山河故人

THE FILMS OF JIA ZHANOKE

POETIC REALIST OF GLOBALIZATION

by Declan McGrath

In 1998, Chinese film director Jia Zhangke had just released his second film, Xiao Wu (Pickpocket). Its rough-hewn portrait of a petty thief proclaimed Jia as a filmmaker who bore witness to the reality of a fast-changing China. Three years later, in 2001, the then thirty-one-year-old director pro-claimed his own cinematic manifesto, “The Age of Amateur Cinema Will Return.”】 In it, he criticized filmmakers who paid too much atten¬tion to craft and to "pro¬fessional” techniques. Such an approach, he claimed, threatened "con¬science and sincerity, which are crucial to film¬making.” For Jia Zhangke, “the most important thing is whether the film expresses the stuff of real life, whether it offers insights into reality.

Now, almost twenty years later, Jia's lat-est feature Mountains May Depart (2015) has been criticized for being melodramatic and even unrealistic. The film portrays the lives of a group of Chinese people in 1999, 2014, and 2025. In it, the author of that crit-ical manifesto not only re-creates a past and invents a future. He also frames each year in a different aspect ratio. The frame expands from an almost square (1.33:1) Academy ratio during the 1999 sequence, to wide-screen (1.85:1) for 2014, and finally to an even wider screen (2.39:1) for the 2025 sequence. More damaging for Jia's creden-tials, however, as someone seeking to por-tray reality, was a critical consensus that some of the dialogue, acting, and even the scenario in the 2025 segment were simply not credible. Jia cannot be blamed for want-ing to express his futuristic vision in a more stylistic, heightened, and purposively manipulated form, but it is fair to ask if he has now abandoned the principles of his early manifesto.

Jia's sociorealist approach was partly a reaction against the work of the previous Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers. This group consisted of directors who had graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in 1982, when the constraints of the Cultural Revolution had begun to loosen. Jia publicly criticized them for betraying the early promise of films such as Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984) by focusing on big-budget his¬torical epics and mythic melodramas, including Red Sorghum (Zhang Yimou, 1987), Ju Dou (Zhang Yimou, 1990), Farewell My Concubine (Chen Kaige, 1993), and To Live (Zhang Yimou, 1994).

Jia's commitment to films about everyday people, to whom viewers throughout the world can relate, has produced an important body of work that provides valuable insights into an officially hidden China. It has acted as a corrective not only to the mythic and often fantastical world of the heroic figures in the films of the Fifth Generation but also to the equally false impression of China cre¬ated by the Western media's long-time por¬trayal of the country as one vast, faceless communist monolith, whose inhabitants very much represented the "Other." Jia's cin¬ematic contribution to how we understand each other should not be undervalued. And yet his films have proven vitally relevant to both China and the rest of the world for another reason altogether.

The impact of capitalism and of rapid technological change on the Chinese people is the recurrent theme of all of Jia Zhangke

These thematic inter¬ests were evident from his first film, Xiao Shan (Going Home), made in 1995 while he was a stu¬dent of film theory at the Beijing Film Academy. The film follows Xiao Shan, a migrant worker in Beijing, as he tries to find someone to accompany him on the journey to his hometown for the Chinese New Year, a holiday when all Chinese tradi¬tionally return home. Despite his best efforts, Xiao Shan can find no one to accompany him. His friends in Beijing prefer to stay and work in the city—the desire to earn money has already eclipsed family and tradition.

Along with these thematic concerns, Jia's filmmaking method was also established in this first film. He used a classmate, Wang Hongwei, to play the lead character. Jia said that he cast a nonprofessional actor because it reflected his udesire to make films about people in a very natural and realistic state.” He also established his preference for long takes. Seven minutes of the film (over one tenth of its fifty-eight-minute running time) is comprised of two shots of Xiao Shan sim-ply walking. Such long takes, where the action slowly unravels, seemingly unforced and in real time, further contributes to a sense of naturalistic observation.

