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Word: zhang (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
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...From this movement emerged the visually stunning Yellow Earth, Red Sorghum, and Raise the Red Lantern. Zhang Yuan's films embody a directional shift in Chinese film. Instead of turning backward in time to locate and problematize the Chinese experience, Zhang turns inward. His films capture modern psychological tales rather than distanced histories. However, the Fifth Generations' affinity for setting their films in the pre-Revolutionary past was more than stylistic choice-it was practical necessity. State monopoly funding of films and a wary censorship board forced any critique of the regime to be shrouded in allegory. Zhang bypassed...

Author: By Shannon May, | Title: Cinemanic -- ZHANG YUAN: A Portrait of the Young Artist | 11/12/1999 | See Source »

...Even before shooting Beijing Bastards, Zhang knew that the first film to capture the lifestyles of China's contemporary Rock and Roll stars would be censored. His desire to document the society in which he lived--not the one in which the State wanted him to live--forced him to turn to friends and foreign corporations for money. Unlike many of China's other young directors, Zhang does not censor his own ideas to win State approval for his films. Consequently, only his first film, Mama (1990) has been released in China to date, although pirated Video Compact Discs (VCDs...

Author: By Shannon May, | Title: Cinemanic -- ZHANG YUAN: A Portrait of the Young Artist | 11/12/1999 | See Source »

...another departure from previous Chinese cinematic practice, Zhang does not base his films on literature, but rather writes screenplays based on real-life. East Palace West Palace (1996) sprung from a newspaper clipping about police officers' interrogation of gay me. In all of his films, Zhang positions the marginalized of society at the focal point. Zhang argues that "by representing the marginal you get a better picture of society. It is through the marginal that the character of society emerges...

Author: By Shannon May, | Title: Cinemanic -- ZHANG YUAN: A Portrait of the Young Artist | 11/12/1999 | See Source »

...Influenced by German artist Kthe Kollwitz (1867 - 1945), Zhang's films capture struggle and pain without victimizing the subject. Zhang reduces life to its most basic elements-the individual and the interpersonal--and makes moments timeless. Unlike China's more commercial directors such as Feng Xiaogang, Zhang is not trying to play to a popular trope but to create a work of art that "could be seen 500 years ago or 500 years in the future and still be relevant...

Author: By Shannon May, | Title: Cinemanic -- ZHANG YUAN: A Portrait of the Young Artist | 11/12/1999 | See Source »

...into the State's project of socialist utopia. By making films that force the Chinese to look into amirror of their own experiences, he seeks to "provoke Chinese people's thinking about their real lives and stir their memories of what has happened in the past." Yet even Zhang seems wary of his own medicine: he has not let his family see his films because watching them "invokes too much pain...

Author: By Shannon May, | Title: Cinemanic -- ZHANG YUAN: A Portrait of the Young Artist | 11/12/1999 | See Source »

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