부산대학교 도서관

From the beginning of his career to 2002, Jia Zhangke, a preeminent Chinese Sixth Generation filmmaker, has presented realist depictions of various spaces in his films. This study, however, focuses on his films The World (2004) and Still Life (2006) in which Jia discovers two basic post-socialist China spatial forms, the local simulacrum of the transnational space, and ruins, in an unconventional style that goes beyond his previous realism. In The World, the local simulacrum of the transnational space and the virtual world of animation together create a heightened symbolic space which forms a metaphor for several paradoxical relationships found within post-socialist conditions In Still Life, Jia achieves a defamiliarizing effect by employing some surreal elements, presenting ruins as liminal spaces that only exist in the present moment as transitory phenomena. The study thus suggests that Jia's transcendence of realism is part of his generation's common cinematic renewal of jishizhuyi (realism).