While Jia sought an unaffected realism, he was aware that such formal techniques made for a stylized form of realism. From the beginning, he quoted art-house stylists such as Robert Bresson and Vittorio De Sica as inspirations. He said that it was through watching De Sica that he "began to under-stand that there is no barrier between pure realism and expressionistic or surrealistic content...Behind his naturalistic style...lies a meticulous ordering of things.M

In common with De Sica's neorealism, in his first three feature films—Pickpocket, Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasures (2002)—Jia Zhangke not only continued to use nonprofessional actors but also focused

on marginal characters against a backdrop of real-life decaying locations. All three films are set in his home province of Shanxi (the first two in his hometown of Fenyang) and together they have become known as the Hometown Trilogy. The films portray the lives of young drifters and petty thieves between the years of 1979 and 2001, a time when China radically transformed from socialism to capitalism. Watching them, you have a sense of being witness to a key period of flux in the history of China.

The drifting youths who are Jia's protago¬nists simply accept this fast-changing world as normal. Like most people, they are barely cognizant of the larger historical, social, and political forces that have so much influence over their lives. Such forces are simply pre¬sent, just as the manmade and natural envi¬ronments around them. They have neither created these forces nor can they affect them. The audience is skillfully made aware of soci¬etal change through elements of conversa¬tions, TV program excerpts, and snatches of public loudspeaker announcements. For example, in Pickpocket (set in 1997), we see someone enthuse about smoking the West¬ern cigarette brand Marlboro. In Unknown Pleasures (set in 2001) characters chat about U.S. films, glance at television news stories of world events, and celebrate the coming of the Olympic Games to Beijing. The entire scenario of Platform illustrates the effects of change. Set between 1979 and 1989, it opens with the main protagonists dressed in tradi¬tional costumes and Mao uniforms. They are onstage, as part of the Fenyang County Cul¬tural Troupe, performing a poem that prais¬es the Maoist Revolution. As the film unfolds, and as the years pass, one member of the troupe takes advantage of economic liberalization, privatizes the group, and takes it on tour as a profit-making "Rock 'n' Breakdance Band.”

Like youths the world over, the primary need of these young Chinese people is to define themselves and to connect with oth-ers. And, like young people everywhere, they are attracted by the new and exotic. For example, a few scenes after the opening of Platform, the same characters who had just performed a piece of communist propagan¬da are seen dancing wildly and getting drunk as they listen to "Genghis Khan,” a Cantopop version of the German entry in the 1970 Eurovision Song Contest, which they play on their newly acquired boombox cassette player. By interweaving a transition¬al moment in these characters, lives (adoles-cence and early adulthood) with a moment of flux in the history of China (the adoption of the profit motive, new technology, and global culture), Jia vividly dramatizes the allure of global capitalism. As a vigorous and all-pervasive force, this process of interna¬tional integration offers these youths an intoxicating cocktail of energy, change, and constant becoming.

In the end, however, the dreams presented to these drifters are empty ones. The girl is rarely won and neither money nor fame is ever gained, except by bigger and better crim-inals. As these films progress in their portrayal of China between 1979 and 2001, and as we witness new technology, consumerism, and capitalism being increasingly embraced, a more disturbing aspect of the characters> need to earn money becomes evident, and a coarsening violence begins to pervade society. In Pickpocket, the former petty thief Xiaoyong transforms himself into a respected entrepre¬neur, one celebrated on television, not only by opening karaoke bars but also by selling smuggled cigarettes. By 200Ts Unknown Pleasures, capitalism has become even more closely intertwined with crime. When a young man is asked, “Weren't you in jail?” he replies, 'Tm in and out of jail like home. I work in finance now." The local nightclub owner is essentially a brutal gangster. Unknown Pleasures, and therefore the trilogy, ends with the main protagonists staging a far¬cical bank robbery to get money.

