에코시네마의 관점에서 본 자장커 영화 속 인물과 풍경

Abstract

Since the 21st century, humankind has faced new environmental changes such as global warming, climate crisis, and reduced biodiversity. For this reason, it is argued that how much the existing anthropocetrism has made the ecological crisis on the Earth. The anthropocene, post-human, and neo-materialism discourses show a certain trend that calls for new awareness and awakening of these ecological crises. Ecocinema is a field of ecological criticism and refers to the study on films from the perspective of changes between humans and the environment. Recently, ecocinema has emerged as one of the major areas of interest in the field of Chinese film studies. In a sense, Chinese ecocinema studies can be understood as a cinematic response and reflection on China's rapid economic development, urban change, and environmental destruction in the past decades after the reform and opening. One of the Chinese most prominent filmmakers, Jia Zhangke, has been paying keen attention to China's rapid changes and the resulting destruction of individual lives and nature. In his films, the characters are usually alienated from the national grand narrative, economic development, modernization, and globalization, and lose their way of life or wander around the margin of the city. In Jia’s films, the physical and social environment always overwhelms the characters, and the tension in the narrative is caused by the conflict between the character and the environment rather than between the characters. Jia‘s film Still Life (2006) features the landscape of Fengjie, a small village ruined by the construction of the Sanxia Dam on the Yangzi river. In the film, the two main characters roam around the village to look at the broken landscape. They become cinematic objects as parts of the landscape rather than subjects looking at the landscape. The camera in Still Life arrives first before the characters arrive in the space, and even if the characters leave the space, the camera stays there and stares at the space. The film calmly looks at the landscape of thousands of years of old villages being destroyed by economic development and captures the lives of the people living in this dangerous area. Since Still Life, Jia has explored the relationship between the human and the nature, or the subject and the object with a non-anthropocentric attitude. This is his cinematic resistance to the national narrative of development and an aesthetic practice to reveal the existence of the people who has not been seen on screen.