Week 2 – To Live (1994)

Hi everyone, this week for my senior project I began analyzing the movies I am going to include in my final product. This week I watched the movie To Live, a movie based on a book written by Yu Hua and directed by Yimou Zhang.

Intro

​The title of the book and film itself allows room for interpretation as when translated, it is To Live, however as mentioned by Shi in a paper, the title in Chinese contains multiple meanings, allowing for translations such as To Live, Living, and To Remain Alive. This is a reflection of the events the film takes the audience through. We follow Fugui through decades during which he continues to lose and gain. As the protagonist, Fugui is not a perfectly moral man: the movie begins with him losing his family’s inherited property by gambling, leading to his father’s death and descending circumstances for his pregnant wife and child. Despite this, the audience empathize with him, as he is seen to learn through consequences,: keeping his promise of not gambling and beginning to take care of his family properly. By presenting the character as human, the film shows the character’s life as a product of his own doing as much as historical events, showing him to have little personal agent in his own life.

Summary

​The stage is set in the 1940s and goes into the cultural revolution, displaying events such as the Civil War, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural revolution as lived by Fugui. The film utilizes irony to demonstrate the lack of agency Fugui has despite his efforts to live a “good” life. When he attempts to care for his wife and children, he is drafted to fight for the nationalist army. When he eventually returns home, his daughter has lost her hearing. He then faces the execution of the man who he lost his family’s property to, which would have been him if not for his gambling habits. Then he is forced to donate his family’s theater props to the army to aid “The great leap forward”, to help the nation fight Taiwan. His son then dies, killed ironically by a man who saved him in the war. Then his daughter marries and dies during childbirth. This happens during the cultural revolution, when experienced doctors were being persecuted, resulting in the lack of professional help during birth.

Analysis

​The consequences of Fugui’s life are a product of both his own doing and historical events as his son’s death is a result of Fugui’s conformist attempts to establish a good reputation, yet the basis of his action is the need to conform that the communist party has created. His daughter’s death is a product of him feeding the doctor they rescued seven too many buns and the persecution of these doctors in the first place. Under such circumstances, Fugui is unable to act in the best interest of himself and his family, the one good thing which happens to him is him being able to avoid being executed by losing his house to gambling. Shi suggests that as Fugui develops moral character, his life descends — he loses his children and other things. This irony further demonstrates that there isn’t an individual life to be lived under the historical background.

Next week

​In comparison to the movie mentioned last week: The Battle at Lake Changjin, this movie was not popularly accepted in China but rather internationally. It was not initially allowed to be released in China due to its portrayal of the communist party and the consequences in individual families. Next week, I will compare this film’s portrayal of individual fates to that in The Battle at Lake Changjin.