earticle

영어

This study analyzes how chengzhongcun-like spaces formed through China’s urbanization process are cinematically configured and operate at the level of the senses, focusing on Diao Yinan’s film The Wild Goose Lake (2019). Moving beyond approaches that reduce the urban village to an object of social representation, this article examines how the film organizes a sensory environment through audiovisual devices that regulate human perception, judgment, and ethical orientation. The theoretical framework of this study is sensory realism. Sensory realism does not refer to an aesthetic that seeks to faithfully reproduce reality; rather, it is a methodological perspective for analyzing how cinematic form constructs conditions of perception through light, sound, spatial density, and rhythm, and how these conditions preconfigure characters’ actions and ethical judgments. From this perspective, The Wild Goose Lake is interpreted not as a film that narratively explains the contradictions of urbanization, but as a cinematic practice that renders urban space experientially as an order of the senses. The analysis demonstrates that the fictional space of Yanan Tang in the film does not simply reflect real urban villages, but functions as an environment in which institutional voids and sensory imbalances are reconfigured into audiovisual conditions. Within this space, the organization of the senses regulates characters’ judgments and actions, resulting in an ethical order structured not by moral norms but by calculations of risk and efficiency. Moreover, this sensory organization extends into the rule-based normalization of violence, structurally transforming the conditions of human relations and action in urbanized space. This study contributes to Chinese urban cinema studies by proposing a methodological framework for analyzing urban space at the level of sensation, perception, and ethics, beyond representational paradigms. At the same time, it is limited by its focus on a single film. Future research may expand this analytical framework to other urban peripheral spaces or to contemporary East Asian cinema, thereby further exploring how cinema mediates social reality through sensory configurations.