caught by the tides (w&d jia zhang-ke, w. jiahuan wan)

Zhang-ke’s film is, like Linklater’s Boyhood, an assemblage, cobbled together from four different eras, four different films. At the very opening, we note that the ratio is 4:3, a ratio from 2001, as women practice songs in an industrial backwater, presumably filmed on a camcorder. The images are disconnected, almost random. Where is the story? What is this film about?

The answers to these questions emerge gradually. The film is a love story, of sorts. It is also an account of the transformation of China over the course of quarter of a century. The love story takes the near mute Qiaoqiao, played by Tao Zhao, on a journey from the north to find her lover in Ganghzou. Theirs is a flawed relationship. He is selfish and obsessed by money. She steps through the ruins of a city destroyed to make way for the Three Gorges Dam, like she could be tiptoeing through the remains of their relationship. China evolves from a deep industrial hardship into a world where a robot becomes your shopping friend and can see sadness in your eyes. The relationship bobs alongside the country’s changes. There’s no happy ending, just various kinds of survival.

It struck me, watching the film, that the China I know, having never visited, is entirely filtered through the lens of Jia Zhang-ke. His vision has not so much shaped mine, as formed it. 

A touch of sin/ tian zhu ding (w&d jia zhang-ke)

Zhang-Ke’s magisterial film yokes complexity with simplicity, micro with macro, tragedy with comedy, violence and humour. Each of the four tales within the film employs the eternally potent dramatic tool of violence, to offer a savage X-ray of society, moving from high end hotels to scabrous street restaurants where anonymous faces slurp noodles like there’s no tomorrow. I was watching it with Mr Presno, who said at the end: But they can’t show that in China can they? How Zhang-Ke gets financing for his films remains a mystery but in many ways they give the lie to the idea of China as an overwhelmingly repressive state, in part because they are permitted to show the worst of the corruption and decadence of the new money with its communist party kickbacks. Despite being split into four parts, A Touch of Sin in many ways employs a classical narrative character framework. Each of the featured four flawed characters have to fight to find their significance within a world which reduces the individual to a part in a vast machine. Whether this is through the cathartic act of killing the bad guys, as in stories 1 and 3, or choosing a tragic end, as in story 4, or just assuming a role beyond the moral or social remit of society, as in the story 2, each character realises themselves though their capacity to enact violence. This model makes for straightforward storytelling, which is at the same time a radical critique of the society they emerge from. 

the world/ shijie (w&d jia zhang-ke)

The World is named for a theme park in Beijing which features selected wonders of the world, including Big Ben, a mini Manhattan complete with Twin Towers, (long after they have fallen), a mini Eiffel Tower as well as a Taj Mahal, a St Mark’s Square and other sundry wonders. The film follows the lives of several performers who participate in the shows staged in the theme park, where they dress up in national dress of different regions. Tao, the central character, appears as an Indian dancer and a Japanese geisha, among others. However, Tao longs to travel, and although the world is on their doorstep, few of the people who work there have ever been out of China. So Jia Zhang-Ke’s conceit takes shape: the image of a burgeoning China where the world appears to be opening up is nothing more than a simulacra. The reality is that this is a kind of prison. So far so Baudrillard. It’s also interesting to note that the film occurs just as mobile phones are starting to infiltrate the social web, another mechanism that appears to expand the world, but actually contracts it, with jealous individuals constantly asking why their partner hasn’t answered their call, using the phones as a tool to micro-manage day to day relationships.

Within this context, the film looks at the realities of the lives of these ordinary citizens, many of whom are internal immigrants, coming from rural parts of the country to participate in the economic boom. This is perhaps more typical Jia Zhang-Ke material, the struggle of its citizens to adapt to the rapidly changing face of China. What he succeeds in doing so skilfully is conjuring out of this material an overview of an entire society. By the time we reach Tao’s tragic end in a flat on an old industrial estate, a far cry from the fake glory of The World, it feels as though we have traversed the length and breadth of Chinese society, from high class karaoke joints for the elite to the desperate hotels where internal immigrants turn up when they first land in town. There are many things which make Jia Zhang-Ke one of the greatest living directors, but one of them is the sheer scale of his cinematic imagination. 

ash is purest white (w&d jia zhangke)

Jia Zhang-ke latest film is a sweeping tale which chronicles recent Chinese history through the story of Qiao, a gangster’s moll who takes the fall for him and then discovers when she emerges from five years prison that he hasn’t shown her the same loyalty. Instead he’s gone off with another woman, and in addition gone straight. As such the film is split into two parts, pre and post prison. The first part, building up to the incident where Qiao saves Bin’s life, is by far the most effective. It details how the charismatic Bin manoeuvres himself in the small but growing mining town. The film offers a vivid portrayal of a society on the point of transition, a metaphor for the country. Qiao becomes a sacrificial lamb on the altar of change. The second part is more picaresque, with the narrative having less of a sense of purpose, leading to a consciously anti-climactic finale. It feels a little bit as though the film is slipping out of the director’s grasp, in much the same way as Bin is fated to always escape the grasp of Qiao. Nevertheless, even if the film doesn’t quite live up to its promise, there’s something in the overarching vision that Jia Zhang-ke conjures which lends the film a flawed grandeur. 

