Zhang Yimou’s Unbridled Creativity and Skyscraping Ambition Made The 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony A Lasting Work Of Art

This Friday, the 2022 Winter Olympics will kick off at the National Stadium in Beijing, promising two weeks of tragedy, triumph, and wanton sexual escapades for a new generation of athletes. To the sport-averse among us, however, the primary interest lies in the pageantry and spectacle of the opening ceremonies. Directed by the filmmaking great Zhang Yimou, this year’s launch team has pre-announced its themes as the classic “faster, higher, stronger — together” Olympic motto, the slogan “together for a shared future,” and the ideal of “China’s yearning for and willingness to pursue world peace.” They’re all rolled in to Zhang’s overall aspiration to provide uplift and healing after the past two years of pandemic hardship, even as the ongoing question of COVID has put an anxious damper on the upcoming games. That, and the handful of countries diplomatically withdrawing from representation at the ceremonies in protest of China’s human rights violations. And the Russian doping scandal. And the infrastructure issues threatening to metastasize into a clusterfuck of unprecedented proportions.

It’s no small undertaking, with Zhang reportedly marshaling four thousand performers and untold millions in the knowledge that he’s got stiff competition — himself. He directed the ceremonies the last time the Olympics came to Beijing in summer 2008, a feat of artistic coordination mounted on a scale dwarfing everything that came before. His technical mastery, unbridled creativity, and skyscraping ambition had the dumbstruck press declaring the four-plus-hour proceedings the greatest in the program’s history. Revisiting the broadcast today (available to stream in full on YouTube), there’s no arguing with the fact of its sheer grandeur. But with almost a decade and a half of retrospect, its political dimension commands almost as much attention as the hurricanes of light and color. More than mere spectacle, the Beijing opening ceremonies now tower over the whole of twenty-first-century media as the most epically accomplished work of propaganda since I Am Cuba.

China had settled into its role as a global superpower by 2008, well on the way to becoming the richest and most influential nation on the planet. In this respect, the ceremony had a tricky needle to thread, angling to both establish the dominance of the host country while conveying their stated position of a “peaceful rise” under President Hu Jintao. The result was a show of Riefenstahlian might (complete with an aerial prelude, goose-stepping soldiers, and one-armed salutes) studiously scrubbed of any explicit ideological content, reaching to prove its harmlessness despite the firepower on display. This would be China’s coming-out party to the rest of Earth, dazzling proof that they’d fully arrived following the hardships of Maoism and its aftershocks.

There’s an inherent shock-and-awe factor to Zhang’s buffet-style maximalism, which strives to be every art form at once in its delirious combination of cinema, theatre, marching band, color guard, painting, and architecture, with just a dash of puppetry and opera thrown in for good measure. A hundred-million-plus budget will get you pretty far in China, paying for thousands of bronze drums, a gigantic movable LED scroll, and enough fireworks for a dozen 4th of Julys. At one point, a globe rises out of the floor and performers run around it in seeming defiance of the laws of gravity. No expense was spared; this would be the first ceremony to guarantee a rainless night for its open-air extravaganza through the use of weather-modification techniques.

Some of the most breathtaking moments fall under the principle of art for its own glorious sake, even with their clearly delineated symbolism. The initial countdown suggests unity by depicting Arabic numerals alongside Chinese characters, though we’re all busy in amazement over the kaleidoscopic sight of thousands of percussionists in perfect lines, perfectly synchronized. (As Michael Sheen joked on 30 Rock about the London Olympics in 2012, “We don’t have control over our people like that.”) When the dove-of-peace icon appears in a human chain, it’s the physical effect that commands focus, its wing-flapping motion simulated by hundreds of performers in Christmas-lights-and-yellow-highlighter costumes running back and forth. Between the uniformity of the movement and the enormous size of the formations, many of the group numbers faintly resemble militaristic Busby Berkeley abstractions, ravishing tessellations of dyed silk.

In his coverage for the Associated Press, reporter David Crary noted the ceremony’s avoidance of anything that could scan as overtly political. But that absence can’t help making its own statements in a barely concealed subtext, promoting the image of a robust, advanced China. Zhang placed his focus squarely on the medieval past and elided the messy, contentious present to foreground the many contributions his country has made to the fabric of modern life. Beyond the Four Great Inventions of paper, the compass, gunpowder, and printmaking, we see fantastical representations of ceramics, the kite, junk ships, stringed instruments like the guqin, and a booming space exploration program. A nod to the superior education system provides one of the more surreal moments, as children in crayon-colored backpacks chant dubbed-in poetry while painting a mural envisioning a healthy environment in their lifetime.

Those kids appeared earlier in the show, wearing the customary dress of the 56 ethnic groups comprising the Chinese population. Here, the messaging comes closest to outright state revisionism, painting over centuries of turbulence and persecution for minorities with an apple-cheeked smiley-face. Tellingly, the gathered children were all of Han descent, the ethnicity making up over ninety percent of China’s citizenry. And going unrepresented that night were the estimated hundred-plus ethnic factions that the Chinese government refuses to recognize, their space occupied by hundreds of umbrellas unfurling to reveal smiling children of every race. Agreeable neutrality is still a position, not a lack of one, something Steven Spielberg presumably understood when he withdrew as advisor in objection to China’s support of the Sudanese government’s genocide in Darfur.

Looking back at the hilariously tacky Britishisms of the 2012 opening ceremony in London or the awkward mea culpa for slavery from Rio de Janeiro in 2016, it looks like packaging a national identity may necessarily entail a bit of tone-deafness or unsettling patriotism. But no one has done it with the audacious aplomb of Zhang, who parleyed the limitless backing that comes with a government gig into wuxia magnificence unseen on TV before or since. There’s a special thrill unique to his organizational coup, a transparency that his cinema work can obfuscate through editing or special-effects work. There’s no CGI jiggery-pokery at play, just human willpower and discipline in concert with the most cutting-edge staging money can buy. In one sequence, type-blocks join together to form a facsimile of the Great Wall and then undulate in a flawless wave-form, until the tops pop off and the performers inside wave. It’s as if they mean to confirm that people did this, not computers. They’re the newest manmade wonder of the world.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.