What makes the work of Chinese filmmaker
Zhang Yimou so remarkable is not the period settings, the historical significance
or the politically charged subject matter.Review:
What makes the work of Chinese filmmaker
Zhang Yimou so remarkable is not the period settings, the historical significance
or the politically charged subject matter.
Movies like "Red Sorghum," "Ju Dou" and "Raise the Red Lantern" are enthralling because they so accurately focus in on the human condition. Zhang has managed to grasp a simple truth that so often eludes modern filmmakers - if the story is recognizable and the characters are real, the audience will easily identify with them and be swept away.
To Live, Zhang Yimou's sixth feature, explores
territory that is rapidly becoming familiar to those who view the works of China's
so-called "Fifth Generation" film makers. The events of the middle
decades of the twentieth century, including the Communist Civil War, the "Great
Leap Forward", and the Cultural Revolution, represent fertile ground for
grand stories of mingled tragedy and triumph.
An extraordinarily moving journey through
the Chinese upheavals of the 20th Century, Huozhe finds an intimate focus within
the larger picture. Kicking off in the 40s, Xu Fugui (Ge You) is a well known
itinerant, amateur gambler and good-for-nothing. A typical day involves spending
the night throwing dice at the club before being carried home at dawn, returning
to under-valued wife Jiazhen (Gong Li). With a young daughter Fengxia (Liu Tianchi,
when adult), and an unborn son, she has a difficult enough time without Fugui's
absence. His elderly father isn't much help either, berating Fugui and exasperating
his equally ancient wife, seemingly content with watching his fortune trickle
away.
"To Live" is a simple title,
but it conceals a universe. The film follows the life of one family in China,
from the heady days of gambling dens in the 1940s to the austere hardship of
the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. And through all of their fierce struggles
with fate, all of the political twists and turns they endure, their hope is
basically one summed up by the heroine, a wife who loses wealth and position
and children, and who says, "All I ask is a quiet life together."
Zhang Yimou's "To Live" is a
sweeping examination of the hardships endured by a Chinese family during the
political upheavals following the communist revolution. At the film's opening,
Fugui (Ge You) is so dissolute from a debauched life of drinking and gambling
that he looks like a drug-ravaged rock star. Every night he goes to a club where,
over the protests of his wife, Jiazhen (Gong Li), and his father, the arrogant
wastrel fritters away the family fortune, running up such a ledger of debts
that, eventually, he is forced to sell off their ancestral home to pay them
off.
National Trauma, Global Allegory: reconstruction
of collective memory in Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite
by Xudong Zhang
Abstract: "In this paper the author examines the ideological use of history in ‘International Film Festival Films’ from Mainland China in the early 1990s. The author observes that films like Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite, and Zhang Yimou’s To Live all share the post-revolutionary assumption and seek to deconstruct the ‘grand-narrative’ of social revolution and idealism by constructing a counter-narrative of national trauma and traumatized individual life. By analyzing the filmic text of The Blue Kite, the author argues that, instead of exploring the complexity of social change and everyday life of the Chinese twentieth century, the former Fifth Generation auteurs resorted to a visual ontology or mythology of the present, which in turn invents its past as a melodrama of ‘human nature’ or ‘art as such’. The reason why moments of those films remain compelling, as the author argues, is not because of the new metaphysics and ahistorical conclusions at the superficial level, but lies in the fact that the visual and narrative logic of the ‘new cinematic language’ (as a result of the aesthetic–political upheaval of the Chinese 1980s) resists the formula of ‘healing’ and captures the irreducible complexity of a world of life (i.e. Mao’s China) despite the ideological tendency of the global 1990s."
The Wooden Man's Bride.; Farewell My
Concubine.; The Blue Kite.; To Live.
by Zhiwei Xiao
Excerpt: "International attention has been brought to Chinese cinema primarily through the films of a group of elite directors referred to in China as "The Fifth Generation." Directors such as Chen Kaige, Huang Jianxin, Tian Zhuangzhuang, and Zhang Yimou have been called, variously, "xianfeng daoyan" (vanguard director), "zheli daoyan" (philosophical director), or "yishu dianying daoyan" (art film director). These terms of designation suggest the distance and difference between their works and those of mainstream popular film production in China."
Actor/Actress Info: