Zhang Yimou: Interviews
edited by Frances Gateward

"With a concrete image we can dissolve boundaries and allow one to see, think, and feel."

Ranging from 1988 to 1999, this book includes interviews with the acclaimed Chinese director of such films as Red Sorghum (1987), Shanghai Triad (1995), and Not One Less (1999) and the trilogy Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1992), and The Story of Qiu Ju (1992).

Zhang was one of the 1982 Beijing Film Academy graduates-the so-called Fifth Generation of filmmakers, who were the first generation of Chinese directors trained after the Cultural Revolution. As he discusses the Academy's impact on him and his peers, he often mentions that many of his fellow graduates now work in television because the state did not deem their films successful. Using his art as a means of exploring oppression and its devastation of human relationships, Zhang talks openly about the effects of mainland China's codes of censorship on his work.

As he discusses his filmmaking style and compares it to the current state of Chinese filmmaking, he is revealed as open and modest, yet deeply passionate about his art. Readers meeting him through these interviews will see him to be complex, serious, and as quietly unassuming as his movies.

Frances Gateward is an assistant professor in the Program of Film and Video Studies and in the Center for African and Afro-American Studies at the University of Michigan.