C'mon. Most people on your LJ know it's me, anyway.
I have nothing against "Hero" as spectacle qua spectacle. I think the director, Zhang Zimou, did a remarkable job framing each sequence (the emperor's palace, the calligraphy school, the boarding house, the desert sequences) in its own color scheme and visual style. I've already said elsewhere that the battle between Moon and Snow amongst the yellow leaves--pardon the fanboyishness--kicked major ass.
But is spectacle enough in film? Can a movie be rapturously beautiful yet morally and emotionally empty at its center? Of course it can. We know that from Riefenstahl and D.W. Griffith and many other film-makers whose skill in presenting visual images was unassailable, but whose purpose for presenting these images was morally questionable at best.
Am I saying that Hero is the Chinese version of Birth of a Nation or the Triumph of the Will? No, I wouldn't go that far, in either direction. Number one, I don't think it stacked up in terms of sheer visual power to either of those other two movies. Number two, I think there was just a shade more moral ambiguity (thanks to the characters of Falling Snow and Broken Sword) in Hero than in those "classic" fascist spectacles.
But I did feel the pull of those old fascist spectacles nonetheless. I've mentioned in other LJ entries how disturbed I was at the bloodless, aesteticized violence. The entire film was designed as a "birth of a nation" myth, and the sole purpose of all the action of the movie was to provide moral justification for the would-be emperor to ravage the armies (and populations) of the other provinces and unite what would become China under his iron fist.
I want to make a distinction here, and it's an important distinction. If the movie was designed so that the tales of Jet Li's nameless warrior and the conflicting views of Broken Sword and Falling Snow were part of the emperor's interior conflict--i.e., the three warriors were symbols of the emperor's internal debate about the worthiness of his own cause--I don't think I would have had a problem with the movie. But the emperor never struck me as that vivid a character. He seemed as much a part of the rigid thematic structure as all the other characters. I guess what I'm saying is that the filmmaker wasn't interested in having the characters justify their actions to themselves. He wanted to justify the actions of the emperor TO THE AUDIENCE--and once I realized that, my antennae snapped up and I no longer trusted the movie.
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branchandroot
HERO: I think it's time "the friend" spoke up here.
Date: 2004-09-13 09:53 am (UTC)C'mon. Most people on your LJ know it's me, anyway.
I have nothing against "Hero" as spectacle qua spectacle. I think the director, Zhang Zimou, did a remarkable job framing each sequence (the emperor's palace, the calligraphy school, the boarding house, the desert sequences) in its own color scheme and visual style. I've already said elsewhere that the battle between Moon and Snow amongst the yellow leaves--pardon the fanboyishness--kicked major ass.
But is spectacle enough in film? Can a movie be rapturously beautiful yet morally and emotionally empty at its center? Of course it can. We know that from Riefenstahl and D.W. Griffith and many other film-makers whose skill in presenting visual images was unassailable, but whose purpose for presenting these images was morally questionable at best.
Am I saying that Hero is the Chinese version of Birth of a Nation or the Triumph of the Will? No, I wouldn't go that far, in either direction. Number one, I don't think it stacked up in terms of sheer visual power to either of those other two movies. Number two, I think there was just a shade more moral ambiguity (thanks to the characters of Falling Snow and Broken Sword) in Hero than in those "classic" fascist spectacles.
But I did feel the pull of those old fascist spectacles nonetheless. I've mentioned in other LJ entries how disturbed I was at the bloodless, aesteticized violence. The entire film was designed as a "birth of a nation" myth, and the sole purpose of all the action of the movie was to provide moral justification for the would-be emperor to ravage the armies (and populations) of the other provinces and unite what would become China under his iron fist.
I want to make a distinction here, and it's an important distinction. If the movie was designed so that the tales of Jet Li's nameless warrior and the conflicting views of Broken Sword and Falling Snow were part of the emperor's interior conflict--i.e., the three warriors were symbols of the emperor's internal debate about the worthiness of his own cause--I don't think I would have had a problem with the movie. But the emperor never struck me as that vivid a character. He seemed as much a part of the rigid thematic structure as all the other characters. I guess what I'm saying is that the filmmaker wasn't interested in having the characters justify their actions to themselves. He wanted to justify the actions of the emperor TO THE AUDIENCE--and once I realized that, my antennae snapped up and I no longer trusted the movie.