To Live by Zhang Yimou - Movie Review Example

To Live by Zhang Yimou In the film, the reintroduction of the "I"-philosophy for the current Chinese cultural life, there is satisfaction of the collective unconscious in expressing itself as well as compensating the various sets of conscious attitudes which people have adopted in modernizing China. The Taoist attitudes resurgence is almost a major expectation of whether or not there is an under­standing of the direction that China modems. This means issues of exclusion for some of those psychic elements play a major role in their respective lives even though they are denied the ultimate rights of existing because they can be incompatible with general atti­tudes. Further down, embedding the systems into Taoism is the primordial vision for life bound towards the recurrenceof the compensatory adjustmentsof such conscious attitudes irrespective of their kind. Though the tragedies befalling Fu-gui appear to be as a result of chance, they are a symbol of the failure of reconciling human experience with morality. This is coupled with the failure of recognizing the collective unconsciousness. Therefore, the elements that stayalive within the film, huozhe, are not simply the biological hero and heroine lives, but the "archaic remnants" of the psychic life and the images and associations which are analogous to various primitive ideas, rites, and mythwhich try to continue re-establishing an equilibrium through restoration of the images and emotions to express a state of unconscious. Evidently, Zhang is a commendable film­maker who seeks to keepalive the forgotten instincts’ language and is also a popular myth-maker who trends towards the Chinese to again understand life based on how best to imagine up to its distant past. The film’s viewer is led to see bias, prejudice as well as psychic malaise of the 20thCentury immediately he is taken through the rites and symbols through which life was perceived and lived within the ancient Asia andChina. The precarious life of Fu-gui's is icon-graphically related to that of Sakyamuni. He is born son of the petty king who is also brought up through a relatively luxurious and abandoned life, his young son and wife at the age of 29 and attains enlightenment close to six years after extreme self-mortification. Basically, the events within To Live indicate the Noble Truths across Indian Buddhism. First, life is seen to be permeated through suffering and dissatisfaction and the origin of suffering is attached to a craving. Further, the cessation of suffering as depicted in the film is based on the cessation of the craving. All persons in the film are visited by suffering and pain due to the need to keep on hoping for their bitter disillusionment to be a condition for enlightenment as well as a possibility of turning into an individual of self-knowledge. What is striking within the film ‘To Live’is the perception of life across the twentieth-century Chinese who are accustomed to discarding and ignoring the culture to be "archaic" and "old" The film proceeds to validate traditional worldviews which are held in contempt based on the earlier iconoclast and radical intellectuals. Such reversal is only attained through utter failure of Fu­gui in comprehending the changes taking through as seen in communist revolution. The experience of Fu-gui makes the viewer on the other hand more aware of the atrocities and indignities which the Chinese population have endured andcommitted, and of the simple and narrow ways the state has interpreted history. The social progress narrative is parodied and satirized as a dream while Fu-gui makes prophesies for the grandson, Man-tou, and son, You-qin, who, on a number of occasions request him to make predictions of their future. The happens within the Civil War as well as the land reform processes in the 1940s, the 1950s Great Leap Forward andthe socialist collectivization coupled with the Cultural Revolution lasting to 1976 from 1966, could have been "progress" a number of them but not for Fu-gui as they were recurring natural and human situations as represented by the hexagrams. They had collapsed and revolved from one to many in complex and dynamic ways among the past millennia. The main internal logic in this case was the detection of the chances of meaningful coincidence. The story of Fu-gui needs to be understood with respect to spiritual imaginations which allow life to be perceived in a range of richness, wonders, andcomplexity. It is worth understanding that his life is not overly reduced into sets of philosophical and moral postulates or even made worth living based on the sets of qualities and purposes stated. The punctuation of nuisance and danger of chance has Fu-gui's life underscoring the Taoist belief for which Earth and Heaven are considered inhumane viewing myriad creatures to be straw dogs. The audience can easily relate to Fu-gui as he reminds them of the primitive selves whose the sufferings have imbued meaning due to the representations of the mythic world. The mythic world has natural events and human affairs mysteriously and intertwined, similar to the wonders that were captured in the interconnected film ‘Grand Canyon’ by Lawrence Kasdan on 1992. Fu-gui’slife is full of moments whichencompass various aspects all the way down to nonsensical details resulting from the consideration of various ingredients that make up the observed moments. Due to this, the emphasis regarding chance as well as the unexpected details which significantly change the lives of people are part and partial of the narrative techniques upon which Zhang Yimou is in a position of translating the modern Chinese political experience for the mythic languages from the past. In simpler terms, modern China's political and social events in the filmare reconstructed and are not how the state would priorities them to historicize be. However, they are portrayed as psychic experiences of individual people who were used as pawns by the ideologists and with whom voiceswere silenced by various tyrannies. The film proceeds to de­politicize the Chinese experience through the re-establishment the individual person's relation with the human psyche. That relationship materializes for us in the twists and turns of Fu-gui's life. Part of the issues addressed in the film appears to be the item that Jung regards to be conflict of responsibilities between the two as mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed attitudes for knowledge upon one hand where the understanding on others is as per. further, that comes in handy in shaping the human spirit. In the film, To Live, the audience sees human propensity for moralizing the world, idealizing humans to be rational beings as well as intellectualizing human existence while at the same time perceive the use of wisdom not building tower of Babel. For this, the humility of owning up for human limitations is based on the same reasons that standards are set. In fact, the issue of the conflict exercises itself on a regular basis through a way of literature, religion, and philosophyhaving developed similar aspects within the world. Most of the details within To Live are reflective of the pessimistic perspective of man which the fortuitous consideration of circumstances and chance, guides him over the way he is able to guide himself. Such moral pessimism is to be found within ‘The Book of Changes (1-Ching)’, one of the first Chinese efforts towards making sense to the world are viewed. Within such contexts of the "I"-philoso­phy, most of the human events are regularly understood based on times of "meaningful coincidence". As appreciated in this contexts, the attempts of giving expression to the psychic wholeness within the film renders an ineffectiveness of the terms "gain" and "loss" or "good" and "evil". The most that is seen is that all people within the audience are stricken by the split of knowledge from instincts. All the characters pay heavily for their respective one-sidedness due to what they chose to ignore not being in existence. The viewer is also presented with as situation of appreciating psychological equilibrium where he is able to see the conscious life among the characters getting disrupted by the unconscious’ contents. While Long-er assumes possession of the mansion belonging to Fu-gui's family, he is rather unaware of the degree to which he bears possession from his inner demon-greed-that later cause’s death in the land reform movement (Communist). Further, what is perceived to be the work of probability is later translated into a psychological equilibrium agent. As time goes by, Fu-gui is able to let go of the conscious ego through involuntarily joining ranks of homeless as well as the "proletariat", there is a touch of an instinctual side as he seeks to support his family. The film is very interesting and informative of the Chinese culture and their response to modernity. Works Cited Yimou, Zhang. To Live. 1994. 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