Zhang Yimou's Huozhe

Zhang’s To Live (Huozhe, 1994) will remain an eminent example of his presentation of Chinese history on an epic canvas. In this film you can also find Zhang’s subtlest dismissal of the communist/socialist regime. The film is scripted with a comic tone, meaning that the ups and downs of the protagonist’s fortunes always hinge on something fortuitous. Originally a landlord’s son, the ne’er-do-well protagonist Fu Gui loses his inherited wealth by gambling; as it turns out, Fu has also blessedly pawned off his undesirable (feudalist) class background when the Communists arrive. Underneath its comic veneer, the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution campaigns unfolds. (Another comic mishap ends up costing the life of Fu’s daughter.) To Live is a piece of “humanist cinema,” as indicated by its title, which suggests the Chinese people’s obdurate will to survive. The caveat we have with certain humanist cinema may be that almost every character is delineated as essentially a “good” person. People misbehave only because of the force of circumstances. Thus, in To Live, even the notorious Red Guards are glimpsed as frightened kids who botch, tragically, a birthing process. There is a scene in the middle of the film, in which Fu Gui tells a story to his son: A small chick will grow up into a goose; a goose will turn into a sheep; a sheep into an oxen; oxen into…Communism, which will bring meat and dumplings everyday. The scene is reprised at the end when an elderly Fu Gui, after losing both his children to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, repeats the story to his grandson: a chick turns into a goose, a goose into a sheep, a sheep into an oxen. Yet instead of oxen turning into Communism, Fu Gui tells his grandson that he’ll ride the oxen, then trains and airplanes. So communism has been quietly dropped from the fairy tale of fulfillment and development in To Live, maybe the most daring and masterly film among the Zhang corpus.

As an internationally successful Chinese filmmaker with a “bad class” background (his father a Nationalist officer and his mother a medical doctor), Zhang has always been a target. His early films repeatedly ran into censorship problems. And China’s Film Bureau decided that the only way of saving the Chinese film industry from a total collapse would be by roping in filmmakers like Zhang to work for it. To Live, which was Zhang’s fourth feature financed by overseas producers, became a scapegoat of unspecified disapproval. Zhang was intimidated enough to cancel an intended visit to Cannes.

This past summer I read the novel upon which the film is based. It's interesting to see how much adaptation takes place in turning a novel into a film script:

AUTHOR Yu, Hua, 1960-
TITLE Huo zhe. English.
TITLE To live : a novel / Yu Hua ; translated and with an afterword by Michael Berry.
IMPRINT New York : Anchor Books, 2003
CALL NO. PL2928.H78 H8613 2003.

A conversation with Yu Hua ...and another

"In 2002 Yu Hua became the first Chinese writer to win the prestigious James Joyce Foundation Award. His novel "To Live" was awarded Italy's Premio Grinzane Cavour in 1998, and "To Live" and "Chronicle of a Blood Merchant" were named two of the last decade's ten most influential books in China." (http://shkca.berkeley.edu/fall03-events.html)

James Winship's review of To Live

Zhang Yimou's To Live as an Allegory of Historical Discourse (Williams College student Samuel Doyon)

The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1967 CIA report --see National Intelligence Council for more along the same lines)