An Analysis Of The Movie To Live By Zhang Yimou

The movie “To Live” is a film about a family’s experience during hard and challenging time under Mao’s rule. Released in 1994, the movie was directed by Zhang Yimou and his sixth collaboration with Gong Li, “To Live” gives its viewers a journey towards this very revolutionary stage for the whole Chinese people. This movie transcends four decades of China’s history, which includes the Chinese Civil War, Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. “To Live” gives another perspective about this particular stage of China’s history. Instead of looking from above, the movie emphasizes the life experiences of the ordinary people as they try to cope up with these changes brought by the Chinese government under Mao’s rule

The movie focuses on the

In 1958, when Mao launched the ruinous “Great Leap Forward”. This included mass collectivization and the attempt to push forward Chinese industrialization by organizing “backyard furnaces” for every commune. People were ordered to contribute all their iron-made tools and cooking utensils to local smelters and to work round the clock in order to achieve ambitious production quotas. In one of the scenes in the film “To Live”, Fugui, in order to maintain face in the commune, ordered his exhausted young son to report for work at the smelter. When his son fell asleep on the job, he was crushed to death by a falling brick wall accidentally run into by a truck driven by, as fate would have it, another exhausted worker, Chunsheng, who has now become a local Party official. The remorseful Chunsheng begs forgiveness, but Jiazhen is inconsolable and declares that he “owes her a life”. The promulgation of the Great Leap Forward was the result of the failure of the Soviet model of industrialization in China, the reason behind this was that, china had a very dense population and no large agricultural surplus with which to accumulate