ABSTRACT
Zhang Yimou’s Hero is a rare specimen in the history of Chinese cinema. As well as achieving blockbuster status in the West that few Chinese movies have managed, it was also extremely successful in China. The plot of the film is based loosely on stories of assassination attempts on the First Emperor of the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE) in Historical Records (Shiji) by Sima Qian (145-c.85 BCE). Reworkings of the assassin story abound throughout Chinese history. Hero is one such reworking, but a very unusual one. Other chapters in this book examine some of the reasons for the film’s commercial success and the critical attention it received, together with the major historical and political issues that provoked the events depicted. In this chapter, I examine how the First Emperor and the assassin are interpreted in the film, and contrast this with another big-budget movie made at around the same time by another high-profile director: Zhou Xiaowen’s The Emperor’s Shadow (Qin song, 1996, hereafter Shadow). Through this comparison I aim to illustrate the main features in the composition of an ideal hero in the contemporary Chinese consciousness. Hero and Shadow provide contrasting but pertinent illustrations of the Chinese construction of a hero because both present an epic narrative and draw on archetypal images of heroes from Shiji. In their negotiation with Shiji both films also present decidedly contemporary revisions of heroism. They are thus ideal vehicles for examining the elements that constitute the notion of a hero for the filmmakers and their audiences. Another film in the same style, Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin (Jingke ci qinwang, 1998, hereafter Assassin), will also be referred to briefly, but will not be the main focus of attention since Yiyan Wang has already compared it with Hero in the preceding chapter.
