벤야민의 역사철학으로 읽는 <황금시대>(2014): 영화적 회억과 변증법적 이미지 = Reading The Golden Era through Benjamin’s Philosophy of History: Cinematic Remembrance and the Dialectical Image

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper reads Ann Hui’s The Golden Era (2014) not merely as a biographical film about the life of the writer Xiao Hong (1911~1942), but also as a work that enacts Walter Benjamin’s historico- philosophical concept of time under the conditions of film as a medium. Borrowing the form of the “pseudo-documentary,” The Golden Era does not translate the textuality of Xiao Hong’s fiction, prose, and letters into dramatized scenes; instead it sets that textuality, quoted as such, alongside the image, thereby problematizing the relationship between past and present, and between the absent body and the traces it has left behind. The paper maps the three sequences in which this problematization is concentrated, namely Tokyo in the winter of 1936, Wuhan in the summer of 1938, and the Eingedenken (remembrance) of Hulan in 1940, onto three temporal forms, respectively: “the ever-same (das Immergleiche),” “the gaze of the angel of history,” and “the dialectical image.” In the first moment, the standstill appears as the congealing of a room that has lost its stars; in the second, it appears as a pause of roughly two seconds within the configuration of the ninth thesis of “On the Concept of History,” where the figure driven forward and the camera that gazes at the rubble are separated, yet neither attains a dialectical conjunction. The site at which the gaze finally crosses over into citation is the third moment, where the rear garden (後園) of childhood is superimposed, through a dissolve, upon the dying body. The paper argues that in film, which takes flow as its very condition of existence, the standstill of time becomes possible not through the interruption of movement but only through the superimposition of two times, and it shows that this superimposition is the form proper to Benjamin’s “dialectics at a standstill” as cinema attains it. Furthermore, the film does not seal even this consummate form as a final image; by withdrawing again and again into the direct-to-camera address and the manuscript paper of an empty room, it carries through a formal strategy of anti-suture and anti-empathy that refuses to suture a writer’s life either into a misfortune to be pitied or into an honor at last restored.