Time, History, And Memory in Jia Zhangke's 24 City (Critical Essay‪)‬

Henry Lefebvre once said that "[i]t is now space more than time that hides things from us.... [T]he demystification of spatiality and its veiled instrumentality of power is the key to making practical, political, and theoretical sense of the contemporary era" (qtd. in Soja 61). In recent years, the research focus in academic disciplines such as history and sociology, which traditionally have framed their research questions in terms of time, has been undergoing a conceptual shift from time to space. This trend is evident in the popularity of concepts such as world history, transnationalism, and globalism, all of which are conceptualized in topological forms and structures. This interest in space also has infiltrated discussions of China's underground and independent films, many of which center on the experience of urbanization and locality as well as the issues of modernity and globalization. In Gilles Deleuze's colossal works on cinema, The Movement Image and The Time Image, he uses 1945 as a demarcation and argues that the development of cinema in its pre-1945 mode was obsessed with space while the post-1945 cinema has been preoccupied with time and modernity. Important works on China's contemporary underground and independent films, such as Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a Globalizing China (2010), The Urban Generation (2007), and From Underground to Independent (2006), all focus extensively on cities as sites of social, economic, and political transformation. These works help to explain many underground and independent filmmakers' singular preoccupation with space, specifically demolition and reconstruction in cities, and the related issues of sociopolitical change in contemporary China. These recent studies raise important theoretical questions of whether this current preoccupation with space signals a new phase in the development of cinema, a return to Deleuze's pre-1945 classical mode of obsession with space, or something completely new. This vexing question, however, exceeds the scope of the current study. My intent here is to point out that in these important works on China's underground and independent films, the issue of space is frequently emphasized in a way that leads to the critical neglect of temporal considerations.