Tag: Region: China

Retelling Stories: Jia Zhangke on Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue

This interview was originally published at Mubi.

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Near the end of Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, Jia Zhangke turns his attention from the celebrated author, critic, and professor, Liang Hong, to her 14-year-old son. He appears briefly earlier in the film, staring silently at his phone while on a train, surrounded by other teenagers who likewise stare at screens. To underline his point about China’s Generation Z, Jia layers subjective sounds of video games and WeChat over the images.

In the film’s final interview, Jia asks the boy to introduce himself in Henan dialect, the native tongue of his mother, who was born into poverty in Dengzhou, more than a thousand kilometers away from their current home in Beijing. He’s uncomfortable in front of the camera, shy, a bit awkward, and the request makes him even more so. Liang rescues him by asking him to repeat after her, one phrase at a time, which he does with little hesitation. He then introduces himself again in Henan, without help, and with growing confidence.

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue continues Jia’s on-going project of analyzing, in both his documentary and narrative work, the unfathomable transformation China has experienced in the 21st century. I use the word “analyze” in multiple senses, as Jia’s genius lies in his ability to map the emotional and spiritual lives of his subjects onto the nation’s shifting terrain. His work is part historiography, part political/economic critique, part psychotherapy, and in that praxis he discovers tangible, illuminating metaphors. His body of work is gradually taking the shape of wisdom literature.

Jia’s analysis is also always aesthetic. He describes Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue as the conclusion of his “Artists Trilogy,” following Dong (2006), about painter Liu Xiaodong, and Useless (2007), a profile of fashion designer Ma Ke. In May 2019, Jia traveled to the Jia family village (no relation) in his home province of Shanxi to attend a literature festival that attracted dozens of China’s most prominent authors. The event affords him an opportunity to chronicle the country’s rapid transition from an agrarian economy to a modern, industrialized one and, more pointedly, to argue for the necessity of art that engages personally and meaningfully—pedagogically, even—with the traumatic repercussions of that transition.

During a Q&A after the film’s premiere at the Berlinale, Jia compared authors to “the postman, who tells you how things are changing in other parts of the world.” A self-described avid reader, Jia has included quotations from fiction and poetry in his films since 24 City (2008) in order to “express the inner life.” “There are places cinema can go that other arts cannot,” he said in Berlin. “And vice-versa.”

Jia’s respect for the medium extends as well to the main subjects of Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, four “rebel” authors who speak on behalf of four distinct eras in China’s recent past: Ma Feng (1922-2004), whose plainspoken novels of the 1940s and 1950s depict the everyday realities of village life; Jia Pingwa (b. 1952), who as a child experienced the hardships of communal living during the Cultural Revolution and whose novels set in rural Shangzhou made him a key figure in the Xungen (“Roots Literature”) Movement; Yu Hua (b. 1960), the most internationally acclaimed of the four, who in the 1980s quickly established a reputation for formal invention, which helped to shape “Chinese Pioneer Literature;” and Liang (b. 1973), whose essays, stories, and novel explore the consequences of China’s transforming economy by focusing on Liang village.

The bulk of Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue is built from interviews with the surviving authors and with Ma’s daughter, whose deeply personal stories and various performance styles embody four generations of cultural change without ever feeling diagrammatic. (The style of the film is more straight-forward than much of Jia’s work, but he occasionally slips in a stunning image—the deep-lined face of an elderly woman, harvesters cutting fields, a white shirt hanging from a clothesline—as a reminder that he can do so at will.) Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue is a middle-aged film, at once a nostalgic reckoning with one’s childhood home, in every sense of the word, and a legacy.

I spoke with Jia on February 23, 2020 at the Berlinale Palast. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue will have its North American premiere on October 1 as part of the Main Slate of the 58th New York Film Festival.

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Notebook: Near the beginning of the film, there’s footage from 1979. You would have been about nine years old then?

Jia Zhangke: Actually, that’s a fictional image that I shot for one of my first films, Platform. It’s in the same location, which is the Jia family village. The people who appear in this fictional image of 1979 were still living in the village in 1999.

Notebook: So an image of 1979, shot in 1999, and reused in 2019?

Jia: Yes!

Notebook: Why is it necessary for the new film?

Jia: The reason why I find this very, very important is because the backdrop of this particular shot, the image from 1979, is actually the village plan. [Jia corrected the translator when he said “city plan” rather than “village plan.”] We have urban planning, and we also have village planning. It’s the blueprint for how they envisioned what the village would become.

When we went back for this documentary, we visited the village history museum and saw a similar village plan, or blueprint. Of course, it’s very different from in 1979, but I thought the juxtaposition was important because this film is about change—about how society evolved during this period of time.

Notebook: The film includes a montage of speakers at the literature festival, and one of them says, “We’ve used the word nostalgia many times today.” Later someone says, “Longing for your native space is longing for reassurance.” You mentioned yesterday during the Q&A that you still spend half of your time in Fenyang. Is nostalgia a necessary tool for artists? Are you nostalgic?

Jia: Yes, many of the authors talked about this idea of seeking their roots or returning home to their native birth place. I think it’s because right now there’s an overwhelming sense of people just feeling lost.

To understand China, you must put things in a historical context. Chinese society and the communities started in these rural villages. Imagine 700 or 800 million people at the time living in the countryside, in these rural villages. It’s not until the past decades that we have experienced dramatic urbanization.

And then the younger generation, suddenly, they don’t even understand or know what it’s like to have that type of rural culture, rural community, and rural history. I think it’s especially important right now, in China, to be able to understand that reality. We need to not only return temporarily to the past [via memory or nostalgia], but also actually go back to the villages and rural communities. We need to understand how we have grown, how we have evolved as a society. That’s why it is important to go back to your native soil.

