Mai Nguyen.

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. After graduation, he was sent as a cinematographer to small inland studios that did not have the entrenched apprenticeship system of the big coastal studios. Zhang’s visual storytelling is evident in his early work as a cinematographer. While these early films are collective works, the visuals show a working method that informs Zhang Yimou’s later films as a director. Zhang says that he always adapts films from stories that he likes. It is widely recognized that Zhang’s visual imagery redefines the politics of Chinese self and identity. In the first decade, this imagery focused on the sexual power, reproductive continuity, and spectacle of the female body onscreen. Beautiful young women, played by Gong Li, are wife-daughter-mother-lover-virgin-vamp in the trilogy. This following video essay will examine more in Zhang's women figure through the use of colors in his footage.