Heroic Human Pixels: Mass Ornaments and Digital Multitudes in Zhang Yimou’s Spectacles

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 51

Heroic Human Pixels: Mass Ornaments and Digital Multitudes in Zhang Yimou’s Spectacles†

Jason McGrath

During NBC’s live U.S. television broadcast of the opening ceremonies of

the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Bob Costas remarked that the thousands of

drummers who kicked off the ceremony performed with “almost fierce

precision” (his emphasis). Shortly later in the broadcast, commentator Matt

Lauer observed: “Bob, a nation of 1.3 billion putting on a show like this,

and people at home are not alone if they’re saying it’s both awe-inspiring

and perhaps a little intimidating, but they told these drummers earlier in

a rehearsal to smile more, and that’s taken some of the edge off of it . . .

some.” (Dry laughter follows.) What exactly was “fierce” or “intimidating”

about the performances hardly needed to be spelled out, nor was

the metonymic relation of the performers to their 1.3 billion Chinese

compatriots questioned. Although NBC’s narration of the spectacle—

staged by renowned film director Zhang Yimou—mostly hewed to the

themes of harmony and openness (“one world, one dream”) that were

the official script of the ceremonies, moments like these clearly activated

a dark yet familiar alternative image of the Chinese as an undifferentiated,

highly disciplined mass, a threatening yellow horde that comes from an

imagination fueled by both longstanding American racism and Cold War

† My thanks to the MCLC editors and anonymous readers for their very helpful suggestions, to David J. Davies for key reading recommendations and the use of his photograph, and to Daniel Morgan for feedback and encouragement.

52 • Heroic Human Pixels

fantasies of communism. As a television critic for the Orlando Sentinel

bluntly put it, the opening ceremony “reduced performers to cogs in a

machine” and aimed “to celebrate Chinese militarism” to the extent that

“a dance to Mao and [the] Cultural Revolution . . . would have been in

keeping with the military themes” (Boedeker 2008).

The threat invoked is that of the loss of freedom through the total

subsumption of the individual by the collective, a sense that is rhetorically

emphasized by describing the performers’ precision not just as fierce or

intimidating but as downright military. Nonetheless, the NBC commentators

themselves mostly attempted to present such issues in a polite, politically

correct, culturally relativist frame. For example, as a vaguely traditionally

costumed performer danced on a surface held aloft by a multitude of

people below her, the commentators remarked on “the symbolism of

this one dancer being supported by these many beneath her,” explaining

that “it’s a fundamental issue in the nature of Chinese culture about the

relationship between the one and the many, and Zhang Yimou, who’s a

master of visual symbolism, obviously here sending a message that great

accomplishments—great individual accomplishments—particularly in this

society rely on much more than the individual alone.”

Indeed, the Western imagination activated here is one overdetermined

not just by the threat of communism but by past stereotypes ranging

from patriarchal Confucian family values to “Oriental despotism”; as

Daniel Vukovich (2012) has convincingly demonstrated, the demonization

of Chinese communism is deeply imbricated in the broader orientalist

discourse about China in the West. There is in fact a fundamental irony to

any Western fears of a unified and thereby threatening Chinese society. As

Tong Lam (2011: 9) has shown in detail, the very concept of society did not

exist in China until around the beginning of the twentieth century, and it

was introduced into Chinese discourse mainly as a lamented lack, in that

“many Chinese writers contended . . . that China did not have a real society.”

The fear was rather that, as Sun Yat-sen himself put it, China was merely


“‘a heap of loose sand’ (yipan san sha) made up of four hundred million

individuals” rather than “a cohesive ‘national social body’ (minzu tuanti)

as solid as a rock” (Lam 2009: 9) and thus unable to stand up to imperialist

aggression from more economically and militarily advanced nations.

A century later, of course, in the context of China’s emergence as

an economic powerhouse within a precarious global capitalist system,

any Western paranoia over a Chinese society so solidified as to lack

individual granularity contrasts with the ongoing fear within China of

social disintegration in the face of the massive forces transforming the

country. Westerners’ suspicious comments on the Olympic ceremony are

perhaps motivated equally by fears of uncontrollable global economic

forces. The anxiety they reveal has less to do with Confucian tradition or

Maoist ideology than with the idea that the Chinese economic machine,

fueled by a vast, disciplined social workforce, will overcome Western

economic hegemony. Such conditions also are relevant to NBC anchor Jim

Lampley’s description of the Olympic ceremony as “a spectacle without

equal in Olympics history—15,000 cast members in a futuristic production

that exceeds even the most lavish of Hollywood blockbusters.” Specifically

cinematic spectacle has become one of the areas in which competition from

China offers both a threat and an opportunity, just as the Olympic festivities

themselves were judged at least somewhat negatively according to liberal

Western criteria even as they were packaged and consumed abroad for

the profit of global media corporations such as NBC.

It is at least partly in this context that we should understand the by-

now-familiar story of director Zhang Yimou himself transitioning from

being celebrated in the West as an artist-dissident to being criticized for

selling out to an oppressive Chinese government. In this essay, I look in

particular at the use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in Zhang Yimou’s

films and relate his special-effects blockbusters in the latter stage of his

career to his work on the opening and closing ceremonies for the Beijing

Olympics. One issue I examine is the claim that Zhang Yimou’s talents


have been thoroughly co-opted by the Chinese Communist authorities;

in particular, his 2002 film Yingxiong (Hero) and his Olympic ceremonies

choreography have been accused of promoting what is at best the crass

nationalism of a Chinese state on the rise and at worst a downright

totalitarian or fascist aesthetic that celebrates mindless submission of the

individual to state power. I consider such views through selected Western

and Chinese criticism as well as through the critiques of fascist aesthetics

offered by Susan Sontag and Siegfried Kracauer. More important, however,

I seek to complicate such a perspective by reference to a set of theoretical

concepts that facilitate an approach to the aesthetics of human figures in

these works; these concepts include the “digital multitude” as conceived

by Kristen Whissel in her analysis of special-effects blockbusters as well as

Kracauer’s divergent discussions of the “mass ornament” as a manifestation

either of fascism or of capitalist modernity. I suggest that the sorts of

mass spectacles organized by Zhang Yimou in the end say more about the

“harmony” of contemporary China with globalized capitalism than about

either totalitarian aesthetics or nationalist propaganda. In fact, of much

more interest than their ostensible capitulation to Chinese nationalism is

their demonstration of the logic of digital labor in a globalized economy,

including the surplus value Chinese workers offer within a system of global

labor arbitrage.

