지아장커 『무용(無用)』의 숨은 구조 ― 노동, 예술, 일상의 ‘황토 리얼리즘’

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze and identify the structure hidden in the movie 『Useless (無用)』 by Jiazhangke 賈樟柯. The movie is composed of three parts. Part I shows a production line of a clothes factory in Zhuhai 珠海, Guangdong 廣東, China and the laborers in the factory. Part II realistically describes the clothing philosophy of Make, an internationally recognized designer from China and the designers' fashion exhibitions in Paris. She resists clothes as products of mass production and consumption societies. She pays attention to the history of joy, sadness, warmth and memory arising in the process of making and consuming clothes that are unique to humans while prioritizing the very individual characteristics of clothes. Her manual work includes burying cloth under the earth so that time and space of earth can soak into the cloth quality in the process of clothes making. This enables her to create clothes of art as if they have many stories and memories after a long history and time. Part III photographs the poor daily life of people in Penyang 汾陽, Shanxi 山西 who have been driven away and become peripheral by urbanization and industrialization. All including attachment to clothes of a man who was ‘reduced’ to a miner from a tailor due to mass-producing industry and his wife, their suffering livelihood as well as labor and daily life of a tailor and repairers working in a store which should be removed soon are revealed objectively. These three parts are just played based on a documentary technique without any narrative connections except for one common theme about clothes. However, this movie closes up bodies and worn-out uniforms of miners and then captures the scenes as long takes in Part III, which suggests that the philosophy and works of art meant to be materialized by Make as a world's famous artist were based on labor and labor uniforms. In Part III, Jiazhangke generates a breathtaking screen which seems to have reached the ‘loess(黃土) realism’ through the loess of Penyang which seems to be his spiritual ‘sanctum (聖所. sacred place)’, the coal town, and reinstatement of laborers' bodies and working clothes. The movie, 『Useless』, through labor, art, and daily life, expresses that the most personal thing and the wholeness of the earth as well as the most peripheral thing and the most central thing are in instantaneous and absolute relationships upon a certain chain.