The Posthuman in Suzhou River (Dir. Lou Ye 2000)

초록

Lou Ye’s Suzhou River has attracted international attention for its distinctive style and complex narrative. Lou Ye is known as a representative director of the Sixth Generation which is characterized by neorealist style and representations of urban marginalities. The film creates interplays between fiction and documentary, past and present, the real and fantasy, and the actual and the virtual. This article re-approaches the film from the perspective of posthumanism, paying particular attention to the motif of the mermaid and the distinctive role of the camera. The hybrid image of the mermaid leads to explore urban exoticism of a Chinese global city; human-animal mutation and afterlife; and ecological, epistemological questions about the relationship between humans and inanimate objects such as waste from a female perspective. The film also has a distinctive way of integrating the camera into the film, which, I think, denotes the transition from neorealism to posthumanism. In the film, the camera’s role is not limited to presenting the so-called “machine vision” but it draws near to a character. Furthermore, machines like a camera seem not only involved in perception within the film but also in creation of the story in Suzhou River. The framing structure of the film mimics algorithmic generation of a story by an intelligent machine. In this sense, the doppelganger characters can be approached in terms of digital simulation. Suzhou River explores interfaces between humans and machine in characters, cinematography and scriptwriting, in other words, both realms of epistemology and ontology. The film defies the exclusive status of humans as the subject of perception and creation.

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