Zhang Yimou
Zhang Yimou is seen as the leading
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Zhang Yimou is seen as the leading film director in China today not only because of the quality of his work but because so many of his films have made it to screens in the West. One of his recent works is To Live, released in 1994. This film portrays the mode of life prevailing in China from the 1940s through the era of the Cultural Revolution, and it thus covers the period from the Communist success in the Chinese Revolution to the period when the leadership believed the purity of the revolution was endangered and so was in need of a purging of certain counter-revolutionary elements in Chinese society. Zhang achieves a sense of continuity in his body of work by using similar storylines to explore various themes and by using many of the same actors over and over again, creating the image of a repertory company performing different works for a growing world audience. The film will serve as the artifact and will be analyzed using Fantasy-theme Criticism, as created by Ernest G. Bormann. The purpose of this critical framework is to provide insights into the shared world view of groups of rhetors. The method was developed from the work of Robert Bales and his associates who studied communication in small groups, and they discovered the process of group fantasizing or dramatizing as a type of communication that occurs in small groups. Extending this into a theory, Bormann created symbolic convergence theory and the method of fantasy-theme criticism that c
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examines the broad intentions of these leaders in launching the Cultural Revolution. The leadership had goals in terms of altering first the political purposes of literature and the performing arts. What began as a push for the socialist purification of art would become pressure for the socialist purification of all aspects of society and life as well as a drawing of lines between competing groups and an effort to weed out all dissent and all enemies, real or perceived. Spence says that the leaders of the Cultural Revolution led a comprehensive attack on the four old elements in Chinese society--old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. They left it to the Red Guard to carry out the reforms. Spence's view is that the leadership had one idea of the Cultural Revolution an the Red Guard another, since the Red Guard exerted all their energies on proving their own revolutionary zeal by denouncing any perceived lack of it in others. This led to escalating violence, and the intellectual class in particular was persecuted, imprisoned, and murdered, with many committing suicide under the pressure brought to bear against them. As Spence also shows, the program was less and less coordinated as it progressed, with differe
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 5336
Approximate Pages = 21 (250 words per page)
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