To give you one example, a lot of young people don’t understand why others don’t line up for their turn. Even if they go to fly in an airplane and have assigned seats, still they will sometimes rush trying to get to their seats as if they’re going to lose it. Younger Chinese don’t know that it has a lot to do with what we experienced in the past, in the rural village. It’s all about not having enough food. If you don’t rush, then you will have nothing to eat. We need to somehow look back and examine what it was before, how they acted before, how they thought before. That past is the foundation of Chinese reality.

Notebook: Jia Pingwa tells a story about a woman who wants to become a poet. At first, his story seems a bit macho, like he’s telling her to go back to the kitchen and just be a good wife and mother. But that’s just the setup for his practical artistic advice: “Writing poetry does not mean living a poetic life.” Do you agree?

Jia: In my line of work as a filmmaker, I must somehow express the emotions that have accumulated within me. I want to find a way to express that innately. It cannot be helped, that I have to do this. This is something I need to do. It’s more about the process of making a film to express myself, rather than thinking about the final product. I don’t think about whether or not this film, or any of my films, will make a difference or have some impact on the society.

On some level, this documentary is not really about the writings or the words of these authors. It’s about how they capture what’s going on at the time, how they retell stories—their personal memories and personal stories. We must preserve that part of the history, either collectively or individually. It’s not unlike what you mentioned: the poetic life versus poetry. These authors have really great storytelling skills. That’s the reason why I’m relying on them.

Notebook: In the first long interview, Ma Feng’s daughter sounds like she has told those stories about her father a thousand times. She’s very proud and practiced. And then, by contrast, Liang Hong’s story at the end of the film is still very fresh to her. She gets quite emotional, as if she’s only now beginning to process the traumas of her childhood. When you’re making a documentary rather than a fiction, do you still direct your performers? Did you cast the authors for their performance styles?

Jia: I think it’s a little bit of both. In terms of “casting,” I selected these subjects because they represent, as you mentioned, different styles of narration, but also because of the eras and the generations they belong to. The first one, Ma Feng, through his daughter, is very much from the era of socialistic experimentations and socialist construction. He was a renowned revolutionary artist and revolutionary writer. It’s not only about the artwork or the writing itself, it’s very much about his participation in certain social movements at the time.

And then you move on to Jia Pingwa, the second author. Those stories are very much about the hardship he endured during the Cultural Revolution. The third author, Yu Hua, came of age during the time of the reform and opening up. His generation somehow took on this very satirical and ironic way of speaking. His “performance,” or narration style, is representative of that particular generation. Liang Hong is famous for the very private and intimate details of her characters, and that’s also the way she expressed herself. I thought it fitting to have these four different authors from four different generations, or four different eras, and in four different styles.

Notebook: The film charts nearly seventy years of social and political change, but it doesn’t include the kind of historical primers that we often see in documentaries. Instead, the four interviews focus on very personal stories. You chose to look at the “micro” rather than the “macro,” as you’ve said elsewhere. What was your strategy for shooting the interviews? Were you concerned about losing the larger context?

Jia: In terms of the “control” that I can have during the production, I positioned the authors in different locations for their segment of the narrations. For the first part, in order for Ma Feng to talk about her father, I intentionally positioned her in front of her father’s statue. As a daughter, to talk about your father right in front of your father’s statue, definitely would evoke a lot of different emotions.

In the second one for Jia Pingwa, we actually shot it in his study because that’s the place where he feels the most comfortable. It’s not in public spaces because he is going to, in this particular segment, talk about something that is very private and very traumatic. Not only was he talking about the father-son relationship, but also about how he suffered, politically speaking, in his career as a result of that relationship.

The third section, with Yu Hua, is very much about public spaces—small restaurants, eateries, and food stands on the street—because these are the places where he penned the characters in his novels. That felt appropriate.

And then in the last section, I positioned Liang Hong in places that were somehow associated with her characters and with her background—the tailor shop or in the classrooms that she used to work in. Education is the one thing that changed her life. Her father insisted that she would go to school, despite not having any money. She suffered poverty, stood outside the classroom, but still she persisted, all the way to a Ph.D. and becoming a professor.

I think that’s the control I can exercise in the production process in order for these narrators or storytellers to feel the most comfortable, in order to tease out their performance styles, as you mentioned earlier.

October 1, 2020
“A Dance of Her Whole Life”: Zhao Tao on Mountains May Depart

This interview was originally published at Mubi.

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Midway through A Touch of Sin (2013), Jia Zhang-ke’s violent and reality-inspired account of China’s seismic economic shifts, a massage parlor receptionist played by Zhao Tao is attacked suddenly by a non-descript businessman, who beats her with a fistful of renminbi while shouting, “Isn’t my money good enough? Not a prostitute? Who is then?” Jia documents the assault in a two-minute, unbroken closeup, whipping the camera from side to side with each blow. By the end, Zhao’s cheeks and neck are flush from exertion and physical contact, which is an interesting intrusion of documentary into such a fantastic scene. She reaches for a hidden knife and then, with a swift slash to the man’s chest, becomes transformed into a wuxia warrior.

A Touch of Sin seems to have marked a shift in Jia’s filmmaking, away from the contemplative, docu-realist style that characterized much of his previous work and toward something more closely resembling genre. As a consequence, Jia’s longtime lead has notably expanded her range as an actress. In the aftermath of the beating in A Touch of Sin, Zhao walks cautiously, blood-soaked and sobbing, toward the camera in a manner that would be unthinkable in a film like Still Life (2006), which treats her and the other performers primarily as expressionless faces wandering through landscapes. What little optimism there is to be found in A Touch of Sin is born of Zhao’s performance, which, as Jia told me in 2013, represents a kind of redemption, suggesting a path “through this period of darkness and violence.”

In her latest collaboration with Jia, Mountains May Depart, Zhao plays a woman, Tao, at three different stages of life: a 20-something beauty in 1999, who must choose between two love interests; a middle-aged mother in 2014, who has become separated from her only child; and an older woman in 2025, who has found a certain contentment but still suffers the pangs of nostalgia. For longtime fans, the first section is uncanny, as Zhao herself first appeared in front of a camera in 1999, when Jia discovered and cast her in Platform (2000). Her performance in Mountains May Depart has earned much-deserved praise since the film’s premiere last year at Cannes.

