Ink and wash from color to shadow Zhang Yimou’s film is a complete book of colors.

Special feature of 1905 film network Telling stories with colors is Zhang Yimou’s skill and his instinct.

When choosing a novel for adaptation, he said, "I like it because it is like a touch of pink in the war."

The first picture he thought of was that the students saw a group of beautifully dressed and dancing prostitutes entering the church through the bullet holes in the stained glass windows.

Laomouzi was born as a photographer, and the elements of photography are light, color, composition and movement. He is most sensitive to color.

Spielberg said: "I don’t know Chinese, but I understand Zhang Yimou’s through colors."

From bright and bright to black and white ink and wash, color has become the primary feature of his films, which is modeling, emotion and symbol. It has become both aesthetics and controversy.

Zhang Yimou’s palette

In his films, red is the most eye-catching, and it exists as a totem.

"Qin Jin, namely Shaanxi and Shanxi, will use red color when doing many things. Their manners and customs have influenced me, making me have a preference for red color, and then I will express this red color in turn. "

The red color of Red Sorghum was used to the extreme by him.

Red hijab, red sedan chair, red shoes, red sorghum wine, red sun and a pool of red blood, the rich and full red color first brings hearty wild beauty, and finally pours out and is all tragic.

Make a fuss in the dyehouse. Azure and chrysanthemum beans have an affair, red-dyed cloth flies up and down, and taboo lust is completely released.

Finally, Tianbai, the son of Tianqing, killed his father, and the red dyed cloth fell into the dyeing pool again, and the meaning of the red logo changed from desire to death.

The red lantern is the narrative "MacGuffin", which uses lighting, extinguishing and sealing to advance the story. Red lanterns point to women, status and power in the closed gray-black house and the feudal ethics.

Yellow is the initial primary color of Zhang Yimou’s participation in movies. In his chromatography, he always likes to combine red with yellow, just like the high-slope soil with red yellow in his hometown of Shaanxi.

The red cloth and the yellow cloth in "Chrysanthemum Bean" were sun-dried high, and they were all burned out, indicating warmth and intensity.

And the yellow dress that Gong Li wore at first pointed to the naked body and erotic temptation.

Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi confronted each other in the Populus euphratica forest in Hero. The golden leaves and the red clothes worn by the two men showed their coolness in the sword.

The imperial robe and phoenix robe in the garden are shiny with gold, and chrysanthemums are endowed with rebellious images. When the coup failed, yellow was dyed red with blood.

Blue-green has become the main color of people’s clothes in the park.

Among the green bamboo forests, Zhang Ziyi stood out in a green robe and cloak. Two policemen, Andy Lau in dark green, Takeshi Kaneshiro in blue and purple, each composed and calculating.

The blue light in the church of flowers of war is the main color of the film, and the students are also dressed in gray-blue clothes, which adds to the solemnity and heaviness during the war.　

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, Zhang Yimou’s film atlas began to be mixed from the early bright single color block to Hero.

Hero is divided into five colors: red, green, blue, white and black. Although gaudy, one person and one color;

A piece of stained glass in "flowers of war" draws out a female tragedy, in which NiNi is dressed in emeralds, and a "Qinhuai scene" is presented, in which all kinds of cheongsam are mixed in groups.

Even if he still uses the orange-blue tone used in Hollywood blockbusters, Lao Mouzi will still use five-color military uniforms, imperial robes and green beasts to engrave his own color imprint.

In "Shadow", the old man gradually put down his excessive fascination with bright colors and moved closer to the pale tones.

"Hawthorn Tree Love" and "Return" both took place in the 1970s, which was the era of blue, white, gray and green military uniforms. The color of the film was simple and elegant, and the color could no longer dominate.

The new film Shadow is a stage drama set in ink painting, and the black-and-white painting style is Zhang Yimou’s brand-new aesthetic choice.

The color of "madness"

Zhang Yimou and his team can do anything for these colors.

The colors of dyed fabrics in Chrysanthemum Bean are red, yellow, pink, blue and yellow, etc. The art group specially made chromatography to follow the story, and hung different colors of dyed fabrics every day to make choices.

The calligraphy museum in Hero is painted with a background color first, then painted and waxed with red shoe polish, and finally polished repeatedly with sandpaper, which takes a lot of effort.

Emi Wada, the clothing director, experimented with the dyeing methods of various fabrics for Hero. She soaked in the dye house every day, with the aim of dyeing 54 different reds.

"Hero" Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi’s duel in Huangshulin is breathtaking, but when shooting, because they can’t pick off the leaves on the trees in the scene, Zhang Yimou can only make a surprise move and mobilize fellow villagers to pick up the leaves.

Leaves are also divided into super, first, second and third grades. The color of the super-grade leaves is the golden, the first-grade leaves are accidentally scattered into the line of sight, the second-grade leaves are flying in the background, and the third-grade leaves are laid on the ground.

The main color of "House of Flying Daggers" is "Dunhuang color", mainly red, green and blue. In order to create the magnificence of the Peony Square, production designer Huo Tingxiao once revealed that there are more than 200 pillars in the Peony Square, with four or five hundred windows carved by hand with real wood and more than 50 palace lanterns. The Peony Square has been built for more than two months.