Throughout these films, Jia maintained his commitment to the observation of every-day lives as he witnessed and experienced them. In long continuous takes, he shows his characters walking through grubby and ramshackle streets, and lets his camera roll as they interact with others along the way. Only when these drifters' lives become more dramatic does the pace pick up. It is as if Jia's style is being dictated by his characters and their lifestyles. If the style exhibits empathy with his mostly marginalized char-acters, it is also intended to encourage empathy in the viewer. Jia has said that he uses long takes to force the audience to engage with and understand the characters, their concerns, and needs. Such humanistic filmmaking, according to Jia, reflects his personal vision of the world. In 1997, he wrote about how he himself experienced communion with strangers, in terms redo¬lent of some sort of religious ecstasy:

Certain moments and situations excite me uncontrollably. I'm suddenly overtaken by a heightened sense of reality. Lives come and go, unnoticed. When they pass by, I smell the pungent sweat from their bodies and from mine. Our breaths intertwine, and we've made contact.

The film-festival success of the Hometown Trilogy saw Jia receive many invitations to trav¬el, and those journeys exposed him to other countries and cultures. The country boy from Fenyang transformed into a cosmopolitan citi¬zen of the world. He became aware that, uThe lives of humans are very similar. We all get old, get sick, and die." With this universal empathy came the less satisfying realization that, in an increasingly globalized world, most people were consuming the same popular culture: uThe global trend towards sameness threatens to leave us with a drab world,” he lamented.

This wider experience of the effects of glob¬alization, along with his continuing observa¬tion of China's ongoing embrace of technolo¬gy and capitalism, seems to have given Jia the desire to more actively comment on the soci¬etal change to which his earlier films had merely borne witness. The success of those early films also won him access to the financial means to create a more constructed and medi¬ated artistic vision. Whereas Xiao Wu was pri¬vately funded by Shanxi and Hong Kong investors, on the strength of that film's festival success his next film, Platform, received money from Hong Kong, Italy, France, and Japan. Unknown Pleasures was not only funded inter¬nationally but also enjoyed an international production model, using France for laboratory services and postproduction. Despite Jia's increasing international backing and interest, however, none of his films could officially be screened in China. It was only with his next film, The World (2004), that Jia was recog-nized by the Chinese authorities for the first time, and received investment from the Shanghai Film Corporation.

The World continued Jia's commit¬ment to bearing witness to the diffi¬cult reality of life for marginal Chi¬nese. In this case, he focused on economic migrants, a group that increasingly bears the brunt of globalization. Once again, the main protagonists are from his home province of Shanxi, and they have come to Beijing in order to work in a theme park called "The World.” Amidst the glittering, neon-lit attractions of the modern city, as well as the rubble and dust of the construction sites that are destroying its past, Jia focuses on everyday lives. These migrants have timeless needs of love and interpersonal connection, but it is the pressing necessity to earn money to survive that dominates their lives and threatens to ruin them. A construction worker in the film is killed in an industrial accident, for example, while working over¬time to boost his wages.

Jia's access to a larger budget for The World is immediately noticeable in its many cos¬tumed extras, better picture quality, and bigger locations. The director continues to shoot long takes, but the elements within those takes are grander and more controlled, including musi¬cal set pieces featuring performances the park offers its visitors. The camera style now appears less determined by the characters and more by an imposed vision, as Jia increasingly mediates between the viewer and the reality he is portraying. In a radical departure from any sense of naturalistic observation, Jia has the screen occasionally burst into animated flights of fancy that illustrate the content of texts that the young couple who are at the center of the story send to each other on their mobile phones. These colorful sequences briefly bring us, and the characters, out of the daily grind of their lives. By linking this moment of escape to technology, such sequences show how it has become part of our imagination as well as of our daily experience of life.

