To Live (1994 film)

To Live (活着, Huózhe), also known as Lifetimes, is a 1994 Chinese drama directed by Zhang Yimou and adapted from Yu Hua's 1993 novel of the same name. The film spans the 1940s–1970s, tracing the Xu family's survival through the Chinese Civil War, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution. It won the Grand Prix, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and Best Actor (Ge You) at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, and despite domestic censorship, is widely respected for its portrayal of ordinary resilience under political duress. The film also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language at the 48th British Academy Film Awards in 1995.

The film looks back on four generations of the Xu family: Xu Fugui, played by Ge You; his father, a wealthy landowner; his wife, Jiazhen, played by Gong Li; their daughter, Fengxia, and son, Youqing; and finally their grandson, Little Bun. The action goes from the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The film, like many examples of fiction and film in the 1970s and 1980s, demonstrates the difficulties of the common Chinese, but ends when conditions are seemingly improving in the 1980s.

To Live was screened at the 1994 New York Film Festival before eventually receiving a limited release in the United States on November 18, 1994. The film has been used in the United States as a support to teach Chinese history in colleges. Films like To Live present opportunities for diverse audiences to effectively visualize prominent historical events, and the impact that they had on different demographics of people. To Live offers a straightforward, almost plain, approach to portraying personal perspective within a complicated period of Chinese history. It is this simplicity that makes it an invaluable educational asset in teaching the impacts of this period and the issues of the Great Leap Forward in particular.

Having achieved international success with his previous films (Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern), director Zhang Yimou's To Live came with high expectations, and lived up to it, receiving critical acclaim. It is the first Chinese film that had its foreign distribution rights pre-sold. Furthermore, To Live brought home the Grand Prix, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and Best Actor Award (Ge You)

The film was denied a theatrical release in mainland China by the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television due to its critical portrayal of policies and campaigns. Zhang Yimou and Gong Li were each banned from filmmaking for two years as a consequence of the film's submission to Cannes without prior official approval, and the ban on the film itself was not lifted until late 2008.

Plot

In the 1940s, Xu Fugui, a rich man's son and compulsive gambler, loses his ancestral home to a man named Long'er. His wife Jiazhen leaves him with their daughter Fengxia and unborn son Youqing. His father dies after signing over the family house to Long'er. Destitute, Fugui vows to never gamble again as Jiazhen returns. When Fugui asks for a loan, Long'er gives Fugui a set of shadow puppets. To make a living, Fugui starts a shadow puppet troupe with a partner named Chunsheng. The Chinese Civil War is occurring at the time, and Fugui and Chunsheng are conscripted into the Kuomintang's Republic of China armed forces during a performance. Midway through the war, the two are captured by the communist People's Liberation Army and earn a certificate of commendation for performing their shadow puppet operas for the revolutionaries. After the Communist victory, Fugui returns home and learns that Fengxia has become mute and partially deaf due to illness.

Fugui learns that Long'er burned all his property just to deny the new regime from seizing it. He is eventually put on trial for counter-revolutionary sabotage and sentenced to execution. Realizing that Long'er's fate would have been his if not for his "misfortune" earlier, Fugui is filled with fear. He runs home to tell Jiazhen what has happened, and they quickly retrieve the certificate stating that Fugui served in the communist People's Liberation Army. Jiazhen assures him they are no longer gentries and will not be killed.

A decade later, Mao initiates the Great Leap Forward. The local village chief enlists everyone to donate all scrap iron to the national drive to produce steel and make weaponry for invading Taiwan. As an entertainer, Fugui performs for the entire town nightly. Fengxia delivers water to the workers, and the children aid in the steel-making process.

The children are exhausted from the hard labor they are doing in the town and try to sleep whenever they can. They eventually get a break during the festivities for meeting the scrap metal quota while the entire village eats dumplings in celebration. However, Youqing is called to the school to prepare for the District Chief's inspection. Though Jiazhen wants to let him sleep, Fugui insists that he go and carries his son to school. Later that night, the car carrying the District Chief gets into a freak accident and kills Youqing. The District Chief visits the family at the grave, only to be revealed as Chunsheng. His attempts to apologize and compensate the family are rejected, particularly by Jiazhen, who tells him he owes her family a life.