When I spoke with Zhao, Jia was sitting just a few feet away, giving an interview of his own. I mention that only to illustrate a certain quality—“tension” is too strong a word, perhaps—I noticed at the time and again when transcribing our conversation. Zhao defers to Jia on all matters relating to the style and content of the films they’ve made together but doesn’t shy away from expressing her preferences, both in the specific choices she makes as an actress (in the moment of filming) and for the type of performance she’s given in the two most recent films. Her response suggests a depth to their creative partnership that is too often glossed over in critical appraisals of their work.

This interview took place on September 15, 2015, soon after Mountains May Depart received its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

A quick note about the photo: At the end of the interview I asked Zhao if I could take a picture. She agreed and then glanced at the lighting in the room, shifted in her seat, and tilted her head slightly to one side. When she looked into my camera, she was a movie star. It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen.

* * *

HUGHES: Have you watched Platform recently? I wonder what it’s like to see yourself on screen in 1999 at a time when you’re preparing to play a character in 1999?

ZHAO TAO: Cannes just gave our director a lifetime achievement award this year, so after the ceremony they showed Platform. It was the film version, not the digital version. That was the second time I saw Platform on a big screen. The first was in Venice [where it premiered in 2000]. This year in Cannes we invited a lot of our old partners, for example the actor who played Chang Jun [Jing Dong Liang] and the sound editor, Zhang Yang. The three of us sat together, watched the film together, and [revisited] the time when we met and started working together.

I was really, really excited when I saw the film. When the music started, I got goosebumps. So many wonderful memories came back when watching the film. For example, I remembered that scene where I was sitting on the bed, and I was trying to pretend that I didn’t know how to smoke [laughs] even though I was a smoker at the time. There’s also the scene when I was dancing in the office. I didn’t look at it as if I was dancing; it was Ruijuan [the character] who was dancing in the office. I thought it was beautiful and was very moved by the scene. When I saw the truck come, and everyone was on the tour, I completely lost it. I was so moved. I really love that film.

HUGHES: Did you like your performance?

ZHAO: [laughs] It’s okay.

HUGHES: Often Director Jia tells his stories through images of relatively expressionless faces, but in the last two films, you’ve given more traditional performances. For example, in Still Life, there are none of the emotionally-heightened scenes that we see in Mountains May Depart and A Touch of Sin. Is there any particular cause for that shift in style?

ZHAO: Perhaps that question could be answered better by the director, but from the actor’s point of view, my understanding is that the plot of A Touch of Sin requires it. It’s a very sudden, emotional event. It’s very, very direct. The character would naturally have a clear emotional response that demonstrates how the event affects her.

With Mountains May Depart, I think the intent of the director is to represent life and to represent the evolution of human emotion through this character. For example, the scene when Tao goes to the hospital to claim the body of her deceased father—before we filmed that, the director had a discussion with me, and his approach—what he thought would be most beautiful—was to not have a lot of emotion outwardly expressed. He didn’t want hysterical crying. From my understanding of the character, she was at that particular point in her late-30s, she has a son who she hasn’t seen for several years, and her only close relative is her father. He was the only person she was close to. She doesn’t have any other outlet to express emotion, and I would imagine this would be an appropriate opportunity for her to let those emotions out. I toned down the emotions, according to the director’s wishes, but I had the character crying the whole time, with tears running down her face.

HUGHES: Is that performance style more pleasurable to you as an actor?

ZHAO: If you compare the two characters, Shen Hong in Still Life and Tao in Mountains May Depart, I think it’s easier to play Shen Hong. A character like Tao is a wonderful opportunity as an actress—to play her in her youth, in middle age, and when she’s older. How do you do it so that it’s convincing for the audience? How do you perform so that the audience can feel the passage of time? In Still Life there isn’t much time dedicated to Shen Hong’s everyday life. We don’t know what her marriage was like. Most of the time she was just wandering. It’s easier to portray her wandering. With Tao, one must create three different ways of acting.

HUGHES: We only see Tao very briefly in 2025, so you had less screen time to reveal that version of the character. Director Jia said during the Q&A that he was inspired by a vision of an older woman dancing alone, and I’m wondering how you felt about the character in that moment?

ZHAO: That is the kind of work I need to do as an actor. The director chose to show a month in 1999, a week in 2014, and a couple days in 2025. As an actor, I have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks because it’s not a continuous biography. It’s obviously a very emotional scene for me, so as we were filming the director kept reminding me, “Do not show too much emotion. Do not cry.” I put on the clothes of an older woman, I had a little dog and I was walking through the snow, and I heard this music—it was very moving because I thought, “I’m not dancing; the character is dancing, and this is a dance of her whole life.”

There she is, in her 50s, and she hears this piece of music from her youth, as if it’s floated through the air and drifted to her. It reminds her of her youth and of where she is today. It’s very complicated, but it’s the music that brings these feelings directly to her.

I wrote a full biography of the character—when she was born, when she went to kindergarten, all the different stages of her life. So when I act a certain scene—when she met Zhang Jinsheng, when she got married—I’m acting a particular segment of that life.

HUGHES: For fifteen years now, you’ve been part of Director Jia’s project, which for me—and for many other film critics and audiences in the West—has been, among other things, an important document of the recent transformation of China. Is that something you’re aware of? Or perhaps even proud of?

ZHAO: I’m not really aware of that. In fact, I’m a little surprised to learn that people’s understanding of China, and the changes happening in China, [have been shaped by] the films I’m in. That’s surprising to hear. [laughs] So many films are made in China, and the films I’ve made are such a small part of the films that come from China.

