Space and Intermediality in Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life

Autores/as

  • Cecília Mello Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Departamento de História da Arte, Campus Guarulhos, CEP: 07112-000

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14591/aniki.v1n2.91

Palabras clave:

Chinese cinema, intermediality, Chinese landscape painting, cinematic space, Jia Zhang-ke

Resumen

This article is dedicated to an analysis of Chinese director Jia Zhang-ke’s film Still Life (San Xia Hao Ren 三峡好人, 2006) from the point of view of its intermedial relationship with Chinese landscape painting. As I will suggest, Jia’s discovery of a real landscape and a vanishing cityscape in this film, shot on location in the region of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, springs from a realist impulse and from an original aesthetic response to a new historical and social conjuncture. But while it seems firmly located in the landscape of contemporary China, the film also shares aesthetic qualities with the tradition of Chinese landscape painting, mounted on hanging or hand scrolls. A focus on this particular instance of intermediality leads to a reflection on cinema’s spatial organization in light of current revisions in film and audiovisual theory, which suggest that filmic space and its spectatorial experience should be considered above all from the point of view of touch and movement. It also allows for a broader understanding of the political implications of intermediality in Jia Zhang-ke’s oeuvre, fruit of an organic link between form and content that brings a historical resonance to a contemporary perspective.

Biografía del autor/a

Cecília Mello, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, Departamento de História da Arte, Campus Guarulhos, CEP: 07112-000

Cecília Mello is Lecturer in Film Studies at the Department of Film, Radio and Television, School of Communications and Arts, University of São Paulo and  Fapesp Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History of Art, Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil. She was Fapesp Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of São Paulo (2008-2011), has an MA in Film and Television Production, University of Bristol (1998) and a PhD in Film Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London (2006). Her research focuses on world cinema – with an emphasis on British and Chinese cinemas – and on issues of audiovisual realism, cinema and urban spaces and intermediality. She has published several essays and co-edited with Lúcia Nagib the book Realism and the Audiovisual Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

 

Capa da edição

Descargas

Publicado

2014-06-21

Número

Vol. 1 Núm. 2 (2014): Arte e cinema

Sección

Dossier temático