Another decade later, the Cultural Revolution is starting. The village chief advises Fugui to burn his shadow puppets, which have been deemed as counter-revolutionary. Fengxia is now grown up and her family arranges for her to meet Wan Erxi, a local leader of the Red Guards. Erxi, a man crippled by a workplace accident, fixes her parents' roof and paints depictions of Mao Zedong on their walls with his workmates. He proves to be a kind, gentle man; he and Fengxia fall in love and marry, and she soon becomes pregnant. Chunsheng, still in the government, visits immediately after the wedding to ask for Jiazhen's forgiveness, but she refuses to acknowledge him.

Later, Chunsheng is branded a reactionary and a capitalist. He comes to tell them his wife has committed suicide and that he intends to as well. To atone for Youqing's death, he has come to give them all his money. Fugui refuses to take it. As Chunsheng leaves, Jiazhen commands him to live, reminding him that he still owes them a life.

Months later, during Fengxia's childbirth, her parents and husband accompany her to the county hospital. All doctors have been sent to do hard labor for being over educated, and the students are left as the only ones in charge after they have "overthrown" the doctors. Wan Erxi manages to find a doctor to oversee the birth, removing him from confinement, but he is very weak from starvation. Fugui purchases seven steamed buns (mantou) for him and the family decides to name the son Mantou, after the buns. Fengxia begins to hemorrhage, and the nurses panic, admitting that they do not know what to do. The family and nurses seek the advice of the doctor, but find that he has overeaten and is semiconscious. The family is helpless, and Fengxia dies.

The film ends six years later, with the family now consisting of Fugui, Jiazhen, their son-in-law Erxi, and grandson Mantou. The family visits the graves of Youqing and Fengxia, where Jiazhen leaves dumplings for her son and family photos for her daughter. Erxi buys a box full of young chicks for his son, which they decide to keep in the chest formerly used for the shadow puppets. When Mantou inquires how long it will take for the chicks to grow up, Fugui's response is a more tempered version of something he said earlier in the film. He expresses optimism for his grandson's future, and the film ends with his statement, "life will get better and better" as the family sits down to eat.

Cast

Ge You as Xu Fugui ():
Fugui came from a rich family, but he is addicted to gambling, so his pregnant wife walks away from him with their daughter. After he gambles away all his possessions, his father passes away due to anger. After a year, his wife comes back and they start their life over again. Fugui and Chunsheng together maintain a shadow puppet business for their livelihood, but they are forcibly conscripted by the Kuomintang army, and later the Communist Party. When at last, Fugui gets home after the war, everything has changed.
Gong Li as Jiazhen (), Fugui's wife:
Jiazhen is a hard-working, kind, and virtuous woman. She is a strong spiritual pillar for Fugui. When her husband gambles his possessions away, Jiazhen angrily leaves him and takes their daughter away. But when Fugui had lost everything, and she knows that Fugui had completely quit gambling, she returns to his side to share in weal and woe. She is not after a great fortune, just a peaceful life with her family. one of the works, he was unable to stop reading it. Zhang met with Yu to discuss the script for Mistake at River's Edge, but they kept bringing up To Live. Thus, the two decided to adapt To Live instead.

Casting

Ge You, known for his comedic roles, was chosen by Zhang Yimou to play the title character, Fugui. Known for poker-faced comedy, he was not accustomed to expressing emotional states this character requires. Thus, he was not very confident in himself, even protesting going to the Cannes Film Festival where he would eventually garner a best actor award. Zhang had taken particular notice of Ge You's nuanced supporting performance in Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993), and felt his deadpan timing could provide a counterweight to the gravity of the material.

The combination of the two very crucial parts of his life provided him with a very strong vision for his films. He was able to have a very strong understanding of both the Chinese national outlook as well as the international outlook of films and applied them extensively throughout his career.

Cinematography and visual style

The cinematography was overseen by Lü Yue, replacing Zhang's earlier collaborator Gu Changwei, who had shot Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, and Raise the Red Lantern. The film's visual approach is notably restrained compared with Zhang's earlier work, exchanging saturated colour fields and stylised tableaux for a quieter palette suited to a story of ordinary domestic life unfolding across decades. Critics have observed that Zhang and Lü Yue rely on emblematic compositions drawn from everyday detail: the red thumbprints sealing Fugui's gambling debts at the start of the film; a bayonet punching through the screen of a shadow-puppet performance to mark the arrival of the Civil War; the silhouettes of Fugui and Chunsheng tumbling down a snowy hillside as Communist forces overtake them.