My life before Still Life basically consisted of three parts: make a film with the director, do the actual filming; go to festivals with him to present the film; and teach dance at the Taiyuan dance school. Right after Platform I went back to being a teacher. At that point I didn’t think I should get an agent or plan my acting career. At the time I thought my normal life was as a dance teacher. Making films and going to festivals was something extra—and wonderful. Quite often I think, “I didn’t choose to be an actress. The career chose me.”

Even after I went to festivals and saw that so many people liked the films, I didn’t act for a particular audience. I act to what I think the character should be. I’m sure the director didn’t make Mountains May Depart to show it to an American audience, and he didn’t make Platform to show it to a European audience or Still Life for such-and-such audience. He just wants to make what he thinks are good, quality films that make creative sense for him. I think the reason his films are well accepted in the West—and in the world, in general—is because film is a medium with a lot of common ground. If he presents quality films, he will continue to have a place among the world’s filmmakers.

February 13, 2016
Jia Zhangke: Confronting the Darkness

This essay was originally published at Mubi.

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“Resorting to violence is the quickest and most direct way that the weak can try to restore their lost dignity.”
– Jia Zhangke, in the press notes for A Touch of Sin

Since the 2006 diptych, Still Life (Sanxia haoren) and Dong, Jia Zhangke’s work has tended toward the documentary side of the fiction/non-fiction spectrum, and much of the pleasure of watching these recent films owes to Jia’s clever invention—his playful and curious disregard for traditional forms. (Five years later, I’m still not sure how to even describe a film like 24 City.)

In that regard, A Touch of Sin represents a noteworthy turn for the director, as the new film is both a return to standard narrative filmmaking (relatively speaking) and Jia’s first experiment with genre: produced by Office Kitano and inspired in part by King Hu’s classic martial arts films, A Touch of Sin is Jia’s 21st-century take on wuxia cinema. As Marie-Pierre Duhamel points out in her essay for MUBI, however, despite the superficial shifts in style, A Touch of Sin “appears so strongly rooted in a set of themes, characters and concerns that run through Jia’s filmography that its most striking beauties may well be in the consistency and strength of his film world.”

Structured like an opera, with a prologue, multiple acts, and an epilogue, A Touch of Sin tells four stories that were inspired by real acts of violence in China and that span from the north of the country to the south. I spoke with Jia about his “comprehensive portrait of life in contemporary China” at the Toronto International Film Festival, where A Touch of Sin received its North American premiere.

Special thanks to Aliza Ma for translating our conversation.

* * *

HUGHES: I’d like to begin by talking about the fourth story, which is about a young man [played by Luo Lanshan) who drifts between various jobs and towns before, ultimately, committing suicide. It’s different from the other stories in interesting ways. You once said in an interview that Chinese youth don’t know how to communicate. Do you still believe that to be the case?

JIA: Ever since Unknown Pleasures [2002], I’ve been exploring the disparity between the new generation of wealthy Chinese and those that came before. The rapid growth of the economy and changes in our political structures have expanded the divide between the rich and the poor. The youth I focus on tend to be the victims of these recent changes rather than the beneficiaries. As the economy expands, so does that disparity. And, as a result, more suffering.

HUGHES: So, then the lack of communication is mostly a result of economic changes and poverty. What about the other institutions that enculturate us? Families? Education? Are they systematically failing this generation, too?

JIA: The boy in the fourth story was conditioned in the same way that his parents were. When he grew up, his parents were working, so he was surrounded by other children and by elderly people but not necessarily by parental figures. Wang Baoqiang’s character in the second section would have had the same experience.

Today, there are two kinds of youth who don’t have steady work. The first is people who haven’t graduated from high school. The second group has perhaps finished high school, but the next step, applying for university, is a very selective process, so they perhaps don’t make it there. The impending sense of loss begins early, while preparing for exams in high school.

HUGHES: Luo and the girl he meets [played by Li Meng] both seem to drift aimlessly, never quite connecting with others in any meaningful way. It’s a recurring image in your work. For example, there’s a beautiful long-distance shot of them walking through a barren landscape, dwarfed by a massive factory in the distance. Ever since Still Life [2006], I’ve come to expect buildings like that to take off like a rocket—it’s such a strange world you shoot.

JIA: The premise of the fourth section was inspired by the suicide of a Taiwanese factory worker. The building you’re talking about is in Guangdong, which has the highest density of factories in the world. They manufacture iPhones and those types of things.

HUGHES: One reason I’m asking about the fourth story is because in the other three sections, the main characters turn to violence, which in a way is a kind of heroic act. I’m interested in what makes the young boy different. Is it the difference between anger and despair?

JIA: The first three stories are about people acting violently against others; the fourth is about people who act violently against themselves. In the first three stories, you can identify an antagonist; in the fourth, it’s difficult to know with whom the youth can be upset. There’s no direct enemy. Perhaps there are elements that contribute to the formation of his anger—the noise of the factory, his general milieu—but it’s a formless anger. There’s no clear source to which he can direct it.

HUGHES: I had mixed feelings about A Touch of Sin until the epilogue. In my notes I’d written “L’Argent“—I think because of the scene in which Zhao Tao’s character is beaten by the man with a fistful of money. But the final sequence gives a shape to the film by turning each individual story into a ballad or fable, which rescues it all from cynicism. I won’t call it a happy ending, but there’s suddenly, almost magically, a kind of grace or redemption.

JIA: I agree! By the end of the film, Zhao Tao’s character has passed through this period of darkness and violence.

Often in China I’m asked why I choose to depict such violence, and my response is that it would be naïve to think a film can positively affect the violence and darkness of Chinese society, but confronting these conditions is itself an act of courage. I believe it’s important that we do so before the darkness and violence become worse.

HUGHES: Your characters often show very little emotion, but the violence here, like the musical sequences in all of your films, serves as an expressionistic touch. Does beauty serve the same function? I’m thinking of a shot of Zhao Tao sitting bored at her reception desk, which you shoot through a window. She’s expressionless, but the image itself is remarkable and exploding with emotion.

