Noir flâneur as method : mapping postsocialist affect in The Wild Goose Lake (2019) and Long day’s journey into night (2018)
department or school: Arts, Faculty of
department or school: Theatre and Film, Department of
data provider: DSpace
degree campus: UBCV
creator: Liu, Siwei
issued: 2025-10-21T23:55:01Z
issued: 2025
related degree: Master of Arts - MA
degree grantor: University of British Columbia
description: Noir is an elusive discourse, a genre filled with smoking bars, deception, dark alleyways, and disillusioned outlooks of life. So is flânerie, a drifting, aimless mode of being in a fast-changing world. What happens if these two forms converge, when one engages in delayed drifting in a world foreclosed by noir fatalism? Such aesthetic of noir flânerie is the central concern of this thesis. Through close analysis of Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake (2019) and Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), I argue that noir flânerie functions as a critical strategy of framing ambivalent movement within narratives of disillusionment, creating an alternative time-space that problematizes the mainland socialist teleology. This thesis draws on Linda Chiu-han Lai’s articulation of the flâneur as a critical method for probing the cinematic postsocialist Chinese cities as an embodied cinematic experience of discovery. I further invoke Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the any-space-whatever and David H. Fleming’s any-now(here)-space to complement Lai’s method, in reinforcing the affective potential of the flâneur’s movement in mapping noir fragmentation, which mirrors postsocialist disorientation. Drawing on these theoretical frameworks, this thesis interprets the cinematic Chinese city as an anonymous noir-coded any-space-whatever, embodied through the flâneur’s exploration, which emerges as critical representational strategies in a time of heightened ideological control and accelerated film market development. Besides textual analysis, I also relate to directors’ own account as well as the cultural policies of mainland China and France, to account for the transnational conditions underpinning the films’ circulation. This thesis thus situates itself in the intersection of global noir, mainland postsocialist cinema, and transnational Chinese cinema. Addressing these two films from this intersection is important because they emerge in a new industrial and sociopolitical context of …
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/92692
note: Noir Flâneur As Method: Mapping Postsocialist Affect In The Wild Goose Lake (2019) And Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018) by Siwei Liu B.A., McGill University, 2023 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Cinema and Media Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2025 © Siwei Liu, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Noir Flâneur As Method: Mapping Postsocialist Affect In The Wild Goose Lake (2019) And Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018) submitted by Siwei Liu in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in Cinema and Media Studies (Cinema Studies) Examining Committee: Dr. William Brown, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, UBC Supervisor Dr. Yang Renren, Assistant Professor, Asian Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Noir is an elusive discourse, a genre filled with smoking bars, deception, dark alleyways, and disillusioned outlooks of life. So is flânerie, a drifting, aimless mode of being in a fast-changing world. What happens if these two forms converge, when one engages in delayed drifting in a world foreclosed by noir fatalism? Such aesthetic of noir flânerie is the central concern of this thesis. Through close analysis of Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake (2019) and Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), I argue that noir flânerie functions as a critical strategy of framing ambivalent movement within narratives of disillusionment, creating an alternative time-space that problematizes the mainland socialist teleology. This thesis draws on Linda Chiu-han Lai’s articulation of the flâneur as a critical method for probing the cinematic postsocialist Chinese cities as an embodied cinematic experience of discovery. I further invoke Gilles Deleu…
has type: Thesis/Dissertation
date issued: 2025-11
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0450520
language: eng
degree discipline: Cinema and Media Studies
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
publisher: University of British Columbia
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
scholar level: Graduate
contributor: Brown, William, 1977-
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/92692