Ciclo Luzes na Caverna XIV:
”Como nasce uma verdade? Como mantê-la viva?”:
“HERO”
2002 | M/13 | 1h39’ [CN/HK]
De Zhang Yimou

_ENG

Lights in the Cave XIV Cinema Screenings: How Is a Truth Born? How Do We Keep It Alive?
“HERO” 2002 | M/13 | 1h39’ [CN/HK]
De Zhang Yimou
With Alexandre Braga

In Hero (2002), Zhang Yimou tells us a story and then immediately withdraws the certainty that we should believe it. The same event returns several times, transformed by memory, intention, imagination and desire. Colours change, gestures acquire different meanings, heroes become fragile and enemies may cease to be enemies at all. Truth is not hidden at the end of a path, waiting to be discovered: it slowly emerges from the confrontation between different ways of seeing.

Perhaps this is precisely where Hero becomes a film about cinema itself. Cinema, too, never simply gives us the world: it chooses a frame, a duration, a distance, a colour, a movement, a silence. Faced with the infinity of reality, every film opens only one window. Yet it is precisely because that window is limited that it can reveal something. To see everything would perhaps be to see nothing. To look through someone else’s gaze — to accept, for a few hours, that singular perspective on existence — can profoundly transform the way we look at our own lives.

Zhang Yimou pushes this idea almost to its limit. In Hero, each version of the story possesses its own truth because it possesses its own form. Red does not tell us the same thing as blue; white does not remember in the same way as green. The image ceases to be a mere illustration of events and becomes thought itself. Even before we rationally understand what has changed, we already feel it through light, bodies, music, space and colour.

And perhaps this is one of cinema’s greatest gifts: it allows us to experience other forms of existence without having to abandon our own. For a while, we see through the eyes of another human being. We inhabit another consciousness. We encounter other relationships with love, violence, memory, death, power and sacrifice. And when we return to the world, something may have changed — not necessarily because we have found an answer, but because we have learnt to ask the question differently.

It is in that instant that we search for what we might call an éclair d’être: a flash of being. That rare moment when an image, a gesture or a silence suddenly illuminates a region of our own experience. It is not a religious revelation in the strict sense, nor a moral conclusion. It is a small epiphany: for a few seconds, we see.

By the end of Hero, what seemed to be a story about revenge has become a far greater question about what we do with truth once we finally believe we have found it. Because discovering a truth may be only the first movement. The more difficult task is deciding how to live after it — and what we are willing to relinquish in order to keep it alive.

Perhaps this is also why we continue to enter a darkened cinema.

Not simply to watch the lives of others, but to return to our own with slightly different eyes. Cinema does not light our path because it knows where we should go. It illuminates it because, for a few hours, it opens before us a window we could never have opened alone.

And sometimes, that single window is enough to make the whole world look different.