JIA: A Touch of Sin alludes to wuxia films, and a defining characteristic of the genre is that the heroes are always on the move. Scenes take audiences from one location to another. The photography in this film, the landscapes you see, span from the northernmost to the southernmost parts of China. I wanted the photography to represent as much of China as possible, because along with the characters’ personal interactions and expressions, their stories are being told by their surroundings.

My films are interested in the relationship between people and the spaces around them. In A Touch of Sin I explore new parts of the Chinese landscape, places like the airport and high-speed trains, and these spaces become part of the face of China.

HUGHES: As a western viewer, I often wonder what I’m missing, and I’m curious in particular about the accents and dialects in this film. How does language change as the film moves from north to south, and what do those changes tell us about the characters?

JIA: Yes, foreign audiences are often attuned to the changes in locale. They notice the gradual transition from the dry minerality of the north to the humid, tropical environment in the south. But language is also an important landscape in this film.

Each story is told in a different dialect. The first part is in Shanxi, the second is in Chongqing, the third is in Hubei, and the fourth part is a smorgasbord of dialects, including Cantonese. Regional stories—for example, a Shanxi story—should be told in regional dialects. Many, if not most, of the films produced in mainland China conflate them all into Mandarin. This makes me very uncomfortable. It’s unsettling.

All of the main characters are played by professional actors, but it was very important that each speak in the appropriate regional dialect, so I made them study. It was also important that others who appear in the film be the faces of that specific region.

September 30, 2013
Three Sisters (2012)

Dir. by Wang Bing

There’s a shot about two hours into Three Sisters that recalls Wang’s previous film, The Ditch (2010). Yingying, who at 10 is the oldest of the three subjects of the documentary, has been left behind to live with her grandfather in their small village after her father returns to the city in search of work, this time taking Zhenzhen (6) and Fenfen (4) with him. Their mother is gone for good, having left for another man and other opportunities. Yingying sits alone in her windowless, one-room house, lit only by the faint grey sunlight from an open doorway. She’s curled up at the small table where she eats her meals and occasionally attempts to complete her homework. (In another scene we see her pretend-mouthing the words of her lessons while her classmates recite in unison.) She stares straight ahead and, as she does throughout the three-hour film, sniffs and coughs like clockwork. This is Yingying’s home but it could just as well be the underground dugout where the prisoners sleep in The Ditch, Wang’s fictional recreation of China’s labor camps of the 1950s. There’s the same loneliness and hunger, the same daily struggle to fend off decay and despair.

Wang introduced Three Sisters as “a simple film” that “might be too long.” I appreciate his humility (a hallmark of his filmmaking, too), but I think he’s wrong on both counts. There’s nothing simple about this precise assemblage of footage collected during several visits to the girls’ remote farming village, and the length of the film is, in fact, essential to its success. The sisters live a life of miserable poverty, but Wang rescues their story from the now-standard tropes of miserablist cinema and poverty tourism by respecting the temporal rhythms of that life and by acknowledging his own problematic role as a visiting observer. Yingying is never pitied by the camera (although her situation is nearly always pitiable); instead, she’s made dignified by it. We watch from a distance in long, unbroken shots as she struggles to carry a basket, throws a load of pinecones on her back, and slowly, patiently chops firewood. There’s a lived-in-ness to her movements that can only be represented on screen because Wang understands that cutting any of those behaviors into a sequence of shots would rob her work of its honor. The difference between a 3-minute, unbroken shot of a feather-light girl hacking at a tree branch and a 20-second shot of the same followed by an elliptical cut to a woodpile is the difference between documentary and fiction.

As a work of drama, Three Sisters rises and falls with the returns and departures of the girls’ father, a world-weary young man with a kind smile and a deep affection for his daughters. It’s a bit of a shock when he first appears, one hour into the film, because Wang withholds explanation of his absence until a later conversation. When, in an early scene, one of the younger girls threatens her sister with, “I’m gonna tell daddy,” it’s unclear whether her threat is valid or if she doesn’t yet understand the permanence of death. Soon after he arrives, though, we see him sitting at that same small table with one of the girls on his lap and the others seated close beside him, each smiling and grateful, and that one moment of tenderness puts the entire first act of the film in relief and makes his inevitable departure all the more cruel. He buys new coats and shoes for Zhenzhen and Fenfen and washes their legs and feet in hopes that they can remain clean just long enough to make the long walk to the bus stop. Wang follows them onto the bus, rides along for a few miles, and then leaves them to their journey.

The bus scene is worth noting because it’s the one moment in Three Sisters when Wang’s presence is commented on by another person in the film. The father, visibly nervous for the trip and for the commotion he is causing, explains that he already bought tickets for himself and his two daughters, but the bus driver is more concerned about “the guy with the camera.” It’s an important moment because it acknowledges explicitly what is obvious throughout Three Sisters – that there’s no such thing as “fly on the wall” observational cinema, that Wang and his occasional crew are affecting the conditions of their little social experiment simply by being there and looking. A few minutes after the shot of Yingying alone at the table, we see her again outside, high on a hillside, walking a few yards in front of the camera. Eventually she stops, sits, and looks out across the valley. The camera also pans to take in the view. It’s a remarkable scene because without being sentimental or naïve, it manages to share her experience of something beautiful as she shares it with Wang. It’s a generous act on both of their parts.

October 14, 2012
Platform (2000)

Dir. by Jia Zhang-ke

With so many directors now throwing in their cameras with the “single-shot scenes from a fixed position” school of filmmaking, there’s a growing problem for those of us who believe that a fundamental job of critics is to accurately describe what we see. Films built almost entirely from images that would have been described traditionally as “establishing shots” beg the question: How does one describe and evaluate this kind of montage (if that’s even the right word)?

