The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film 9781784538156, 9781350122154, 9781350121706

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Series
Author biography
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
2022 Preface
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Note on transliteration
1 Introduction: Jia Zhangke, realism, impurity and memory
2 The walls of China: Between ephemerality and permanence
3 Pingyao’s city walls: On-location filming and the weight of history
4 Pop music’s sonic memories
5 Landscape painting, Chinese philosophy and the aesthetic innovation of Still Life
6 Opera, wuxia and China’s imagined civilization
7 Painterly still lifes and photographic poses
8 Garden heterotopias and the memory of space
9 I Wish I Knew’s cinephilic journeys (an afterword on intertextuality)
Appendix I: Filmography
Appendix II: Songography
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

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Series Editors: Lúcia Nagib, Professor of Film at the University of Reading Julian Ross, Research Fellow at Leiden University Advisory Board: Laura Mulvey (UK), Robert Stam (USA), Ismail Xavier (Brazil), Dudley Andrew (USA) The World Cinema Series aims to reveal and celebrate the richness and complexity of film art across the globe, exploring a wide variety of cinemas set within their own cultures and as they interconnect in a global context. The books in the series will represent innovative scholarship, in tune with the multicultural character of contemporary audiences. Drawing upon an international authorship, they will challenge outdated conceptions of world cinema, and provide new ways of understanding a field at the centre of fi lm studies in an era of transnational networks. Published and forthcoming in the World Cinema series:

Contemporary New Zealand Cinema Edited by Ian Conrich and Stuart Murray

Allegory in Iranian Cinema: The Aesthetics of Poetry and Resistance Michelle Langford

Cosmopolitan Cinema: Cross-cultural Encounters in East Asian Film Felicia Chan

Amharic Film Genres and Ethiopian Cinema Michael W. Thomas

Documentary Cinema in Chile: Confronting History, Memory, Trauma Antonio Traverso

Animation in the Middle East: Practice and Aesthetics from Baghdad to Casablanca Stefanie Van de Peer Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History Rob Stone and Maria Pilar Rodriguez Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia Lúcia Nagib Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins Guilherme Carréra Cinema in the Arab World: New Histories, New Approaches Edited By Philippe Meers, Daniel Biltereyst and Ifdal Elsaket

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East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film Edited by Leon Hunt and Leung Wing-Fai East Asian Film Noir: Transnational Encounters and Intercultural Dialogue Edited by Chi-Yun Shin and Mark Gallagher Eastern Approaches to Western Film: Asian Reception and Aesthetics in Cinema Stephen Teo Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film Edited by Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics Edited by Deborah Martin and Deborah Shaw

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Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond Lina Khatib

Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality Tiago de Luca

New Argentine Cinema Jens Andermann

Stars in World Cinema: Screen Icons and Star Systems Across Cultures Edited by Andrea Bandhauer and Michelle Royer

New Directions in German Cinema Edited by Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood New Turkish Cinema: Belonging, Identity and Memory Asuman Suner On Cinema Glauber Rocha, Edited by Ismail Xavier Pablo Trapero and the Politics of Violence Douglas Mulliken Palestinian Filmmaking in Israel: Narratives of Place and Identity Yael Friedman Performing Authorship: Self-inscription and Corporeality in the Cinema Cecilia Sayad Portugal’s Global Cinema: Industry, History and Culture Edited by Mariana Liz Queer Masculinities in Latin American Cinema: Male Bodies and Narrative Representations Gustavo Subero Realism in Greek Cinema: From the Post-War Period to the Present Vrasidas Karalis

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film Cecília Mello The Cinema of Sri Lanka: South Asian Film in Texts and Contexts Ian Conrich The New Generation in Chinese Animation Shaopeng Chen The Spanish Fantastic: Contemporary Filmmaking in Horror, Fantasy and Sci-fi Shelagh-Rowan Legg Theorizing World Cinema Edited by Lúcia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah Queries, ideas and submissions to: Series Editor: Professor Lúcia Nagib – [email protected] Series Editor: Dr. Julian Ross – [email protected] Publisher at Bloomsbury, Rebecca Barden – [email protected]

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CECÍLIA MELLO is Professor of Film at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She has written previously on Jia Zhangke and Chinese cinemas in book chapters and articles, and she is the co-editor, with Lúcia Nagib, of Realism and the Audiovisual Media (2009).

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke Realism and Memory in Chinese Film Cecília Mello

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2022 Copyright © Cecília Mello, 2019, 2022 Cecília Mello has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image: from Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000) (© Xstream Pictures) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3815-6 PB: 978-1-3502-9342-7 ePDF: 978-1-3501-2170-6 eBook: 978-1-3501-2171-3 Series: World Cinema Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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To João

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Contents List of figures 2022 Preface Foreword by Walter Salles Acknowledgements Note on transliteration 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

xii xiv xviii

Introduction: Jia Zhangke, realism, impurity and memory The walls of China: Between ephemerality and permanence Pingyao’s city walls: On-location filming and the weight of history Pop music’s sonic memories Landscape painting, Chinese philosophy and the aesthetic innovation of Still Life Opera, wuxia and China’s imagined civilization Painterly still lifes and photographic poses Garden heterotopias and the memory of space I Wish I Knew’s cinephilic journeys (an afterword on intertextuality)

Appendix I: Filmography Appendix II: Songography Notes Bibliography Index

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x

xx 1 29 59 81 113 145 175 201 225 238 257 263 273 293

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Figures 1 .1 Coal miners in Fenyang (Useless)  1.2 Model in Paris (Useless)  1.3 Coal miner in Fenyang (Useless)  2.1 Indexical memories on the brick wall (Xiao Wu) 2.2 Digital memories on the green wall (The World) 2.3 The intangible wall (Still Life) 3.1 Cui Mingliang and Yin Ruijuan by Pingyao’s city wall (Platform) 3.2 Tao dances to the Pet Shop Boys with Wenfeng Pagoda in the distance (Mountains May Depart) 3.3 History as show business in The Hedonists 4.1 Dancing to the tune of ‘Genghis Khan’ in Platform 4.2 Dancing to ‘Shi fou’ in Platform 4.3 Standing on the platform (Platform) 4.4 The Butterfly Dream (Unknown Pleasures) 5.1 An immortal landscape (Still Life) 5.2 An ephemeral cityscape (Still Life) 5.3 Empty space and Jia Zhangke’s ‘cinema of delay’ (Still Life) 5.4 Miniature man in Yellow Earth 5.5 Miniature landscape in Still Life 6.1 Lin Chong Escapes at Night (A Touch of Sin) 6.2 The Story of Su San by Pingyao’s city walls (A Touch of Sin) 6.3 ‘Su San, do you understand your sin?’ (A Touch of Sin) 6.4 The crowd as opera spectators in A Touch of Sin 7.1 ‘The Internationale’ and Yeats’s ‘Spilt Milk’ in 24 City 7.2 Posing for the camera inside Factory 420 (24 City) 7.3 Black Breakfast 7.4 Photograph of Xiaohe moments before his execution (I Wish I Knew)  7.5 Still life and the secrets of life (Still Life)  8.1 Beijing World Park 8.2 See the world by monorail without leaving Beijing (The World)

