Note: This piece is the beginning of a new column at Literary Matters which I am calling “Images and Words.” I have begun this series at the behest of our beloved Cameron Clark, who asked me to write it after my many discussions with him on the poetic merits of that popular art form, the movies. This column also seeks to help us meet the sixth goal of the ALSCW, as stated on our website, “to explore the literary dimensions of other arts, including film, drama, painting, and music.” This piece, in particular, is a reworking of a paper I wrote for Elijah Blumov’s “Poetry and Mythology” panel at the 2025 ALSCW Conference. Enjoy!
When our very humanity is alienated from us on a daily basis, we must have salutary art which recalls us to what we are; art which reminds us that we are not mere apes, not mere machines, but little less than angels: born to suffer and die, but also to grasp toward the divine. Now is the time for such art to be made again. May Epic and Tragedy rise. May Lyric regain the voice of eagles.
Elijah Perseus Blumov, “The Iron Lyre”
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To be a poet today is to work within conditions of fragmentation: of audience, of patronage, of medium, of culture, of myth. The poet’s traditional role as a public maker, or communicator, of meaning has receded in an age dominated by mass media, commerce, and spectacle—large in scale but small in presentation.
Even in The Republic, Plato agrees that, indeed, Homer is the great poetic educator of Greece, though his greatness is faded in most of his successors. Aristotle agrees, too, in his Poetics, saying that it is Homer in particular who taught the poets the best and most universal way to imitate life. Fast-forward a couple millennia, though, and Nietzsche writing of European decadence says through his Zarathustra that the poets lie too much, know too little, are bad learners, and are obliged to lie. Move forward less than 150 years more, and what do we have?—Perhaps poets who have even totally abdicated their role in culture, especially considering poets as writers of so-called verse, but even considering poets as literary writers at large.
Paradoxically, it is within this very spectacle of decadence and decline that something like poetry has continued to thrive. Only a decade after Nietzsche’s death, as verse poetry through Modernism was being revolutionized but also being made less popular, a new poetic form emerged: Cinema. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the “popular poet” is often not a writer of verse but a filmmaker, of one kind or another. Cinema, through its capacity for rhythmic imagery, emotional compression, and archetypal narrative, has, in its way, become the vessel in which popular poetry persists.
The popular poet, in the Aristotelian sense, as seen in the Poetics—where Aristotle further refines Plato’s understanding of “the poets” (their popular attitude being one of their key attributes)—is one who crafts stories that communicate the “probable”: εἰκός—kata to eikos—It rings deeply and true. As Aristotle says in Malcolm Heath’s translation, “The function of the poet is not to say what has happened, but to say the kind of thing that would happen, i.e. what is possible in accordance with probability or necessity,” and, for the poet, “probable impossibilities are preferable to implausible possibilities.” Further, the popular poet expresses, illustrates, and conveys universal truths through imitation, mimesis—through myth, through poiesis, through the shaping of “probability” in moral imagination.
Even so, especially in the current environment of decadence and hypercapitalism, such a poet faces extraordinary difficulties: to please a mass audience while aspiring toward artistic truth, to negotiate between art and patronage, and to preserve moral sincerity in an age of commodified emotion. These tensions partially define the careers of all the best of the great popular poets, likewise all the great filmmakers—especially the filmmaker I wish to consider here: the Chinese writer and director Zhang Yimou.
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Zhang Yimou is a filmmaker still working near the full of his strength today and still producing commercially successful films, so he presents himself to us as an excellent example of these tensions. He is an artist working to transform images and myths into modern poetic forms, and he is an artist whose struggles within power structures illuminate both the perils and the possibilities of being not only a poet but a popular poet in our postmodern age.
Zhang’s career as one of the greatest of the Chinese filmmakers illustrates how mythological imagination can survive within political constraints. It even reveals how this has long been the case—we have only to think of such examples as Virgil and his Aeneid.
Emerging in China’s Fifth Generation of filmmakers, who first artistically legitimized Chinese cinema post-Cultural Revolution, Zhang first gained international acclaim with social realist-adjacent films like Red Sorghum (1987) and Raise the Red Lantern (1991), which, despite their leanings toward and slightly away from Communist social realism, nevertheless employed formal beauty to critique Chinese government propaganda, social oppression, and cultural repression. Yet Zhang’s later works—approved and sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party, in contrast to his earlier films, in and around which he often resisted the CCP—increasingly turned to stylized mythology and historical allegory. Hero (2002), Shadow (2018), and Full River Red (2023) exemplify his evolution into a Chinese visual poet of national myth, a turn toward legend and epic, marking a shift in his stories from individual psychology to civilizational poetics.
