Jung Koo Kim
Cinema of Paradox – The Individual and the Crowd in Jia Zhangke’s films
My research attempts to understand the Chinese film director Jia Zhangke’s films as cinema of “paradox”. Based on film text analysis, my discussion is developed by two parts: First, the emergence of the Chinese individual subject from his debut film Xiao Wu to The World; and second, the relationship between the individual and the crowd from Still Life to his recent documentary films such as Useless and 24 city.
The first part, challenging the existing Chinese film history, focuses on how the individual is differentiated from the crowd in Jia’s film texts under the Chinese social transformation during the 1990s and 2000s. In so doing, I explore a shift from cinema for the collective to cinema for the individual. The second part discusses the change of Jia Zhangke’s filmic concern from the individual to the crowd, from the self to the others, and from the subject to the object. Through his subsequent filmic experiments since Still Life and Dong, I examine how he addresses the others and raises the questions about reality/fantasy, fiction/documentary, and the representable/the unrepresentable. It also includes the problematic on possibilities and limits of film medium.
I consider the emergence of the individual subject in Jia’s early films as “paradox” in terms of Deleuze’s concept. As paradox is opposed to “doxa” (common sense or good sense), Jia’s early films of the individual construct paradox in Chinese film history, which had been dominated by cinema of the collective. In Jia’s recent films, paradox is marked by his cinematic experiments such as challenging the filmic convention of fiction/documentary and representing the impossibility of representation. For example, posing an attitude of objective fiction film and subjective documentary, Jia questions which is real, whom he can address, and what film can represent. In this regard, I seek to explore the significance of Jia Zhangke’s cinema arising between these paradoxical relationships.
My areas of interest focus on mainland Chinese cinema, East Asian cinema including Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean Cinema, cultural studies, modernity, and the politics of aesthetics.
Publications
“An Attitude to the Death: Reading Mourning and Melancholy in 2010 Korean Cinema”, in A Crack of Light and Shadow (Guangying zhi xi), Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2011.
“The Cultural Hero Narrative and Cultural Studies,” in The Cultural Map of China in the Twenty First Century, chapter translator, Seoul: Hyunsil Munhwa, 2009.
“The Power to Break through the Mist,” Book Review on Landscape of the Mist, in The Modern Chinese Literature Journal 42, Seoul, September 2007.
“Chinese Modernity of Shanghai Cinema during the 1930s” in A Selection of Excellent Theses 2004, Seoul: Korea Film Committee, 2004.
China Film Industry White Book, with two other writers, Seoul: Korea Film Committee, 2002.
“The Meeting of New thought and New media: The Left-wing Cinema Movement During the 1930s” in The History of Film Movement: From Visual Feast to the Tool of Liberation, contributor, Seoul: Seoul Press Media, 2002.