As the narrative moves into the Mao era, the iconography of the Communist Party — slogans, big-character posters, propaganda murals, and especially portraits of Mao — saturates the family's domestic spaces, often appearing as the dominant visual element within a frame. For To Live, Zhao combined a Western-style symphony orchestra with traditional Chinese instruments such as the banhu, xun, sheng, and erhu, using the latter to underscore moments of grief and quiet endurance. Cues from the score, including "Fu Gui and Jia Zhen", were later collected on the Marco Polo anthology Electric Shadows: Film Music by Zhao Jiping, performed by the China Symphony Orchestra and released in 2000.

Post-production

Because To Live was a foreign-funded co-production with Taiwanese backing, Zhang's team sent the negative to Japan for laboratory work and post-production. According to a contemporary Variety report, this took place shortly before Chinese authorities issued a regulation requiring that the negatives of foreign-funded films receive domestic approval before being processed abroad — a sequence of events that contributed to the political fallout following the film's Cannes premiere.

Second narrator and the ox not present in the film.

Adaptation

In the film of To Live, Zhang Yimou did not choose to directly express the theme of the novel, but to reduce the number of deaths, change the way of death, and cut into the doomed sense of fate to eliminate the audience's immediate depression brought by the story itself. In the film, these deliberately set dramatic turns highlight the theme that those infinitely small people, as living “others”, can only rely on living instinct to bear suffering in history, times and social torrents. The theme of the novel – the ability to bear suffering and the optimistic attitude to the world – is hidden in these little people who are helpless to their own fate, but still live strongly.

An extremely faithful adaptation of the novel would have been far too dark and depressing for an audience to endure. The original novel's characters continually experience misery and loss, and suffer without a break. It implies a bleaker philosophy on the trials the characters face: that life's suffering is pointless and humans continue living because they feel obligated to continue existing. The film is optimistic and presents an uplifting interpretation by comparison, portraying an appreciation for the simpler moments of life and that the suffering of life is eventually rewarded. Though Yu Hua continues to prefer his novel, the collaboration between Yu Hua and the film adaptation's screenwriters ensured the core focus of the story–the undying tenacity of the human spirit in the face of suffering–remains clear.

Release

Cannes premiere

To Live premiered in competition at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 1994. Although the film took home three major prizes — the Grand Prix (tied with Nikita Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun), the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and Best Actor for Ge You — Zhang Yimou himself did not attend the festival. According to Variety, his absence was widely interpreted as a deferential gesture toward Beijing authorities, who had not officially cleared the film for international submission. Worldwide gross has been reported at approximately US$2.33 million. Zhang was reported to have submitted a public letter of self-criticism to Chinese authorities as part of the resolution.

Despite being officially banned, the film was widely available on video in China upon its release and was even shown in some theaters. The official ban was reported to have been quietly lifted in late 2008, although the film has remained outside the channels of mainstream domestic theatrical distribution. The MGM disc went out of print, and the film has not received a North American Blu-ray release. Region-coded DVDs have also been issued in the UK, Australia (by AV Channel), and several territories in continental Europe and East Asia.

Reception

Critical response

To Live received critical acclaim and various critics selected the film in their year end lists. To Live has an approval rating of 87% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 23 reviews, and an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's critical consensus states: "To Live (Huo zhe) offers a gut-wrenching overview of Chinese political upheaval through the lens of one family's unforgettable experiences".

Reviewing the film for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars out of four and praised it as a strong and energetic work covering four decades of Chinese history through the lives of ordinary people. He highlighted Jiazhen's longing for a quiet life as the film's emotional core, and observed that the political fallout faced by Zhang and Gong Li had only sharpened the urgency of the work.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in the Chicago Reader, praised the film for combining vast historical scope with a sense of intimacy, and for foregrounding the role of chance and fate in the lives of its characters. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times ranked the film fourth on his year-end list, and James Berardinelli of ReelViews awarded the film high marks, calling Zhang's work as honest as nearly any other film of 1994 and grouping it with the director's prior breakthroughs Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern.

In Variety, critic Derek Elley gave the film a more measured assessment, praising its craftsmanship and Ge You's "quirky, ironic edge" but arguing that Lü Yue's restrained cinematography parades through history rather than fully engaging the viewer's emotions for sustained passages. Time Out described the film as less an indictment of the Mao era than a portrait of the resilience that allowed people to live through it.

There is, among film critics, almost a consensus that To Live is not merely a lament of difficult times, nor a critique of the evils of the totalitarian system, but more “an homage to the characters’ resilience and heroism in their odyssey of survival.” Some scholars further argue that the era's hostile and chaotic environment is not the story itself, but simply serves as a stage for the story.