CGI and the Cultural Imaginary

The CGI-enabled Chinese martial arts action cinema that has come to

prominence since around the turn of the twenty-first century often draws

on funding and talent from across “greater China” and beyond. Special

effects of one kind or another have been an important aspect of martial arts

films since the silent era of Shanghai cinema, but in recent years the use of

CGI in particular has been featured in global blockbusters in the resurgent

genre, such as Wohu canglong (Crouching tiger, hidden dragon; dir. Ang

Lee [Li An], 2000), Hero (2002), Shimian maifu (House of flying daggers;


dir. Zhang Yimou, 2003), Gongfu (Kung fu hustle; dir. Stephen Chow [Zhou

Xingchi], 2004), and Chi bi (Red cliff; dir. John Woo [Wu Yusen], 2008). In

such films, digital techniques are enlisted to create spectacular illusory

effects corresponding to stories and images from the Chinese narrative

tradition—from the Buddha’s palm motif in Kung Fu Hustle to the trick

torching of Cao Cao’s armada in Red Cliff’s adaptation of the Romance

of the Three Kingdoms story. The virtual reality of CGI enables both an

expressionistic illusionism that frees the filmmaker from the ontological

realism of traditional photography and a remediation in particular of the

wuxia (martial arts) tradition in Chinese vernacular narrative.

A striking example of the use of CGI to achieve aesthetic effects (and

emotional affects) that favor expressionism over photographic realism

is the scene in Hero in which, just after Flying Snow defeats Moon in a

swordfight, all the leaves in the surrounding birch forest change within

seconds from yellow to a deep blood red. The scene makes no pretense to

prosaic realism but rather allows Zhang Yimou, who from his earliest films

could figuratively be called among the most painterly of contemporary

directors, to become so almost literally—at least insofar as, according to

the hyperbolic assertion of new-media theorist Lev Manovich (2001: 295),

in the digital age cinema “is no longer an indexical media technology but,

rather, a subgenre of painting.” In fact, the technological challenges of

the scene in the birch forest introduce many of the issues I consider here,

including the complicated relationship between the actual photographic

realism of on-location shooting and the photo-realist illusionism of CGI

added in postproduction, but also the more specific issue of the challenge

of scale in generating images of massive numbers of the same things—in

this case, the leaves themselves.

Mary Farquhar (2010: 191–193) has detailed how the scene was put

together. The shooting location was a birch forest in Mongolia, and the

original yellow of the leaves results from shooting the scene at exactly the

right moment in the autumn when the leaves were changing colors and


beginning to fall. The further change to blood red, of course, was achieved

by CGI in postproduction, but the filmmakers had another problem, which

was that the leaves in the forest—though carefully selected by color and

gathered to form swirling masses during the original shoot—were not

nearly numerous enough to achieve the desired effects, and they were

falling so quickly that the trees had become too bare by the late stages of

shooting. Both problems were solved through compositing, by creating

computer models from the original leaves and then adding texture,

variation, and swirling effects to achieve the masses of leaves in the final

images in the film—leaves that mix seamlessly with the real leaves in the

forest from the original photographic footage (fig. 1). The leaves thus

became one incidental version of the “digital multitudes” I am examining

here, even carrying the sense of danger that such multitudes generally

represent (discussed shortly), in that “the whirlwind of golden leaves also

becomes Flying Snow’s weapon” as she fatally defeats Moon. Particularly

with their spectacular transition from yellow to red, the leaves are also

relatively straightforward as a “painterly” effect in that, as Farquhar

(2010: 193) puts it, “unusually, the after-footage makes the special effects

transparent or ‘visible’ in a celebration of color, movement, and death”;

the painterly use of CGI does not just play a supporting role but ends up

being the main focus of the scene’s last few shots.

Digital Multitudes in Martial Arts Films

A more explicit example of a digital multitude in recent Chinese martial

arts cinema can be found in director John Woo’s Red Cliff. In an especially

spectacular “tracking” shot (in which the camera movement is not real but

virtual), a released dove flies from one military encampment to another

one across the Yangzi River, passing in the process a giant armada of

ancient warships (fig. 2). Not only is the camera movement an animated

illusion, but most of what we see in the image is computer-generated. The

multitude of ships is a composited image: only a few models of vessels of

Fig. 1: Hero: Sword fight in birch leaves.

Fig. 2: Red Cliff: Cao Cao’s armada.


different sizes were built, and all the others were created digitally out

of the photographic information from the actual ones. In an interview

included as a special feature on the film’s overseas DVD release, Woo (2010)

confirms that for most of the shot the bird, the ships, and the river are

all computer-generated, and he further asserts that his producer warned

him that it might be the most expensive shot in film history—though he

proceeded with it anyway, helping to make Red Cliff the highest-budget

film produced in Asia up to that time. The result, in the case of this shot, is

without doubt the most awe-inspiring visualization ever of Cao Cao’s vast

armada, helping to vividly renew the cultural imagination of this legendary

historical event for contemporary audiences both in China and abroad.

Cao Cao’s digital armada recalls the one in the Hollywood epic film

Troy (dir. Wolfgang Petersen, 2004), introduced in a spectacular shot that

tracks backward rather than forward, revealing an ever greater expanse of

sailing ships. Kristen Whissel (2010: 91) mentions this shot as one example

of what she labels digital multitudes, or “massive CG armies, swarms,

armadas, and hordes composed of as many as hundreds of thousands

of digital beings.” Exemplified by such images as the seemingly infinite

armies of evil creatures in the Lord of the Rings trilogy (dir. Peter Jackson,

2001/2002/2003), the digital multitude evokes the utter fear of a threat that

appears overwhelming, portending apocalyptic, epochal historical change.

