Medialogy

Having seen the last big budget film of Beijing filmmaker, Yimou Zhang (of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon fame), Red Cliff, I recognized the grammar-less fantastics of the Beijing Opening ceremony created with the advertised budget of 300 million USD (you have to wonder at this figure, the budget of Hollywood films are normally expanded and hyped to become part of the PR campaign itself, but in this case perhaps the figure represents real dollars spent). His films are characterized by the combination of astonishingly high production value (albeit strange value to American eyes, where you notice the fake beard in a scene with 5000 costumed extras), especially focusing on the maximal use of people with a looseness of narrative… both the motives between scenes and between the action cut loose… practically gibberish, in the sense that the scenes are clearly cut on the basis of pageantry, like a song-less musical, instead of narrative cause and effect. I watched his newest, Red Ridge, just a few weeks ago in Singapore, and the audience refreshingly laughed through the whole thing… a refreshing expression of cynicism in the repressive Singaporean culture, his films functioning as a sort of camp of money—a post-irony camp, un-moored from any retro reference, but simply maximal and consumerist and extremely Chinese.

This reminds me of Barthes... particularly his affection for the fake beards in Ivan the Terrible

A desperate western interpretation... Photoshop-Tricks of Humanism.

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