ABSTRACT
There is a sequence in Shijie/The World (Jia Zhangke 2005), in which two newly arrived migrant workers are given a tour of Beijing’s World Park by old hometown friends who now work at the Park. As they wander off the screen, the camera lingers on a family posing for a picture in front of a replica of St. Peter’s Square. We notice something eerily familiar: they pose exactly like millions of Chinese have once posed – in Tiananmen Square. As long as they stand there, they have about them a phantom Tiananmen, superimposed on the reproduction St. Peter’s. Any lingering illusion that the screen is a homogeneous time-space is instantaneously shattered.