Often, as in the case of the allies facing down Cao Cao’s force in Red Cliff,

the narrative leads up to a massive battle by pitting a grossly outnumbered

minority, led by the film’s protagonists, against a vastly superior force.

Whissel mentions Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower (2006) as

among the films employing digital multitudes, but she does not linger

much on that case—perhaps because it lacks some of the elements she finds

in other films such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Mummy (dir.

Stephen Sommers, 1999). Although Curse of the Golden Flower employs

CGI in several shots to multiply into vast armies the few hundred People’s

Liberation Army soldiers who were used as extras, those armies do not


represent an ultimate threatening other so much as they do rival factions

loyal to different members of the royal family in a palace intrigue (Roberts

2006) (fig. 3). A better example from among Zhang Yimou’s films, more

akin to Cao Cao’s vast armed force in Woo’s Red Cliff, would be the army

of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang, as depicted in Hero.

That army in Hero—based on the actual historical force immortalized

in the form of the terracotta warriors that the Qin emperor had placed

in his tomb—is represented as a vast, threatening multitude from the

perspective of the colorful array of assassins who hope to eliminate the Qin

ruler before he can militarily overwhelm their home states and subordinate

them to a newly unified China. These fictional assassins—Nameless (Jet Li),

Broken Sword (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) and his apprentice, Moon (Zhang

Ziyi), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Long Sky (Donnie Yen)—must

confront the massive army of the conquering Qin forces.1 In an early

sequence, for example, the Qin army advances on a tiny compound in the

state of Zhao housing a calligraphy school where some of the assassins are

staying. Throughout the sequence, dozens of shots show tight bunches of

foot soldiers and archers, their density strongly accentuated by the use of

telephoto lenses (fig. 4). Whereas these shots employ hundreds of extras,

there are repeated shots of a computer-generated multitude in a type of

composition described by Whissel (2010)—high-angle extreme long shots

that accentuate the army’s lateral extension along the x-axis, filling the

frame and spilling off the wide screen into offscreen space, as well as its

depth along the z-axis, extending all the way to the horizon formed by

distant mountains (fig. 5). As with the digital multitudes Whissel examines,

such a composition spatializes time, with the vast army dramatically

suggesting an epochal transition in which massive destruction will lead

to a new order. At the same time, such images of the Qin soldiers in Hero

seem to directly reference the familiar iconography of the terracotta army

that protected the actual Qin emperor’s tomb (fig. 6).

The digital army in Hero unleashes a deadly metonymic digital

Fig. 3: Curse of the Golden Flower: Opposing digital multitudes.

Fig. 6: Terracotta army near Qin emperor’s tomb (photo courtesy of David J. Davies).

Fig. 4: Hero: Qin army.

Fig. 5: Hero: Qin army as digital multitude.

1 The film is often said to have a Rashomon-like structure, but the comparison is fairly weak because Akira Kurosawa’s film from 1950 much more radically leaves the “true” story in question, whereas Hero narrates several stories later shown to be false, ending with a version acknowledged as “true” within its fictional world.


multitude when its archers begin firing their arrows en masse toward the

calligraphy school, a symbol of, among other things, the independence

of the state of Zhao, which the Qin ruler is determined to conquer. The

thousands of arrows that rain down on the school are represented as

digitally generated swarms in several types of shots. Shots from the

perspective of the Qin army show the arrows being launched into the

sky in great numbers. Extreme long shots from the perspective of the

settlement show the masses of arrows rising from the distant army and

then taking up ever more of the screen as they race toward the “camera,”

thus beginning as an array of specks in the distance and ending by almost

filling the screen (figs. 7–9). A brief but spectacular “tracking” shot early

in the sequence shows the arrows approaching the settlement, seemingly

from the perspective of one of the arrows in flight.2 More conventional

ground-level shots show the arrows being launched by the army or landing

at the settlement, which then bristles more and more densely with fallen

arrows. During part of the sequence, Nameless and Flying Snow go out on

the roof of the calligraphy school to acrobatically fend off the arrows and

protect the school; these shots often reach such a degree of expressionism

that the images seem to come less from photographed reality than from a

cartoon fantasy, with the arrows forming almost abstract patterns of lines

that get implausibly scattered this way and that by the heroic characters

(fig. 10). Indeed, Flying Snow in particular is shown as fending them off

with little more than her long sleeves. The digital swarms of arrows thus

reinforce the impression of the overwhelming numbers of the Qin forces,

whereas the small band of assassins appear somewhat like the members

of the “Fellowship of the Ring,” a tiny force romantically and heroically

resisting a great army against all odds.

Scenes at the Qin imperial palace further emphasize the Qin army’s

size and discipline, either through tightly framed telephoto shots showing

dense groups of soldiers (fig. 11) or, again, through extreme long shots

of digitally generated multitudes (fig. 12). In the film’s climactic closing

Fig. 7: Hero: Arrow multitude 1.



2 Such “arrow POV shots” would be derided as cliché by the time Ridley Scott used them in 2010 in his Robin Hood (Bierly 2010).

Fig. 10: Hero: Flying Snow fighting animated arrows.

Fig. 11: Hero: Army at Qin palace.


sequence, in which Nameless is executed by a gigantic firing squad after

he spares the life of the emperor, a flying mass of arrows again appears as

a digital multitude, shot from similar angles as in the earlier sequence at

the calligraphy school (fig. 13). Here again, the effect is, as Mary Farquhar

(2010: 193) has put it, “like a swarm of black locusts” that “symbolize the

King’s power as they kill Nameless.”

