"The so-called commercialism includes elements like story, plots, rhythms and large big scenes"
About this Quote
“Commercialism” is usually lobbed as an insult at filmmakers: a shorthand for selling out, sanding off rough edges, swapping ideas for box office. Zhang Yimou flips the slur into a toolkit. By calling it “so-called,” he’s doing two things at once: mocking the gatekeepers who treat popular appeal as contamination, and refusing to apologize for the craft of spectacle.
The list that follows is the tell. He doesn’t lead with merch or marketing; he leads with story, plots, rhythms. In other words: the grammar of audience attention. Zhang’s subtext is that commerce isn’t just money, it’s legibility. A film that moves - that has propulsion, tempo, and emotional beats - is already negotiating with mass desire. The “large big scenes” aren’t merely visual flexing; they’re a promise of scale, a way to translate theme into something you can feel in your chest. Think of his work where choreography, color, and crowds become narrative force, not garnish.
Context matters: Zhang’s career spans the art-house acclaim of early films and the era when Chinese cinema was asked to compete globally, domestically, and politically - often all at once. His quote reads like a defense brief delivered with a director’s pragmatism: the popular is not the enemy of the meaningful. It’s a set of levers. The real question isn’t whether a film is “commercial,” but whether it knows what it’s buying with those levers: awe, clarity, access, or compliance.
The list that follows is the tell. He doesn’t lead with merch or marketing; he leads with story, plots, rhythms. In other words: the grammar of audience attention. Zhang’s subtext is that commerce isn’t just money, it’s legibility. A film that moves - that has propulsion, tempo, and emotional beats - is already negotiating with mass desire. The “large big scenes” aren’t merely visual flexing; they’re a promise of scale, a way to translate theme into something you can feel in your chest. Think of his work where choreography, color, and crowds become narrative force, not garnish.
Context matters: Zhang’s career spans the art-house acclaim of early films and the era when Chinese cinema was asked to compete globally, domestically, and politically - often all at once. His quote reads like a defense brief delivered with a director’s pragmatism: the popular is not the enemy of the meaningful. It’s a set of levers. The real question isn’t whether a film is “commercial,” but whether it knows what it’s buying with those levers: awe, clarity, access, or compliance.
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| Topic | Movie |
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