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HOME > Archives > 2025 > Volume 11 Number 6 (2025) >
IJLLL 2025 Vol.11(6): 301-304
DOI: 10.18178/IJLLL.2025.11.6.619

Visualizing the Pain of Female Existence: A Case Study of Mama (2022)

Huiqiang Dong1,2
1. Shandong University of Arts, Ji’nan, Shandong 250014, P. R. China
2. Department of Comparative Literature, Binghamton University SUNY, Binghamton, NY 13901 USA
Email: hdong6@ binghamton.edu (H.Q.D.)

Manuscript received July 22, 2025; accepted November 17, 2025; published December 25, 2025.

Abstract—The film Mama is another powerful feminist- themed masterpiece of director Lina Yang after her Spring Tide. The film downplays the promotion of language and plot, presenting a non-verbal expression path of female existential pain based on visualization. This article takes the visual expression of female existential pain as the core topic. Starting from the three dimensions of camera rhythm, spatial structure and body expression, it analyzes the emotional repression, physiological confusion and loss of consciousness of the mother and daughter in the film when they face the identity confusion caused by aging and illness, and the collapse of the mother-daughter relationship, exploring how the film uses a variety of imaging strategies to transform women’s experiences into a penetrating emotional scene. The film’s cinematic rhythm is built around the use of long shots, and the gaze created under the non-narrative structure thereby constructed; at the same time, a large amount of negative spaces and jump cuts are used in the editing process to construct a visual language that evades narrative; meanwhile, prolonged camera shots also generate intense pressure of the gaze. These shot rhythms further affect the configuration and feeling of space, constructing a spatial field of emotional expression through the repression of family space, the expression of spatial emotions, and the absence of external space. The closure of space ultimately presents various non-verbal reactions on the female body—the silence of the body, the visual presentation of physiological degeneration, and the rupture of the body and memory. In all, the film uses restrained, forbearing and penetrating images to construct a unique visual expression path of the pain of female existence.

Keywords—female existential pain, Lina Yang, spatial oppression, visual expression, women’s film

Cite: Huiqiang Dong, "Visualizing the Pain of Female Existence: A Case Study of Mama (2022)," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 301-304, 2025.

Copyright © 2025 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).

 

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