5th – James Berardinelli, ReelViews
9th – Michael MacCambridge, Austin American-Statesman.
Honourable mention – Mike Clark, USA Today.
Honourable mention – Betsy Pickle, Knoxville News-Sentinel.

Awards and nominations

{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="margin:1em auto;"

! Awards

! width="5%"|Year

! Category

! Result

! Notes

! scope="row" rowspan="4"| Cannes Film Festival

| rowspan="4"| 1994

| Grand Prix

| Tied with Burnt by the Sun

| Prize of the Ecumenical Jury

| Tied with Burnt by the Sun

| Best Actor<br/>(Ge You)

| Palme d'Or

! scope="row"| Golden Globe Award

| 1994

| Best Foreign Language Film

! scope="row"| National Board of Review

| 1994

| Best Foreign Language Film

| with four other films

! scope="row"| National Society of Film Critics Award

| 1995

| Best Foreign Language Film

! scope="row"| BAFTA Award

| 1995

| Best Film Not in the English Language

!scope="row"| Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics Association Award

Included in The New York Times list of The Best 1000 Movies Ever Made in 2004
included in CNN's list of 18 Best Asian Movie of All Time in 2008
The film ranked 41st in BBC's 2018 list of The 100 greatest foreign language films voted by 109 film critics from 43 countries around the world.

Themes

Survival and endurance

The Mandarin word huózhe (活着) translates simply as "alive" or "to be alive", and critics have identified survival as the film's most insistent theme. Rather than positing resistance, transcendence, or political awakening as the answer to historical violence, To Live privileges what scholar Rey Chow has described as the act of merely enduring: a sustained, ungrand persistence of ordinary life through whatever conditions history imposes on it.

Fate, Daoism and the cyclical nature of life

Several critics have read the film through the lens of Daoist thought, in particular the Daoist conception of fate as a cycle of fortune and misfortune that operates beyond individual control. In an essay in Film Criticism, Liang Shi argues that To Live embodies a Daoist cosmic discourse: the title's apparent simplicity masks a complex resignation to the arbitrary play of fate, and the plot's central pattern — Fugui's continual movement between fortune and misfortune — recurs in a manner consistent with classical Daoist accounts of cosmic alternation.

Political imagery and the figure of Mao

The image of Mao saturates the film's later scenes — appearing on walls, posters, badges, propaganda murals painted by Erxi and his comrades on the Xu family home, and even on the bedclothes used at Fengxia and Erxi's wedding. One scholarly reading argues that Mao functions almost as an additional, voiceless character within the film, an omnipresent force whose decrees translate directly into the family's tragedies. He intended to strengthen the film's narrative and metaphors, allowing the shadow puppet performances to help drive the narrative throughout the story. The shadow play depicted in To Live is characteristic of the melancholic northwestern style of the Shaanxi and Gansu areas, contributing to the tragic mood forged by Yimou.

The shadow puppetry functions as a profound symbol in the film, initially representing a "symbol of wealth" for Fugui, and later metaphorically representing his life as a young man of prestige and power. Despite the slight variations, this line consistently acts as a picture of the Chinese people's perseverance in the face of historical hardships, giving the feeling of hope for the audience. The dumplings that appear at multiple turning points have been read in the same allegorical register, since their shape echoes that of traditional Chinese gold ingots (yuanbao) and so silently links Mao-era promises of plenty to older, pre-revolutionary symbols of prosperity.

Legacy

To Live is widely regarded as one of the major works of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers — the first cohort of directors trained at the Beijing Film Academy after the Cultural Revolution — and is frequently grouped with Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993) and Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite (1993) as part of an early-1990s wave of historical epics that examined the human cost of mid-twentieth-century Chinese politics. Yu Hua's source novel — also widely read in Chinese-language curricula and translated into more than a dozen languages — has been adapted in several other media, including a stage play and a 33-episode Chinese television series, Fugui (富贵), broadcast in 2005.

Bibliography

External links

Roger Ebert's review of To Live at RogerEbert.com
Derek Elley's Cannes review in Variety

To Live (1994 film)

Plot

Cast

Casting

Cinematography and visual style

Post-production

Adaptation

Release

Cannes premiere

Reception

Critical response

Awards and nominations

Themes

Survival and endurance

Fate, Daoism and the cyclical nature of life

Political imagery and the figure of Mao

Legacy

See also

Bibliography

Further reading

External links