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19 20 21 55 55 56 65 74 79 95 98 99 108 120 121 131 137 138 159 165 166 167 187 188 193 196 199 208 208

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Figures

8 .3 The Summer Palace in Beijing: China’s last imperial garden 8.4 The Long Corridor at the Summer Palace 8.5 Yuan Ming Yuan or the ‘garden of gardens’ 8.6 Gardens and memories in Cry Me a River 9.1 Female nomadism and otherworldliness in I Wish I Knew  9.2 Guan Yu 关羽 roams the land in Mountains May Depart

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xi 210 211 214 222 233 234

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Preface The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film explores the work of China’s leading film director from the point of view of its at once realist and intermedial impulse. It draws on foundational and contemporary realist theories to suggest that a belief in cinema’s natural inclination towards realism transforms Jia’s camera into a source of power. On the other hand, it suggests that his cinema’s articulation of reality shares aesthetic resources with other Chinese artistic traditions, which are able to unearth a memory both personal and collective, still lingering within the ever-changing landscapes of contemporary China. The methodology proposed is grounded on an interdisciplinary approach and interweaves issues relating to painting, architecture, operatic theatre, pop music, literature, photography and garden design. Jia Zhangke’s 2018 feature film Ash Is Purest White (江湖儿 Jianghu ernü) came out as this book had just gone into production. The film was shot in different parts of China but the story initiates in Datong, located in the north of Jia’s native Shanxi Province. Previously, the city had served as a location in Unknown Pleasures (任逍遥 Ren xiao yao), from 2002, and Jia revisits many aspects of this film in Ash Is Purest White. The habit of re-examining his own work, which became more pronounced from A Touch of Sin (天注定 Tian zhuding, 2013) onwards, results in the creation of a singular cinematic world, allowing audiences to become familiar with places, characters, actors, motifs and plot lines. His previous fictional feature, Mountains May Depart (山河故人 Shanhe guren, 2015), had likewise originated from a dialogue with Platform (站台 Zhantai, 2000), made fifteen years earlier in his hometown of Fenyang. Platform composes, alongside Unknown Pleasures and Xiao Wu (小武, 1997), the director’s famous Hometown Trilogy, made in a truly independent spirit and to this day deprived of the Dragon Seal, the Chinese censors’ official stamp of endorsement that allows films to be shown in commercial theatres. Since the 1990s, Jia has been negotiating his space and his role within China’s complex film production landscape and finally achieved

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Preface

xiii

nationwide success with Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White, films that combine his authorial trademarks with a popular appeal and that were screened in cinemas all around China. The fact that he chose to revisit his early works in quite an overt fashion in his latest films could thus be seen as deriving from his deep-seated desire to reach a wider audience in his country, allowing them at least a flavour and a glimpse of his Hometown Trilogy on the big screen. Since this book came out in 2019, in a hardback edition, Jia has directed a new short film (Visit, 来访  Lai fang, 2020) and a new documentary feature, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (一直游到海水变蓝 Yi zhi you dao hai shui bian lan, 2020). The latter is a complex, affective group portrait composed of testimonies of three writers, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua and Liang Hong, born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s respectively. In the film, the emotional recounting of their lives illuminates the complex history of China and its people from 1949 onwards, and reveals how reality and art are intrinsic to each other. The appearance of a film that relies so heavily on intermediality, deriving meaning from cinema’s relationship with literature, confirms the relevance of the methodology proposed in my study of Jia Zhangke’s cinema. As well as a world-renowned film auteur, Jia now also sees himself very much as someone who should play a leading role in producing the work of young film directors in China, and in finding a platform – mainly at film festivals in Fenyang and Pingyao – for these films to be screened. In 2021, his company XStream was also involved in the production of award-winning foreign films, including Memoria by Thai maverick film-maker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and White Building, the debut feature from Cambodian director Kavich Neang, extending Jia’s ventures outside China. The interdisciplinary approach embraced in The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film unveils the complex web of temporalities that exists in Jia Zhangke’s filmic spaces, capable of containing both the China of globalization and the China of millennial traditions. This paperback edition, which includes some minor corrections to the original text, will now make the book accessible to the wider academic community and to the general public, and will hopefully contribute to the debate around the hybrid nature of Chinese, and other, cinemas.

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Foreword Jia Zhangke: Unveiling memory November 2013. Jia Zhangke tries to find the place where he filmed the final scene of Xiao Wu (1997), in Fenyang, his hometown in northern China. By his side, his friend and actor Wang Hongwei scrutinizes the space that he, like Jia Zhangke, has traversed, but no longer recognizes. In less than twenty years, secular alleys have given way to impersonal avenues with heavy traffic. The director points to a certain location, the actor does not identify it.1 The architectural change of the city is such that there is no possible agreement between the friends. Without the memory of demolition recorded in Xiao Wu, that space would be little more than a blank page. Few countries have undergone such severe transformations in as short a time as China, and few film-makers have recorded them with the acuity of Jia Zhangke. To do justice to an artist whose work presages and foresees what is constantly changing, and who is therefore also in constant motion, a book as immersive as The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film was needed, which Cecília Mello formulated over several years of research and now shares with us. Time and space, raw materials of the cinema, undergo a brutal acceleration in the films of Zhangke. Jorge Luis Borges said that ‘the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past’. There is not, perhaps, as brief a present as the one forged by Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, which led China to embrace market economics from 1978 onwards. It is a physical, but, above all, human geography, an extraordinarily complex social fabric, that is redrawn in post-Maoist China. The ‘floaters’ in Still Life (2006) or in The World (2004), new migrants of a globalized economy, are the reserve army of this rapidly changing society. And it is towards the ‘powerless’ that Jia Zhangke turns his camera. To account for such a mutation, to map it, is what both Jia Zhangke and Cecília Mello propose, each in their own way. From the start, Mello recalls

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Foreword

xv

that Zhangke’s realism is essentially impure. Of the neorealists who made an impression on him as a film student, he kept mainly their model of production. All his work challenges definitions, it does not fit into predetermined pigeonholes. Many of his documentaries drift into fiction, while his fictions tend to approach the documentary. In some cases, as in Still Life, different narrative forms intermingle. A  man and a woman seek out their former partners amid the demolition of millennial cities at the time of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Here, realism takes on an unexpected dimension. A  couple look at what’s left of a ruined city. In the distance, a building collapses, another launches skyward. In an interview, the director said that the reality that surrounded him when filming was so surreal that this option seemed, first and foremost, logical. The ability to uncover what was previously invisible, and thus to express the essence of things, distinguishes Jia Zhangke from any other film-maker working today. We are faced with an artist who thinks with an unusual degree of freedom, and who defies our expectations. Not surprisingly, the director was also one of the first to investigate and to express himself through digital technology, which serves the urgency of his cinema. ‘We must hurry if we still want to see something because things are disappearing’, said Paul Cézanne. The recording of memory, the countershot of the ephemeral, has been at the heart of Jia Zhangke’s creative process from the outset. For the characters in Platform (2000), members of a young theatre troupe that, over ten years, go from socialist–realist representations to hip-hop performances, the whistle of the train is the connection between the ancestral walls of Pingyao and ‘the world, vast world’ they pursue. This same whistle runs through the film, first sung by the actors on stage, then following the group of youngsters who run after a train and finally in the scene that brings the film to a close. At the end of the decade, this recurrent sound is reduced to the whistle of a kettle in a domestic space. Gone is the vastness of the world. The characters surrendered to a new life, confined in a small apartment. ‘Memory is like the sound that continues to echo after the sound goes out’, said Bergson. It is not in the Western tradition, however, that the author inscribes her analysis. Unlike books that analyse a film-maker’s work from film to film, Cecília Mello proposes to correlate the cinema of Jia Zhangke with other Chinese cultural manifestations that pulsate within his films and make

