Mountains May Depart: Socio-historical Changes from a Female Subject Perspective—An Integrated Analysis Based on Feminist Film Theory and Socio-historical Narrative Theory
Abstract
Drawing on the feminist film theory and socio-historical narrative theories, this paper examines the socio-historical changes from a female subjectivity-based perspective in Zhangke Jia’s film Mountains May Depart. The paper explores how the female protagonist embodies emotional displacement, identity dissolution, and cultural rupture during the social changes. Combining private emotional experience with structural critique of the society, the film traces the protagonist’s evolving subjectivity across the years 1999, 2014, and 2025. With the special camera techniques, temporal dis-junctions, and the nuanced body expressions, the film articulates memory, trauma and loss, not only at the personal 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 intertwine within the dynamics of tradition, socio-historical transformations, modernity and globalization.
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