Through such scenes, the Qin army is shown to be an awesome and

formidable force, always dressed in black, contrasting with the colorful

costumes of the assassins. In her insightful analysis of Hero, Wendy Larson

(2008) has argued convincingly that the film’s dramatic color schemes

help contrast the vibrant world of the assassins with the grim, regimented

world of the Qin ruler. The assassins come from the rich traditional

imagination of the jianghu, or “rivers and lakes”—the wuxia milieu not

just of warrior prowess but of love, passion, individuality, and spiritual

culture, as represented by themes such as calligraphy in addition to the

balletic beauty of the martial artists’ fighting styles. The Qin emperor’s

palace complex, in contrast, is a place committed only to military and

political power, where even some decorative green curtains must be torn

down after they are realized to be a place where assassins might hide.

The king’s black-clad forces achieve victory not through beautiful displays

of graceful movements and gravity-defying acrobatics but through rigid,

ruthless discipline combined with sheer numbers.3

Fascist Aesthetics and the Mass Ornament

It is in the context of this contrast between the colorful, romantic world of

the assassins and the rigid, lifeless world of the Qin state that we should

consider the decision of Nameless, the greatest of the film’s fictional

would-be assassins, to spare the future emperor’s life just when he finally

has the opportunity to kill him, on the rationale that a greater good will

be achieved by the king’s plan to conquer all the rival kingdoms and unite

“all under heaven” (tianxia) under not just singular political rule but also

Fig. 12: Hero: Qin palace army as digital multitude.

Fig. 13: Hero: Hail of arrows executing Nameless.

3 Although Hero takes many liberties with the history of the Qin emperor—insofar as that history is known through such sources as Sima Qian’s Shiji (Historical records)—its portrayal of the extreme regimentation of the Qin army is based on historical fact. See Lothar Ledderose (2000) for an account of how the ancient armed force was organized as well as how a veritable army of regimented craftsmen mass-produced the terracotta facsimile of the army to protect the emperor after death.


standardized measures, a unified writing system, and so on. The willing

abrogation of the romantic individualism of the wuxia world in favor of

submission to state power under Qin rule has been taken by critics both

in and out of China as a thinly veiled gesture of ideological support for

China’s current leadership, with its emphasis on harmony over individual

rights and national unity over autonomy for diverse regions including

Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Bloggers in China accused

Zhang Yimou of stimulating “viewers’ desire for domination,” “directing

totalitarian group calisthenics,” and following “fascist aesthetics.”4 Beijing

Film Academy professor Cui Weiping referred directly to Susan Sontag’s

classic 1975 essay about Leni Riefenstahl, including the latter’s infamous

documentary on Hitler’s 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg, Triumph of the Will

(1935). Sontag’s essay was also the reference point for J. Hoberman’s (2004)

review of Hero in the Village Voice that concluded as follows: “Hero’s vast

imperial sets and symmetrical tumult, its decorative dialectical montage

and sanctimonious traditionalism, its glorification of ruthless leadership

and self-sacrifice on the altar of national greatness, not to mention the

sense that this might somehow stoke the engine of political regeneration,

are all redolent of fascinatin’ fascism.”

Certainly there is evidence to support this argument. Aside from the

final decision of Nameless to negate himself in the service of a totalitarian

ruler, the film employs many other tropes that recall Triumph of the Will.

Soldiers chant in seemingly impossible unison; compositions, particularly

within the magnificent palace grounds of the Qin ruler, are relentlessly

symmetrical; one shot of the Qin army, in which Nameless walks through a

multitude of soldiers toward his audience with the emperor, even recalls a

specific shot in Riefenstahl’s film (compare figs. 12 & 14). Parts of Sontag’s

analysis of Triumph of the Will could well be applied to Hero:

Fascist aesthetics . . . flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, and extravagant effort; they exalt two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude.

4 Comments are by Liu Hongbo, Zhu Dake, and Cui Weiping, respectively, from translations posted in Beach (2008).

Fig. 14: Triumph of the Will.


The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication of things and grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader figure or force. . . . Fascist art glorifies surrender; it exalts mindlessness: it glamorizes death. (Sontag 1975)

The references to submissive behavior, a combination of both egomania

and servitude, surrender to an all-powerful leader, and the glamorization of

death all resonate with the sacrifice of Nameless, whereas the references to

“the massing of groups of people,” “the turning of people into things,” and

“the multiplication of things” all recall the depictions of the massive Qin

army, including digital multitudes in which the “things” that “people” are

turned into include the pixilated representations generated by computer

simulation and animation programs. Indeed, the digital multitudes analyzed

by Whissel—the armies of evil creatures in The Lord of the Rings and the

clone army in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (dir. George Lucas, 2002),

for example—embody the fascist ideal of “a multiplicity that functions as

one, a heterogeneous mass that functions homogeneously” (Whissel 2010:

103). Whissel herself mentions Triumph of the Will as one of the predigital

forerunners to the digital multitude, in which enormous masses of Nazi

Party members are organized to present a “visual uniformity” that renews

national identity and suggests that a new era is dawning.

The massed formations of real people in Riefenstahl’s film, through

their highly disciplined bodies and visual uniformity as a group, anticipate

digital multitudes in the specific form that Siegfried Kracauer labeled

“mass ornaments.” In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the

German Film, Kracauer (2004: 94) finds that “absolute authority asserts itself

by arranging people under its domination in pleasing designs,” resulting

in “the complete triumph of the ornamental over the human.” Addressing

mass rallies such as that in Triumph of the Will, Kracauer (2004: 95) asserts,

Hitler “surveyed not so much hundreds of thousands of listeners as an


enormous ornament consisting of hundreds of thousands of particles.”

Kracauer (2004: 301) also notes how groups of the Nazis’ followers “were

trained to speak in chorus,” a disconcerting effect echoed by the beastly

Uruk-hai soldiers chanting in unison in The Lord of the Rings (Whissel

2010: 98) as well as both the soldiers and retainers of the Qin emperor

repeatedly doing the same in Hero. According to Kracauer (2004: 301), such

“living ornaments . . . symbolically presented the masses as instrumental

superunits”—anticipating Whissel’s (2010: 103) description of the digital

multitude as “a multiplicity that functions as one.” Kracauer (2004: 302)

argues that Hitler and his staff must have appreciated the mass ornaments

“as configurations symbolizing the readiness of the masses to be shaped

and used at will by their leaders,” and that the film’s spectators would

have been captivated by their aesthetic qualities and led “to believe in

the solidity of the swastika world.”