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xvi

Foreword

them unique:  painting, literature, operatic theatre, pop music, architecture, calligraphy, geography, millennial gardens. The political and existential force of his work lies at the confluence between the realism redefined by Jia Zhangke and the intermediality of his cinema, in the dialogue with other forms of expression. The nine chapters that compose the book not only broaden the understanding of the work of one of our greatest contemporary directors, but also offer the tools to better understand a culture with its own codes. In seventeenth-century Chinese painting, in the transition between the Ming and Qing Dynasties, dissident artists like Zhu Da painted landscapes partially obscured by mist. A  fraction of the represented universe was therefore offered to the viewer’s interpretation. In the same way, Zhangke’s cinema is a space open to interpretation. Temporal ellipses, long takes, constant use of off-screen space, endings that are open to the viewer’s decipherment – we are facing a cinema of subtraction, essentially suggestive and unimposing. Starting from the works of Tang Dynasty artists (618–907), Mello mentions that painting, poetry and calligraphy were seen as forms of expression without definite boundaries. In the Chinese tradition, ‘poetic sense’ means ‘poetic sense and picturesque scene’. Quoting Jia Zhangke, the author recalls that ‘films can provide poetic sense as poems do in literature. Painting, literature, and cinema are thus directly interconnected’. From this hybrid and defining quality of Zhangke’s cinema, it is inferred that modernity would not exist without a constant re-reading of the past. Her knowledge of Mandarin, which Mello studied to sharpen her analysis, gives her a privileged vision of an artist that sits between two worlds: that of the ancient Chinese culture and the culture of Shanxi, a region where Zhangke was born and where he finds inspiration for most of his films. Platform is the reflection of the shared coexistence and collision of these worlds. In the film’s dialogue, this tension inherent in the director’s films emerges in the dialect spoken by the characters, or in the constant references to ‘the wind of Ulan Bator’, the capital of Mongolia, lying north of Shanxi province. In its turn, the invasion of pop music in the film suggests other winds, those of a transformation of values in mainland China. Young people dance to the sound of Teresa Teng, a Taiwanese singer who became popular in China in the 1980s. Her popularity was such that it gave rise to a saying that

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Foreword

xvii

became commonplace throughout the country: ‘Deng Xiaoping by day, Teresa Teng by night’. As the author points out, there would be no A Touch of Sin (2013) without reference to the Chinese wuxia genre and the work of King Hu. His cinema represents not only the tradition of the martial arts film but also, and especially, the ‘inalienable relationship between man and nature’, as Jia Zhangke says. In the same way, the ending of this extraordinary film would not exist without reference to a seventeenth-century opera, The Story of Su San. The violence that assails contemporary Chinese society and unifies the four stories of the film gains an additional, historical dimension, when all the characters who have gone through their ordeal are faced with Su San, the woman who, in the opera, takes revenge on the injustices that befell her. The opera, on the other hand, refers to another unifying element, the compendium of oral stories published in 1589, Water Margin, about more than one hundred outlaws living during the Song Dynasty. Jia Zhangke’s film works the miracle of dialoguing with these distinct roots in a fluid way, without exposing the sources of inspiration or the script’s architecture. There is no moralism or desire to judge the characters in any of the forms of expression that interact to make A Touch of Sin possible. There is still much to be said about Zhangke’s intermediality in cinema, which Cecília Mello generously exposes. It is best not to go any further on this delicate uncovering operation, as this could risk detracting from the pleasure afforded by the book. Suffice it to say that the author’s brilliant reading of the documentary Useless (2007) and of The World, among other films, allows us to glimpse submerged layers of these works that suddenly become even deeper than we had imagined. When we were making the documentary Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang in 2013, Zhangke told us that his father kept a diary from his youth, gathering personal experiences and stories of his family and his city. During the Cultural Revolution, the diaries were discovered and his father was arrested. Later, sorrow would drive him to burn all his writings. Zhangke’s films may be like his father’s reimagined notebooks, giving shape to what can no longer be erased. This book is the key that unlocks for its readers a full understanding of the precious record that is the filmography of Jia Zhangke. Walter Salles

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Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge a three-year Young Investigator Award from FAPESP – São Paulo Research Foundation, which enabled me to do the research for this book. I also gratefully acknowledge the host institution Federal University of São Paulo – UNIFESP Campus Guarulhos, as well as the institutions in China and Taiwan where I spent time as visiting fellow: Beijing Film Academy (2013), Peking University (2015) and Taipei National University of the Arts (2017). I would like to thank: Director Jia Zhangke, Zhao Tao, Wang Hongwei, Han Sanming and staff, at different times, at Xstream Pictures Beijing, especially Jing Shuai, Ah Xiao and Justine O., for their generosity. Director Walter Salles, with whom I share the passion and enthusiasm for Jia Zhangke’s cinema, and who gave me the greatest gift in the world by inviting me to accompany the shoot of his beautiful film Jia Zhangke, A  Guy from Fenyang in 2013. Thanks also to Jean-Michel Frodon, Maria Carlota Bruno, Florencia Ferrari and Livia Lima. From Beijing Film Academy Zhong Dafeng, Sun Xin, Li Ran, Wang Yao, Liu Beibei and Mi Jing. From Peking University Chen Xuguang, Hu Xudong and Li Yujian. From Taipei National University of the Arts Lee Daw-ming and Wang Toon. My friends and family in Beijing, Wuhan, Taipei, Tokyo, London, São Paulo and Poços de Caldas, for their kindness and extraordinary help:  Christina Liu, Anamaria Boschi, Milena de Moura Barba, Zhou Xiang, Cao Rui, Ronald Laura, Winnie Xiong Fanghua, Zhou Yuan, Hsu Yao-wen, Huang Jin-ting, Randy Finch, Liao Chen-kai, Lucy Ko Yu-chen, Miyuki Tokoi, Anna Thomson, Eleni Liarou, Mel Whittingham, Philip McArdle, Luke Singer, David Baksh, Tiago de Luca, Beatriz Stolf, José Fernando Simão, Paulo Talarico, Claude Ricci, Roberto Antakly, Ricardo Frayha, Geny Frayha and Guilherme Delany. Carolin Overhoff Ferreira, who invited me to conduct this research at UNIFESP and encouraged me along the way.

