Resumo

Director Zhang Yimou is a prominent Chinese filmmaker who has managed to reach large audiences while maintaining a particularly auteur-driven approach in his work. In films depicting China of today and the past, the director addresses subjects ranging from politics and action to gender violence and oppression. He does so by employing an extremely expressive visual narrative in which stands out an intentional use of color, aspect under which excels the 2002 movie Hero (Yīngxióng). Not only is the expressiveness remarkable, but also the depth of the possible meanings behind its colors, to the point of raising the following question: How does Zhang Yimou’s chromatic iconography enable symbolic interpretations in Hero, contributing to its narrative, aesthetic, and semantic structure? To answer such question, I rely on the iconological studies of Erwin Panofsky (1955) in order to conduct an iconographic reading of Zhang Yimou’s colors through a formalist film analysis, as suggested by the pairs of authors Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie (2009) and Francis Vanoye and Anne Goliot-Lété (2006), by means of the observation and interpretation of the film in fragments, as proposed by Serguei Eisenstein (2002). It was possible to identify a narrative with multiple temporalities explicitly demarcated throughout the film, in which four main colors stand out in five segments. Such color palette carries meanings that escape clichés and other representations consecrated by psychology and culture, thus establishing the films own original chromatic iconography.