도시를, 인터(inter) 뷰(view)하다 ― 지아장커(賈樟柯) 『해상전기(海上傳奇)』론

Abstract

This paper explores the images of Shanghai that Jiazhangke wants to show in his movie titled I wish I knew as well as what urban epics are. This movie starts as an urban wanderer enters as a person who represents the desire to view the whole image of the world or recognize the world, which is an assumption in this paper that all humans have this desire, among all other desires universally held by humans. The wanderer represents a human desire to view the whole view of a city and considers himself to have a bird's-eye view. The wanderer's will to have a bird's eye view of Shanghai is linked with the universal desire of humans to view the whole world. Throughout the movie, the wanderer enters between appearances of the interview subjects. He enters momentarily between points of time and places of the past and present reflected by the subjects or the current landscapes of Shanghai that are not related to the subjects' reminiscence. In this way, the countless, seemingly unrelated people in reminiscence are converged in one space at one point of time. The form of this movie is just like the Zhanghui style(章回體, a narration by chapter) in traditional Chinese novels where each interview subject's reminiscence provides a chapter while the silent wanderer and laborers enter just like poems placed between them. Unlike the interview subjects who keep talking to reorganize their past, the wanderer and laborers are speechless while their facial expressions and gestures come into the passages between and among the chapters, playing a lyrical role with mysterious lingering images just like poems placed between chapters of a novel. Just like a Zhanghui novel(Fiction in chapters) begins and ends with a poem(以詩爲始, 以詩爲結)’, this movie begins and ends with the wanderer. Based on this form, this movie works to describe something like spiritual history of a city beyond materialism by persistently pursuing something that may be called ‘inter'. ‘Inter' refers to ‘the Inter' between and among people, matters, and everything. Trying to look into ‘the Inter' is trying to look into the bare skin or grains of a subject that you wish to recognize. Based on this task, this movie transforms experiences and perception of the subjects into history and reorganizes them by interviewing about what happened to the ‘inter' between Shanghai and the subjects. By persistently tracing stories in the history of ‘capital letters' and ‘small letters' contained in the ‘inter', it tries to expose the spatial and time structure of large space called a city. This is something like an aura created by an intersection of the aggregate of group history(History) and personal history(history) that are becoming, growing or dying out or have become, grown, and died out right here in the past and now as well as the memories and sentiments coming from them.