Jia also makes use of allegory to criticize how the use of technology has frequently replaced interpersonal contact and experi-ence. The World theme park is filled with replicas of the world's top tourist attractions and promotes itself as a place where people can c<travel without leaving Beijing.” The visitor can go from "India” to "Manhattan” in minutes, and get their photograph taken in front of the "Taj Mahal,,, "St. Peters,M “The Eiffel Tower,M and numerous other replica sites all within the same day. Such an ersatz encounter clearly cannot match authentic experience of another culture, and merely acts as a metaphor for the increasing superficiality of knowledge in this age of the Internet and cheap flights (notably, Jia did not invent the The World to make a point; it is based on a conflation of two actual theme parks in China).

In Still Life (2006), Jia once again uses a surreal yet actual location as a metaphor. In this case, he explores how the change that comes with globalization leads to an inevitable loss and forgetting. The setting is Fengjie, an actual town that, at the time of shooting, was in the process of being demol-ished before being flooded to make way for the modernizing Three Gorges Dam. This mammoth (and very real) destruction of a town with over two thousand years of history is the backdrop for a narrative featuring two unconnected people who come to Fengjie to search for their former partners. To recover anything from the past, however, proves dif¬ficult in a place about to be submerged and for the most part already demolished.

Still Life is mostly presented in Jia's stan¬dard naturalistic and observational tone. One of the two leads, for example, is played by his cousin (who is not a professional actor) and the film's demolition workers are portrayed by men who are demolishing the town in real life. Once again, however, Jia

includes surreal elements, this time of fanta-sy and science fiction: we see men in space suits move through partially destroyed buildings as they spray them to kill disease; we are introduced to a new character by a UFO that moves across the sky; at one point, a building that looks like a rocket actually takes off into space. For brief moments, these hints of another world give Jia's tale a mythic, transcendent quality that distances us from the difficult lives of Fengjie's inhab-itants and makes them part of a larger imag-ined universe.

In the course of the film's narrative, Jia continues to present us with social-realist observations of daily life. In an increasingly capitalist China, he shows scam artists exploiting victims, evicted tenants arguing with officials, and the meager living and working conditions of manual workers that contrast starkly with the conspicuous con-sumption of the wealthy. While Jia's sympa-thy for the area's inhabitants (mostly inartic-ulate, marginal people who struggle to make enough money in order to survive) is clear, and while the tone is warm and at times humorous, Fengjie proves to be a corrupt and venal society where nobody will do any¬thing for another unless money is transacted. Human interaction has been coarsened by capitalism. A further price of modernization is evident in the massive destruction of the environment caused by the building of the dam needed to power China's growth.

In Jia's next feature film, 24 City (2008), his commentary upon the protagonists' lives is even clearer and takes a metaphysical turn, even though it is nominally a docu¬mentary. 24 City consists of a series of inter¬views with former employees of an arma¬ments factory that is in the process of being demolished to allow for a new, modern city to be built on the site. Their testimony con-firms that life in China before the adoption of global capitalism was tough and imper-sonal, a perspective that shows Jia is not blind to the hardships of the preglobalized world of communist China, even if he has notably never challenged the Mao regime and its excesses.2

To distance us from the testimonies of the interviewees in 24 City, during their comments Jia cuts to artfully staged portrait shots that show them posing for the camera. He also intercuts slow tracking shots of the empty factory that lend it a magisterial, dreamlike quality. That four of those ainter- viewees” are actors further moves the docu-mentary from a purely observational approach (Jia justifies the use of actors by saying that they "enrich” the film). He also inserts regular title cards that feature verse from Chinese poets and W. B. Yeats. These lines of poetry function as a commentary, specifically on the interviewees' testimony and generally on the passage of time. The most striking example is a shot near the end that shows the ruins of the factory being gradually erased by a mist that rolls toward the camera until the frame becomes com-pletely enveloped in white. It is a poetic image that communicates the transitory nature of life and of material objects, an impermanence that contextualizes the spe-cific historical moment and the particular economic system under discussion. The effect is underlined when the following text from Yeats appears on the screen:

Things we have thought and done

Must ramble and thin out

Like milk spilt upon a stone.

