소문자 ‘역사들’의 복원을 위하여 ― 지아장커(賈樟柯)의 『24시티』론

Abstract

This study is to analyze the movie, ‘24 City,’ directed by Jiazhangke focused on the what the movie meant for restoration of individual history, closed life style of laborers, techniques of literaturized movie and its function as an anthropological report. This movie was produced by restoring 50 years of individual histories of 9 people based on their memories and statements. It is a history of the laborers and their families working for government owned munition factory which was relocated a few times from Shenyang (沈陽) to Chengdu (成都) in 1958. As this factory was a strategic facility under Maozedong(毛澤東)'s regime, which was relocated from Shenyang to deep into the mountain of Chengdu for national security purpose, those who working for the factory were low-class laborers forced to migrate. The laborers accepted national ideology as their own, where they sacrificed their personal desires for the sake of the ideology. Their lives were overshadowed by ‘Capital-lettered History’ representing Maozedong and Zhou-enlai(周恩來). This movie was to restore ‘small-lettered histories,’ which was overshadowed and distorted by ‘Capital-lettered History’ written under the proposition of the state, the nation, the power and male-led historian, by collecting and editing the pieces of memories that has been disappeared. In the process of analysis upon the movie, it was found that 50 years of lives of these factory workers were related to the structure of ‘The Great Wall’ gene that has been immanent within the Chinese cultural history. Assuming that the world of self-sufficiency and self-existence, the civilization to live in piece within, the gene of civilization tied to the land and the gene ignorant to the outside world were to reveal as a materialized pattern of the wall such as The Great Wall in ancient Chinese civilization, a Socialism political system called Danwei (單位) was to be operated in the history of modern revolution. The factory and the dwelling of the laborers in ‘24 City’ were a single self-sufficient and closed structure. They were kept living at the Danwei of the factory and the public dwelling. The director, realizing the restriction upon visual expression, inserted the sub-titles with a number of poems and sentences on the screen in the process of restoring complicated individual histories, which led the audience to feel as if they were experiencing a poem reading. And the language of the characters, who narrate their past memories while standing still, made the audience to feel as if the narrators were reading a long piece of prose to the crowd. In other words, this movie conveyed the past history by subtitled letters and the language of the characters on the movie instead of reproducing them relying on the acts by actors and actresses. The audience was to become a reader, and the readers were to reorganize the past through their imagination based on the narration of the characters. It proves that this movie was experimenting the freedom of employment of ‘Inter Media,’ which has been experimented in other movies by director Jiazhangke , as a ‘Literaturization of the movie.’ Furthermore, this movie offered another value for being an anthropological report as it recorded all the small details of daily lives.