I find it frustrating that, even after years of seeking out and championing directors who I casually label “meditative” or “contemplative,” I’m no closer to understanding how their films work, exactly, and I’m certainly no better at arguing the merits of a particularly “great” director as opposed to just a “good” one. Likewise, I’m often at an embarrassing loss when asked to evaluate a particular film by a favorite filmmaker who works in this style. (Oddly, I would love someday to be disappointed by a Hou Hsiao-hsien film if only because it would offer some tangible proof that I’m capable of being a . . . what’s the word? . . . critic of his work.) I skate by with a bit of critical sleight of hand: I allude to an aesthetic by uttering a few incantations — “static,” “elliptical,” “unhurried,” “natural” — and then, poof, the real form of the film disappears. Magic.

Case in point: Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform. Narratively and thematically, it’s a fun film to discuss. Like all of Jia’s work, it’s about the social, economic, and political forces that have radically altered China over the past three decades. Platform begins in 1979, when a group of teenaged musicians and dancers from the small town of Fenyang go to work with a Peasant Culture Group, traveling by bus from town to town and performing songs in celebration of Chairman Mao. By the time the film ends, two-and-a-half hours later, it’s 1989 and the Group has been transformed by privatization into a pop music and breakdance revue, playing to small and mostly uninterested crowds. Platform is one of those great small epics. It’s ambitious and wildly catholic in its range of socio-political concerns, but it’s also a very human and personal film. Jia has the sensibilities of a novelist, I think.

That’s the easy part, though. What about the form of the film? Jia’s camera is often “static,” with only occasional pans and tilts. His editing is “elliptical,” and the performances of his actors are “natural” and “unhurried.” (Abracadabra!) I also noticed that nearly all interiors, at least in small rooms, are shot on a diagonal from corner to corner, unless there’s a window, in which case he likes to shoot directly into the natural light, hiding his actors’ faces in the shadows cast by strong backlighting.

I want this post to do something more specific, though. The following nine images represent eight shots (with seven cuts and one pan) that account for approximately five minutes of the film’s running time. This section comes near the midpoint of the film, when the troupe hits the road for a brief tour.

Shot 1: Near-complete silence, with only the sound of wind and a brief exchange of dialog between Ming-liang (on right) and his cousin, who has taken a job at a mine. Notice how they crouch below the horizon. It’s a recurring motiff — people being overshadowed by the landscape, I mean.

Shot 2: Cut to a performance of traditional music by the troupe. Jia’s cuts are often more jarring on the soundtrack than in the frame, and in Platform he’s especially fond of cutting from silence or natural sounds to the rattling of a diesel engine (see shot 3). The ellision seems to completely displace this moment from the preceding shot, but notice the flag atop the tower. (Remind anyone else of this album cover?) I didn’t actually notice this graphic match until after grabbing the screen captures. The flag confirms that our p.o.v. has shifted almost exactly 180 degrees — from atop the hill looking down to below the hill looking up.

Shot 3: Cut to a road beside the mine, as the troupe rides away in the bed of a noisy tractor. (This shot is a mirror image of one that came three minutes earlier.)

Shot 4: A new sequence, a new truck, and no clues as to how much time or distance have been ellided by the cut.

Shot 5: Am I mistaken, or is this a cut from an establishing shot to a medium shot? Finally! Jia is doing some standard blocking. Ming-liang puts in a tape and listens to a pop song, which creates a kind of cultural or thematic ellision, too — from tradition and timelessness to of-the-moment fashion and coming-of-age angst.

Shot 6: So much for a standard shot breakdown. Instead of cutting to Ming-liang in close-up, as Hollywood continuity editing would lead us to expect, Jia shifts our p.o.v. by 180 degrees again. The other kids eventually gather around his door to listen to the music . . .

. . . but then become distracted by the sound of a passing train behind them. They run off toward the sound, and Jia’s camera pans 180 degrees to follow them. Our p.o.v. is now essentially the same as it was in shot 5, except we’re now on the far side of the truck.

Shot 7: Can you spot our pack of running teenagers? Like the pink flag in shot 1, they’ve been made tiny by distance and consigned to the bottom-right corner of the frame. It’s impossible to tell from this still image, but they’re actually running toward us, which means, of course, that our p.o.v. has shifted 180 degrees one more time.

Shot 8: After the train passes, the troupe races to the track to watch it race off. (The scene is a nice answer to the opening moments of the film, when Ming-liang is chastised for incorrectly mimicking the sounds of a train during a performance — which is forgivable, I would think, since he had never seen or heard one before.) Here we have another graphic match in the cut. Notice how the bridge in shot 7 and the guardrail and horizon line in shot 8 divide the frames at almost the exact same point. Note also the slivers of blue sky peeking over the rounded mountains in both images.

Edit: Out of curiosity, I did a quick superimposition of shots 7 and 8 and, sure enough, the horizontal line created by the guardrail in both images is an exact match:

I suspect that I could grab any other five-minute section from the film and find a similar precision in the cuts. Jia repeatedly breaks the cardinal rule of continuity editing, but the jarring ruptures of our perspective are modulated precisely by his rhythm (time is something I can’t really discuss with still images, unfortunately) and by graphic matches.

March 25, 2008
2007 TIFF Day 3

Naomi Kawase’s Mourning Forest could be used as a template for the kind of film I love. A slow, moving camera that captures images of nature, with an almost fetishistic fascination with wind blowing through trees and tall grass. Nearly wordless characters, whose desires and pain are expressed instead by their faces, which we’re allowed to watch closely and intimately. A curiosity about essential things like faith and love and loss. Oh, and the desire for transcendence, of course. It’s a ready-made Long Pauses kind of film. Except that it isn’t. Girish and I have been trying to understand why we’re the only people among our group of like-minded friends here who were disappointed by Mourning Forest. (And, for the record, to say that I was disappointed is not to say it isn’t an interesting film.) The story concerns a young woman and elderly man, both of whom have suffered a great loss. For the first half of the film, we watch them going about the routines of daily life at the retirement home where she works and he lives. I was quite liking the film until they began their journey through the forest, at which point I was instantly reminded of other similar, more compelling movies. I think Kawase’s handheld photography was part of the problem for me. It seemed at odds with the tone of the film. But mostly I was frustratingly unmoved by the two leads, and the last image of the film — that inevitable grasp at transcendence — was too calculated and a little clumsy. But don’t listen to me. Everyone else loves it.

