Between Tradition And Modernity: The Trauma Narrative Of The Movie "Beautiful Shanghai"

Modern society is full of trauma. China’s urban modernization process has revealed a destructive side of modernity. From the perspective of modernity, China’s cultural revolution history just proved the invisible and uncontrollable national crisis in the process of modernization. The city life has been experiencing dramatic change as cities are transformed. Traditional life and culture is disappearing, and interpersonal relationship is in jeopardy. Trauma is everywhere. Urban film reflects every aspect of the city, and interacts with reality the other way. Under the background of modern society, connecting with local context which is based on Shanghai history and citizen culture, I take the perspective of psychoanalysis to study the traumatic narrative of the film "Shanghai Story", which can be attributed to the study of Shanghai city image. Considering the derector’s personal experiences, I will take intertextual analysis research method between a literary text about the director’s traumatic experience and film text. This paper mainly discusses three issues:(1)How does the urban film narrate trauma? Based on the key points of modernity and the urban film study, I built up a structure of time/space/subject, elaborating analysis from time to space and from the macro side of the city and age to individuals’fate. (2)How does traumatic narrative connect with modernity? This article is trying to find the root cause and evidence in modernity when analyzing trauma narrative. (3) How does the traumatic narrative respond to the chance of survival of the individual/group? In the last part, combining the text analysis and realistic context, I will respond to the theory and describe the unique picture of trama sympotms of modern China and reveal the complicated relevance among the films, the city, the history and culture.