Ghost Returns and Historical Memories in Zhang Yimou’s Gui lai and Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver Miaowei Weng
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Gui lai” in Chinese carries the same meaning as “volver” in Spanish: both mean “to return.” Volver, released in 2006, is a hard-hitting drama by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar; Gui lai, released in 2015, is a historical romance by Chinese director Zhang Yimou. Viewing Volver as a modern update of Odysseus’s homecoming from the perspective of gender, Corinne Pache claims that “to raise the phenomenon of return is inevitably to start a conversation with Homer’s Odyssey, which is, the home to which all narratives of homecoming must themselves return” (55). Indeed, Odysseus’s homecoming, as a mythical ritual, goes beyond individual experiences and embodies human fate across nation and culture. As Gregory Nagy notes, return - in Greek, nostos - in Homer’s Odyssey refers to “homecoming,” a “song about homecoming” and a “return to light” (283). Differences between Gui lai and Volver aside, the two films show parallels with relation to these three connotations of nostos. More speci cally, both recount homecoming stories and use those stories to allude to historical memories; both use art, including songs and photographs, as means for the main characters to recover their memories; and lighting shapes the way the audience perceives the (non-)boundary between the dead and the living. Whereas a comparison of these two works shows different approaches to the concept of returning, the allegorical interpretations of both works in their respective sociopolitical contexts, in turn, shed light on these differences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".