Zhang Yimou

A lantern is hung outside one of four wives' doors each evening in Raise the Red Lantern, and the household reads it to learn who has the master's attention tonight. Colour carries the information. That method survives the move to spectacle: Hero tells one assassination three times and recolours the whole palette for each version. In between, To Live takes a family through four decades of Chinese history and lets the losses accumulate without comment.

Signature

• Colour used structurally, keyed to a version of events or a state of power.
• Enclosed households as a model of the state.
• Wide, symmetrical staging of massed figures.
• Twentieth-century Chinese history borne by one family.