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Acknowledgements

xix

Mariana Kaufman, Jo Serfaty, Gilberto Sobrinho, Karla Holanda, Molly Tsai and André Sun, who contributed to my research at different stages and in important ways. My students and colleagues at both UNIFESP (2013–2016) and the University of São Paulo, with whom I learn everyday. Maddy Hamey-Thomas, for her expert and rigorous reading of the first version of the manuscript. Julian Ross and the anonymous reviewers, for their precious suggestions. Rebecca Barden and Becca Richards, my editors at Bloomsbury, who expertly guided me in the important final stages of this book. I cannot express enough gratitude for Lúcia Nagib’s personal and intellectual guidance and her unfailing support of my research throughout the years. Many thanks also to Laura Mulvey and Maria Dora Mourão for their precious mentorship and friendship. I have been greatly assisted in research and in many other ways by João Lemos, whom I also thank for his careful reading of the manuscript and for compiling this book’s filmography with me. My final words of gratitude go to my parents Newton and Helena, who have given me everything, and to my dear sister Valéria, for her unfailing love and support. Parts of Chapter 2 have previously appeared in Slow Cinema, ed. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)  and are reproduced with the permission of Edinburgh University Press. Parts of Chapter 8 have previously appeared in Impure Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev (I.B. Tauris, 2014)  and are reproduced with the permission of I.B. Tauris. Parts of Chapter 5 have previously appeared in Aniki: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image [Online] 1:2, and are reproduced with the permission of AIM – Associação de Investigadores da Imagem em Movimento.

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Note on transliteration For the most part, the pinyin Romanization system has been used for transcription of Chinese names and words, with the exception of Taiwanese names (written in Wade-Giles Romanization) and Hong Kong names (written in Jyutping Romanization, in use in Hong Kong for Cantonese). The Chinese norm of placing the surname before the name has been retained, abbreviated to the surname in future references.

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1

Introduction: Jia Zhangke, realism, impurity and memory

China is developing rapidly. Everything happens fast. For us, the key is to hold tight to our camera, hold tight to our power. Jia Zhangke (2009b: 133) This book offers an analysis of the work of China’s leading independent film director, Jia Zhangke, from the point of view of its at once realist and intermedial impulse. Born in 1970 in Fenyang, Shanxi province, located in the north of China, Jia started making films in the 1990s as a student in Beijing. At first, he was largely seen as the main representative of the so-called sixth generation of Chinese film-makers, whose films signalled a move towards realism in their incorporation of contemporary issues and in their depiction of the urban landscapes of the country. Now, he has long outgrown this label of convenience to become one of world cinema’s most original and important directors. Thus far, he has made twenty-seven films, including features and shorts, documentaries and fiction,1 and has garnered a reputation both nationally and abroad, where he has been lauded with awards at prestigious film festivals such as Venice and Cannes. As well as a film-maker, Jia has been displaying what can be described as a polymathic nature:  he is a film producer,2 occasional actor,3 initiator of a film festival,4 lecturer in film and art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and the founding partner of four different film companies.5 He owns a restaurant and a cultural centre;6 he has published books and screenplays, some of which have been translated into French and English; he has currently over 16 million followers on Weibo, having become a sort of pundit despite the persistent tension between him and the Chinese censorship officials, now eased judging by his recent role

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2

The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

as one of the many new deputies to the National People’s Congress in 2018.7 Not surprisingly, he has also been the face of publicity campaigns for Johnnie Walker, Moleskine and other labels, and has featured on a number of popular magazines in his country, including in-flight and in-train ones.8 Finally, he has been the subject of four documentaries,9 one made for Chinese television and the other three by international film-makers, most notably Walter Salles, who in 2014 shot an affective portrait of his Chinese colleague, whom he considers to be this generation’s most important world film director. The centrality and importance of Jia Zhangke’s work in today’s cinematographic landscape seem to corroborate the polycentric definition of world cinema proposed by Lúcia Nagib in her essay ‘Towards a Positive Definition of World Cinema’ (2006). Drawing on Stam and Shohat’s foundational Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994), Nagib refuted the binary division between centre (Hollywood) and periphery (the rest of the world) and proposed instead a polycentric, democratic and inclusive approach to the study of world cinema. According to Nagib, this polycentrism is characterized by peaks of creation in different countries around the world, which normally appear during periods of crisis and transition. Today, this view seems in tune with the current political and economic scenario in which new powers emerge in different points of the planet, thus leading to a polycentric global configuration. By taking these observations into account, it would be fair to say that Jia Zhangke’s work represents a peak of creation within this polycentric ‘atlas of world cinema’ (Andrew 2006), emerging from China and responding to a new reality through an original aesthetics. In fact, one could argue that the originality of his aesthetic contribution corroborates the idea that cinema’s greatest innovators tend to thrive in periods of cultural and historical transition, when a new conjuncture calls for the articulation of a new language – or new languages – better suited to address and respond to a new reality (Mello 2006). Such innovations are also quite often the fruit of a combination of technological advances, aesthetic originality and a political will. Jia Zhangke’s oeuvre shares a similarity with previous and current innovations in film production across the globe in that it is concerned with cinema’s relationship with reality, springing first and foremost from a realist impulse. Cinematographic realism is, of course, a malleable concept, frequently fragmented into smaller categories or subspecies (Andrew 1995:  198), and often defined in relation to a particular period and a particular place (Bazin

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Introduction

3

1958: 156). It is nonetheless possible to speak of certain common currencies in realist cinema, both in terms of subject matter and its modes of production, which relate to the type of realism observed in Jia’s cinema. Raymond Williams’s defining characteristics of realism, for instance, were a focus on contemporary and secular action and, most importantly, ‘a conscious movement towards social extension’ (1977: 63). In cinema, this means that realist turns often seek to articulate hitherto hidden or repressed facets of reality, operating under a revelatory principle. In his turn, André Bazin (1958; 2002), who has given the most enduring contribution to this debate, identified realist modes of production such as the technique of deep focus and the long take, grounded on the ontological foundations of cinematographic art, as well as location shooting with natural light and the use of semi- or non-professional actors, as central to cinematographic realism’s revelatory principle. These remain to this day associated with realist experiences in the cinema, albeit in their myriad forms and functions. The films of Jia Zhangke share an affinity with these characteristics and he could, of his own accord, be called a Bazinian film-maker (Frodon 2008: 76–7; Li Lei-wei 2008: 78; Osnos 2009). As a student of film theory at the Beijing Film Academy (BFA) in the early to mid-1990s, Jia had the opportunity to read fresh translations of some of the most important works in film theory that had only been made available in China in the 1980s.10 Bazin’s view of cinema as the art of reality had a particular impact on him, and he became a diligent follower of Bazin’s canon, with an early preference for De Sica and Bresson (Frodon and Salles 2014). Likewise, Jia’s emphasis on contemporary Chinese social and economic issues such as migrant workers, criminality, pollution, unemployment, violence and prostitution also firmly place him within the realm of realist film-making, one that he claims derives from his own background growing up in the backwater town of Fenyang in Shanxi province (Jia 2009b: 45–6). It is no surprise, therefore, to identify in Jia’s work traces of post-war Italian neorealist practices, alive in his desire to establish a direct approach with the real in all its materiality, ambiguity, contingency and mystery. His is a cinema mindful and respectful of the existential link between reality and its image, between sign and object. Dudley Andrew has called it a ‘cinema of discovery’ (2010: 60), and recently Jia himself claimed likewise in an interview to Chinese film magazine Contemporary Cinema, stressing how for him film-making is indeed about ‘discovery/发现’ (Yang and Jia 2015: 38).