Zhang’s films operate within (and, even still, subtly against, but in this regard more esoterically) the ideological apparatus of the Chinese state, which he has both resisted and served. In his early career, the CCP criticized and censored him for his veiled dissent. Later, they commissioned him to direct the Beijing Olympics ceremony, a nationalistic spectacle that nonetheless revealed Zhang’s mastery of choreographed beauty in images.
“The Chinese censorship system has been in practice for many years,” he told the Guardian in 2004. “I don’t think there will be much change in society… This situation has been present for a long time, and it is a reality in China. I work and live in this system.”
This duality marks Zhang as a modern version of the Chinese court poet, a servant to power yet striving desperately to humanize—to humanize his government, his nation, his people, the lovers of his work, even himself.
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In Hero, Zhang transforms the historical Chinese legend of Jing Ke’s attempted assassination of the Qin emperor King Zheng, the first emperor of China, into a meditation on unity and sacrifice. The film’s color-coded flashbacks (red for passion, blue for reflection, white for transcendence), shifting perspectives, stylized choreography, and love of calligraphy not only compose a visual prosody that helps elevate its narrative to the level of mythological poetry but also create an epic of moral ambiguity: Is peace purchased through tyranny justified? The mythic narrative becomes a mirror then for both China’s imperial past and its authoritarian present—again bringing Virgil and his Aeneid to mind—but also a contemplation on the universal problem of moral compromise. Hero is both a propagandistic patriotic allegory and a critique of authoritarian idealism on both sides in the story.
Shadow continues this exploration through a filmic color palette of grayscale tones and reflections, evoking the beauty of Chinese ink paintings. The film stages dualities of self and other, loyalty and betrayal. A historical martial arts drama with rare emotional depth and complexity of character. Its martial arts sequences are ballets of symmetry and negation, embodying what might be called a Taoist poetics of power. Zhang’s mythological imagination turns historical material into visual allegory. Each shot is a lyrical stanza in an epic cinematic poem of identity, nationality, and human frailty. The mirrored imagery allows for this Taoist meditation on duality.
The protagonist’s body double becomes a figure of both political substitution and ontological crisis.—What is the nature of being? Shadows—poetic, philosophic, aesthetic, and moral—abound. They reflect the artist’s and the nation’s conflicts of identity too. In Shadow, again, there is the concern with unity, this time in opposites. Yin-yang as symbol. Tai-chi as spiritual. The low versus the high (the high arises through the low, as the Tao Te Ching says). The male versus the female. The man and his shadow. The concerns are human, all too human, but the consequences are national and spiritual.
Full River Red, meanwhile, directly engages literary verse poetry: Central to the hidden romance of the story is a traditional “Cherry Song” lyric; toward the finale, character monologues fall in and out of Chinese poetic meters; and the film’s climax reveals the importance of General Yue Fei’s famous patriotic poem, “Man Jiang Hong (Full River Red),” to the plot.
In this way, Zhang fuses cinematic and literary traditions into a modern act of national remembrance. This can be seen as well in the way Zhang fuses genres in Full River Red (first thriller, then black comedy, then tragedy) as well as music (traditional and contemporary music mixed together in the soundtrack, drawing an explicit comparison between Song Dynasty and contemporary China in both culture and politics). Full River Red is so focused on Chinese things as to alienate much of the Western audience, yet it is also a subtle critique of the Han.
While Full River Red is ostensibly a historical thriller about the Song dynasty, it extends Zhang’s project by reworking classical Chinese poetry in cinematic form. The film concludes with the recitation of Yue Fei’s poem, invoking moral endurance within political constraint. Word, image, and myth work together for national memory. Yet, intriguingly, the story features a protagonist with the same family name as Zhang: Zhang Da—clever, careful, unassuming, but secretly carrying out a mission of immense national importance, a humanistic mission relying on the power of a betrayed general’s well-written poem to overcome the decadent intricacies of late Song Dynasty politics, or at least to let in a ray of hope.
“Man Jiang Hong (The River is Full and Red)”
By General Yue Fei
My helmet rattles furiously
As I lean against the parapet—
The rain stops… for a moment.
I turn to face the clouds
And hiss strong curses, toward the gods,
From deep within my aching breast.
