For the two outsiders, the city of Fengjie has a special symbolic meaning. The people they are looking for live in a corner of the city, and the memories of the past are also inhabited in this city, or sealed in this city. Although they have never set foot in this city before, in the memory of their former lover, this city has been touched and imagined countless times, so a city built of impressions was born, and it is also a sustenance. City. So the city is familiar, at least psychologically. But when the two really went up the water and faced the city, they realized that their memory and imagination had lagged behind the time of change.
The memories of the two survived in the Fengjie City in the Three Gorges in an imaginary way. Compared to the changing time and space, changing moods and daily life that the two of them are in, the time and space here is stagnant, and it is because of this stagnation that imagination and memory can exist. But once the two faced the real Fengjie City in the midst of great changes, when everything was palpable, the stagnant memories were instantly thawed. In the demolished old city, the two were embarrassed or contradictory. They pursue the beauty of the past, looking forward to the moment when the past and the present, imagination and reality meet, but when this moment comes, they find that the things they are looking for are irretrievably disappearing. Should we continue to pursue and wait, or face it calmly and say goodbye with a smile?
The closer you are, the farther you are away; it is a pursuit and a farewell. This antagonistic and inclusive character's actions and mentality are probably the ambivalence of director Jia Zhangke when he faced the small town of Fengjie under the great era. To some extent, it also represents the current state of mind of the people here or all who have accepted the fate of relocation due to the Three Gorges Project. In the calm narrative of "The Good Man in Three Gorges", Jia Zhangke, who is also an outsider as the director, delicately grasps the intersection of the characters' fates and creates a profound space with overlapping images. In this space, the author uses the still people and objects as mirrors to reflect the movement of time and space. While writing people, he also depicts a turbulent era in China.
In this turbulent era, with the imprint of the magnificent Three Gorges Project construction, it indicates a modern China with reform and opening up and rapid development. Compared with this drastic change in the external world, Jia Zhangke's lens shows Fengjie County, which is both magical and realistic, the closed and self-contained space and time, the quiet mountains and waters, the stagnant people and things, and the ruins of the past. It is a fading pastoral image in the post-industrial era, behind which it represents not only the people of Fengjie, but also the loss and panic of countless Chinese people in a rapidly changing era. Through the quiet image of this corner of the landscape, Jia Zhangke, who is the other, skillfully expresses a certain characteristic of the times we live in, transforming the guest into the subject and the subject and the guest as one, and suddenly reveals a humanistic feeling of compassion and compassion.
Looking at Jia Zhangke's authorship, there are also multiple layers of references. The first is the Confucian concern of traditional Chinese literati. This kind of feeling is mainly based on the idea of "harmony between man and nature" in Confucian philosophy, which pursues the harmony, harmony and harmony between man and nature. It is reflected in the film. The visible dimension is the conflict between modern human landscape and landscape landscape, such as Hongqiao , geometric sculptures on the top of the mountain, etc. Simply looking, these landscapes are similar to spectacles, and they also have the characteristics of beauty, but they are somewhat out of tune with the integration of "the unity of nature and man". In the plot, the geometric sculpture on the top of the mountain disappears in a surreal way, probably representing Jia Zhangke's thoughts. In addition, the Three Gorges have been entrusted with the literati and poet's landscape feelings since ancient times, but the process of industrialization has changed the landscape. But there is no denying that this change has its positive side. Based on this contradictory mentality, Jia Zhangke did not give a positive or negative conclusion, but described the changes in which he was in detail. This was a relatively successful treatment, because no matter what kind of tendencies were expressed, the thought would be detrimental to the whole of the work. richness and ambiguity. In this Confucian ideological influence, the ego must eventually obey the big ego, and even if there is nostalgia and pain, one must move forward calmly. This is obviously a positive aspect of the ending.
If you step back a little further and look at this feeling, there is a broader background inside. The Fengjie City or the Three Gorges that Jia Zhangke painted has not yet completely changed. Compared with the modern China outside the mountains and in the process of industrialization, it is backward, and the reference is modern China; and how to define modern China? Its reference is clearly the modern West. That is to say, Jia Zhangke finally stands in the perspective of the other and uses the scale of modernity (the West) as a reference to express the panic of people in Fengjie at this moment - the panic of immigrants - which is also the overwhelming majority of China at this moment. The panic that people face. Therefore, this kind of humanistic concern is, in a sense, a manifestation of postcolonial discourse in the process of globalization. From this perspective, the textual myths about the Three Gorges once manifested in Jia Zhangke's lens as a bizarre gathering of death and new life, magic and reality, and the pursuit and memory of the irreversible disappearance during this period are like a sad song. Pastoral elegy.
This vanished Shangri-La myth, under the invasion of modern industrial civilization, symbolizes the disappearance of human spiritual homeland one by one. This kind of theme is obviously global in today's globalization process. In the eyes of Westerners who have completed the process of industrialization, the contradictions and ambiguous meanings shown in "The Good Man of the Three Gorges" also vaguely fit their mentality towards contemporary China. This kind of expectation with post-colonial characteristics, on the one hand, is manifested as the ultimate worry about the fate of mankind, and on the other hand, it is also a negative treatment of the rising China. The Tibet issue is obviously one of the political by-products of this mentality.
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