7 Market Socialism and Its Discontent*
Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Narrative of China’s Transition in the Age of Global Capital
Limits of Chinese Modernism
Post-Mao Chinese cinematic modernism, China’s ticket to “modern world cinema”—a polite name for global culture market—came into being through repudiating the socialist-realist studio-theatrical tradition. In historical hindsight, what was considered “new” in the 1980s was only new symbolically and retroactively, because the cinematic language and stylistic innovation practiced by the Fifth Generation filmmakers like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou did not seem to possess much shock value in a technical or merely historical context of world cinema or international modernism. Rather, the new was nearly always measured politically vis-à-vis the pre-existing frames of everyday life, aesthetic taste, value system, and sociomaterial conditions inherited from Mao’s China that had been pronounced old, obsolete, and in need of radical reform. Modernism, in this regard, was evoked, mobilized, and deployed more like a confirmation of universal time defined by the global market, whose economic and political substance and specificities can be grasped with some clarity only in the 1990s when the Chinese moment of high modernism quickly morphed and dispersed into a grab-bag mixture of postmodern variations of assorted local/global genres, from the kung fu movie, TV sitcom, to the uniquely Chinese visual spectaculars such as the 2008 Beijing Olympia Opening Ceremony.
However, it would be a simplification to regard Chinese modernism as merely a sentimental footnote to the prevailing modernization ideology of Deng’s China. The intense Western gaze in the last decade of Cold War (brought to a sudden end with the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 and the implosion of Soviet Union in 1991) had produced a cultural-historical drama that virtually restaged the entire history of bourgeois civilization, from the Renaissance to Theatre of the Absurd—all within a single decade. Such compression and condensation of ideas, styles, and value judgments were bound to produce a new formal and ideological intensity in its own right and at a heighted level of aesthetic and philosophical fetishism. Whereas this artificially fortified formal space propped up the imagined cultural space of the Chinese New Era, it also made itself—unconsciously but objectively—available to the unresolved collective energy, utopian idealism, and subjectivity of Mao’s revolutionary and socialist era. Such formal-historical complexity, however, did not seem to allow a patient, thick description and explanation of what has been going on in concrete historical time and its multiplicity and differentiation in concrete social-material space. Differently put, the creative energy registered under the rubric of Chinese modernism never clearly separated itself from the two predominant institutions whose conflict as well as overlap define its historic window of opportunity, namely, on the one hand, the institution of international High Modernism appropriated solely in abstract, apolitical fashion of the cult of Form and the fetish of the Author and above all as a technology for formal and aesthetic intensity; and, on the other, the reformist state whose modernization agenda, ownership of the moral legacy of the revolution, and political-discursive monopoly over the entire national space formed an ideal (objectively speaking) pressurized cabin—in terms of both its incorporation within and resistance to universal time—in which a “local” (defined vis-à-vis the global) modernism managed to overcome its various disadvantages and poverties to complete a rapid climb to stylistic autonomy and professional prestige, both within and beyond the nation-state.
The “mysterious” success story of the Fifth Generation always had its detractors and critics, to be sure. The socialist realist tradition, however, never mounted any effective, even merely coherent, resistance, as its habitual reliance on bureaucratic policies and discursive officialdom rendered it discredited and irrelevant in the great post-Mao political-aesthetic debate. Rather, from the very beginning, the deficiency and even fraudulence of the new modernist aesthetic was seen, as plainly as the emperor’s new clothes, in a much more pedestrian and immediate sense, namely, as its inability or unwillingness to “tell a story” (jiang gushi). In other words, its elevated style, capable of reifying into something “timeless” failed at the level of representation and narrative because the self-expression of the neo-Enlightenment intelligentsia seemed far too busy chasing its dreams and utopia and launching metaphysical critiques of various Chinese and socialist traditions to care about concrete experiences produced by its very own times, much less to come up with intimate narratives and representations that touch and inspire a nation to reflect upon the ongoing epic social transformation. The vacuity of stories in the Fifth Generation revealed a poverty of experience in form, which stands in stark contrast to a riot of bewildering experiences in content. To this extent, Chinese modernism serves as a paradoxical allegory for the “empty, homogeneous time” at the historic-philosophical core of a successful period of modern Chinese history marked by the upheaval of market economy with all its abundant material and symbolic wealth.
Throughout the 1990s, as the critical, reflexive intellectual energy of 1980s Chinese modernism became increasingly diverted to coping with the upheavals of the market economy at home and absorbed into the global discourse of the post– Cold War liberal democracy and free market abroad, its political and cultural niche within the national theater of social and ideological change and conflict became more and more precarious and indefensible. The Tiananmen Incident (June 1989) and its aftermath rendered everything vaguely critical or nonconformist a real or potential political dissent vis-à-vis the new technocratic state, which had to be muffled if not summarily suppressed by state censorship. The access to international film festivals, which itself had always been a privileged license granted by the state, only seemed to ensure the reception of the works of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou in the early 1990s as political allegories of a repressive regime, which deserved to be censored or banned in the domestic market. But even this harsh administrative and controlling measure turned out to be sentimental in the face of full-throttle globalization and marketization in China toward the end of the 1990s. In this process, with a few fleeting exceptions, in which some gestures at exploring a new reality with a selfconsciously innovative cinematic language were made (with Zhang Yimou’s The Story of Qiu Ju being the most memorable), the lingering force of post Mao Chinese modernism found its fate all but sealed in a false, indeed farcical dichotomy. It either persisted in the form of a nostalgic gaze at its earlier self, such as Chen Kaige’s Mei Lan Fang (2008), a lesser version of his 1994 Palm d’Or winner Farewell My Concubine, with, predictably, an artistic talent’s obsession with art standing for all kinds of cultural and moral certainty; or it embraced unapologetically the total instrumentalization of its “sculptural consciousness” represented by the cinematography of early Zhang Yimou, which culminated in the latter’s role in directing the visually spectacular 2008 Beijing Olympia’s Opening Ceremony and the 60th Anniversary of PRC parade and evening gala, winning him the dubious title as the chief “interior designer/contractor” of the state.