At thirty years of age, my deeds and fame mean nothing—dust.
My journey—cruel—brought me eight thousand li beneath the moon.
“Fool, sit ye not by idly,” mocks the sage, “and let black hair grow gray!
Young men grow white despairing.”
Yet the crushing Jingkang Shame
Still lingers—winter snow.
When will oppressive hearts
Melt and bring on spring?
No more waiting! Let’s break out our chariots and ride for Helan Pass!
There we shall carve out freedom from those slopes—ambitious hunger!
There we shall laugh and drink red Jurchen wine—drink to our fills!
Let us restore these mountains and these rivers for ourselves, anew,
And here rebuild our thrones.
Zhang Yimou’s negotiation with the Chinese state, as his patron and his censor, thus mirrors the ancient poet’s relation to his own patrons: he serves the empire but attempts to speak moral truths from within it. His mythological imagery is a vehicle for both affirmation and critique, a visual poetics of moral ambiguity but also necessity and universality within the spectacle of Chinese nationalism.
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Zhang Yimou inhabits a world shaped by political censorship and navigates systems that demand compromise. He is a poet under an imperfect system of patronage, entangled with power, constrained yet creative within power’s orbit. His state-sponsored productions, smuggling moral insight and complexity into official narratives and importing tragic myth into escapist entertainment, represents a real form of artistic negotiation: propaganda and spectacle as parallel conditions of modern poiesis.
Zhang is a director who brings his strong mythological imagination to bear in mediating between art and authority. Myth allows him to encode moral truth within forms acceptable to his patrons. Even in his patriotic allegories, myth restores the human to systems that threaten to erase it. His visual formalism and techniques, the choreographic precision of his painterly compositions, demonstrate a belief that poetic form itself is moral. Beauty is his vehicle for truth, even when that truth must hide beneath spectacle—sometimes silly but not unserious in his hands. Zhang’s filmography suggests that beauty in poetry can be a form of moral resistance to decadence. Form almost as conscience.
Critically, Zhang Yimou is a director who asserts cinema’s potential as popular art with moral vision, elevating the mass medium to the level of mythic expression. He adapts an inherited vocabulary of Chinese historical legend to reimagine collective ideals. Through mythic poetics, he reconciles pleasure, imitation, and truth, giving his popular audience not simple escapism but participation in the moral imagination. He believes in cinema’s universality. As the Chinese put it, it is his tianxia, the all-under-heaven, a striving toward moral totality. He adapts that inherited mythic vocabulary and commits to it in order to reassert the moral universality of popular art, the ability of cinema to be an art of the people that still aspires to truth, and the shaping of collective feeling through symbolic action.
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It is through filmmakers like Zhang Yimou, then, that cinema endures as, currently, the last great art of the people, a modern poiesis reconciling spectacle with truth, transcending its constraints through the power of creative will, and discovering in myth the language through which mass art might still aspire to permanence.
Zhang’s work reminds us that myth remains the living grammar of collective imagination. To watch a film like Hero or Full River Red is to encounter, though not as purely, the same poetic impulses that moved Homer and Virgil: as Aristotle described it, the desire to show both emotionally and intellectually what humankind probably or inevitably does or should do in its search for justice, beauty, meaning, and transcendence.
Zhang Yimou has both faced and overcome challenges similar to those faced by all aspiring poets in the modern media landscape, and more. For the modern artist in general, his lesson is clear: to be a true popular poet today is not to abandon seriousness for accessibility, nor art for entertainment, but to find within the popular the very conditions of enduring art. Cinema, the art of images in motion, remains the medium where the ancient marriage of pleasure, imitation, and truth continues or can continue. Through filmmakers like Zhang Yimou, cinema shows us that poetry still lives, not in the margins, but in the luminous center of the world.
Cinema continues to be what Aristotle envisioned poetry to be: the art that makes human life intelligible through beautiful imitation. In the great filmmakers’ work, poetry still lives, in movement, in image, in myth.
However, in closing, I wish to offer some encouragement for those of us who are not filmmakers: Cinema need not continue as the last great art of the people, the last holding on and moving forward, if only the more traditionally serious poets will learn the lessons that such artists as Zhang Yimou have to teach us. There is no need for us to abdicate our responsibilities! As Ernest Fenollosa once advised, “The chief work of literary men in dealing with language, and of poets especially, lies in feeling back along the ancient lines of advance.”