By Raymond Dokupil
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Abstract
Professor Rey Chow has used Martin Heidegger’s essay “Age of the World Picture” as a theoretical framing for discussing contemporary China and Chinese cinema, particularly as a means of informing the way Chinese measure their own worth in relation to Western spectatorship. In this essay, I show how Heidegger’s existentialism facilitates a specific metanarrative of transcendent values, a “myth of world picture” which depends on associating the exotic with the valuable. Using René Girard as a means of redefining my position, I show how these ambiguous discussions on value can be made intelligible by understanding narratives of value through a fundamentally anthropological, or humanistic, lens. The relation between economic and transcendent value is equivocated and challenged in the works of Zhang Yimou and Jia Zhangke. These films suggest a new kind of mythic enchantment, in which the means of transcendent value production does not emphasize escaping the world picture but rather reclaiming the value of human relationships as having intrinsic worth.
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