Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Zhang, Jing

Area of Concentration

Chinese Language and Culture

Abstract

Recent Chinese filmmaking demonstrates a unique spatial and ecological consciousness. Two films produced in the last three decades, Zhang Ming’s Wushan Yunyu and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, focus this consciousness towards the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. Narratives focusing on the transient and unstable lives lived in the shadow of the Dam are deepened by unique cinematographic technique and intertextual reference to China’s tradition of landscape aesthetics, suggesting a deep connection between Chinese artistic and poetic history, physical Chinese landscapes, and the inner lives of these films’ characters. In order to access and discuss that connection, I adapt Fredric Jameson’s concept of cognitive mapping. This concept allows me to talk about how characters understand the world around them, how they use these “cognitive maps” to understand their own identity, and how the unique circumstances of modernity and globalization (embodied by and around the dam) change that process. Ultimately, I find that characters are forced to create new cognitive mapping strategies disconnected from the material landscape, with mixed and uncertain results.

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