24 city (d. zhang ke jia, w. zhang ke jia & yongming zhai)

My appetite for reviewing appears to be waning somewhat, so my apologies if this is at all cursory. Perhaps its the result of the political manoeuvrings which have been occuring in the UK of late. Strange to think that as a nation we once held sway over China, forcibly addicting its citizens to opium, in one of the more benevolent phases of British imperialism. Now it's China which is finally looking outwards, imposing its mark upon the world. I have no figures but its said they own most of Africa, I know they own large parts of Australia, and are no doubt active in Latin America. Over the course of what seems like no time at all they've become the world's greatest commercial power, or have initiated the process of becoming it. The transformation seems astonishing, but then one of the conundrums of ageing is that it's only as you yourself devour the years alloted to you that you begin to realise how fast history operates, and how impermanent are things that in your youth seemed to have been the same for ever.

All of which is apropos of Zhang Ke Jia's film, which is a study of an old weapons factory in the growing city of Chengdu. Zhang films the process of its destruction as it makes way for a swanky housing/ commercial development. In the course of the film he stages interviews with workers (apparently played by actors) who recount some anecdote from their past, thereby bringing the social fabric of the factory to life from its inception in the fifties up to its recent closure. These stories are counter-pointed by images of the factory as the last workers work there, engaged in the rugged labour of heavy industry. Rings of molten metal are beaten into shape, before the workers leave and the space becomes a kind of mausoleum to the China which has now slipped away.

Zhang's film is lengthy and far from an easy watch. Its pace is slow and there's little attempt to dramatise the stories, which are told by speaking heads in fixed locations (a bus, a hairdresser's etc.) Yet the film has a subtle and gradually accumulating potency, with the final subject, a pretty young buyer who owns a new VW Beetle talking about how she finally grew up when she realised she had to take responsibility for her parents. Which suggests the film's message is that the present cannot be called mature, or developed, until it learns to respect the past. The dangers and ironies of vast material growth at the expense of spiritual (for want of a better word) development are reaffirmed by the closing vision of modern Chengdu, a sprawling, characterless seeming city of glass skyscrapers and flyovers. This is a documentary of sorts, but it is also a critique of onrushing history and the way in which China is changing.

still life (d. Jia Zhangke)

Still Life, is, in its discreet way, another dystopian fable, dealing with the end of civilisation. The film is set in the last days of a 2000 year old city, Fengjie, over an unclear period of a time. The town will be submerged as a result of the Three Gorge's dam being built on the Yangtze river, and the film follows the journeys of two unconnected characters who travel there looking for their missing spouses.

The currents of history, both personal and political, flow through the film, suggesting the rootlessness caused by the political act of destroying the city is mirrored in the lives of the citizens in the new China. The labourer Han Sanming comes to the town by river to seek a wife who left him sixteen years ago. His story is counterpointed by that of Mrs Guo, the wife of a party official, who has not seen him for two years. Her story is sandwiched within Han Sanming's, and any connections are implicit, rather than direct.

Han Sanming's is played with a kind of virile docility by the actor who shares his name. A labourer who knows little of the city but arrives and becomes a part of its destruction, working in the demolition teams. These are frequently captured on film like the still lives of the title, the labourers framed from a distance, sometimes sillhouetted. The act of labour eclipses the artifacts of labour - buildings and monuments collapse at the whim of history (Mrs Guo's contact for her husband is an archeologist, excavating ruins within soon-to-be-ruins) but human toil continues until the bitter end.

Still Life is a stately film, infused with the torpor of Sichuan Province. Nothing happens in a hurry. A cigarette lingers, a husband waits sixteen years before he decides to find his lost wife. When he does she asks him to sit down and offers him a plate of noodles. Civilisations come and go, but history is subject to the sluggish tide of human development and perception. Some of the most eye catching scenes in the film are a-historical: the monument blasting into space; and the filmmaker's whimsical depiction of a UFO, the only point of connection between the twin protagonists, suggesting that no matter what influence the historical powers of China seek to exert on history, even geography, there will always be forces beyond their control.