The Break of the “Sixth Generation”
The arrival of Jia Zhangke and his fellow “Sixth Generation” filmmakers since the mid-1990s was in every sense a response to that situation. In the place of a fantastic, ideological symbolic unity of modernization, they staged allegorical fragments of a broken, disoriented reality. Whereas the Fifth Generation sutured together a mythological whole—embodied by the vast empty shots of a pristine, ahistorical landscape, from “yellow earth” to “red sorghum” to the icy mountain ranges in Tibet—with the cinematic language of late modernism, the Sixth Generation was eager to show the shabby, formless fabric of everyday life at the county level where socialist underdevelopment meets the onslaught of marketization, producing a ghostly landscape filled with wandering souls and the scattered body parts of shattered dreams, suppressed rage, disappointments and despair running so deep that they, like a chronic disease, become part of the quotidian routine of normalcy. Youthful rebellion and hopelessness on the margins of Chinese modernization (that is, far away from the glamour of Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen) is a predominating theme in Jia Zhangke’s early films. The dissolution of whole families and the demolition of entire neighborhoods and communities; the destruction of the natural and social environment; and the loss of individual and collective memories and modes of life all constitute the leitmotifs of his later films.
Indeed, there seems to be a systematic and methodical sociological approach in Jia Zhangke’s movies, whose thematics could all too easily be taken up as a list of topics for an academic conference on problems of contemporary Chinese development: its human cost (alienated youth in Xiaowu and Unknown Pleasure; migrant labor and population relocation in Still Life, The World and 24 City); its social and cultural cost (the erasure of collective memory, the destruction of families and communities, the flattening of culture and value, the shrinkage of time-space in The World); the environmental cost (the violation of nature and pollution in Still Life); etc.
Whereas the real or imagined “Western Gaze” in Fifth Generation film production prefigured a metaphysical image of China as a whole—as trope of backwardness or newfound social desire, its introverted version and rejection among the Sixth Generation filmmakers gave rise to a melancholic contemplation of the decidedly glamourless everyday forms captured in between the more stable, more romanticized norms of Chinese rural and urban life. A more differentiated observation of contemporary Chinese daily life is not only necessitated by, but also reflects the more disparate, uneven, and polarized society; as a new visual-symbolic regime it also required a paradigmatic transformation of the way the camera confronts reality. It’s no accident that Jia Zhangke’s rise paralleled that of the New Documentary Movement: both returned to the street level, descending from the aesthetic height of “modern world cinema” and new national mythology; both required the fragmentation in cinematic or narrative articulation so as to stay in touch with a brute reality that exists below the radar screen of modernist form-making. Even though the two phenomena operated at different levels in the social registry and aesthetic frame of reference, they share something decidedly in common: the air of underground filmmaking, of countercultures, small circles, and niche markets. If this is what it takes to gain an intimate look at an uncharted terrain inaccessible to the selfimportant modernist-intellectual discourses of the 1980s, embracing this “art-house, small-circle documentary style” also comes with its downside as a price to pay for its nimble freedom: the unwillingness or inability to engage the masses or virtually anything with a mass appeal, whether melodrama or genre movies, and thus a self-imposed isolation and obscurity that follows a critical, nonconformist perspective of an alienated native son whose growing frustration with and distance from his own environment lends the films a touch of visual detachment verging on utter extraneousness. “Representations of lower-class life only high-culture audiences can understand” or “lamentation of urban demolition funded by the developers/demolishers” are then part of the irony not lost even on Jia Zhangke’s proponents and supporters. 24 City, for instance, is funded by the very developers of the 24 City project featured in the film, for some, a virtually embedded commercial.
Born in 1970 in the city of Fenyang, Shanxi Province (in northwest China), Jia Zhangke’s conversion to filmmaking was as chance an encounter as it was relatively late. Son of a high school Chinese teacher and a grocery shop saleswoman, he grew up in a semirural, semi-urban environment relatively insulated from the allures of the outside world. When explaining to interviewers why pop music features so prominently in his films, he points to the utter lack of culture and entertainment in any shape and form throughout his childhood and early adolescence. Jia recalls, “After dinner, the four of us [his parents, his sister, and himself] just sat in the room, having nothing to do and nothing to say, until it was time to go to bed”: thus the liberating effect of the arrival of Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and Japanese pop songs and Hollywood films and the ways in which they became intimately intertwined with his personal memory. He was once a good break-dancer, coming close to being able to support himself financially through gigs and street shows, a result of having seen Break Dance over a dozen times.
In 1990, while training to be a graphic designer in Taiyuan, the capital city of Shanxi, Jia Zhangke accidentally saw Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984) and decided overnight to become a filmmaker. This conversion was followed by two failed attempts at getting into the Beijing Film Academy, which finally accepted him into its Literature Department in 1993. The choice of studying film theory rather than directing was simply because he figured it would be easier to get in. Always willing to acknowledge that he is but a product of his environment, and that this environment always presents multiple choices and multiple possibilities, he once speculated that had he not become a filmmaker, he might well have ended up either a novelist (he has published some essays and stories in literary magazines of Shanxi Province and even had an invitation to join the provincial Writers’ Association, thus becoming a salaried writer), or a painter (as part of apprenticeship he lived with other would-be artists on the outskirts of Taiyuan, gaining a firsthand experience of living dangerously on the margins as a “aimless roamer”[mangliu] and urban vagabond, sharing the streets with migrant laborers, subjected to random police searches in the middle of the night), or even a private coal mine owner in the coal country of Shanxi, knowing full well that of all occupations in contemporary China, this last one has come to epitomize the lawless and heartless predatory exploitation of man and nature in contemporary China.
For the generation that came after Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, the task is not another visual-linguistic coup within the regime of the senses and imagination, but, rather, to gain a sense certainty vis-à-vis a concrete, irreducible reality that will in turn define and give substance to a new cinematic language and personal style. For Jia Zhangke as a Beijing Film Academy student, this reality is perceived, first of all, as the disappearance of all reality in Chinese filmmaking. Of all the Wednesday double features of newly released Chinese films he saw while studying at BFA, he concluded that “none whatsoever had anything to do with me, or with the real experiences and situations of living Chinese men and women.”1 This epiphany prompted his decision to “do it by myself,” that is, to “struggle for a right of discourse” (zhengduo huayuquan) to “represent the life concealed by the silver screen.”2
In the decade that followed, Jia Zhangke found himself “always ready to rush off to the street with a camera” in search of a reality—any reality outside the visual, discursive, and administrative regimes of post-Tiananmen China in the 1990s. It is worth noting that one can find similar impatience, outrage, and motivation in Fifth Generation filmmakers while they were students at Beijing Film Academy, always ready to break free from the ossified clichés of “socialist realism” by calling it a lie. In Chinese cinematic modernism’s new social being, the social intellectual utopia of the initial years of Chinese socialist reforms both anticipated and projected a new photographic ontology (a Bazin-inspired idea with its dialogue with Italian neorealism in the immediate post-W WII context).3 As it withered, with all its visual and political implications, a new reality must be defined afresh at the heart of the disappearance of reality, not as a new ontology or myth (of modernization, of new enlightenment, of the intellectuals, or of a harmonious, mutually beneficial relationship between the socialist state form and the capitalist economy), but as a critical discursive capture of the multiplicity of reality and its inherent contradictions.