As discussed earlier, the mass ornaments and digital multitudes coexist

and reinforce each other in Hero; closer shots show Qin army soldiers,

played by extras, doing things in unison—chanting, shooting arrows, raising

banners, and so on—and extreme long shots feature digital multitudes that

emphasize not just the uniformity but also the vastness of Qin Shihuang’s

force. Such masses of soldiers function as “instrumental superunits” serving

“absolute authority,” as in the Nuremberg rallies Kracauer described.

Not long after making Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower, Zhang

Yimou would employ human mass ornaments to an almost unprecedented

degree in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics

(fig. 15). The ceremonies were actually a series of spectacles, with symbolic

numbers of performers (exactly 2008 drummers, for example) creating

precise stadium-friendly living ornaments of immense proportions. Of

particular interest here are the instances in which the human units of the

ornaments invoked the pixels of a digital display. In the opening drumming

sequence, for example, each drum was a square that lit up when struck. In

the final countdown to the beginning of the Olympics (at precisely 8:08:08 Fig. 15: Beijing Olympics: Drummers as mass ornament.


p.m. on August 8, 2008 or 08/08/08) each drummer appeared as a pixel in a

living digital display (fig. 16) as the final sixty seconds were counted down,

ending in the explosions of fireworks celebrating that the time—which

had been counted down across China for years, often in digital displays

placed prominently in provincial capitals, for example—had finally arrived.

Later in the ceremony, a wondrous electronic screen in the shape of

a giant scroll displayed digital images while human mass ornaments were

assembled on top of it. A key sequence featured what appeared to be an

oversized, mechanized moveable-type printing press, highlighting China’s

pioneering role in the history of printing technology. In the Olympic

ceremony, the giant blocks of the press rippled to create human waves

and settled into various patterns, most notably repeated variations of the

character he, or “harmony” (fig. 17). The final effect came in a spectacular

reveal of the “Mechanical Turk” nature of the whole sequence’s technology:

the tops of the printing blocks suddenly popped open to show that each

one had a person inside, and that the machine-like precision of the spectacle

had been achieved not by high-tech programmers but by a collection of

individuals who must have drilled for countless hours to achieve it.5 As

the NBC commentator gushed at the point of reveal, “And how did they

do it? They do it with people, not with computers”—each person being a

modular agent in achieving the overall effect.

Zhang Yimou’s drumming and printing press sequences of the Olympics

opening ceremonies are thus particularly notable for their imitation of

digital display screens, despite the fact that they were mass ornaments

done with real people. The pixel is the smallest unit of information in a

digital image, but it has meaning only as part of a larger constellation

of pixels, the meaning or overall impression of which is clear only when

viewing the totality. In arranging dynamic human bodies into arrays of

pixel-like units, Zhang Yimou refers to the dominant mode of visuality

of new media in the digital age—and indeed new media played a key

role throughout his ceremonies’ choreography. However, at the same

Fig. 16: Beijing Olympics: Drummers as digital display countdown.

Fig. 17: Beijing Olympics: Printing press mass ornament.

5 The Mechanical Turk was the chess-playing machine that amazed audiences in Europe in the late 1700s: a mecha-nized Turkish-looking automaton con-nected to a large box with a chessboard on top appeared to be able to defeat human opponents, when in fact a per-son hiding inside the box determined the Mechanical Turk’s moves.


time, Zhang’s human pixels mimic the aesthetics of the mass ornament as

described by Kracauer and as employed elsewhere in the same ceremonies.

As in the early twentieth-century mass ornaments Kracauer observed, in

the Beijing Olympics opening pageant “people become fractions of a

figure,” “clusters whose movements are demonstrations of mathematics”

(Kracauer 2005: 76).

What Does the Mass Serve?

The preceding quote comes not from Kracauer’s critique of the Nuremberg

rallies featured in Triumph of the Will, but rather from his landmark essay

“The Mass Ornament” (written in 1927, well before the rise of Hitler), which

took as its main example not the fascist masses but the British popular dance

troupe the Tiller Girls, akin to the American dance company the Rockettes.

Kracauer (2005: 79) had reacted much more ambivalently to these mass

ornaments, seeing in them a true aesthetic reflection of the capitalist mode

of production: “The mass ornament is the aesthetic reflex of the rationality

to which the prevailing economic system aspires.” The public’s pleasure in

such ornaments was thus, according to Kracauer, “legitimate,” and superior

at least to a reactionary bourgeois appreciation of the noble forms of high

art from a pre-Fordist/Taylorist society. Here Kracauer’s rhetoric anticipates

Walter Benjamin’s (2006: 101–133) welcoming of the loss of art’s “aura”

in the age of technological reproducibility, with a similar argument that

the way to genuine human liberation lies through and beyond the current

mode of production, not by turning back to try to regain some romanticized

lost state of nature or purity.

The digital multitudes of contemporary special-effects cinema in part

update the aesthetics of the mass ornament, but in a way that uses real

bodies, if at all, only as information that gets processed and multiplied into

“ornaments” on a potentially unprecedented scale. The monster armies

in The Lord of the Rings trilogy are, in an important sense, the aesthetic

descendents of the Nazi masses captured by Riefenstahl, but with their


sublime appeal morally inverted because the film does not celebrate the

invincible force their discipline seems to imply but uses it as a vehicle of both

awe and dread—indeed drawing in part on the historical memory of Hitler’s

war machine. The human mass ornaments of the Olympic ceremonies are,

by contrast, the descendents of the Tiller Girls, in that they are consumed

primarily as superficial entertaining spectacle (even if they still can be

turned into objects of dread by Western commentators, as we have seen).

