Abstract
Jia Zhangke’s film The World explores the relationship between architecture and desire in twenty-first-century China. The film is set in a Beijing theme park designed to simulate various world monuments. It focuses on the lives of workers living in the park, most of whom have migrated from rural China to work there. The film asks: what happens when architecture designed to be looked at is lived in? This chapter explores the forms of desire which are generated when workers inhabit tourist spaces and argues that Jia’s film explicates the relationships which the theme park city silently organizes. The architectural spaces of global capital are maintained through complex organizations of emotion which Jia’s cinema is capable of mapping, reorganizing and challenging.
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