Yimou Zhang: The Director of film"Not One Less". 张艺谋与“一个都不能少”
Today we are going to have a look at a Chinese director named Yimou Zhang, and review one of his early films, titled "Not One Less"(In Chinese: 一个都不能少).
Who is Yimou Zhang?
Yimou Zhang was born on November 14, 1951 in Xi'an, Shaanxi, China. He is a director and actor, known for Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004) and Curse of the Golden Flower (2006). (Source: IMDb) He is a Chinese film director, producer, writer and actor, and former cinematographer. He is counted amongst the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, having made his directorial debut in 1987 with Red Sorghum. (Source: Wikipedia).
YIMOU ZHANG AND THE FIFTH GENERATION
Zhang Yimou is an internationally acclaimed director working in the People’s Republic of China. He graduated in the fifth class of the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, along with classmates such as Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang. This graduating class formed a core of young filmmakers ¾ called the Fifth Generation ¾ who produced a new Chinese cinema that exploded on screens around the world in the mid-1980s. Fifth Generation films continue Chinese cinema’s long preoccupation with China as a nation. However, these directors reject the politicised angst of national survival in films of the first half of the 20th century and the class heroics of socialist realist cinema under Mao Zedong after 1949. Their films dare to be different and dare to deconstruct the China they know. Two decades on, Zhang Yimou is one of the most prolific, versatile and significant of these Fifth Generation directors. His signature as a filmmaker is a storytelling mode dominated by visual display, especially of his female stars. This display is part of a complex picture of generation and gender in Zhang’s work that reaches back to debates on Chinese modernity in the early 20th century.
Zhang was born in Xi’an in 1951 to parents of “bad” class background and reportedly sold his own blood to buy his first camera. He grew up in socialist China where class struggle dominated life and literature. Like many young Chinese of the time, he was sent to farms and factories during the Cultural Revolution and so gained grass-roots knowledge of life in China. His portfolio of photographs helped win him admission to the cinematography department of the Beijing Film Academy in 1978, after successfully appealing a decision to bar him on the basis of age. (Source: senseofcinema.com)
Fun Fact: Yimou Zhang was the director for the opening and closing ceremonies of 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games.
Zhang has won numerous awards and recognitions, with Best Foreign Film nominations for Ju Dou in 1990, Raise the Red Lantern in 1991, and Hero in 2003, Silver Lion and Golden Lion prizes at the Venice Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 1993, he was a member of the jury at the 43rd Berlin International Film Festival. Zhang directed the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games, which received considerable international acclaim. As said under the Wikipedia page for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic: Featuring 15,000 performers, the ceremony lasted over four hours and was reported to have cost over US$100 million to produce. The opening ceremony was lauded by spectators and various international presses as spectacular and spellbinding and by many accounts "the greatest ever".
REVIEW ON "NOT ONE LESS"(1999)
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| Scene from the film "Not One Less" |
Not One Less (Chinese: 一个都不能少; pinyin: yíge dōu bùnéng shǎo) is a 1999 drama film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou, adapted from Shi Xiangsheng's 1997 story "A Sun in the Sky" (Chinese: 天上有个太阳; pinyin: tiān shàng yǒu ge tàiyáng). It was produced by Guangxi Film Studio and released by China Film Group Corporation in mainland China, and distributed by Sony Pictures Classics and Columbia TriStar internationally.
Background of the film
Set in the People's Republic of China during the 1990s, the film centers on a 13-year-old substitute teacher, Wei Minzhi, in the Chinese countryside. Called in to substitute for a village teacher for one month, Wei is told not to lose any students. When one of the boys takes off in search of work in the big city, she goes looking for him. The film addresses education reform in China, the economic gap between urban and rural populations, and the prevalence of bureaucracy and authority figures in everyday life. It is filmed in a neorealist/documentary style with a troupe of non-professional actors who play characters with the same names and occupations as the actors have in real life, blurring the boundaries between drama and reality. (Wikipedia)
Personal review on "Not One Less": Learn to appreciate what we have.
In the movie, young children in Shuiquan village were shown to be studying in a very poor condition. They did not have a comfortable study environment, shown by the condition of their classroom: shared table and benches. The classroom is also small as compared to the numbers of students attending the class. The village is too poor to even afford chalks, as teacher Gao told his substitute teacher, teacher Wei to "not use more than a chalk per day because the village is too poor to afford more." Nowadays, we are gifted with better education quality in terms of content and environment. I am grateful because I don't have to be a dropout to support my family as a kid.
When one of the boys, namely Zhang Huike went Zhangjiakou to find a job, the substitute teacher wanted to go and search for him. The bus ticket to the city is so expensive that she had to work with other students to earn money by moving bricks. However, the ticket was still too expensive. In the end, she had to walk to the city, before she found a truck that allowed her to get a free lift. In today's life, we have everything at our disposal. travelling by bus is even cheaper than before. In such rural area portrayed in the movie, even a bus ride was too much to afford.
Lastly, we also have better technology compared to those living in rural area. The substitute teacher has no success finding Zhang Huike in the city through the public address system and "missing person" posters, so she has to go to the local television station to broadcast a missing person notice. In those three ways that she tried, none reached the little boy Zhang Huike because those media only reach a small audience. Nowadays, we only need to share the information online and we can easily reach a bigger audience than she could in the movie, making life easier. Although these little things seem to be normal for us, we shall always keep in mind that what we have is something someone wished to have.
Reference links: http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/zhang/
Credit for picture used: http://www.insidethegames.biz/articles/1045665/director-of-beijing-2008-opening-and-closing-ceremonies-to-arrange-pyeongchang-2018-handover-show
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