Jia Zhangke's Still Life and Global Neorealism

The Department of English at the American University of Beirut

Cordially invites you to

Towards an Epic Cinema: Jia Zhangke's Still Life and Global Neorealism

A talk by

Yanping Zhang (Harvard University)

Wednesday, February 8, 2017 at 5 p.m. West Hall - Auditorium A

All roads lead to Rome, we have been told: such is the global trajectory of cinematic neorealism. The life and work of the leading contemporary Chinese director Jia Zhangke (b.1970) have encouraged interpretations through such a lens. This talk proposes a reading of Jia's Still Life -- a 2006 feature film that won the Golden Lion in Venice -- as an epic cinema. Jia's epic cinema is defined both by an aspiration to achieve tranquil objectivity of the epic and a conception of film as an act oriented towards transforming life. This talk proposes that such a cinema evokes a tradition of socialist cinema -- a tradition characterized by a direct line from Soviet montage and Italian neorealism to "Third Cinema." This cinematic tradition is inextricably intertwined with a 20th-century novelists' international that brought the novel to the forefront of world literature, on the one hand, and with a thrust of anti-theatricalism that culminated in turning the world into a great revolutionary spectacle in 1968, on the other hand. By reading Jia's film in the context of a largely overlooked worldwide socialist culture of the 20th-century, this talk seeks to go beyond the unidirectional and center-periphery mode of understanding world film and literature, and to shed new light on Chinese film in an age of globalization. Yanping Zhang is finishing her PhD in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Her main research interests include world literature and film, contemporary Chinese literature and culture, and global South studies. Her dissertation is titled "From Internationalism to Globalism: Chinese Literature and Film in the World System, 1978-2008." Dr. Zhang is a candidate for the position of Assistant Professor in World Literature and Global Film in the Department of English.