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 can be applied to studies of rhetoric. According to symbolic convergence theory, communication creates reality through symbols, and this occurs because of the capacity of symbols to introduce form and law into a disordered sensory experience (Foss 290).
The basic unit of symbolic convergence theory and fantasy-theme criticism is fantasy or fantasy theme. Fantasy here means the creative and imaginative interpretation of events, and a fantasy theme is the means through which...