Melodrama and Global Neorealism: Colossal Youth and The World

Abstract

Both The World/Shijie (Jia Zhangke, 2004) and Colossal Youth/Juventude em marcha (Pedro Costa, 2006) are social-realist portraits, films that aim to convey the experience of immigrants in a world increasingly characterized by dislocation, but where global dislocation still finds its place in national locales, places of alienation that house or contain the underclass of our globalized reality. Pedro Costa has made his imprint on world cinema by producing aggressively minimalist films, a cinema stripped of contraptions and conventions, the apparatus dismantled to only the barebones elements that the director deems essential. Jia Zhangke is the leading figure of China’s Sixth Generation of filmmakers. Jia’s films work specifically against the epic reach and melodramatic gloss that made the films of Fifth Generation filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige popular worldwide. Given the ways in which melodrama is associated with narrative and emotional excess, along with high production values, it follows that referring to Colossal Youth and The World as melodramas can seem a bit of a stretch. Yet, these films’ interest in exploring the effects of transitional historical moments as filtered through the lives of ordinary individuals, struggling to live meaningful lives, land the films in the realm of melodrama.