Ideography·Documentation·Spectacle

The literary style means work shows special appearane and aesthtic characteristic in organic unify of content and form, it is embodiment of personality and sign of mature creation of body of art. But, the art style of creating body is seldom fixed and unchanged again. The excellent creator always forms own special style on the hand , constantly breaks and develops own esthetic style in the meantime, make style possess dynamic and exotertic diversity, in the Creation of contemporary movie art, ZhangYimou is doubtless the successful example of this aspect.In the career of direction nearly for 20 years, he always emphasize particularly on expression of art form and plastic language of film.meanwhile, advances with times, investigates continuously, innovates bravely , keeps oneself flexibility and tension of art, also makes workes appear diversification, multiformity of esthetics style, to investigate esthetics modality of Zhangyimou's movie works, we can generalize so: The directing films of Zhangyimou , from The Red Sorghum to The City Golden Armor, actually engender 3 kinds of esthetic styles or modalities, namely ideography, documentation and Spectacle, and along with the change of ages, experiences transmutation process one by one in order from ideography to documentation, to spectacle in the end.The ideography movie values a cinematic shape performance function very much, the environment and appearance are fully symbolized, the person image is signed , color, voice and so on—these movie chemical element are height of ideography. as a result, strong subjective and heavy feelings color for the film , it appears deep philosophy meaning and strong poetry style. ZhangYmou's films for earlier period such as The Red Sorghum, The Chrysanthemum Bean and Raise The Red Lantern incarnate this aspect art interest and pursuit, they are mature ideography esthetic modality.In a comparative sense,the films such as The Story of Qiu Ju ,To live, Not onelessthen pay more attention to narrative and expending of time . the director makes use of a realistic technique of expression and not show his feelings of drawing, try hard to reproduce"original ecosystem" of the social activities and show unintentionally the person genuine feelings. They belong to documentation esthetics modality , also constitute ZhangYimou's main art pursuit for second stage.Then three ancient costume big films in the new century -Hero , House of Flying Daggers ,The City Golden Armor emblematize perfection and maturity increasingly of ZhangYimou's pectacular movie modality, they belong to director a kind of new esthetics aim and art pursuit, namely the visual sense highlighted esthetics: to emphasize expression on perceptive aspect of movie, great scene extremely dainty image , spectacular shape , have very strong wallop in visual sense . But oppositely, then usually are simple narrative not plentiful character and not deep thought, exactly in a way, the spectacular movie has postmodern meaning which seeks plane flat surface and un-deep expression.ZhangYimou is the director who investigates continuously,pursues continuously and "pursues novelty and change ",which is surely the performance of his art character and cultural pioneer consciousness, in the meantime is aslo his public-cultural strategy, namely to concentrate on leading current,construct vogue and push fad. this has something to do with the director's life and personality, life-experience and the influence of the fifth generation movie person's art activity in early days . On the other hand, the same artic creator shows different esthetic characteristic and appearance in the different history period work, which would be the influence of cultural condition of age .when ZhangYimou directs film, he always pays attention to dialogizing and intertexting to cultural condition of age, in other words cultural condition of age is always the latent dialogue object and background of ZhangYimou's movie creations, the special esthetics appearance is the result which ZhangYimou tastes and perceive condition of times. According to these, we can look on ZhangYimou's movie as a mirror to new period of China, a kind of good metaphor and token.