In A Touch of Sin (2014), Jia made his most decisive criticism of the new China (and his clearest departure from realism) by whole-heartedly embracing genre and myth to comment upon the corrosive effects of capi-talism. The film draws upon wuxia, a tradi-tional literary genre of martial arts and swordplay (also preserved in Hong Kong film culture) that generally features height-ened incidents and larger-than- life charac-ters that avenge corruption and injustice. Purposively dreamlike and fantastically vio-lent, the film consists of four overlapping stories, each featuring extraordinary brutali-ty and death spawned by callous economic exploitation. The rough-hewn naturalism of Jia's handheld, observational style and long takes is now replaced by the smooth use of a Steadicam, controlled cutting, and an unashamedly intensified reality. Even in A Touch of Sin, however, he has not complete-ly eschewed his commitment to portraying life as it is actually lived. The incidents fea-tured are based on four real-life events that occurred in China, and which Jia discovered on the Chinese social-media site Weibo.

Following the trajectory of Jia's films, it is hardly surprising that his most recent film, Mountains May Depart, should not only examine how our lives are influenced by the socioeconomic force of globalization but also how our lives are governed by the more metaphysical forces of time and fate. Nor is it surprising that Jia is no longer a seemingly passive witness to these forces. In his latest film, he is openly constructing an experience to create in the viewer an emotional, if some-what ambiguous, response to their impact.

Mountains May Depart begins its portrayal of the lives of a group of Chinese over three different time periods in 1999 because, for Jia, that was "a threshold year” when mobile phones, the Internet, and private cars were more widely introduced, and when these modern technologies began not only to speed up the pace of life but also to "isolate” people. The film is his strongest critique to date of the negative effect of modern technology, particu¬larly social media. He has said, “I think there is a huge loss of face to face connection, of interaction, of getting to listen to another per¬son and to observe their facial expression rather than just a simple emoticon."

The film's main concession to realism is its incorporation of documentary footage shot by Jia in 1999 and during the 2000s. He has said that the reason the aspect ratio changes during the film is to match this doc-umentary material, since the 1999 footage was shot in the almost square Academy ratio. Despite this footage, the film is often melo-dramatic. At times, Jia's developing pen-chant for allegory becomes severely overstat¬ed and the characters function more as archetypes designed to make his points about the negative influence of technology and capitalism on China.

In the 1999 section, Tao (Jia's wife and muse Zhao Tao) is faced with two suitors: one is the opportunistic entrepreneur Zhang (Zhang Yi); the other is Liangzi (Liang Jing Dong), a coal miner who is not seduced by money. Tao's choice is clearly a metaphor for China's choice between embracing and reject¬ing capitalism. Unsurprisingly, she pragmati¬cally picks the capitalist Zhang. In the second part, set in 2014, we see the negative repercus¬sions of that choice: Tao and Zhang are divorced and the now wealthy Zhang has taken their son Zhang Daole, aka "Dollar,” to live with him in Shanghai. When the fourteen- year-old, tech-sawy, English-speaking Dollar returns for his grandfather^ funeral, it is clear that he has become estranged from Chinese tradition. He refers to Tao as "mummy” (like an American) and he is unable to follow the traditional Chinese funeral ritual.

The final part, set in 2025, shows a now twenty-five-year-old Dollar living with his father in Australia. Since Dollar speaks only English and his father Zhang speaks only Chinese, the two are able to communicate only through the Internet, using Google Translate. This has justifiably been criticized as unbelievable. Critics have also comment¬ed that the acting—especially the perfor¬mance by Zijian Dong as Dollar—along with much of the dialogue, is unconvincing. To focus on the most grating and unrealistic parts of Jia's film, however, seems unfair. While at times his message is hamfisted, as a whole the film is a worthwhile exploration of the impact of modernity and consumer¬ism on China (and the world).

