Cognitive mapping with Chinese characteristics: Block structure, realism and transmedial allusions in Jia Zhangke’s film 24 City (2008)

My research engages with the critical and cultural theory of American thinker Fredric Jameson (1934–2024) to explore the cinema of contemporary Chinese director Jia Zhangke (1970–present). In this article, I argue that Jia’s films achieve what Jameson, in his conceptualization of postmodernity and late capitalism, calls cognitive mapping. This concept refers to the complexly mediated relationships between cultural representational forms and social totality. Thinking with Jameson and pushing his theory to a new direction, I contend that Jia’s films illustrate ‘cognitive mapping with Chinese characteristics’. These special features include: first, Jia’s use of xiancheng (‘county-level city’) perspective; second, his utilization of the bankuai (‘block’) structure; third, his interrogation of reality and fiction; and fourth, his use of intertextual and transmedial references. In this article, I focus on Jia’s film, Ershisichengji ( 24 City ) (2008). I argue that in 24 City , Jia adopts the second, third and fourth strategies and seeks to capture the effects of the otherwise unrepresentable totality that is global capitalism in China. When Sigmund Freud analyses his patient’s dreams, he begins with the dream-contents (manifest content). Then he moves through the unconscious desire (form) and arrives at the dream-thoughts (latent content). Similarly, when Jia explores history and memory, he begins with reality. Then he moves through fiction and arrives at the sense of history. What Jia tries to capture is the sense of history, not simply history. Engaging with the moving image and contemporary Chinese art in a creative manner, Jia attempts to bring this sense of history back to our postmodern time in which historicity, according to Jameson, has been lost.