Xiancheng as Visual Politics
For the newcomers in Chinese filmmaking the new is therefore not defined in terms of “post-Mao,” but rather in terms of the collapse of the aesthetic and intellectual regimes of the self-styled “New Enlightenment” of the 1980s, of which the modernist cinema was an integral part, and which came to be wrapped up in the thick mythology of a bureaucratic market economy during the 1990s. What this new generation faced on the thresh-old of the post–New Era is not a changed or distorted reality but indeed the complete absence of reality as a result of total rationalization of the social sphere by the monopoly of power, capital, and their attendant mercenary culture industry and framework of values. The 1980s modernism was, in retrospect, not a negation of this totality, but merely exploited its internal unevenness and contradictions for a fast-track aesthetic and professional success—an escape masquerading as heroic transcendence. The tough part of the work, namely, a full, frontal confrontation with reality, remains to be done but without the valorization of the modernist cinematic language, whose aesthetic properties are exhausted and whose political poignancy is squandered or ignored.
The breaking of the ideological totality at the end of the 1980s and the intensified disintegration of the “reform consensus” throughout the 1990s finally resulted in a fragmentation of Chinese society in every dimension and domain such that a “discovery” of reality could no longer meaningfully envisage a new unifying totality. Rather, a search for “reality” must start with a cognitive mapping of the contradictory multiplicity of realities that, thus captured, are open to the critical, discursive interventions of socially and politically concrete personal histories, positions, interests, identities, and consciousness, whether dormant or emergent. Jia Zhangke’s work can be understood most effectively in this context as a cinematic discursive invention pertaining to a particular layer or topology in the fragmented social sphere. And the particular milieu that defines the “physical reality” undergirding Jia Zhangke’s visual-political impact is xiancheng, or the county-level city.
It should be noted that, with respect to Jia Zhangke’s film production, xiancheng is not a description but a full-fledged concept. The name does not refer to its technical administrative definition (“the site of a county,” governing townships but in turn governed by districts or district-level cities), but includes both county-level cities such as Fenyang (Jia’s hometown and setting for both Xiaowu and Platform, it rose from township status to that of a county-level city in the early 1990s) and larger district-level provincial cities and industrial centers like Datong (the setting of Unknown Pleasure).4 One may find the following journalistic observations on Fenyang as it is made visible through the prism of Jia Zhangke’s films:
The objective spatial properties of xiancheng would include the following: Demolishing-spawn rubbles standing next to characterless streets and buildings; deserted coal mines and highways; large unused areas; modern dance shows on a flatbed truck competing with village operas and mad disco dances; sleepy pool houses, video parlors, and the decayed, empty train station; lottery sales all over the places, indifferent, monotonous and yet stirring, even demagogue-like, a sound typical of an age of mental absent-mindedness and restlessness; the lonely, despirited pedestrians walking in the dust that thickens the air; odors of foods; or other nameless odors… . This is the hometown without famous ancient architectural relics or logos of modern kitsch, and yet a spatial structure with poetic significance.5
The peculiarity of xiancheng as a type of social landscape lies in its omnipresence in socioeconomic, geographic, and sociological senses, as well as its underrepresentation in film and literature. Focusing on xiancheng is, consciously or not, zooming in on the underbelly of Chinese reform and Chinese socialist modernity in general. As part of “urban China,” xiancheng sets itself apart from the fantasyland of a pristine and authentic, custom-bound rural China, with its substantive benefits from early reform years (due to the household-based production system and the rise of food prices) and its stable, village-based social and ethical structure. All of this was in very short order torn asunder by the reach of market forces, creating a massive loss of arable land and exodus of the rural population to rapidly expanding urban industrial and service-industrial centers). On the other hand, a xiancheng is decidedly not an urban, metropolitan center, but rather the opposite of urbane sophistication, fashion, high-paying whitercollar jobs, and access to national cultural and political power and to international, global capital and ideas, all of which are lived realities in national cities such as Beijing and Shanghai and provincial capitals in coastal or major industrial areas with rich economic, cultural, or tourist resources (the names of Nanjing, Hangzhou, Xi’an, Guangzhou, and Chengdu come immediately to mind). In terms of material or symbolic capital, xiancheng is proletarian China, par excellence. In terms of urban forms and their visual representation, xiancheng is usually found to be shapeless and unattractive, exposing spatial and social organization based on necessity and with no prospect of transcendance. In other words, this is the in-between, generic area where the daily reality of contemporary China is laid bare, much to the inconvenience of the symbolic or allegorical sublimation of China as an image, an idea, a world-historical standard-bearer sought by the socialist realists and modernists alike. To anyone who is condemned to having to look at its social fabric closely, xiancheng in the hinterland is an aching reminder of all the failings and compromises of socialist industrialization, of postsocialist reforms, and even of the sweeping market forces, whose forces and edges, brutal as they were in the more even, homogeneous space of the Chinese countryside or big cities like Beijing or Shanghai, turned out to be half-measures at best when confronted with this dull, unruly reality. But Jia Zhangke’s films are neither moral condemnations on the crushing material or cultural poverty of xiancheng nor nostalgic apologies for one’s personal history bearing its fateful imprints. If there are any traces of sentimentalism, it is the emotional residue or surplus of past memories, lost in time and now regained through filmmaking, whose Proustian ritualworthiness lies in its ability to document and, while doing so, enables the filmmaker to touch upon not one particular moment of the past but a chain of moments before and after it as well.
With no clean-cut boundaries or clear distinctions, whether between rural and urban, between industrial and agricultural, between “state” and “non-state,” and between high culture and low culture, xiancheng becomes a meeting place of all current or anachronistic forces but without any contending party’s ideology or utopia triumphing over others in a decisive fashion. Either too overdeveloped (such as the huge state-run coal mines in Datong, forming the semi-visible background of Unknown Pleasures in the form of the run-down workers’ dormitory in which the protagonist lives with his mother) or too underdeveloped (such as the rudimentary service sectors developed in China all over the place in the 1990s—small teahouses and restaurants, public baths, hair salons, restaurants, karaoke clubs, pool houses, and brothels in Jia Zhangke films), different modes of production or consumption present in this context find in xiancheng not a showcase for their material accomplishment and ideological appeal, but, rather, their burial ground. Jia Zhangke arrived at the center stage of contemporary Chinese filmmaking as the filmmaker of xiancheng, and xiancheng experiences and images define his work so thoroughly that he later felt compelled to rise above it. Jia’s first attempt at doing so is The World, set in Beijing. But the world represented in this film is seen by many as in fact a xiancheng within the global city and the nation’s capital, for the World Theme Park on the outskirts of Beijing is at once a migrant laborers’ village and a xiancheng version of imagined globality. Indeed, the ultimate mockery of the film is not on the Disney-style, miniature World, but Beijing or China itself as a giant xiancheng whose concrete, contradictory realities coexist with a virtual, mirage-like unity.
