39th Annual Student Research Conference
Generational Trauma and Family Separation in Zhang Yimou’s Cultural Revolution Cinema: To Live and Coming Home
Enyetullah Rahimullah*, Tristan Pier, Sakar Pandey, Hank Phan, and Pengkai Ma
Prof. Zhijun Wen, Faculty Mentor
Set against the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), this project examines how Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1994) and Coming Home (2014) represent family separation and generational trauma as lasting effects of political violence. It asks how these films transform historical disruption into cinematic narratives of loss, memory, and fractured kinship across generations. Evidence includes patterns of familial loss, marginalization, and disrupted continuity in To Live; political imprisonment, enforced separation, and trauma-induced memory rupture in Coming Home; plus formal elements like chronology, pacing, color palette, and domestic/public spatial contrasts. Drawing on Cai’s analysis of To Live as historical allegory and Lu’s study of trauma and memory in Coming Home, alongside scholarship on Cultural Revolution persecution and family disruption, the research argues through comparative close reading that both films preserve affective truths about state violence while exposing film’s limits as historical evidence. This comparison reveals cinema’s role in shaping public understanding of historical traumas.
Keywords: Cultural Revolution, Zhang Yimou, Family Separation, Generational Trauma, Political Violence, Cinematic Memory, Historical Representation, Trauma and Memory
Topic(s):Chinese
Presentation Type: Oral Presentation
Session: TBA
Location: TBA
Time: TBA