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- Title
The World without Future: Stage as Entrapment in Jia Zhangke's Film.
- Authors
Bordeleau, Erik
- Abstract
The World offers a unique occasion to think of globalization's process as entrapment. The setting, a Disney-like theme park, allows for a powerful critical allegory of globalization. It is a non-place, a paradoxical theatre of the characters' efforts to form community. As underlined by Jia Zhangke (These characters cannot be represented into ASCII text) in an interview, economic growth has introduced into the everyday life of the Chinese a constellation of "shows," "sort of like economic bubbles, filling up every sector of our lives." The author aims to show how The World works as a cinematic extension of this observation, by making us enter into the ob-scene conditions of production of the global spectacle and by showing its repercussions at the level of being together. The central idea of this article is to present The World as a practice of non-place and a unilaterizing itinerary for the existential malaise linked to the capitalist total mobilization. The author examines how The World can contribute to a collective demobilization through the production of a claustrophobic effect on the audience. The guiding hypothesis of this work is that the claustrophobic effect skillfully orchestrated by Jia assumes and conjures up the claustrophobic feeling provoked by the process of global entrapment and thus opens up new ways of being-in-the-world.
- Subjects
CHINESE films; MOTION pictures &; globalization; JIA, Zhangke, 1970-; SPECTACLE films; CAPITALIST propaganda; CLAUSTROPHOBIA
- Publication
China Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal on Greater China, 2010, Vol 10, Issue 2, p155
- ISSN
1680-2012
- Publication type
Article