Xiancheng is the sociological, if not biographical, origin of Jia Zhangke’s cinematic language, which, once invented, serves as a nimble, effective, and defiant tool in discursively subverting the stale modernist holdover and the enveloping monopoly of the Hollywood-style commercial blockbuster. In terms of this “discovery” of reality, xiancheng is not located merely at some ethnographic “street level,” nor is it simply a cinematic dialect. Rather, in Jia Zhangke’s oeuvre it is a state of being, an existential mood, and a political ontology waiting to burst into the linguistic-discursive world of self-expression and representation to claim for itself a rightful place with a suppressed rage. This is the reason why it is never too productive to try to reduce Jia Zhang’s film production to a new sociologically, even classdefined agency or identity, such as “small folks” (xiaorenwu), or “those on the margin” (bianyuan), or the “underprivileged group” (ruoshi qunti), or “the bottom” (diceng). That would be either giving too much or too little credit to Jia’s filmmaking practice, which is only rarely aligned with a classor economic-centered analysis of the social situation, but is instead more engaged in finding a legitimate perspective, voice, or position from which to capture a reality that is simultaneously slipping away from experience and coming back to haunt and overwhelm it at an abstract, mythological level. While seeking this legitimacy of the self, Jia Zhangke’s world of visual discourse continues to reveal the illegitimacy of various dominant discourses of representation and propaganda. But Jia’s films do so without committing themselves to a fixed position, politically or aesthetically; rather, their work is made possible by a deliberate mobility and reflexiveness—in terms of physical location, group identity, vis-à-vis the state and capital (in the form of inventors, distributors, and censors), and in relation to prevalent intellectual and critical discourses, even though it appears often to devote itself to those who are rendered immobile by the prevailing social, economic, and ideological forces in a structural sense—whether they are being eradicated from their roots and driven ever deeper into the alien land of capitalist economy is a different matter.
When asked whether he thinks his films represent the Chinese reality, Jia answers by saying that his films represent one of the Chinese realities; and that what he has learned from his own decade of filmmaking experiences is that China is presenting increasingly multiple realities. Rather than trying to capture a totality or “completeness” (wanzhengxing), Jia seeks to “break its silence” and to show the “facial expressions” of this “giant economic entity” (Zhangke 2009, p. 68)—often by making audible and visible what is muffled or blurred and what is forgotten altogether. At the end of Xiaowu, the audience sees Xiaowu, handcuffed to a light pole like a stray dog captured by an animal shelter, expressionlessly staring back at the passersby gathering around and staring at him. But this memorable scene of immobility in the minute context reveals precisely the mobility of Xiaowu as a migrant laborer surviving in xiancheng as a pickpocket, only his is a mobility people too conveniently ignore and too readily deny when “necessary.” Xiaowu the film is thus this invisible and inaudible body of experience called “Xiaowu” turned into language, as an idea, a representation, and a discourse—of mobility, action, emotions, and expression (even if an expressionless one). The same concern and interest can be seen in The World, whose representational and discursive center is not the theme park (it only serves as a prop), but rather stories of mobility and immobility (ending with the dead, hardened bodies of its two protagonists), whose trajectories or “routes of flight” create traces of human expression—as signs of experiential and emotional intensities—bursting from behind the crushing dullness and indifference of xiancheng, the hollow mirage of fantasyland, and the death mask of alienation. To trace these human traces, to follow his protagonists doggedly as they roam across different, sometimes unbridgeable social terrains, is the documentary, even detective ambition of Jia Zhangke’s cinematic style.
Jia Zhangke and the New Documentary Movement
Xiancheng, despite its unassuming, unattractive appearances, is a war zone both in the socioeconomic sense and for its impact on the visual registers of contemporary China, in which the most brutal battles of a historical transformation are being fought, out of sight and silently. Just as Xiaowu is widely credited by critics for its “discovery” of xiancheng, demolition (chai) is credited by the filmmaker himself for the becoming visible of small-town experiences as a visual-political construct and as an allegory. For Jia Zhangke, xiancheng is not at all merely a film set, a background, or an object of representation. Rather, it is an ongoing event that visualpolitically defines his filmmaking as a will to documentary that must be carried out by “going back to the scene” (huidao xianchang). The “scene,” to be sure, refers not only explicitly to the familiar, even omnipresent scenes of demolition, relocation, and construction in urban centers as well as the adjacent areas between city and country (chengxiang jiehebu) in China today, but more implicitly to the scenes of the crime and violence of the Chinese 1990s, whose beginning can be traced back to Tiananmen Square in June 1989. “Going back to the scene” thus inevitably assumes the position of not only a documenter trying to recover lost personal and collective memories from a rebellious and failed youth, but that of a victim obsessivecompulsively wanting to go back to “the scene” just to live it once again, as if to prove that the lived moment, unabsorbed by memory and conscious, is, rather, an ongoing, continuous traumatic event. The scene, in other words, is a sociopsychological idée fixe clinging to the heart of happenings, in which concrete experiences and lives are lost and gained, and in which the real, however fragmented and unbearable, can be once again confronted and captured from a cinematic “writing degree zero.”
Jia’s age and small-town upbringing may provide a biographical clue for his desire to go back to the “scene,” but he would still need a cinematicdiscursive device with which to get even closer to and to make consciously alive what only exists in itself but not for itself. That cinematic-discursive device he found in the idea of the documentary parallel to and nourished by the New Documentary Movement (xin jilupian yundong) of the Chinese 1990s, and in the new technology of digital video camera (DV).