Despite the similarities of their aesthetics if not their media, an

interesting paradox arises in the comparison between mass ornaments

and digital multitudes. The former, in trying to achieve the mathematical

precision Kracauer noted, essentially aim to turn human bodies, or parts

thereof, into machine-like collections of identical parts—whether the

simultaneously moving, identically costumed legs of the Tiller Girls or

the identically choreographed swinging arms of the Olympic ceremony

drummers. That is, mass ornaments serve to make what are organic and

different—individual human bodies—look, as much as possible, mechanized

and identical. Digital multitudes, by contrast, begin with sameness—the

exact multiplication of visual information from a single leaf into a swarm

of leaves, or from a few dozen model ships into an armada of thousands—

and, to make it visually “realistic,” intentionally introduce some level of

difference. Thus programs such as MASSIVE (Multiple Agent Simulation

System in Virtual Environment, used to create the digital multitudes in

The Lord of the Rings) apply fuzzy-logic-based algorithms to information

from either live photography or hand animation to program each “agent”

within a multitude to respond to its immediate environment in ways that

add a further level of complexity to what would otherwise too obviously

be a mere cut-and-paste multiplication of identical visual images. (In fact,

some of the vastest digital multitudes presented in Hero appear, at least

in freeze frame, to lack the level of complexity that MASSIVE had lent to

the Lord of the Rings multitudes, weakening the realism of the effect.)

Keeping in mind the similar aesthetic effect—though in a sense coming


at it from opposite directions—of mass ornaments and digital multitudes,

in the context of the Beijing Olympics as well as in Hero, it is important to

distinguish Kracauer’s descriptions of the purpose and audience of the mass

ornament in his 1927 essay from his revival of the term in From Caligari

to Hitler. In the latter work, he makes clear that the living ornaments

of the Nuremberg rally exist to serve the gaze of authority, in particular

the Fuhrer himself. Riefenstahl’s film depicts just such an organization of

visuality through cuts from the masses of soldiers and party members to

low-angle shots of Hitler looking out over them. In one sequence, such

a cut interrupts a slow pan across the crowd, so that, with the insertion

of the shot of Hitler, we are invited to interpret the panning view as a

point-of-view shot from his perspective as his eyes scan the ornamental

mass (figs. 18, 19).

In the televised Olympic ceremonies, the gaze of the Chinese leader, Hu

Jintao, is briefly invoked insofar as he is shown being seated and waving

to the crowd before the ceremonies begin. However, he appears in the

frame equally with International Olympic Committee President Jacques

Rogge and in any case is rarely shown after the ceremonies begin. The

NBC broadcast of the event also features George W. and Laura Bush being

seated, whereas the CCTV broadcast skips that detail, instead cutting

from the seating of Hu to multiple shots of the anonymous crowd in the

stadium. Such shots invoke the source of the gaze through which the

mass ornaments described by Kracauer (2005: 76) were appreciated: “The

regularity of their patterns is cheered by the masses, themselves arranged

by the stands in tier upon ordered tier.” In the televisual age, of course,

even the massive crowd in the stadium is dwarfed by the vast audience

viewing the spectacle from homes across the planet. For those spectators,

the pleasure of viewing Zhang Yimou’s elaborate ornaments lies partly in

the frequent cut-ins, in both the CCTV and NBC broadcasts, through which

the totality is periodically abandoned in order to view the atomic units

who form the ornaments. These closer shots of the vigorous bodies and

Fig. 18: Triumph of the Will: Nazi formation.

Fig. 19: Triumph of the Will: Inserted shot of Hitler’s gaze.


smiling faces of the individuals making the patterns help to glorify their

voluntary role in the display.

As we have seen, the ceremonies were widely taken as displays of

a nationalistic China on the rise, and of course it is true that the various

spectacles Zhang Yimou deployed, which go far beyond the few I have

highlighted here, seek to demonstrate China’s illustrious past and point to

its future prominence. However, in the end it is quite a stretch to equate

the posture of the current Chinese government with the fascist movement

in the 1930s or Zhang Yimou with Leni Riefenstahl. As the introduction

to a volume of essays on narratives of the Beijing Olympics puts it, “China

intended the ‘One World, One Dream’ theme to project a benign, harmony-

seeking China emerging as a powerful yet positive global force” (Price 2008:

6). The character for “harmony” may be selectively interpreted as a warning

to Taiwan or Tibet, but it was first and foremost an acknowledgment that

an increasingly powerful China was nonetheless now fully integrated with

the world economy. In short, although the masses of Red Guards gathered

in Tiananmen Square under the appreciative gaze of Mao in the late 1960s

represented real resistance to global capitalism, the mass ornaments of the

2008 Olympics represented quite the opposite.

Armies of Mass Production

Taking our cue from Kracauer, then, we might reconsider the aesthetics of

the Olympic ceremonies in light of the system they idealistically express.

For Kracauer, mass ornaments such as the Tiller Girls were an aesthetic

reflection of the factory assembly line:

Everyone does his or her task on the conveyer belt, performing a partial function without grasping the totality. Like the pattern in the stadium, the organization stands above the masses, a mon-strous figure whose creator withdraws it from the eyes of its bear-ers, and barely even observes it himself.—It is conceived according to rational principles which the Taylor system merely pushes to


their ultimate conclusion. The hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls. (Kracauer 2005: 78–79)

Such a connection is still highly relevant when interpreting the mass

ornaments of Beijing in 2008, given China’s transformation into the

“workshop of the world,” where ever more millions of young people

from farming families leave the countryside to labor in the gigantic

factories that fill Walmart’s shelves and Amazon.com’s warehouses, in

a case that “looks something like Fordism on Steroids” (Ross 2013: 28).