Although the film's 2025 section is admit¬tedly weak, there is perhaps some method in that feebleness. As we see the future's bland, hi-tech environment of glass and metal, intersected by wide streets devoid of people, that very blandness makes us feel somewhat nostalgic for the more emotionally resonant sections of 1999 and 2014, which were pre¬sented in vibrant, vivid colors and projected in smaller frame sizes that often overflowed with people. We begin to feel that the mate¬rially better-off and more technologically interconnected inhabitants of the future are somehow lacking the vitality and humanity of their predecessors. We sense that in this sterile future Dollar is estranged not only from his own culture but also from the sen¬suousness of lived life.

To his credit, while Jia may be overly fond of metaphor, he sticks to his goal of portray¬ing life as it is by being generous (and realis¬tic) enough to present the twenty-five-year- old Dollar as a sympathetic young man who wants to discover his own identity and find self-fulfillment—as someone, in short, who faces the same fundamental issues as the gen¬eration before him. Dollar's ignorance of 1999, and of the lives and traditions it con¬tained, reminds us of one inevitable conse¬quence of time, whether or not exacerbated by globalization—each generation's experi¬ences die with them. The now middle-aged Jia Zhangke can at least be comforted, and we can be thankful, that he has preserved on film for future generations what appears to be an accurate portrait of the already vanished life that he once experienced in Fenyang.3

The conclusion of Mountains May Depart reveals the potential, if still unrealized, of Jia's developing integration of realism and imagination. The final scene shows Tao dancing by herself to the Pet Shop Boys5 cover of the Village People's "Go West.” We remember that the film opened on her danc¬ing to the same tune in 1999, as part of an energetic group of young dancers. Then, the song's lyrics about going West as a group to partake in an idyllic life spoke not only of solidarity but also of hope in the future. The very title "Go West” denoted the allure of Western economics and culture.

By the end of the film, a quarter of a cen¬tury has passed. As we observe Tao dance, we remember how we have watched people once loved by Tao die or move on, and how we have seen the physical exuberance and optimism of youth diminish. We realize how the allure of the West and globalization ulti¬mately proved destructive, even breaking up Tao's family life. Now the "Go West” lyrics take on an ironic twist. Tao is alone and she moves more slowly. It is a powerful closing image, sad and moving, but it also contains a hint of joy. By the very act of dancing, Tao declares that life is still worth celebrating.

But that scene conveys even more layers of ambivalence. Watching a Chinese woman celebrate her past in Fenyang through an American pop song sung by a British band reminds us how much cultural globalization is with us, whether we like it or not. It also suggests that while globalization is destruc¬tive, it can also be potentially liberating. Jia is not a dogmatic antimodernist. He recog¬nizes the attractions of the expansions of the mind that can come with globalization. He

described himself as being "ecstatic," for instance, when he was finally able to read books by Freud and Nietzsche in Fenyang during the "thaw” of the 1980s, thanks to the removal of restrictions. It was also pri¬vate and international capital that from the beginning allowed him to make films inde¬pendently and outside of the state system.

It is a testament to Jia that this final image simultaneously communicates narrative information, strong cathartic emotion, and ambiguous, contradictory ideas about life. To carry so much in one image, you arguably need more than the semblance of actuality. You also need to carefully construct the path that gets you there. Therein may lie the answer as to why Jia has added a variety of aesthetic approaches to his core social realism, including myth, genre, surrealism, and poetry. He needs such a heavy arsenal to tackle his ambitious undertaking—an exploration of the reality of being human, both materially and spiritually, in the globalized capitalist sys¬tem in which most of us live in the twenty- first century. It is a heady cinematic mixture, and one difficult to pull off If Jia ever com¬pletely succeeds in doing so, he will have cre¬ated a vitally relevant masterpiece. ■