The New Documentary Movement became prominent in the early 1990s and mid-1990s, along with a few Chinese independently produced documentary films that were recognized at international film festivals, notably the Yamagata Festival. Its roots, however, can be traced back to the transient moment of intellectual freedom in China in the mid-1980s and late 1980s, which permitted the “educated youth,” mostly poets and painters, to pursue ideals and search for a different lifestyles and realities outside the state or newly emerging market institutions and channels. The first independent documentary filmmakers were so-called “aimless roamers” gathered in college dorms and small inns in remote provinces, with Wu Wenguang’s Roaming in Beijing—the Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing—zuihou de mengxiangzhe) as one of their first manifestos. Utopia in faraway places was quickly annihilated by intensified commercial and technological expansion to nearly every corner of Chinese society in the 1990s. The initial dreamers, or their surviving remnants, now aimed at the “lowest social stratum” (diceng, literally meaning “bottom layer”) as a site for their strivings for the construct of visual and experiential vérité beyond the empty cliché of bureaucratic discourse or the numbing bombardment of the commercial media. To that extent, the new or independent documentary movement was not pursued professionally as a genre or format, but instead was guarded religiously as the last ground for truth, thinking, critique, and idealism that, as Lu Xinyu rightly observes, betray its 1980s’ intellectual birthmark.6
Jia Zhangke’s filmmaking obviously shares with the independent documentary movement the fervor for rediscovering reality at its most concrete, profane, irreducible registers, which means turning his gaze away from visual metaphysics of “yellow earth” or “red sorghum,” and the phantasmagoria of Chinese big cities. In this sense, xiancheng—as opposed to, say, deeply rural or radically urban locales often featured in New Documentary works—is for Jia Zhangke a political choice and narrative design, rather than a visual or existential inevitability. It also overlaps with New Documentary Movement in its propensity to “going back to the scene” by means of a “documentary”-informed camera position and movement; long-take shots; sustained use of interviews that, belatedly, came to the fore only in Jia’s 2009 film 24 City; and simultaneous sound recording. Thirdly, the protagonists in all of Jia Zhangke films are virtually the same group or subgroup of people—unemployed youth and urban wanders, migrant labor, street performers, laid-off state enterprise workers—that occupy center stage in independent documentary works. In fact, Platform, in a way the true autobiographical beginning of his filmmaking and the only Jia Zhangke film whose period of representation is the 1980s, portrays precisely the mode of life of the “roaming artist” type, albeit in the setting of xiancheng.7 Referring to himself as a “cinematic migrant labor” during the precarious early days of his career, Jia Zhangke consciously sets his camera at the eye level of his protagonists, which is to say sometimes as low as that of the squatting Xiaowu. Following or circling around his characters, the camera moves in and out, stands still in their midst as a component of their daily world, waiting to be ignored or, better still, accepted as a documenter. Thus a more equal relationship between the viewer and the viewed is established, and together they form a pact in the name of the “right of discourse” vis-à-vis the multiplicity of reality, vis-à-vis the becoming kitsch of the intellectual elite, and vis-à-vis the ruthless, silencing force of the state and the market. That is the definition of the “independent” in independent documentary movement in China since the early 1990s.
As Walter Benjamin observes in the 1930s, the emergent social subjectivity must strive for its redemption of and by technology, or there is no redemption at all.8 The visual technology that has become handy, indeed indispensible for the independent, democratic search for freedom and a “right of discourse” and for a socially and politically meaningful way of documenting the present is found in DV as the liberating alternative to a rented professional film camera. DV, inexpensive and easy to handle, gives rise to an unprecedented degree of popularization of visual technology and the multiplication of individual perspectives, positions, and expressivity. Wu Wenguang famously describes how he was “salvaged [zhengqiu] by DV”:
I was saved in a completely relaxed state of mind. Paying a hefty price for the rental equipment makes you feel bad and want to finish the whole project in seven or eight hours. You would also have to do postproduction in a rented studio, which often prohibits smoking. I am a chain smoker at work, but whenever I went out for a cigarette I felt I had just burned through another 400 yuan… . Since 1998 I have been led by DV to a completely free state of mind, or perhaps I should say I have utilized DV to such an extent that I can do whatever my mind and heart please.9
Jia Zhangke’s 2002 film Unknown Pleasures (Renxiaoyao) was wholly a DV production. “I shot whatever I saw, completely relaxed and unprepared. It was like an adventure, a wandering without a script,” said Jia about his experience of shooting the film in Datong. Dubbed the “angriest of all Jia Zhangke films,” Unknown Pleasures tells the story of two adolescent sons of laid-off workers who plot and carry out a bank robbery that ends in comic disaster. It would be hard for the viewer to see the boredom, aimlessness, repression, frustration, humiliation, and barely hidden fury that permeates the movie in terms of known or unknown “pleasures” without appreciating the liberating sense of freedom, afforded by DV, with which the film is made. Flat and fragmented, hazy, and sometimes bordering on incoherence and unintelligibility, the visual narrative of Unknown Pleasures (the third and last in Jia’s so-called “Hometown Trilogy,” following Xiaowu and Platform) feels as if it is woven together by an intruder inside a dreamland who does not have to worry about getting caught. DV turned out to be not only suitable for capturing raw, fresh visual encounters with Datong, which excited Jia Zhangke, but to his delight, it was also ideally suited for “shooting things that are abstract”—a “most valuable” asset. Jia explains:
Most people travel along a given order, moving forward like a river. The advantage of DV, however, is that it allows you to step in while keeping an objective distance, tracking the rhythm and heartbeat of this trend, staring at it, following it, all the while conducting a rational observation… . That allows me to add a surrealist layer on top of the super-realist foundation of my previous work. I felt I became an essayist with a digital camera and not a filmmaker. I believe DV will usher in a revolutionary change in the film industry. It is conducive to helping filmmakers shake off the yoke of traditional conventions and formulas to engage in their work in a pressure-free fashion; and it will allow a reentry into filmmaking by those who are out of work due to the constraints of financial and material conditions.10
Jia’s observations on concreteness and abstraction, sensual immediacy and distance, emotional involvement and “rational” reflection are important, as the aesthetic and political ambition of his film and the New Documentary Movement is precisely to forge a new alliance between objectivity and thought in their respective autonomy as they are violently separated by radical transformations of Chinese society created in by the state-sanctioned market forces. It would not be an exaggeration to say that DV allows the new generation of filmmakers to cut deeply into the body of social life and roam between its internal organs, a capacity Walter Benjamin describes via a comparison between film and painting—a comparison that allows us to contemplate the revolutionary implications of this new technology. As DV plunges into its adventure by following the immediate reality in its minute concreteness, the cinematic essayist holding the camera with one hand can still scribble down what he sees and thinks with the other hand, so to speak, thus retaining a critically important distance, freedom, and autonomy unbound by the apparatus of the traditional professional film camera as a virtually immobile institutional system. A more “prosaic” (in the Hegelian sense of the “world of prose”) space is thus created in between the material immediacy and socially given in their radical multiplicity, on one hand, and, on the other hand its opposition and negation in reflexive, critical consciousness, albeit in fragmented and shifting forms. It is in this newly invented topology of cognitive mapping that a crude aesthetics comes into being along with the vital historical and human experiences activated and captured by its gaze. This is the reason why the harsh contours of Datong, a coarse industrial town built on the edges of the Gobi, excites Jia Zhangke with its radical reification, its energy and restlessness amidst its faceless crowds, and with the unnamed fury manifest by its unhinged youth. Whereas the Chinese title “renxiaoyao” suggests a Daoist kind of untamable freedom (with direct allusion to Zhuangzi’s poetry/philosophy), the concrete excitement might as well stem from an incipient DV technology and its promise to permit a cognitive victory snatched from a sleepwalk-like adventure into the land of indifference and reification.