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

If Jia’s biography seems to lend him his realist credentials, his cinema can also be located within the tendency of a ‘return of the real’ in contemporary cinema, which saw, from the mid-1990s onwards, the waning of irony and intertextuality and a reconnection between the moving image and objective reality, leading to new definitions of realism (Nagib and Mello 2009). It is interesting to note that this adherence to realism coincided with the introduction and subsequent prevalence of digital technology in film production, which facilitated the creation of real-like images with no referent in the physical world (Hansen 1997). This brought into question Bazin’s ‘ontology of the photographic image’ (1958) or its translation into Peirce’s semiotic terms ‘indexicality’ (Wollen [1969] 1998)  as the basis for cinematographic realism. While some were quick to announce the loss of the indexical properties of the cinematographic image, it is crucial to notice that digital technology has more often than not enabled a closer contact between cinema and reality by facilitating the shooting in real locations and with real characters and practically without artificial light. It has also allowed for the expansion and resignification of the use of techniques normally associated with realism such as the Bazinian long take, championed by film-makers around the globe such as Tsai Ming-liang, Carlos Reygadas, Gus Van Sant, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Pedro Costa, Alexander Sokurov and Béla Tarr (Nagib and Mello 2009; de Luca 2014). Jia Zhangke’s cinema is a good example of the use of digital technology, starting with In Public (公共场所 Gong gong chang suo, 2001) and most notably Unknown Pleasures (任逍遥 Ren xiao yao, 2002), as a means to achieve a type of Bazinian aesthetic realism connected to prolonged observation, the use of the long take as well as the shooting in real locations with semi- or non-professional actors. Technology, therefore, acted in the first instance to reinforce this realist impulse,11 for, as Dudley Andrew observes, his idea of cinema ‘does not rise or fall with technology. A cinema of discovery and revelation can employ any sort of camera’ (2010: 60).

An itinerant impulse: Jia’s cinematic geography From the mid-1990s onwards, starting with analogue video cameras, moving briefly to 16 mm and 35 mm celluloid film and finally embracing the digital,

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Introduction

5

Jia’s cinema has been discovering and revealing, first and foremost, the real urban landscapes of contemporary China. This means being confronted with an unstable environment, ever-changing since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s Era of Reforms (改革开放 gaige kaifang) in December 1978, which led China into a market economy, completely revolutionizing the country’s social tapestry and not least its geography. Under Deng, following the harsh years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), China had begun to steadily improve its relations with the outside world and to open up its economy to foreign investment. Internally, it decollectivized agriculture, gradually privatized its industry and allowed for the appearance of private businesses. These were dramatic economic reforms whose effects were felt with intensity in the urban spaces of the country, as Zhang Zhen points out: In the 1990s Chinese cities both large and small have seen tremendous changes in both infrastructural and social dimensions. Vernacular housing compounds, neighbourhoods and old communities of commerce and culture have been torn down to give way to expressways, subway stations, corporate buildings, and shopping malls – all in the wake of a ruthlessly advancing market economy and the incursion of global capitalism. (2007a: 3)

It is therefore within a dramatically shifting panorama that Jia Zhangke articulates his original aesthetic, moved by a desire to register and to preserve – through cinema’s unique recording ability  – an ephemeral space. As Jia has acknowledged in several interviews in the past decade (see, e.g., M. Berry 2009; Fiant 2009; Jia 2009b; Mello 2014c), he is conscious of how memory is a spatial as much as a temporal phenomenon, and of how a disappearing space implies the loss of memory. From this, he derives an urgency to film these spaces and these memories, felt to be always on the cusp of disappearance. At the same time, he cultivates a seemingly contradictory slowness in observation, almost as an act of resistance in the face of the speed of transformations, which he regards as a ‘form of violence’, imbued with a ‘destructive nature’ (see Mello 2014c:  353). China’s embracing of a socialist market economy has brought with it an accelerated form of economic expansion that also translates into an accelerated politics of time. Slowing down cinema through greater shot lengths, the use of the long take and by embracing a delayed narrative style (Mulvey 2006), one which would disrupt Communism’s grand narrative of

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

progress of social realist Chinese films, would function, on one level, as an aesthetic response to the violence of speediness (C. Berry 2009). It could thus be said that a dialectics of fastness and slowness lies at the core of Jia’s cinema. This should, however, not be seen as a contradiction, for it derives precisely from the intimate relationship that it nurtures with the real urban spaces of China, where one is constantly confronted with the everyday coexistence of contraries. Contemporary geography’s dynamic definition of space (Massey 2005) based on the notion of an ‘unequal accumulation of times’, in the words of Milton Santos (2004: 9), finds in Chinese cities its perfect translation. In places like Beijing and Shanghai, for instance, old and/ or historical buildings are still standing next to the immense skyscrapers that erupted in the past decade or so, and they preserve a way of life that seems to exist out of step with the twenty-first century. The coexistence of past and present, slowness and fastness, subsists despite the radical ruptures seen in China in the twentieth century, a country that, from the Proclamation of the Republic in 1911 to the Communist Revolution of 1949, and from the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to the Era of Reforms, has repeatedly tried to wipe away the past and reset the counter of history. As well as being essentially connected to the city space, with all its instabilities, contradictions and fluxes, the realist ambition of Jia Zhangke’s cinematographic project also contains, rather congruently, a significant itinerant impulse. A brief look at his filmography, from his first allegedly surviving film Xiao Shan Going Home (小山回家 Xiao Shan hui jia, 1995)12 to his last feature Ash Is Purest White (江湖儿女 Jiang hu er nü, 2018),13 reveals a penchant for dislocation, mobility and transience. Jia has made films in different cities, from the capital Beijing (Xiao Shan Going Home; The World/世界 Shijie, 2004)  to Fenyang and Datong in Shanxi province (Xiao Wu/小武, 1997; Platform/站台Zhantai, 2000; In Public; Unknown Pleasures; Useless/无用Wuyong, 2007; Mountains May Depart/山河故人Shan he gu ren, 2015; The Hedonists/营生 Ying shen, 2016; Where Has the Time Gone/时间去哪儿了 Shijian qu nar le 2017; Ash Is Purest White); from Chengdu in Sichuan (24 City/二十四城记 Ershisi cheng ji, 2008) to Feng Jie in the Three Gorges (Still Life/三峡好人 Sanxia haoren, 2006; Dong/东, 2006); from Guangzhou in the south (Useless) to Suzhou in the east (Cry Me a River/河上的爱情 Heshang de aiqing, 2008); travelling between Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei in I Wish I Knew (海上传奇 Hai