Take Foxconn, for instance, the Taiwan-based company that manufactures

high-end components for many of the leading computer and mobile

phone companies and is China’s largest private employer. Its Longhua

factory campus—the one in Shenzhen that became infamous for worker

suicides—“houses and employs an army of 400,000” in a system “redolent of

the Taylorism of the early twentieth-century assembly lines” (Ross 2013: 28,

29). Indeed, in the context of China’s central role in the production chain of

today’s global capitalist economy, the harmonious patterns of the Olympic

mass ornaments, rather than arousing fear, might well reassure foreign

observers of the skill and precision of the anonymous Chinese who make

their iPhones, while demonstrating to Chinese audiences the beauty of the

system and the honor of their place in it. In reality, of course, the laborers

in factories such as those of Foxconn submit, for lack of better options, to

being at the receiving end of a system of corporate exploitation through

global labor arbitrage, in which the transnational mobility of capital—yet

relative immobility of labor—in an integrated world economy permits the

swift relocation of production to any locale where labor is both adequate

and cheapest; thus Foxconn’s and similar companies’ recent large-scale

migration of operations from Chinese coastal locations such as Shenzhen

to interior sites such as Chongqing and Chengdu, where both land and

people are bought more cheaply.

Nonetheless, although the mass ornaments of the Beijing Olympic


ceremonies in some ways echo those of the early twentieth century in

their evocation of factory labor, the specifically digital form in which

Zhang Yimou cast some of his spectacular arrays of human bodies calls for

an updated explanation in light of the rise of the global digital economy.

The new situation has spurred entirely new methods of value extraction

that rely on individual users of computers, tablets, and smart phones to

generate profit for corporations. These range from the value of aggregated

information from individual users’ web browsing and Facebook “likes” to

more systematic forms of crowdsourcing such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

(named after the chess automaton mentioned earlier), a system whereby

workers throughout the world can perform human intellectual labor for

U.S.-based companies on a piecemeal basis (Aytes 2013). Such digital labor

often pays only a few cents per task completed, and the companies enjoy

complete freedom from payroll taxes, minimum wage laws, or the need

to provide benefits, job security, overtime pay, workers compensation,

and so on.

Zhang Yimou’s heroic human pixels encapsulate the new digital logic

of the human web-browser as a producer of surplus value. As commonly

understood, “a pixel is an atomic visible element of an image, a picture

element or picture cell,” but more technically a pixel is defined as “a sample

of the visual properties of an image that may be representative of a point

or a region within the image” (Tanimoto 2012: 5–6). In other words, what

is important about a pixel is not that it is an individual point, but that it

provides a certain small parcel of information that, when combined with a

vast array of other pixels providing slightly different parcels of information,

will become useful as a component within some totality. Similarly, when I

“like” a product on Facebook or produce a particular browsing history in a

computer session, that information is not of particular interest in itself (thus

digital-age paranoia based on more traditional fears of being personally

spied on are often misplaced), but when treated as an aggregated “pixel”

within a much larger array of information, the information produces value


for whatever company has the power to aggregate it. Thus Zhang Yimou’s

groupings of human bodies evoke simultaneously the Fordist/Taylorist

regime of factory labor (still quite predominant in Chongqing although

largely vanished from Detroit) through their functions as mass ornaments

and the newer logic of digital labor in the global economy through their

representation of humans as pixels. Indeed, the human pixels of the Olympic

ceremonies, like the individual “agents” making up a digital multitude

in a special-effects film, may appear to be at least slightly autonomous

individuals but actually are carefully arrayed to serve a higher function.

Globalized Spectacle

From the perspective of the home television viewer/consumer, the Olympic

ceremonies in fact were not totalitarian displays but manifestations of the

society of the spectacle, and if they represent a threat from China, it is not

a political or military threat but merely a threat to the Western-centrism

of the spectacle. As Guy Debord (1983: sec 57) writes, “The society which

carries the spectacle does not dominate the underdeveloped regions by

its economic hegemony alone. It dominates them as the society of the

spectacle.” Zhang Yimou shows that China too can carry the spectacle

and assert its own hegemony, but more or less within the terms of global

commerce and media exhibitionism already set by capitalism.

Here we have perhaps come a long way from the images of despotic

rule in Hero, but really the charges of totalitarian ideology in that film are

equally spurious. The displays of mindless obedience and military might

in Triumph of the Will are clearly celebrated, but, as Wendy Larson (2008)

has emphasized, those by the Qin army in Hero take place in contrast with

the colorful, romantic, cultural, and individualistic wuxia world of the

assassins, who thus represent the kind of nostalgic turn Kracauer scorns,

a world of nature and beauty that seeks an implausible autonomy from

a globalizing system. Nameless recognizes the futility of this dream, but

that does not mean that he, or the film narration as a whole, glorifies the


conquering power of the system. At the end of the film, even the emperor

himself appears to be saddened and yet incapable of resisting the structure

of power that he embodies, as he yields reluctantly to the retainers who

demand in unison that he execute the would-be assassin who has just spared

his own life and whom he has called his zhiji (true friend).

As Gary D. Rawnsley (2010: 23) argues, “rather than celebrating the

authoritarianism of Qin, Hero is in many ways a depressing and desolate

representation of society at that time.” Haizhou Wang and Ming-Yeh T.

Rawnsley (2010: 98–99) have documented that the film actually frustrated

the expectations of fans of martial arts films in Chinese communities

precisely insofar as the codes of morality and justice of the legendary

jianghu are jettisoned in favor of the logic of the state, which the jianghu by

definition exceeds and opposes.6 Thus, whereas Western commentaries have

tended to read Nameless as the eponymous “hero,” Wang and Rawnsley

cite a poll in which more than twice as many Chinese saw Flying Snow

(the one assassin character who holds out against the Qin emperor until

her dying breath) as the film’s hero.7 The dissatisfaction with Hero among

mainland Chinese critics and audiences presents a conundrum because the

film nonetheless broke box-office records in China. Sabrina Qiong Yu (2010)

has, however, extensively documented the possibility that one of the main

explanations for this was that the film was consumed avidly in China as

laughable camp. The reception of the film in the United States also was

far from uniform, with some critics (Taylor 2004) and scholars (Eng 2004;

Larson 2008) arguing forcefully against the view of the film as a rationale

for authoritarianism. Eng, for example, sees the Qin army represented as

a repulsive Nazi-type force in the same way I have described the digital

multitudes in The Lord of the Rings (“The Qin army’s unison cry of ‘Feng!