Poetics of Vanishing
If the Fifth Generation films, as specimens from the heroic or mythological period of Chinese modernism, are all about emergence and coming-intobeing, Jia Zhangke’s films seem to doggedly stick with one theme: vanishing. In Jia’s own language: “Some beautiful things are quickly disappearing from our lives.”11 The vanishing of friendship, mutual dependence, love, and, eventually, family ties; the vanishing of an entire community (the thirty-thousand-employee state factory, a “work unit” compound with more than one hundred thousand people, including spouses and dependents in 24 City), and even an entire city (the ancient city of Fengjie in Still Life); the vanishing of myth (Three Gorges as a collective reference point, as it is “documented” in classical poetry and represented on Chinese currency), idealism, dreams, or a mere disguise/cover-up of the naked, shapeless reality; the disappearance of security (and thus any sense of security), dignity, sense of belonging, direction (and sense of direction), and “principles or norms” (zhunze); not to mention the extinction or near extinction of social species or subspecies such as the socialist culture workers (epitomized by the head of the singing and dancing troupe in Platform, played by the Beijing poet Xi Chuan, who simply drops out of the scene after the “privatization” of the troupe); or the kind of dreamers as “aimless roamers” due to the disappearance of their habitat. If the 1980s modernist experiments had their deepest dreams in norm-building, then Jia Zhangke can be called a cinematic poet of norm demolition, of the impossibility of keeping anything intact, and of the silent violence endured helplessly by a silent population. Disappearance and demolition as an ontological image in the mind’s eye gives rise to and undergirds the visualization of hectic, anxious, and chaotic transitions or transience or aimless running around (staged in the middle of Xiaowu) that characterize the basic grammar and rhythm of movement, human, physical, or social, in all Jia Zhangke films, which refer to one another to form a persistent documentation of the colossal loss of identity and meaning in post-contemporary Chinese society. Boredom and emptiness in fact are the central subject matter being studied in Jia Zhangke’s early films, represented by Xiaowu, which remains for many critics his best film. In his more recent films, starting from The World, Jia Zhangke seems to be searching for a way to cinematically thematize—itemize and allegorize—the social content of (or socially sanctioned distractions from) this boredom and emptiness, from a theme park rendition of globalization to ruthless surgical operations on nature, to urban demolition and real estate development. Becoming intellectual or critical of the filmmaker is not always viewed approvingly as a promising turn for someone who can barely conceal his shock and rage when gazing at his hometown behind the camera.
As a filmmaker trained in the Literature Department, Jia Zhangke shot his early films from his own notes in the place of a completed script (he is known for never having finalized or completed the script of a film before the film itself was completed). To this extent, he seems to fit the stereotypical image of a “film poet” in the most derogatory sense: an illustrator of ideas and thoughts arbitrarily drawn from outside any cinematic logic. The spontaneous, jolted, uneven, harsh, and free-flowing style exemplified in “hometown trilogy” is not only an explicit homage to Hou Hsiao-Hsien, one of Jia Zhangke’s heroes, but also, a conscious way to compensate and sometimes overcompensate for the dreaded appearance of “intellectualism.” But from the very start, Jia Zhangke’s filmmaking could not possibly be separated from his thinking, and vice versa. Thinking, in the context of Jia Zhangke’s films, is not about deep analysis of a historical situation, or an idealistic venturing beyond, or about devising philosophical schemes. Rather, it is first and foremost driven by particular social anxieties or syndromes that cry out for help. This allows Jia Zhangke to draw a line between his cinematic “thinking” and what he regards as two big problems of Chinese modernism of the 1980s variety: poeticizing crude life experiences; elevating them into the height of legend, fairy tales, and mythology; and “thinking on behalf of everybody,” an intellectual self-indulgence, grandiose, and hegemony that place a privileged “I” or “We” at the center of the universe, which renders the corners of life insignificant or too trivial to be seen. To that, Jia Zhangke quotes a line as his motto from his poet friend Xi Chuan: “Crows solve crows’ problems, and I solve mine” (wuya jiejue wuya de wenti, wo jiejue wo de wenti). Independence, self-representation, humility, and a devotion to the concept of equality are necessary for Jia Zhangke to document the growth or Bildung of an underdeveloped story of formation—like Xiaowu in Xiaowu, who does not know how to sing or dance, who calls himself an artisan and yet does not have any skills other than pickpocket—with all its vivid details and memories, its slowness and serenity, its pleasure and gravity.
The problems Jia Zhangke faces as his own include, first of all, an ethics of truth vis-à-vis truth claims of falsehood, which he had grappled with along with his fellow travelers in the independent documentary movement in the larger context, all the while taking aim at his more immediate professional predecessors with the lineage of “modern cinematic language,” namely, the Fifth Generation. (He openly despises the works of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige in the 1990s.) His rejection of those claims brings him “closer to life” where, paradoxically, the trappings of falsehood intensify. Jia Zhangke does not provide an answer, nor in fact does he seem to have a solution. This turns his films into a series of unending, indeed unendable, experiments in the more radical sense, as the pursuit of truth now opens up a protracted, unsettled dialogue or interaction between theory and practice, between subject and object, and between one and many. The provisional appearance of Jia Zhangke’s films point truthfully to their conditions of possibility as well as their intellectual premises.
But of all things vanishing in front of our very eyes, none is as certain and frightening as the oblivion of the hometown in both personal and collective, actual and symbolic terms. Xiaowu still has a home in the village to return to, even though it is that home that he is determined to escape from to begin with. By contrast, in Platform, set in the 1980s, the theme is unmistakably “on the road.” The Fenyang streets on which the filmaker roams are still as dense and packed as those of any other inhabited town where people go about their usual business and attend, with care and single-mindedness, to their quotidian routine. Even though it was the work of demolition in the town of Fenyang that prompted Jia Zhangke’s desire into wanting to document his hometown life, as memory and as an ongoing transformation in one, there was still a lot to be demolished, and it is the images of bicycles, tractors, and shabby one-story buildings that make concrete the idea of home as but an aesthetic and ethical appearance of a lingering socialist mode of production. In Unknown Pleasures, however, as the socialist workers’ dorms and other public spaces stand in their ghostly anachronistic isolation, large open spaces have been created and brought into view, often in the form of flattened neighborhoods, dusty construction sites, and broad, glistening, endless highways. The disintegration of the socialist organization of labor, privatization of collective ownership, and sweeping commercialization are still contained within the personal parameters of “growth” and “experience” in Platform, but they quickly overwhelm the phenomenological framework of a 1980s Bildungsroman and demand a more concrete and ruthlessly historical approach. It takes a kind of administrative and business efficiency with which whole cities or city-equivalent communities are demolished or relocated (documented in Still Life and 24 City), or an entire “world” of mirage and phantasmagoria is erected (in The World) to register on the personal and collective consciousness this question: What does it mean in general to witness one’s hometown being labeled “to be demolished”?
