in 1995, filmed while both were still attending the Beijing Film Academy. Digital technology and realism Unlike Unknown Pleasures, which only had diegetic music, music was an important feature to The World, which featured snippets of the dance performances that were the park's centerpieces. Music played such an important role that the film was almost considered by some to be a musical. Jia brought in the Taiwanese composer Lim Giong, who had previously worked with Hou Hsiao-hsien, to score the film using primarily electronic music. As stated by Jia, the artifice of the electronic music was to "signify the real emptiness of the lives of Tao and her friends. Life’s heaviness fades when confronted by the silky lightness of dance and music." Jia then tied the music to the animated sequences of the film, wherein Tao's inner thoughts were given life, all to create an "Asian digital life." The animated part reflects both the limiting and liberating potential of new technologies and reminds the world that “analog and digital media, realism and simulation, the local and the global, are in fact contemporaneous phenomena”, as the animation in the film blurs the boundaries between the reality and visual fantasy attractions. The world is shot in digital and is completed with its flash animation, cellphone as a motif, and electronic music. In fact, during the scene where Erguniang dies, the image of writings on the wall from Erguniang is not actually written on the wall but instead shown through a digital effect. According to Cecilia Mello, The World does not provide a clear division between the real world and the digital/artificial world. It rather "point[s] towards a confusion between both, corroborating the point made in the introduction about the coexistence of contraries, so typical of the reality of China's cities." The circular discourse is not Jia's fundamental device on film making, but the reversal of the gaze. "The possibility to poke holes in the fictional system rests on the filmed subject's response to the enquiring gaze of the filming subject." Based on the transition from the circular. discourse to the reversal of the gaze, Anna and Tao from the film as an example on the response to the enquiring gaze between each other. Two characters supposed to not communicate with each other due to the language difference, however, the gaze helped them to talk and feel each other's pains and worries. Outside