ESSAYS

Lou Ye's Summer Palace: internal road of an individual in the political context of China in 1989

The essay reviews the most recent and the fourth film by Lou Ye, a Chinese director of the so-called sixth generation of Chinese directors. Summer Palace (Yihe yuan, 2006) presents student protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 and also some explicit sex scenes, which is why the director was prohibited from work and had conflicts with state censorship. The author of this text examines the structure of Lou Ye's film as a depiction of a journey of a soul from the home town and student life, which coincided with revolutionary events, to disappointment and death, from 1989 to 2003. The author examines the story as a metaphor of generation's disappointment. The thesis is that the internal conflict is a reflection of the external one, and that the external plot (the political part) is presented in the film as only a reflection of a spiritual journey which, according to Lou Ye, could only happen at that time on that place.

Mia Dora Prvan