The general consensus at the festival is that The Man from London is minor Tarr. I’ve been ambivalent about the other two films of his that I’ve seen, Damnation and Satantango. As the latter film proved, I will gladly sit for hours and hours and hours in front of his films. (Question of the day: Has any director in the history of cinema had a more distinct style?) The camera moves slowly, the actors speak slowly, the music churns slowly, and as a result “real” time is compressed. I couldn’t believe, when The Man from London ended, that 135 minutes had passed. My qualms with Tarr have always concerned his view of the world, which is too misanthropic for my tastes. Which is probably why his latest film is my favorite of the three. I keep calling it a film noir that was left to simmer over low heat, reducing the genre to its fundamentals: man is trapped, man finds money, man attempts to escape fate. Friends look at me funny when I tell them how much I liked the protagonist, who in typical Tarr fashion has little to say. But in his own way, he’s actually quite tender at times. (That I managed to use the word “tender” here is probably another reason for disappointment from the Tarr loyalists.) As usual, The Man from London is a joy to look at. His camera is still tracking for minutes at a time, and he’s thrown in a couple new tricks. The 12-minute opener is a doozy. Also, Tarr stuck around for a Q&A and didn’t bite off a single head. He was charming, actually, and really funny.

Jia Zhang-ke’s latest, Useless, is an odd one. Like last year’s documentary, Dong, Useless is a portrait of an artist, though in this case Jia is less concerned with fashion designer Ma Ke, specifically, than with what she represents to China’s leap into consumerism. In a recent interview, Wang Bing (see yesterday’s post on Wang’s latest) mentions that one reason he is not making narrative films right now is because “in China, social changes have come so fast and been so massive, that the opportunities for documentaries are considerable.” I suspect that Jia feels the same way. Useless, the title, comes from the name of Ma Ke’s haute couture line fashioned from traditionally hand-made fabrics. The middle third of Jia’s film documents the line’s impressive debut at Paris’s Fashion Week and includes interviews with Ma in which she waxes nostalgic about the human touch and artistry that is missing from mass-produced clothing. As we’ve learned in the first act of the film, though, Ma is only able to concentrate her efforts on Useless because of the fortune she made with Exception, which seems to be the Chinese equivalent of Banana Republic. Jia opens the film with a tour of the facility where hundreds of workers hunch over sewing machines, manufacturing garments for the chain of Exception store fronts. The shots are mirrored in the second act, when Jia shows two Chinese women hunching over weaving machines to produce the “hand-made” fabrics for Useless. The film ends in a rural mining town, where Jia follows several locals, including two tailors and a former tailor who was forced by the low cost of manufactured clothes to take a job at the mine. This quick summary lays out the macro-structure of Useless, but its the finer points — the visual echoes that reverberate throughout the film, the ironies and ambivalences — that make the film so fascinating. I like it better the more I think about it.

John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind recovers the lost history of class struggle in America by filming, in simple, static shots, the monuments left behind: commemorative plaques, statues, and, most often, cemetery headstones. Gianvito structures the film chronologically and breaks the sequence of shots only on occasion to show images of wind blowing through leaves and grass (shades of Whitman and the Transcendentalists) and to interject jarring hand-drawn animations that represent the impersonal, amoral transactions of capitalism. The relative simplicity of the form allows the film to function pedagogically (I came away with a list of names and events I want to explore), but it also leaves room for the viewer to create connections and find new contexts. We can chart, for example, the movement of civil rights from New England to the South, and, likewise, the movement of manufacturing from the South to the Midwest. Or, in my favorite cut of the film, we learn that the founder of America’s first labor organization lays in an unmarked grave, while, at the same time, Sojourner Truth was being buried under an oversized headstone. In 1883, apparently, an African-American woman could be commemorated with greater honor than a white male labor organizer. Fascinating.

Ute Aurand and Maria Lang’s The Butterfly in Winter is a 30-minute silent portrait of Lang’s life at home, where she tends to her 96-year-old mother. Each day begins with the opening of her mother’s bedroom window, a glass of water, breakfast, a wash and massage, and ends with a whisper in her hear and the closing of the window. Aurand assembles their life in jump cuts and closeups, revealing the slight variations amid the routine. I like Andrea Picard’s description: “Every day is the same and every day is different.” There’s such beauty and sweetness in the film.

September 12, 2007
2007 TIFF Days 1 and 2

My favorite scene in Persepolis takes place at a small kitchen table in the childhood home of writer/illustrator/co-director Marjane Satrapi. An anxious neighbor has dropped in to tell them that her 14-year-old son has been recruited to join the fight against Iraq. Satrapi’s mother — fearless, kind, intractable — comforts her friend, promising, “We’ll talk to him.” The scene ends with a simple voice-over: “Because of my parents, the boy did not go to war.” It’s the kind of moment that could very easily have been cut from the film for the sake of pacing. (And Persepolis does, I think, have some minor pacing problems.) But it’s the level of specificity in the scene, and in the film at large, that makes it so compelling. That moment at the kitchen table so radically transformed Satrapi’s understanding of her parents that now, more than two decades later, she’s still meditating on its significance from the vantage of adulthood. I should also add that the film’s animation is a real pleasure to watch — witty, surprising, and beautiful.

