History, Silence and Homelessness in Contemporary Chinese Cinema

Set a few years after China's opening to the various forces of globalisation, the film Shanghai Dreams (2005) tells the story of the conflict between Qinghong, a 17 year-old schoolgirl who wishes to remain in her hometown of Guiyang, and her father, Lao Wu, whose dream of returning to his hometown of Shanghai is stirred by reports of the better life others have obtained as a result of Deng Xiaoping's policy of economic modernisation. Analysing their familial conflict in terms of a “political melodrama”, the paper contextualises both the dramatic ideological shift from patriarchal state Communism to free market capitalism and the massive internal migration from China's interior to its eastern coast to argue that Qinghong's eventual psychological breakdown represents not merely a personal, sentimental feeling of homelessness but the more philosophical form of estrangement characteristic of modernity examined by Martin Heidegger. The paper then explores how one of the film's most important scenes, Qinghong's rape, links Heidegger's notion of homelessness to Sigmund Freud's understanding of the uncanny. The paper concludes with a brief examination of how Qinghong's catatonic silence represents the less-discussed consequence of the schizophrenic freedoms engendered by late capitalism as defined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Aesthetics · Alienation · Art history · Capitalism · China · Communism · Dream · Ideology · Modernity · Modernization theory · Movie theater · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Silence · Sociology · Subversion · Uncanny · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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