頤和園의 黃昏, ‘6⋅4 천안문세대’의 ‘靑春’을 위한 追念 ― 로우예(婁燁)의 영화 『頤和園』 읽기

Abstract

This paper offers a re-reading of Lou Ye’s Summer Palace by focusing on the film’s implied social and historical contexts. Directed by one of the leading representatives of China’s “sixth generation,” Summer Palace courted controversy when the director’s decision to submit it to 2006 Cannes International Film Festival without first seeking the permission of the Chinese government led to the film’s ban in China. The highly explicit sexual content of the film and the repeated references to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in the background generated further heat in critical evaluations of the film. Such overwhelming attention paid to peripheral or extra-textual aspects of the film, however, has tended to occlude a view of the problematic that lies at the heart of the film: a reinterpretation of the events of the late 1980s and the trauma generated by those events in the context of the changes that have taken place in the role assumed by the category of “the youth” in China’s contemporary history. Pioneers in the “inexorable” progress of history, “the youth” had shouldered a heavy burden and played a symbolic role at every critical juncture in contemporary Chinese history, and yet “the youth” of the 1980s could no longer convince themselves or others of the validity of the very category to which they claimed membership. Summer Palace attests to this confusionin the generation’s self-definition. Suffering from a sense of isolation and impotence in these anomic times, the young protagonists of the film turn to sex as much for a means of communicating with one another as for a way to express passive resistance against the oppressive moral authority of the times. In the form of a retrospective confession, Summer Palace thus invokes the memory of resistance and wandering experienced by the youth of the 1980s—a generation to which Lou Ye himself belongs—in order to bring into sharp focus the trauma that still lingers from the times gone by.