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Introduction

7

shang chuan qi, 2010); more recently, promoting a north to south dislocation through Shanxi, Chongqing, Hubei and Guangdong in A Touch of Sin (天注定 Tian zhu ding, 2013); and venturing outside China towards Australia in Mountains May Depart. The itinerant aspects that move these films to trace and retrace maps across China often impregnate the very mobile drive of Jia Zhangke’s characters. They take the form of city drifters, epitomized by the character Xiao Wu in the eponymous film; travelling artists such as those in the theatre troupe in Platform; internal migrants from the so-called Chinese ‘floating generation’, who travel from distant provinces to main cities in search of work, as seen in The World, Still Life and A Touch of Sin; as well as those moved by an unfulfilled desire to leave, such as the characters in Unknown Pleasures. Zhang Zhen accurately linked Jia’s own migrations to that of his characters: ‘Jia’s firsthand experience (as opposed to ethnographic “fieldwork”) as a migrant urban subject . . . compelled him to place the “migrant-artisan” at the centre stage of his cinema. As a result Jia has been called, admiringly, the “migrant-worker director” (mingong daoyan)’ (2007a: 16). In fact, he has also admiringly called himself a migrant director on more than one occasion. See, for instance, the first newspaper article to draw attention to his and his colleagues’ then recently founded ‘Youth Experimental Film Group’ in the 1990s, highlighted by ‘We are a group of migrant film workers’ (我们是一群电影民工/Women shi yiqun dianying mingong).14 Later, writing in the Cahiers du Cinéma, Jia once again referred to his errant nature: ‘In the past, Chinese poets had the habit of composing poems on the road. In a similar vein, I very much love travelling, going to small towns or unknown villages’ (2004: 22). Note, however, how he significantly shifts the temporal reference here from migrant worker to ancient poet, thus suggesting other meaningful connotations to migration, a point to which I will return later. As well as reflecting on the level of geography and the fable, it is possible to locate a migrant impulse operating within Jia Zhangke’s production strategies. This means that the faithful spectator of his films will soon identify recurrences that create familiarity within the material and the fictional realm of film. This happens, first and foremost, through close collaboration with cast and crew who have become along the years part and parcel of his work. Actors Wang Hongwei, originally his colleague at the film school in Beijing; Zhao Tao, whom

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8

The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

he married in 2011; and his cousin Han Sanming from Fenyang have been constant presences in his films for over two decades. Theirs and many other familiar faces, including cameos by Jia himself, have become indissociable from his cinematic world. Close collaboration has equally been established, from Xiao Wu onwards, with Hong Kongers Yu Lik-wai and Chow Keung. Yu Likwai is Jia’s director of photography, and together they have been building what Jia has described as their ‘own aesthetic system’ through a ‘desire to uncover new ways of understanding our surroundings through film’ (quoted in Ma 2016). Chow Keung has been Jia’s most constant producer to date, and together with Yu Lik-wai the three created XStream Pictures in 2003, with offices in Beijing and Hong Kong. Other artists such as Lin Xudong, who has been Jia’s artistic consultant from the early days, producer Shozo Ichiyama from Office Kitano in Japan, sound designer Zhang Yang and composers Yoshihiro Hanno and Lim Giong are also recurrent presences who migrate from film to film and who became essential role-players within Jia Zhangke’s creative output, contributing to the sense of familiarity and depth within his work. Familiarity is also built through important thematic and stylistic intersections that connect each and every film by Jia Zhangke, in one or more ways:  migrant workers in coal mines and factories; public spaces such as railway stations and hospitals; dancing and singing in halls, nightclubs and KTVs – the name for karaoke parlours in China; the demolition of buildings symbolized by the character 拆 chai; frequent appearances of other media such as the radio, television and cinema; vehicles on the move or sitting still; the handling and handing of RMB notes; as well as certain gestures such as the repetition of actions (slapping, pushing) and the act of protecting oneself from the rain or the smoke with a coat or a veil – all of these occurrences grant Jia’s filmic universe a coherent and highly original quality. Moreover, they paint a picture of China that rings true since it is made of a very acute observation, from an insider’s point of view, of details from everyday life, old and new customs, references and fads in popular culture, in short, of the contemporary experience of time and space in the world’s most populous country. Finally, it should also be noted how the creation of this particular filmic universe has always been very much fed by Jia Zhangke’s avowed cinephilia (Frodon and Salles 2014; Jia 2009b). His work builds a prolific intertextual dialogue with his three masters Hou Hsiao-hsien, Michelangelo Antonioni

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Introduction

9

and Robert Bresson, and equally draws on a number of recent and older films, from China and from abroad. These dialogues and references motivate the creation of other maps within the atlas of Jia Zhangke’s authorial output, going beyond China to Japan and Taiwan, moving from India to Russia, from Italy to France and all the way back to China via the United States. The role of piracy in building his cinephilia has also been well-documented and discussed,15 and pirated ‘Criterion Collection’ titles often appear among the films which he claims to have influenced him the most.

From mapping to drilling: Jia’s cinematic geology So far, I have suggested that the contemporary, peripatetic and cinephilic nature of Jia Zhangke’s realist cinema leads to the creation of different maps operating within itself, within China and within other transnational world cinema maps. These offer multiple angles of approach to the study of this highly engaging body of work. While taking these cartographical and intertextual dimensions into account, the purpose of this book will be to widen the aperture, or rather to drill a bit deeper, in order to unearth other layers of significance which lie ‘beneath the grid’, beyond and below the geography of cinema (Andrew 2013b). I would like to suggest that Jia’s aesthetic and, eventually, political response to China’s transformations in the last decades does not derive entirely from his films’ observation and articulation of contemporary issues and their essentially migrant nature. Rather, I believe it is the combination of cinema’s realism with its impure essence (Bazin 2002) that lies at the root of Jia Zhangke’s original aesthetic spirit, for it allows it to interweave multiple temporal and meaningful layers that make room for the emergence of memory. So if on the one hand, a belief in cinema’s natural inclination towards realism transforms Jia’s camera into a source of power, on the other hand, this articulation of reality shares aesthetic resources with other Chinese artistic traditions, such as painting, architecture, music and opera. This confirms not only the hybrid nature of the cinematographic art but also the coexistence of various temporalities in Jia’s cinema, capable of containing both the China of globalization and the China of millennial traditions. Bazin’s impurity refers to what today has been termed ‘intermediality’, that is, the interbreeding of artistic and technical medial forms. While it is

