2022 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony

Complete first draft for Hyperallergic.

At this point, it’s almost a moot point to discuss the development of Zhang Yimou’s career, certainly one of the most willfully contradictory yet often inspired — or at least beautiful — oeuvres in film history, one indelibly tied up in the politics and socioeconomics of the People’s Republic of China. After serving as cinematographer on Chen Kaige’s landmark film Yellow Earth (1984), Zhang burst out as the international face of the Fifth Generation, the movement that downplayed Cultural Revolution-era social realism filmmaking in favor of more lavish works, frequently set in the past and infusing its melodramas with a profusion of style. Zhang’s professional and personal relationship with Gong Li formed the first part of his career, which stretched from Red Sorghum (1987) to Shanghai Triad (1995) and represented a flourish of recognition of mainland China’s artistic possibility on the world stage, even and perhaps especially because these films were routinely banned in his country. After a brief turn to full-on neorealism at the turn of the century, Zhang’s Hero established him as a newfound director of action-driven spectacle, and his work ever since has effectively alternated between his smaller-scale dramas and historical action. Consequently, he has found great favor with the Chinese government, though this can vary from film to film: One Second (2020), intended as a heartfelt love-letter to cinema, had its international and domestic premieres canceled multiple times before being released unceremoniously in multiplexes. Nevertheless, he clearly stands as not only one of the most prominent mainland Chinese directors, but also one who has a particularly malleable political outlook in his work; unlike, say, Jia Zhangke, who has formed something of an oppositional but still well-recognized output, his films in both modes seem to build out of the internal drama first, involving exterior forces only insofar as they feel germane to the narrative at hand. While it would be too much to read Zhang’s cinema as a reflection of evolving political involvement, his films tend to cater to the status quo, whatever that may be. Such clear gifts for color and scale, and crucially not any direct political statements, were likely the main reasons that Zhang was picked to helm the 2008 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. Prior to 2008, it would be inaccurate to say that there was a lack of ambition, but the “artistic section,” first truly instituted at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, had been mainly directed by people whose main artistic domain lay in theater. While Zhang himself has had substantial experience in stage work, he was the first film director to lead an Olympics opening ceremony. What he turned in still ranks among the great modern spectacles, an epic that led at least the next two opening ceremonies to hire similar metteurs en scènes: Danny Boyle for 2012 in London and Fernando Meirelles in 2016 for Rio. But Zhang’s epic still stands alone, not merely for the extravagant use of 15,000 performers and their awe-inspiring tradition, or the heavy invocations of one of the oldest and most auspicious cultures and nations in the world, or the dramatic LED scroll that connected past, present, and future. What many justified raves failed to point out that the performances weren’t completely perfect: a missed cue here, a light left on there, little moments that popped out of what could have been a uniform, if thoroughly impressive mass. While it’s true that no live performance could ever be totally airtight, it rings as a reminder that these are still actual human beings, all linked together in a grand endeavor to honor something much bigger than themselves; that it so fluidly moved from innovation to innovation, cultural strand to cultural strand, made it all the more moving and vibrant. All of this is to say that Zhang’s return to direct the 2022 Winter Olympics opening ceremony, once again in Beijing, comes as an enormous let-down in comparison. True, the Winter Olympics generally carry considerably less of a global cachet compared to their Summer counterparts, and consequently the opening ceremonies are not required to carry such a fanfare. COVID still remains an enormous concern as well, and it would have probably been far too much to expect Zhang to top his greatest achievement. But everything that distinguished his artistic contributions in 2008 feels either lacking or missing altogether, not only because the initial artistic section lasted less than 20 minutes, close to an hour shorter than 2008. For one, while 2008 used short films as brief interstitial moments, 2022 opened with one, a three-minute countdown that moved backwards through the 24 solar terms in the Chinese calendar as a commemoration of the then-ongoing Chinese New Year/Spring Festival. Each term is represented by glossy, frequently slow-motion images, intended to showcase each spray of snow and ice in a manner far removed from the simplicity of the paper-making video in 2008. That reliance on technology to the detriment of the actual performers and cultural intentions was greatly magnified in the first physical act: 400 performers carried LED sticks to represent the lifecycle of the dandelion, a lovely image of long, waving green stalks that was thoroughly upstaged by what the dancers were standing on: the world’s largest LED screen that covered the entirety of the Bird’s Nest stadium floor, where 2,008 drummers were pounding away less than 14 years before. As the stalks waved, green and yellow rays emanated out, neither subsuming the physical stalks nor truly enhancing them: because the screen stayed as a static floor, the uncanny effect was created of a seemingly bottomless pit of light and bombast that existed in contrast to the image of purported delicacy and harmony that was trying to be conveyed. Due to the paucity of actual acts, the presentation of the Chinese flag ended up effectively as the second part of the artistic program, a long passing of the flag across people from the 56 different ethnic groups of China — here, as elsewhere, the NBC Olympics crew could not resist an extended discussion of the terrible treatment of the Uyghurs, which would ring less hollow if such attention was paid with the same consistency to the plight of the oppressed in every single country that has hosted the Olympics to date. The final part of the initial artistic portion (before the Parade of Nations) was another LED extravaganza, mutating the water into a block of ice that displayed the dates and locations of the previous Winter Olympics in a light show projected on a digital block of ice, followed by human ice skaters miming hitting a LED hockey puck that whizzed into and broke the block to form the Olympic rings, another moment that offered precious little in terms of Chinese specificity; while the Yellow River that formed the ice block might have carried some resonance, it was in the service of a show that felt truly conventional, and totally lacking in the humanity that 2008 had so vividly carried. There were some more aspects of the artistic portion woven throughout the rest, including the introduction of a snowflake motif, a line of people walking across the screen to showcase images of community amid the pandemic, and, of all things, another group of ice skaters moving across the screen to a cover of “Imagine.” But all of that — and Zhang’s decision to use the Olympic torch itself as the Olympic cauldron to encourage environmental sustainability — paled in comparison to the thorniness of a decision that could not have been Zhang’s: to have Dinigeer Yilamujiang, an Uyghur skier, to co-light the cauldron. Such an overtly political act only threw into relief the passive and technology-obsessed displays that had preceded it. While the temptation is to blame Zhang, he has largely resisted the increasing bloat that has gripped Chinese popular filmmaking in the past few decades: his two most recent films, One Second and Cliff Walkers (2021), a taut and violent World War II spy thriller, almost prided themselves on their relatively stripped-down scale. Instead, if Zhang, as per the NBC broadcast, sought to make a more “introspective, thought-provoking” ceremony that emphasized unity, it’s more likely the case that he just missed the mark, unable to bring out these qualities in the face of the drive for innovation and spectacle that he himself helped usher in.