현 중국사회를 읽는 하나의 거울 - 지아장커(賈樟柯)의 『세계』,『스틸라이프』론

Abstract

One of the grandest themes of Jia Zhangke’s films is the transformation of Chinese society and the situation of each individual during the change. From among the diverse individuals in Chinese society, Jia Zhangke chooses the most marginalized lower-class youths and laborers as the protagonists of his films, like pickpockets, touring opera troupe members and young unemployed persons in 'Hometown Trilogy', young laborers from the countryside in 『The World』, and lower-class workers in 『Still Life』. As a part of a sequential study of Jia Zhangke’s films, this paper investigates two films he made after 'Hometown Trilogy', namely 『The World』 and 『Still Life』. In 『The World』, he talks about the desolate life of young laborers who hold up the splendid "world." These laborers leave Fenyang(汾陽), a small town that is also the backdrop for 'Hometown Trilogy', for Beijing and work at the virtual space called the "world," but they are dying due to the poor working conditions and meager salaries of the workplace. By narrating their final suicide without escaping from the "world," Jia Zhangke suggests that the "world" called Beijing is another Fenyang from which they cannot escape. The spatial background of 『Still Life』 is the area surrounding the construction site of the Sanxia(三峽) dam. At the place where the reform of Chinese society is taking place, the director meets with new lower-class workers. They are not the young and fragile jobless youths depicted in 'Hometown Trilogy', which is staged in Fenyang or Datong(大同) in Shanxi(山西) province. They are laborers with a tough life : hardworking, tacit, lonely and fatigued. They are people at the very bottom of Chinese society who hold up the Chinese yearning for rising up in the world by pursuing industrialization and capitalism, while patiently enduring the dangerous working conditions as if they believe that persevering through danger is their destiny. The director portrays the dignity of the marginalized virtuous workers with full of respect and affection, and he asks the audience to sympathize with and participate in the workers’ reticence and loneliness. The cinematic achievement of expressing the workers’ tough and lonely life reaches its peak in two ways: the standstill materiality and the pictorialization of workers’ bodies. The two best aesthetic achievements of 『The World』 and 『Still Life』 are, first, the expression of lower-class workers’ daily life and healthy body through the technique of chiaroscuro and the successful pictorialization of their soul, which blesses the workers with sacredness: that is, the kind of aesthetic achievement of Rembrandt’s paintings. Second achievement of the two films is the private psychologization of the scenes, attained by the steady gaze at objects with fixed lens and the slow movement of the lens, which are added by the effective use of light and silence. Through the investigation, this study finds out that reading Jia Zhangke’s 『The World』 and 『Still Life』 can provide us with the most candid mirror, the most special approach, the best way of understanding the contemporary Chinese society or the actual circumstances of lower-class workers in the society.