Bringing the Past into the Present: West of the Tracks as a Deleuzian Time-Image

Abstract

In this essay, I shall offer up a Deleuzian reading of Wang Bing’s epic documentary, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2003), suggesting that the film functions as a time-image that prioritises memory over history, and that it depicts to us multiple different temporalities. I shall also relate West of the Tracks to other Chinese movies in order to demonstrate that Wang’s film not only reflects in part upon globalisation, but that what constitutes contemporary China and/or Chinese cinema is itself multiple, heterogeneous and globalised. In this way, Deleuze’s concept of the time-image is one that applies not just to films, but which constitutes a framework through which to understand the contemporary world as a whole.