Still Life
The curious English translation of “Sanxia haoren”—literally meaning “the good people of the Three Gorges”—as “still life” (or jingwu in its technical conversion back into Chinese) points to Jia Zhangke’s literary interpretation of his own film. Winner of the 2007 Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, Still Life marks Jia Zhang’s international and professional recognition and places him in a position to elaborate his approach to filmmaking defined vis-à-vis the Fifth Generation. In a director’s sketch about the film, Jia Zhangke writes:
One day I stumbled into an uninhabited room and saw the belongings of the bygone host lying on the desk, covered with dust. All of a sudden it dawned on me that this is the secret of still life. The setting had not been changed for years; everything was covered by dust; an empty wine bottle by the window; the decorations on the walls—suddenly, everything acquired a poetic melancholy. Still life represents a reality neglected by us. Even though it preserves the deep traces of time, it remains in silence and thus keeps the secret of life.12
It is no secret that Still Life the movie begins with the camera, following Han Sanming looking for his wife, entering the scene—the Three Gorges area as a natural wonder, the site of the biggest hydropower station in the world and one of the largest projects of development-related population relocation—in the way similar to a stranger stumbling into an empty, uninhabited room. The two-thousand-year-old town Fengjie, along with its natural surroundings, is portrayed in the film as a city in the act of vanishing—demolished (“dismantled, dynamited, and flattened” [chaihui, baozha, tanta]) into the empty background constituted by “deafening noises and flying dust,” literally sinking under the rising water level. As over a million people are vacated from their homes, the camera roams to and fro, as if searching for signs or proof of life at a surreal site of archeological excavation, but one in which one’s own lifeworld as well as that of one’s contemporaries is to be unearthed. The melancholic contemplation brings about a fixed, harrowing sight, with omnipresent character chai (to be demolished) and red signs painted on urban structures marking the projected water level, which serves as a constant reminder, a “cry for rescue,” transmitted at the spot of a social disaster quietly but inexorably taking place, an incident that must be measured on natural-historical scales (Chernobyl eerily comes to mind—both, incidentally, have to do with power, hydro or nuclear, and with state planning).
In 24 City, “still life” comes in the form of Factory 420 in Chengdu, a huge military equipment producer established in 1958 in the heydays of the Great Leap Forward, sold to a real estate developer in 2008 for demolition and the building of high-end condominiums (the factory itself was to be relocated in the outer suburbs of Chengdu). “Chinese socialism as an experiment has ended at the economic level,” concluded Jia Zhangke, “what I am facing is the memory of this experiment and the ways in which the workers’ experiences and lives had been affected under that system.”13 Based on more than 130 interviews with the 420 employees and retirees, the film turns out to be more “fictional” than most Jia Zhangke films in that a collective institutional history is crystallized in the personal narratives of three women workers, two of whom are played by famous Chinese actresses, Joan Chen, Lu Liping, and Zhao Tao (who has been in every Jia Zhangke film since Platform). This “fictitious concentration,” deemed necessary by the filmmaker, serves as but a discursive “voice-over” that anchors and frames the documentary gaze of the camera, which seeks to weave together two threads of “still life” images from two domains of contemporary Chinese society: that of state-supported institutions soon to go into oblivion, consisting of meeting halls, buses, factory floors, and public space in the communal apartment compounds; and that of private everyday life, consisting of living rooms, kitchens, and personal possessions. What the film presents is not a—however deliberate—collection of still life from the repressed past and the vanishing present, but rather various visual, audio, or discursive tunnels and passageways connecting the bustling surface of contemporary Chinese cities to the darker, subterranean world of “personal stories.”
The obsession with still life in this particular sense also reveals an impulse to document the “laborers coming and going in front of the camera” (p. 167) who stand as an afterimage of the bygone host of the empty room or social theater. It is an “homage” (suran qijing) paid to those whose existence is as silent as a still life. The forced migration in Still Life, in its documentation of involuntary, restless mobility (also documented in The World, in which everybody is on the move—from small towns into big cities, from Ukraine to Beijing, or from Beijing to Ulan Bator, of all places in the world), points back to Jia Zhangke’s traumatic obsession with immobility, with those who are stuck in the provincial cities and towns that defined his formative years. In “Shadow and Light of 2006” Jia Zhangke writes about his unplanned, impulsive trip back to Datong to meet up with his buddies without any advance notice:
Arriving around mid-night, I took a taxi and went straight to a small restaurant … As I expected, all my buddies were there, as they had nowhere else to go. They gathered at this restaurant every day, killing time over drinking and gambling. They never had to make an appointment to see each other.14
Having nowhere else to go, Jia Zhangke and his Shanxi buddies decided to visit abandoned movie theaters in the coal mine district of the city. Stumbling into the dark, empty theaters, some already turned into warehouses, Jia Zhangke’s sketches read like his director’s notes or scripts:
As a group of vagabonds we went along looking for traces of former movie theaters or workers’ clubs and found them still standing in the sand storms of the Gobi desert. Some of them wore glass-less windows like open wounds, others just sat there in silence, as if still in disbelief regarding what had happened. I was struck by the thought that the faces of contemporary Chinese in the past decade or so had never been truly portrayed on the screen, their happiness and sorrows, their life’s drama disappearing into nothingness. Nobody cared about those who still live in the workers’ dorms nearby, about their souls and their spiritual need.15
One may wonder if this is, after all, what drives Jia Zhangke’s filmmaking in the most personal, private, and yet most socially and politically engaging sense. The desire to document, to represent, to remember, to pay respect and homage, as a contemporary and latecomer all in one, to the vanishing, the immobile, and the silent constitutes a rescue mission with a critical edge. Jia Zhangke the public intellectual may refer to this as an effort at “understanding the moral state of being of our nation” (mingbai minzu de jingshen xianzhuang), but Jia Zhangke the private film poet always dedicates his work to “the brothers who are just about to repeat the same routine of eating and drinking, to endure the same solitude and emptiness.”16
Still life as a concept borrowed from painting seems to provide the following functions or possibilities for Jia Zhang’s filmmaking as a poetics of vanishing and a documentary of rescue all at once. It offers an ultimate epistemological category and operational framework with which to arrest a process of rapid, ruthless change and rearrange its dispersing, vanishing fragments into a sequence of enduring visual evidence. What is disappearing in front of us, through the cinematic frame of still life, now becomes a concrete substance of “what has been” that negatively, critically fills up a phenomenology of void, aimlessness, and oblivion. The phenomenological reduction and suspension of history in the form of still life is not merely a technology that makes things too large for human experience and perception able to come within reach and easy to handle, for the stillness and void thus achieved for the benefit of concentration inevitably becomes a focal point toward which all images, sounds, and stories converge. The harrowing monotony of the sound of demolition in Still Life opens itself up to all kinds of sound and light, music and language that a new chronicle of collective experience will likely find a useful cue or stepping-stone. It is no accident that the documentary core of Jia Zhangke’s early films has finally had its debut in his most recent films, 24 City, which consists of interviews and a more deliberate—through the work of editing, and aided by fiction—effort at constructing a gallery of still life from the history of the People’s Republic. The melancholy that dominates Still Life is here replaced by earnest talking and listening. After all, the poetics of vanishing is achieved through a documentary of the present, which strives for a poetics of being—being not in the simple optimistic or utopian sense, but in the agonized sense of an ongoing battle on the frontier of global capital and imperial control. As xiancheng becomes China on a national scale, China becomes xiancheng on a world-historical scale. What is at stake is no less than the meaning of one’s collective social being, for which “hometown” is not the last line of defense, but rather the most immediate and visceral locale through which other, more socially and politically concrete longings are expressed. Jia Zhangke’s still life actively seeks hidden stories as captions that accompany those images; and these hidden stories always imply a human voice and human face.
