Zhang Yimou, who spearheaded the opening pageantry of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, will do the same at this year’s Winter Games.
Nearly 14 years after China kicked off its first Olympics with a four-hour opening spectacle, the same man will be in charge of the pageantry of this year’s all-important opening ceremony: Zhang Yimou, an art house movie director who has evolved into a master of the grandiose, singing-dancing spectacles that are a centerpiece of Chinese political life.
“In many respects, it’s like making a movie,” Zhang said of the opening for this year’s Games, according to the Beijing Daily.
His opening ceremony for the 2008 games was an epic that involved 15,000 performers in the Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing. It is best remembered for 2,008 tightly coordinated drummers chanting Confucius: “Friends have come from afar, and how happy we are.”
It was the kind of extravagant visual flourish that, starting in the 1980s, earned Zhang his reputation as a director of lush historical dramas like “Red Sorghum” and “Raise the Red Lantern.” His films won international prizes, but not always the approval of Chinese censors. In 1994, they banned “To Live,” which depicted the upheavals of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
This time, Zhang has promised a smaller, shorter opening ceremony featuring 3,000 or so performers in the Bird’s Nest. The smaller scale reflects restrictions caused by the coronavirus, winter cold, and a new emphasis from the Olympics movement and the Chinese government on reining in excess.
Zhang has said that the opening for these Winter Olympics will present a more reassuring, folksy image of China than the 2008 spectacle. He has revealed few details but has said it will include China’s version of “square dancing” — boisterous group folk dancing that often brings together retirees in parks and public spaces.
“This time the opening ceremony will emphasize ordinary humanity,” Zhang said, according to the Beijing Daily.
After winning international attention for his lush, erotically charged early films, Zhang shifted in the 1990s to more commercial stories that were also more acceptable to the Chinese authorities. His next film — completed in the midst of preparations for the Olympic opening — is “Sniper,” a patriotic film set in the Korean War.
Still, Zhang has not entirely escaped controversy. In 2014, the government fined the director and his wife the equivalent of $1.24 million for violating family planning limits by having three children. The Chinese government was in the midst of easing one-child restrictions on urban couples, but too late to help Zhang.
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February 04, 2022 at 03:24PM
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