ABSTRACT
Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke has developed an expansive field of citation where the recurrent spaces of demolition and construction are notable tropes. This chapter explores how Jia's creative endeavors of re-presenting historical reality, open up a hermeneutical space for himself and his viewers to decipher the maze-like transformations of postsocialist China. It focuses on the use of silence and ellipsis so as to tease out a spatial typology unique to Jia's films. As filmmaker Li Ying remarks, whereas history begins with truth and ends in fiction, myth starts with fiction and ends in truth and history. Jia has remarked that his mixed mode of realism has arisen from the surreal condition of postsocialist China. As he explained when he was making The World, his sense of disorientation is a result of the dramatic shift from the post-Mao era to the wholesale structural changes after 1989. The speedy process of demolition and construction produced space-time compression and space-time dislocation.
