Evaluating Absence as spectacle: Zhang Yimou's Hero

            The review of the movie Hero, published in 2003 in Cinema Scope Magazine, written by long-time Beijing resident Shelly Kraicer makes a point of emphasizing the beauty of the movie, but fails to mention in its introduction the various other arguments that the reader later discovers. The paragraphs do not seem to follow each other in an orderly manner, more like a story flowing round and round in a spiral, touching the same points again periodically to finally become a whole in the conclusion. It is very well possible that the author of the review, then living in China, was influenced by Asian culture and academic style and had written the piece this way on purpose.

            Four main ideas can be found in the article, more or less intertwined at one point or another. The first argument is that the film is visually stunning and that should be enough reason to watch it; yet this argument is only supported, in the beginning, by the description of a single scene, and only one picture in the entire review. The second paragraph brings up the film’s popularity in China, proposing possible causes and mentioning that it became a social phenomenon, then some paragraphs later developing one of the  causes into a point on how the film’s genre had reached its current state, which is very interesting, but quite far from the original subject. The final point debates whether the film is a people pleaser or a philosophical work with deeply covert meanings that needed to stay hidden from the eyes of the censors.

            In describing the story throughout the second half of the review, the author highlights two characters and discusses their roles as if the movie had no other storyline except for theirs, which is not true. Further scenes are discussed here in detail, again emphasizing the beautiful imagery, finally pointing out that it is actually used for something other than charming the audience. Telling and retelling the story using different images every time while saying nothing explicitly seems to be the way chosen by Zhang Yimou to avoid being banned yet still address the problems with dictatorship.

The arguments lack some support and are loaded with historical facts that are not entirely relevant, such as listing the directors who wish to make a movie in the same genre. The author only tries to explain the title in the second half of the review, but has to start again at the beginning of every paragraph. The article gets side-tracked so often that it becomes hard to follow if the reader does not force himself or herself to continue. It is possible to assume that the introduction and conclusion both consist of multiple paragraphs, but then finding which paragraph belongs to which part is not an easy task.

The director and the writer both weave their masterpiece together slowly; the viewer, the reader only understands the message by the end. This is acceptable for a movie, for a piece of art to make the spectator think about the meaning, but even if to mirror the structure of the original piece, an accomplished critic should not do such a thing when writing in English.

Link to the review: http://www.chinesecinemas.org/hero.html