Mountains May Depart: Socio-historical Changes from a Female Subject PerspectiveAn Integrated Analysis Based on Feminist Film Theory and Socio-historical Narrative Theory

This paper explores how the female protagonist in Zhangke Jias film Mountains May Depart embodies emotional displacement, identity dissolution, and cultural rupture through the lens of feminist film theory and socio-historical narrative analysis. By integrating private emotional experience with structural critique, the film traces the protagonist Tao Shens evolving subjectivity across the years 1999, 2014, and 2025. Through camera techniques, temporal dis-junctions, and the nuanced body expressions, the film articulates memory, trauma, and loss not only at the individual level but as reflections of broader social and global changes. Tao Shen emerges as a witness to national and global transformations and a symbolic figure of global marginalization. This study argues that Mountains May Depart is a critical site for understanding how female agency, cultural identity, and emotional endurance intersect within the dynamics of tradition, socio-historical transformations, modernity and globalization.