It’s no wonder the Chinese Olympic Committee selected Yimou Zhang to produce the opening and the closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Yimou is an incredible talent. Aesthetically speaking, his work is unmatched in Chinese cinema. In the span of just two decades, Yimou has directed several masterpieces — most recently, House of Flying Daggers, his ode to the marshal arts genre — that will no doubt be studied and watched for the century to come. His decision to direct the opening and closing invites an analogy to Leni Riefenstahl. Yimou may make beautiful films, but he is not the soul of Chinese cinema. He has been reluctant to criticize even subtly the persecution of millions under Communist rule. Yimou claims he’s simply an artist. “The objective of any form of art is not political,” Yimou observes. “I am not interested in politics.” But his work is not without a political dimension. In Raise the Red Lantern, Yimou tackles the subjugation of women. But he does so with story set in China of the 1920s, decades preceding China’s revolution. Yimou is not so much disinterested in politics as he is jeopardizing funding for his films. Fortunately, other Chinese filmmakers are braver. In particular, Kaige Chen has ruthlessly taken on the Cultural Revolution in works like Farewell My Concubine, which depicts how Communism destroyed Chinese opera. In Chen’s case, it is all very personal. At the behest of school officials, he named his father as an enemy of the regime when he was just a boy. He says the decision haunts him to this day.
