.

             Throughout the film, the puppet show becomes a device whereby Zhang mixes imagery and uses the shadows to represent ideas, attitudes, and the conception of art reshaping life. Indeed, Zhang makes the puppet show seem like his own means of catharsis, a symbolic representation of the way he himself has found to overcome the ills the revolution thrust upon him as a child so that now he as well creates shadows on a much larger screen, the shadows of the film itself. Fugui in this sense is a filmmaker with a white screen on which an imperfect black and white world stands in for the real world, much as the cinema screen stands in for the real world for Zhang now that the has achieved his position as director. The importance of the screen is evident when a bayonet splits it in half during a show as war interrupts art and life as Fugui is taken into the army.

             The shadow theater also suggests an enduring cultural element which the people are able to maintain even as the revolutionary regime is destroying the old culture in favor of the new. One of the major criticisms of the ruling regime as seen in this film is its changeability and inconsistency. Fugui returns home a hero of the revolutionary regime, for instance, but the Cultural Revolution changes his status immediately in the comic-tragedy of a regime out of control.

             Movies deal very much in shared fantasies, both in the traditional sense of the word and in the way Bormann uses it. The central fantasy in To Live is an evocation of the endurance of the human spirit in the face of adversity of all sorts. This is the underlying statement that helps make sense of all that takes place. This is a shared fantasy that binds together viewers in China and the United States, as well as most of the rest of the world. It is a theme that is embodied in much world literature and other dramatic presentations on stage and screen. It is also a shared fantasy that would be immediately understood by any audience, so that the particular trappings of this film would not hinder an understanding by audiences far from this particular cultural milieu.