All of Fengming, A Chinese Memoir is summed up in the opening minutes of the first interview. He Fengming takes her seat in front of the camera, where she will remain for nearly all of the next 180 minutes, and begins to tell the story of how her life was forever changed in 1949, when at the age of 17 she left the university to join the staff of a newspaper. “And that,” she laughs, “was the start of my revolutionary career.” Her laugh is sarcastic and a little bitter. “We were so naive back then,” she later tells director Wang Bing. “Back then,” she and her husband were branded as “Rightists” by the Party and were separated from each other and from their two young sons in order to undergo rehabilitation at labor camps. Her husband died in his; she returned briefly to her family before being detained again during the Cultural Revolution. We learn relatively late in the film that Fengming wrote a book-length account of her life in the late-1980s, which proves to be an important detail in understanding the form of Wang’s remarkable film. Shot entirely in long static takes, with only a handful of cuts and quick dissolves, it seems to present an unedited account of Fengming’s story. But her story has been edited — over the course of nearly sixty years, changing slightly with each of the tellings and each of the hours spent hunched over a typewriter and notepad. So, for example, when she describes the night when she discovered her husband had died, her language takes on an uncharacteristic literariness, with extended metaphors and hand-picked symbols. Recounting this most “rehearsed” of her memories, she remains composed and calm, despite the horror and sorrow. When she describes a more recent event, however — one that occurred after she’d written her book and that she’s yet to fully integrate into her life’s narrative — she chokes and sobs. I have two pages of hand-written notes on Fengming, one of my favorite films of the fest, and hope to return to it later.

Hou Hsiao-hsien might be my favorite living director, so I had assumed that the lukewarm reviews of Le Voyage du Ballon Rouge coming out of Cannes weren’t to be trusted. I was right. At this point, midway through the festival, Voyage is among my two or three favorites. I’m hopeless when it comes to writing about Hou, whose films are visceral and emotional experiences for me. A friend asked after the screening if I thought the red balloon was integral to the film — if it was necessary at all — and I realized in answering that, for me, the balloon had acted as a kind of emotional locus: a splash of color and beauty, less symbol than catalyst or accelerant.

Last year at the festival, I assumed I had missed something when I came away ambivalent from Manufactured Landscapes. I discovered Friday night that what I had wanted from Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary was, in fact, something closer in spirit to Peter Hutton’s At Sea, a 60-minute, silent triptych about the birth, life, and death of a modern ship. Hutton’s film begins at a massive boatyard in Korea — one of several aspects of At Sea that reminded me of Claire Denis’s L’Intrus — where we watch, in a series of strange and awesome compositions, the workings of modern technology at its most forceful and elegant. In the middle act, Hutton turns his camera to the sea itself. He booked passage on a trans-Atlantic freighter and filmed the water as it churned beneath him and as it turned the moon’s reflection into abstraction. And the final twenty minutes take place on the shores of Bangladesh, where poor men and boys participate in a growing and dangerous trade: breaking ships with their bare hands and the simplest of tools. The structure of the film makes a compelling (if obvious) argument: “The developing world is our dumping ground,” as Hutton said during the Q&A. But that was less interesting to me than the form of his shot selection and cutting. When a member of the audience challenged Hutton, suggesting that his film would be as effective as a series of still photos, Hutton, non-plussed, responded with a phrase I’ll be regurgitating for years. (I’m paraphrasing.) “It’s very difficult for us to watch a silent film today. Cell phones ring. We’re easily distracted. I’m interested in countering the emotional velocity and the visual velocity of contemporary films.” The film’s form, then, which deliberately challenges our “emotional velocity,” offers a more radical political position than its content, I think.

At the very end of Mutum, a middle-class, urban doctor rides into the isolated Brazilian village where the film takes place and offers a young boy a pair of glasses, opening his eyes to the world around him. I was relieved during the post-screening Q&A to hear director Sandra Kogut acknowledge the similarities between herself and that doctor. I’m deeply ambivalent about films like Mutum. They’re a kind of genre, really — stories of the poor in the developing world, shot by well-educated, middle- to upper-class filmmakers, that are then taken to film festivals, where they’re easily digested by well-educated, middle- to upper-class audiences. A surefire cure for those annoying bouts of liberal guilt that plague folks like me. When children are the focus of the story, it’s even easier. Kogut seems to be aware of all of this and has crafted a solid film from the source material, a classic Brazilian novel by Joao Guimaraes Rosa. The key to the film’s success, I think, is Kogut’s camera, which never escapes the subjective perspective of her protagonist, a ten-year-old boy who struggles to make sense of the adult world around him. Because of that p.o.v., the film is full of ambiguities and, occasionally, oversized emotion. This is Kogut’s first feature, and I look forward to seeing whatever comes next from her.

September 7, 2007
World Enough, and Time

Some days I fantasize about giving up on this dissertation. Mostly I want my free time back. I want to walk into a library and choose a book that has nothing to do with Cold War history or American literature. I want to get up on Saturday mornings, watch a film, and lose a few hours writing up a no-pressure response to it. I want to spend an evening with my wife and not be distracted by the structure of my first chapter, which has been dismantled and rebuilt each morning this week.

I fantasize about reading for pure pleasure again. If I had the time, I might start with a biography of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, who died today at the age of 105. Can you imagine how the world changed before her eyes?

For many Americans, Madame Chiang’s finest moment came in 1943, when she barnstormed the United States in search of support for the Nationalist cause against Japan, winning donations from countless Americans who were mesmerized by her passion, determination and striking good looks. Her address to a joint meeting of Congress electrified Washington, winning billions of dollars in aid.

Madame Chiang helped craft American policy toward China during the war years, running the Nationalist Government’s propaganda operation and emerging as its most important diplomat. Yet she was also deeply involved in the endless maneuverings of her husband, Chiang Kai-shek, who was uneasily at the helm of several shifting alliances with Chinese warlords vying for control of what was then a badly fractured nation.

A devout Christian, Madame Chiang spoke fluent English tinted with the Southern accent she acquired as a school girl in Georgia, and presented a civilized and humane image of a courageous China battling a Japanese invasion and Communist subversion. Yet historians have documented the murderous path that Chiang Kai-shek led in his efforts to win, then keep, and ultimately lose power. It also became clear in later years that the Chiang family had pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars of American aid intended for the war.

October 24, 2003