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

an accepted fact that film is, by its own essence, an intermedial phenomenon, there are certain cinematic expressions which embrace intermediality into their style, narrative structure and character construction to the point of depending on their impurity to convey meaning (Nagib and Jerslev 2014). The term ‘intermediality’ derives from the neologism ‘intermedia’ coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1812 (1971), but it was reassessed and defined as a critical term by Dick Higgins in the mid-1960s (1966; 1984). According to Higgins, intermediality described those activities that happened in between different forms of art, leading to new artistic genres such as visual poetry or performance art. Gradually, the term came to be employed to designate the interconnections and interferences happening between different media (Rajewsky 2010). At the same time, its meaning tended to shift according to the multiple conceptions of the root ‘media’, rendering fluidity to the term whose heterogeneous nature is today generally accepted. The importance of cinema’s intermedial or impure essence has been magnified or minimized since the first writings about cinema at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is interesting to note how both positions served the similar purpose of legitimizing cinema, be it through its kinship with older and more respected artistic traditions or rather through the search for its specificity as an autonomous art (Pethő 2010a). S.  M. Eisenstein (2010a) was perhaps the most prolific of voices in the defence of cinema’s dialogue with other forms of art in the 1920s and 1930s, and he famously drew parallels between cinema, music and architecture. In the 1950s, Bazin wrote ‘Pour un cinéma impur: défense de l’adaptation’, in which he embraced cinema’s impure essence at a time when its specificity was being erected and lauded in the pages of the Cahiers du Cinéma (Bazin [1958] 2002; De Baecque 2001). But before the ideologues of the politique des auteurs and their resistance, for instance, against literary adaptations, other authors had already demonstrated a preoccupation with the search for the essence or purity of cinema, whose interaction with other forms of art could be seen as a form of weakness (Arnheim 1989). In the past 20  years, questions concerning cinema’s impure or intermedial nature have become more frequent within the critical and theoretical debate (Pethő 2010a). In part, this relates to the introduction of digital technology and the consequent blurring of boundaries between different audiovisual expressions, previously seen as separate entities. Today, modes of production of film, television,

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Introduction

11

web series and other videos for multiple formats are becoming increasingly similar, with differences depending much more on the budget than on which platform they will be screened. This, as well as the incredible expansion of other audiovisual expressions such as video games and animation, has reignited a debate concerning the specificity or the hybridity of film and audiovisual media, leading to questions of intermediality in film and media studies. The democratization of means of production afforded by the digital has also approximated film and other forms of artistic expression, on the one hand fusing them towards Higgins’s original conception of the term, that is, a hybrid artistic genre, and on the other hand creating a dialogue between different media within a single one.16 If dealing with Bazin’s notion of impurity allows for a wider scope in the study of cinema, my purpose here will be to combine it with the realist impulse that moves Jia Zhangke’s authorial output, and that is equally a Bazinian construct. This means reconciling Bazin’s ontology with his impurity, an apparent search for specificity with a defence of hybridity. Here, Philip Rosen’s and Lúcia Nagib’s insights are essential to a more complex understanding of Bazin’s ideas, where realism and impurity become necessarily intertwined. Rosen explains how, in the context of the so-called classical film theory of the 1960s and 1970s, Bazin’s ideas had been read as part of a search for cinema’s specificity. This perpetuated a reductive idea of realism based on the ontology of the photographic image as, in itself, an instance of this specificity, then challenged by structuralist and poststructuralist semiotics: A dominant tendency was to see Bazin as proposing a primordial realism, which served as the other for the new paradigm based on cinema as signifying process. . . . With the cinematic apparatus now understood as ideological, Bazin’s ontology was described as naively mistaken, and/or idealist, and/or essentialist. (Rosen 2014: 6)

But does Bazinian realism really entail a search for specificity? This would not seem to be the case. As Nagib points out, the novelty in Bazin’s approach to impurity is his equating to realism those films which make apparent and rely upon cinema’s mingling with other arts and media. Thus he defines as ‘realist’

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

films which are not at all subservient to the phenomenological real, but instead faithful to their theatrical or literary origins. (Nagib 2016: 139)

By doing so, Bazin immediately precludes an understanding of realism as a mark of cinematic specificity and invites impurity into it by way of literature. Moreover, as Rosen explains, the question of specificity would only make sense from the point of view of the supremacy of technology over aesthetics, thus becoming invalidated once historicity is brought into the equation. Bazin, of course, viewed cinema as not reducible to technological determination, but rather as a changing, fundamentally historical medium (Rosen 2014: 8). By taking these considerations into account, it would be fair to say that the recent interest in Bazinian ideas of realism and impurity is part of what Rosen called a more generous re-reading of his foundational insights into the cinematographic art, forged during the post-war period. These seem again relevant especially with the shift towards digital technology, which saw, on the one hand, a discussion around ontology and realism and, on the other hand, the defence of cinema’s inevitable hybridity. This corroborates Bazin’s awareness of the importance of historicity, both in terms of a particular historical moment and of the historicity of a particular medium: Overall, then, impurity entails a conception of the inevitable historicity of cinema and its specificities, on the levels of the subject, object and mediating technologies, as well as their interrelationships. Specificity is subject to change. Thus, Bazin’s polemic against purist theory entails an insistence on the historicity of cinema and the historicity of its specificity. (Rosen 2015: 13)

Bazin’s lesson on the importance of historicity is indeed as crucial as his notions of realism and impurity in the cinema. Today, realism and impurity can also be productively described by the terms immediacy and hypermediacy, the two logics of remediation according to the pioneering work of Bolter and Grusin (2000). As Agnes Pethő rightly observes, the phenomenon of hypermediacy, which operates from a logic that acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 33–4), can refer, on one level, to the structuralist and post-structuralist theories, dominant in the 1960s and 1970s, that tended to emphasize the textual and intertextual properties of film as well as its mediated nature. Then, cinema’s ability to build a web of references and multiple layers of meanings was aligned with a view of

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Introduction

13

the world as a combination of ‘signs’ and ‘texts’ (Pethő 2010b). More recently, however, the logic of transparent immediacy and the logic of hypermediacy are no longer seen as necessarily opposed, for the everyday experience in our particular historical moment is inextricable from the presence of multiple media (Bolter and Grusin 2000). As Pethő puts it, ‘in our present daily practices hypermediacy can often be integrated into our sensations of the real’ (2009: 48).17 Thus, postmodern theories’ obsession with the mediated nature of all experience seems to fall apart when faced with an inescapable real. Here, Pethő appropriately evokes Bolter and Grusin’s definitive claim that ‘despite the fact that all media depend on other media in cycles of remediation, our culture still needs to acknowledge that all media remediates the real. Just as there is no getting rid of mediation, there is no getting rid of the real’ (quoted in Pethő 2009: 49). The double logic of remediation thus exposes the fallacy of the duality that persisted for decades in media theory and in film theory, opposing immediacy and hypermediacy, transparency and opacity, realism and impurity. And it gets rid of it by inviting the real into the equation. The realism and impurity, immediacy and hypermediacy debate matters to the present study in so far as it allows for a more complex reading of Jia Zhangke’s cinema. While the realist aspects of the director’s work have been studied mainly through a contemporary perspective that privileges its relationship with the effects of globalization in China, as well as its positionality within Chinese national cinema and its transnational connections with other world cinemas (see, e.g., Zhang Yingjin 2010; Zhang Zhen 2007b; Fiant 2009), a fresh look towards the past and towards varied artistic manifestations can shed new light on important aspects of Jia’s realist and impure cinema by bringing to the fore the heterogeneity of its aesthetic innovation. What is more, a focus on cinema’s connections with other forms of art allows me to locate memory and bring a historical dimension to a body of work so firmly located in contemporary China, the country of intense social, geographical and historical transformations. Therefore, while Zhang Zhen is right in suggesting, in relation to the ‘urban generation’, that the ‘historicity of this particular “new” or contemporary urban cinema is precisely anchored in the unprecedented large-scale urbanization and globalization of China on the threshold of a new century’ (2007:  2), it would be unwise to neglect how Jia Zhangke’s cinema equally relies on artistic traditions and references that add new meaningful