Feng!’ is chillingly similar to the Nazi salute ‘Sieg heil!’”), and he remarks

that “the film ends not in a surge of patriotic feeling but on a pronounced

mournful note of contingency and skepticism.”

Zhang Yimou himself (Cardullo 2008: 140) has said the following of

6 For a rich overview of martial arts cinema in the context of the wuxia liter-ary tradition, including the concept of jianghu, see Teo 2009.

7 I have long suggested such a view to students when using Hero (a word that lacks both gender and number in Chi-nese) in classes. Flying Snow’s resistance calls our attention to the gendered nature of the fascist celebration of sub-mission to the state. In contrast to what Klaus Theweleit (1989: 162) calls the “ideal man of the conservative utopia”—a veritable “robot” with a “machinelike” exterior and no interior life—Flying Snow embodies an almost stereotypi-cally deconstructive femininity insofar as she passionately resists any totalizing authority to the bitter end, no matter how rationally beneficial it may claim to be for “all under heaven.”


Hero: “My hope in this film, as I have tried to make clear, was to help give

Chinese cinema greater international influence in the realm of big-budget

entertainment movies—the main trend in the movie industry right now.”

Again, rather than a sinister totalitarianism, we have a more benign

effort to measure up to the West in the offering of spectacles within the

harmonious totality of global capitalism. In fact, given the globalization

of film production and CGI technology, the national boundaries suggested

by terms such as “Hollywood” or “the Chinese film industry” are in many

ways obsolete. Most of the high-end CGI work in Hero was done in Sydney

by the Australian- and U.S.-based company Animal Logic. Meanwhile,

again taking advantage of global labor arbitrage, Hollywood special-

effects blockbusters are increasingly likely to outsource much of their

digital wizardry to East Asia, or to take on Chinese production companies

as coproducers of the film as a whole. For example, Cloud Atlas (dirs. Tom

Tykwer, Andy Wachowski, and Lana Wachowski, 2012) was coproduced by

the Hong Kong–based Media Asia Group; and Digital Domain, a leading

Hollywood special-effects company founded by James Cameron, the

director of the megablockbusters Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009), was

recently bought by the Chinese company Galloping Horse, which teamed

with an Indian firm for the acquisition (Liu 2012). Further examples of such

industrial interpenetration are plentiful, but suffice it to say that although

the branding of films as Chinese or American, Asian or Western may matter

a great deal to critics, fans, or nationalists of various sorts, national and

regional boundaries are increasingly irrelevant to media conglomerates in

either location that stand to make millions from a global blockbuster. Here

again, in this context of global productive forces, the strikingly efficient

mass ornaments of Zhang Yimou’s Olympic opening ceremonies and the

digital multitudes of his film Hero do not so much take on a nationalist,

Sinocentric meaning as suggest a more genuinely global sense of the

forces that in fact rule “all under heaven”; the modular units of technical

labor that create the digital effects of global blockbusters are themselves


spread globally, competing to exceed each other’s technological prowess

in creating convincing illusions while undercutting each other’s costs.

Whereas the foreboding digital multitudes of Hollywood action

films ultimately are defeated by colorful individuals in an assertion of

the ideology of personal freedom, Hero takes a much darker view: rather

than claiming the ongoing relevance of rugged individualism, it shows

the homogenizing force of a globalizing power as ultimately irresistible.

Far from being a celebration of authoritarianism, unlike a Hollywood

blockbuster, it simply refuses to provide any utopian sugarcoating or

romantic reassurance that the brutal and seemingly irresistible globalizing

power can be magically stopped by the romantic individual (Luke Skywalker

blowing up the Death Star; Frodo destroying the Ring of Power). The film’s

last shots reveal the final image of the ostensible “hero,” showing not

Nameless himself but his empty profile left by the hail of arrows that killed

him (fig. 20), and in the reverse shot (fig. 21) the emperor stands helpless

in the kind of oppressively symmetrical extreme long shot that has been

Zhang Yimou’s specialty at least since Da hong denglong gaogao gua (Raise

the red lantern, 1991), an individual reduced, like the erased Nameless, to a

mere location in a structure, the totality of which exists as an end in itself.Fig. 21: Hero: Final shot of Qin emperor.

Fig. 20: Hero: Space left by the corpse of Nameless.


Glossary

Cao Cao 曹操Cui Weiping 崔卫平he 和jianghu 江湖Liu Hongbo 刘洪波minzu tuanti 民族团体Qin Shihuang 秦始皇Shiji 史记tianxia 天下wuxia 武侠yipan san sha 一盘散沙zhiji 知己Zhu Dake 朱大可

Filmography

Cameron, James. Titanic. 1997.

———. Avatar. 2009.

Jackson, Peter. The Lord of the Rings trilogy. 2001, 2002, 2003.

Li An 李安 (Ang Lee). Wohu canglong 卧虎藏龙 (Crouching tiger, hidden dragon). 2000.

Lucas, George. Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. 2002.

Petersen, Wolfgang. Troy. 2004.

Riefenstahl, Leni. Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the will). 1935.

Sommers, Stephen. The Mummy. 1999.

Tykwer, Tom, Andy Wachowski, and Lana Wachowski. Cloud Atlas. 2012.

Wu Yusen 吴宇森. Chi bi 赤壁 (Red cliff). 2008.

Zhang Yimou 张艺谋. Da hong denglong gaogao gua 大红灯笼高高挂 (Raise the red lantern). 1991.


———. Yingxiong 英雄 (Hero). 2002.

———. Shimian maifu 十面埋伏 (House of flying daggers). 2003.

———. Mancheng jindai huangjinjia 满城尽带黄金甲 (Curse of the golden flower). 2006.

Zhou Xingchi 周星驰 (Stephen Chow). 功夫 Gongfu (Kung fu hustle). 2004.

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Heroic Human Pixels: Mass Ornaments and Digital Multitudes in Zhang Yimou’s Spectacles

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