화해를 위한 두 진혼곡 ― 『색/계』와 『난징! 난징!』

Abstract

In this essay, I analyzed recently released two movies, Lust, Caution and The City of Life and Death in terms of a cultural symptom in the era of reconciliation. Despite many differences between them, both movies share common things in that they are depicting the period of Anti-Japanese War by dealing with the peripheral places such as Shanghai and Nanjing. For long time, many historical events and literary works which had been produced in Shanghai and Nanjing have been excluded from the territory of modern Chinese (literary) history, because they had been conquered by Japanese troops during the war, reflecting contaminated body of national history. With the advent of post-coldwar atmosphere, the subject of reconciliation became important. I suggest that Lust, Caution and The City of Life and Death problematised the subject of reconciliation, or at least become a symptom of it: while the former thematized the reconciliation between CNP and CCP or Mainlander and Taiwanese, the latter tried to call back all strangers who had been excluded from the process of construction of modern Chinese history, such as CNP soldiers, traitors, prostitutes etc. In this sense, both movies are meaningful because they opened an arena for discussion by illuminating the trace of fraction which had been caused by Cold-war. However, they still remain ideological because they suppose a suture of the fraction before exposing the fraction as a problem itself. While Lust, Caution intended to seam up a crack of the modern Chinese history with aesthetic purity through which it closed in upon the deep inside of human desire, The City of Life and Death effectively fulfilled the national ideology of unity, appealing to humanism, a university narrative.