cannot see any other story? We are led to believe that the unique beauties - of the young girls, of the surrounding scenery, or in the case of Ju Dou, the lusciously dyed textiles - will overcome anything. But they don’t, and these young women, once distinctive in their charms and their quests, can never escape their culture’s expectations, and are forced to sacrifice their individuality and singularity to the collective fabric of their communities in sad and tragic ways. Some go insane, others simply get old, and yet others bitterly, or blithely, try to forget.
Throughout China’s history, there seems to have been an overpowering preference for the individual’s submergence into the collective. Confucius lays out the ground rules for this coexistence, and Communism was the harshest, most inhumane, example of that history. Yimou is simply recording this cultural reality. He further demonstrates this with his direction of the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony. The spectacular ceremony consisted of thousands (15,000 in total) of Chinese performers shifting in huge carpets of precise and united movement.
The world of Chinese human coordination is brought to light when Yimou compares Chinese performers to those of North Korea. He says: “Other than North Koreans, there’s not one other country in the world that can achieve such a high quality of performance.” Yimou didn’t compare his 15,000 synchronized human bodies to American or European artistry, but to an enclosed, isolated extreme dictatorial state like North Korea.
While discussing his experience working with Western actors, Yimou says: “[They] were so troublesome [because] in the middle of rehearsals they take two coffee breaks…[T]here can’t be any discomfort, because of human rights…[T]hey have all kinds [of] organizations and labor union structures. We’re not like that. We work hard; we tolerate bitter exertion.”[1] Like the suffering his heroines endure, Yimou confesses that he sees nothing wrong with exerting pressure and discipline on his performers to have them conform to his giant designs.
How different is he and the Chinese, then, from the isolated, dictatorial North Koreans, whose mass parades have garnered his respect? In the name of human collectivity, Yimou acknowledges that Chinese performers are, and should be, willing to tolerate abuses on their bodies, give up their basic human rights, and work under extreme conditions. Yimou’s comparison of neo-Communist, modern Chinese performers with North Koreans is depressingly retrograde. Despite glowing references by the world community, China is still stuck in its past.
Still, one cannot deny the importance of culture and history on a country’s artistic formation. Yimou’s artistic style, both in film and in his latest contribution to the opening ceremonies, is part of Chinese art and artistry, where harmony and cohesion trumps individuality and innovation. This is evident in Chinese watercolor paintings where composition - a concerted effort at harmony – supersedes individual artistic expression. As Yimou’s films themselves show, while his characters go through tremendous suffering and even tragedy, often the best he can come up with is an ambiguous acceptance of the status quo. An outright nihilism or rage would be more understandable, instead of deferment to the collective which in many cases can only be achieved if the individual is sacrificed, like Songlian in Raise the Red Lantern, who goes insane rather than live through her atrocious life.
Olympics which took place in Westernized countries - the US, Australia and Greece to name a few - emphasized more individualized performances and content-rich opening ceremonies, rather than the mastery of synchronized masses. The human presence in these Western performances were a means to a narrative, where one idea leads to another in space and time to tell a story or to reach a point. Most of the Western programs had also a limited in number of performers, since their intention was to use them as actors in a story and not as bodies in giant designs.
Yimou’s primary purpose was to use his human subjects as anonymous forms to make stadium-sized patterns. There was no emphasis on time or space, and the performers were enclosed within their own tightly limited areas. The Western performers, on the other hand, both individuals and groups, often moved from one end of a stadium to another for a particular purpose – to reach a destination, to enter into a building, or as in the young boy in the boat from the Athens show, to reach shore.
Yimou’s shore has now come and gone. The Chinese had their chance to show the world what they were made of. Astute observers will notice that nothing much has really changed in modern China, as exemplified by even their most freest commentator, an artist, who confesses admiration for the artistic endeavors of one of the harshest regime in the world, and admits that he emulates its style.
[1] “Zhang Yimou’s 20,000-Word Interview Reveals Secrets of Opening Ceremony,” Nanfang Zhoumou (Guangzhou), August 14, 2008