For the golden effect in House of Flying Daggers, Zhang Yimou called on his troops to buy flower seeds in Ukraine, which is famous for its rich sunflower, and hired more than 80 local flower farmers to sow and take care of them, but they didn’t grow well. Finally, they changed their location to shoot.

Chung-Man Hai, production designer, bought special fabrics from Hongkong and France, and specially made dragon robes and phoenix robes for Golden Flower.

Chow Yun Fat’s dragon robe is covered with 18K gold pieces with gold thread, weighing 40kg, while Gong Li’s phoenix robe has more than 20kg, while Chow Yun Fat’s gold armor is made of gold plated metal, and the helmet weighs even more than the dragon robe.

The crew of "flowers of war" went to great pains for the color of that window glass.

Zhang Yimou’s request for production designer Yohei Taneda is that "the glass should be as thin as possible, and the light blocking rate should not be too high. Don’t add too much organic texture in the paint. "

The art group has tried out many pieces of colored glass, but they can’t meet the director’s requirements.Too thick pigment affects the transparency of glass, and too thin color is not bright enough.

For this glass, production designer Yohei Taneda thought for several months, debugged various color samples, and finally passed the test.

Color plays, earthy aesthetics?

Zhang Yimou’s color aesthetics uses a single color block or mixed color block with high saturation to highlight the modeling wonders of landscapes and characters, to render the environmental atmosphere and to mobilize psychological emotions.

In visual principle, human eyes have three color-sensing cells: red-green, yellow-blue and black-white. Zhang Yimou is good at using these pairs of complementary colors to create contrast.

　The opening of the show takes color conflict as visual scheduling.

In a group of people dressed in blue, green and black, we were first attracted by Qiu Ju’s younger sister wearing a purple hat, and then we saw Qiu Ju walking behind her. She wore a green scarf and a red cotton-padded jacket, which was bright red and green, and immediately attracted attention.

Red and green are contradictory and fierce, just like Qiu Ju’s experience and attitude.

In the park, Zhang Ziyi ran in a pink cotton-padded jacket in the yellow-green mountains, and a touch of red occasionally appeared, creating a trace of warmth. The same is true of Love of Hawthorn Tree and Return.

In Hero, when the unknown tells the truth, the flying snow and the broken sword greet the fate of death, and the main color turns white, sad and quiet.

When the scene cuts back to the palace of the king of Qin again, it is majestic and powerful black that occupies the picture. The contrast between black and white creates the illusion and truth in the story.

The color of Zhang Yimou’s films is not natural and life-like, but artistic and exaggerated.

"I, together with the artist, often don’t hesitate to work, regardless of the facts. The dyeing of Ju Dou, the brewing of Red Sorghum, and the Red Lantern are not true in many places, so we should surpass the truth. "

Before the 1930s, black-and-white films would add color to the film by tinting, coloring and other dyeing techniques. However, the film not only wanted color, but also used color to create drama.

Lao Mouzi has made great efforts on color, but his color aesthetics is often criticized as "earthy aesthetics" and "formalization".

Especially from "Hero", when his film color enters the grand narrative of history, it often steals the limelight, and the characters become pale symbols, and the problem of taking care of one thing and losing another is exposed.

Colorful "Three Guns" and "The Great Wall" are more dazzling on the surface. "House of Flying Daggers" uses too much color and is wanton.

"Hero" hints at story paragraphs with different color block images, but when these monochromatic colors appear in turn, the characters are in them, and they all become passive unconscious tools.With gorgeous modeling, there is no soul to shake.

The color aesthetics of Shadow is a transformation of Zhang Yimou. He doesn’t use all kinds of bright monochrome directly and rudely like in commercial masterpieces such as Hero and The Great Wall.

Black and white are the main colors, but not only black and white, but also the skin color of people and the blood color that seeps out again and again in the martial arts confrontation.

These colors don’t compete with each other, they are integrated, even if the blood color is so good to play, the old man will not return to "Golden Flower" to deliberately aggravate its red.

The formal aesthetic feeling of Shadow is properly handled and measured.

All the people and things are melted into a smoke-filled ink painting in Shadow, and the characters wear clothes with ink patterns, as if they would melt with the rain at any time.

It creates an atmosphere in which ink and wash are as light as smoke, and the artistic conception of mountains and mountains is also strange when it rains. The plot of the drama is enclosed in a virtual historical time and space of ink painting.

Ink color is tangible and dramatic, but it does not deliberately emphasize the symbolic meaning of black and white, but like the real body and shadow in the story, the complex relationship between the master, the son and the state is contradictory and mutually superficial, secretly conveying the aesthetic value of yin and yang in black and white.

More importantly, in this ink color, Zhang Yimou’s content narrative is very appropriate.

He developed strengths and avoided weaknesses, and subtracted the complex struggle between national interests and political intrigue, and everything only ended.

The growth and transformation of the "shadow" state and the thickness of human nature are his main works.

This is the brilliant place of Shadow — — The dramatic value of people is the greatest value of film color.