The ending of Still Life portrays the migrant laborers leaving Fengjie as a town about to become subterranean, for an unspecified next stop in search of work and livelihood. Behind them, between two condemned buildings, a man walks the tightrope against the background of gloomy sky. To ask what is present in Jia Zhangke’s films is to ask where they are going and what kind of a future they can strive for (“Where Does the Future Lie?” [Weilai zai nali?] is the title of the theme song played at the end of 24 City). As unclear as the answer might be, one thing is certain: They cannot stand still. If the future lies in the promise of a forward momentum, even in the Hegelian sense that it is the bad that creates history (whereas the good remains unproductively benign and constant), one must seek a source of legitimacy for that or any forward momentum in the larger context of history and human experiences. From Fenyang to Beijing and back to the “scenes” of silent battles, Jia Zhangke’s films expand on his “hometown trilogy” while following an expanded notion of hometown that is both political and personal. “The sounds of hometown calm me down,” said Jia Zhangke in an interview. As long as his films let in the sounds and images from the streets and direct them into a form pertaining to the memory and reconstruction of that larger (and more concrete) historical and human context, they will continue to speak to the audience in a way so very few contemporary Chinese films seem to be doing.
1. Jia Zhangke, 2009a, p. 66.
2. Ibid.
3. Whereas his fascination with Ozu and Hou Hsiao-Hsien is often cited by his critics, Jia’s earlier exposure to and lasting influence by Italian neorealism is worth noting. According to Jia, Selected Film Scripts of Italian Neo-Realism was the first film book he ever bought. De Sica’s Bicycle Thief is among his all time favorites. Cf. Lin Xudong, Zhang Yaxuan, and Gu Zheng, 2003, pp. 114 –115.
4. Fenyang, with a population of four hundred thousand (as of 2005) and a citywide GDP of 7.7 billion yuan (as of 2008), is around the average of more than twenty-four hundred counties or county-level cities nationwide. Datong, on the other hand, has a population of 3.2 million and a citywide GDP of 57 billion. The per capital income of urban Fenyang residents is 10,738 (U.S.$1,580, as of 2008), compared to Datong’s 16,655 (U.S.$2,450, as of 2008). In contrast, Shanghai by 2008 had a population of 18.9 million. According to a recent Bloomberg/BusinessWeek report, Shanghai’s GDP, at U.S.$218 billion by the end of 2009, has surpassed that of Hong Kong, even though its GDP per capita, at U.S.$10,713 by the end of 2009 is only slightly more than one-third of that of Hong Kong. That is to say, an average Fenyang resident’s annual income is about 15 percent of his counterpart’s in Shanghai, and only 5 percent of his counterpart’s in Hong Kong. See http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010–03–04/hong-kong-s-economy-surpassed-byshanghai-as-china-advances.html.
5. Wang Xiaodong, 2009, p. 72.
6. Lu Xinyu, 2002, p. 68. Besides Wu Wenguang, Li Xiaoshan, Kang Jianning, and Duan Jinchuan are often mentioned as the most prominent documentary filmmakers from this movement.
7. Jia Zhangke reveals in the interview included in the New Yorker Films DVD version of Platform that he wrote the script for it in 1995, but had to wait until after Xiaowu to work on it, starting in 1999; and that this film is an autobiographical account of his Bildung—his education, formation, and apprenticeship—in the 1980s.
8. Cf. Walter Benjamin, 1968, pp. 217–252.
9. Quoted in Yuan Yanping, 2008, p. 23.
10. Ibid., p. 24.
11. Jia Zhangke, 2009b, p. 25.
12. Jia Zhangke, 2009b, p. 167.
13. Jia Zhangke, 2008, p. 42.
14. Jia Zhangke, 2009b, p. 170.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, 1–272. London and New York: 1999.
Lin Xudong, Zhang Yaxuan, and Gu Zheng, eds. Jia Zhangke dianying [Films by Jia Zhangke]. Beijing: Zhongguo mangwen chubanshe, 2003.
Lu Xinyu. Frontiers [Tianya] 3 (2002).
Wang Xiaodong. “Hometown in Jia Zhangke’s Films” [lun Jia Zhangke dianying zhong de guxiang]. Film Literature 5 (2009): 53–82.
Yanping, Yuan. “A Study of DV Media and Its Impact on Filmmakers’ Attitude” [DV meijie dui chuangzuo xintai yingxiang zhi yanjiu]. Film Literature 17 (2008): 23–44.
Zhangke, Jia. “Interview with Liu Min.” Film World [dianying shijie] 6 (2008): 42.
Zhangke, Jia. “Interview with Nanfang Renwu zhoukan (Southern People Weekly).” Jia Zhangke 10 (2009a).
Zhangke, Jia. Jia Xiang (Jia’s Reflections—Notes from a Filmmaker, 1996–2008). Beijing: Peking University Press, 2009b.
* An abbreviated version of this article appeared in New Left Review, No. 63, May-June, 2010, 71–88.