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

layers to its spatial–temporal fabric, bringing together topicality and historical resonance, innovation and tradition, the present and the past, the migrant worker and the ancient poet, realism and memory. From the perspective of the Chinese filmic and artistic landscape, I should perhaps briefly note, without too much digression, how the conflation of different media is not at all a novelty in principle. As Jerome Silbergeld explains, ‘observed relationships between different artistic media have a long and respected history in China’ (2012:  410). More prominently, painting, poetry and calligraphy have often been seen as artistic expressions without fixed borders, and this is especially evident in the work of poets/calligraphers/ painters from the Tang Dynasty (618–907), quite notably Wang Wei (王维, 699–759). As François Cheng explains, painting is sometimes known in China as 无声诗  wu sheng shi (silent poetry), and poetry and painting inevitably become one within calligraphy’s trace (Cheng 1991). Jia Zhangke himself has referenced this special kinship between the arts in Chinese art history when reflecting on his cinema’s impurities: Painting also has a relationship with literature, as well as with cinema. This also leads me to believe in the continuity between all of them. Take for example the idea of ‘poetic sense’. ‘Poetic sense’ means ‘poetic sense and picturesque scene’ in Chinese (诗情画意  shi qing hua yi). Films can provide ‘poetic sense’ just like poems do in the field of literature. (Jia quoted in Mello 2014c: 345)

Jia refers here to a phrase first coined by poet, calligrapher, painter and imperial officer Zhou Mi (周密1232–1298), active during the Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279) and the start of the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368). His poem ‘清平樂（橫玉亭秋倚) Qing ping le (Heng yu ting qiu yi)’18 starts with the verse ‘poetic sense and picturesque scene’, suggesting a connection between painting, landscape, poetry and human feelings. By referring to an aesthetic aspiration present in poetry and painting in relation to cinema, Jia wishes to approximate film’s artistic potential to other, much older, forms of art, suggesting that all art should strive to achieve a combination of human emotion and the landscape. Early film production in China also combined extra-filmic artistic and cultural forms, resulting in multiple and original aesthetic blends that attest to

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Introduction

15

its cultural specificity. It was, for instance, very much intertwined with variety shows, appearing in the form of ‘chained-sequence plays’ (连环戏 lianhuanxi) in the 1910s and 1920s, a programme which alternated between film screenings and theatrical performances modelled after the Japanese counterpart (Zhang 2004:  17). The relationship between cinema and theatrical and operatic modes of production was also strong from the outset, and this will be further investigated in Chapter 6 on A Touch of Sin, a film that carries this connection to the present. More recently, interactions between cinema and other forms of art in the Chinese landscape came to light as a subject of academic and critical enquiry with the works of fifth-generation film-makers such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. In his book China into Film, Silbergeld indeed makes a case for the study of Chinese cinema from the point of view of its Chinese foundations and its intermedial essence: A visual historian would not very likely regard filmic replication as lacking for purely Chinese foundations on which to build . . . – and so there is little cultural basis by which to essentialize film’s mechanistic dependence on ‘the West’ or to ascribe some ‘fascistic’ privilege to its mechanicity. (1999: 10)

Silbergeld goes on to claim that the construction of a ‘modernity’ should not be attributed to an essentialized ‘West’, and that ‘a Chinese modernity, yes, even a Chinese avant-garde, can be built and perhaps can only be built on a Chinese past: the modern extends into the past and the past survives well into the modern’ (1999: 11). Finally, Silbergeld rightly sees in the films of the fifth generation a playing by Chinese rules rather than a strict aesthetic and narrative dependence on Western or Hollywood film-making practices: Shot-countershot is often ignored in favour of long steady shots; crossing the 180o line, often declared inviolate in Hollywood film, occurs frequently. While comparison with Western film is valuable, comparison with historical examples of Chinese visuality, as seen in traditional Chinese painting, is invaluable. (1999: 11)

While I  largely tend to agree with Silbergeld, I  also believe that even if certain commercial film-making practices were largely ignored or unbeknown to fifth- and sixth-generation film-makers in China, they still established a very important dialogue with other Western cinematic traditions such as those of European art film and Soviet cinema. So my decision to take realism

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

and impurity as a method of study also allows me to relinquish any search for expressions of pure Chineseness, and neither of a globalized digital cinema practice nor of any specific local practices. Here, I would also apply caution to the categorization of Jia’s cinema as an expression of cinematic modernity, as Dudley Andrew suggests when he writes ‘Jia Zhang-ke is, it turns out, a modernist, devoted to the kind of discovery that the neorealists made their mission’ (2010: 60). Andrew replicates Bazin’s classical and modern dichotomy that I  do not necessarily intend to espouse; rather, I  would suggest his engagement with the real through intermediality plays by its own rules and resists categorization, or perhaps that the idea of modern cinema is not so relevant to a work that should be defined as impure from the outset. In short, Jia’s cinema will be seen here, first and foremost, as an instance of impurity, and as Lúcia Nagib accurately points out, such phenomena ‘break the boundaries between local and imported traditions, high and popular cultures, passive and active spectatorship, “classical” and “modern” narrative forms, constituting a democratic space par excellence for artistic and social expression’ (2015). Within this democratic space, the cultural richness and political complexity of Jia Zhangke’s work cannot be understood under binarisms that complicate more than elucidate the study of films, authorial works and movements. This also means encouraging a type of investigation that brings together both the ‘cartographic perspective’ and the ‘archaeological approach’. These are explored by Dudley Andrew in ‘Beyond and Beneath the Map of World Cinema’ (2013b), where he offers a more productive understanding of world cinema that calls for the need to look into what is perennially hidden beneath cinema’s cartographies, that is, other layers of significance that fall beyond the scope of a geographical view. Andrew’s sophisticated framework is tributary to Bazin’s own geographical and geological methodology of film criticism, unfolded by Ludovic Cortade (2010). It does away with the teleological approach of the classical/modern paradigm and unearths the temporal dimension that includes a series of different phenomena, from the circulation of films across the globe in an era of webs, flows, internet piracy and film festivals to how these films must negotiate their ‘jet lags’ when often occupying two time zones at once. Geography, for Andrew, would be a way to position cinema and to orientate us in the direction of countless films, while geology functions towards calculating the value of cinema, and the profundity of individual films (2013b: 36). For the

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purposes of this study, geology means finding beyond the transnational and cinephilic connections in the work of Jia Zhangke an acute look and a conscious recuperation of aesthetic resources found in Chinese art history. Thus, I would suggest that intermediality, which is intrinsic to the cinema, has actually worked in a particular way in Jia’s cinema, allowing it to go beyond and below China’s contemporaneity while remaining firmly within it. This effort of recuperation, of remembering through an intermedial prism, has a definitive political stance in a country so preoccupied with looking towards the future and leaving the past behind, while at the same time embracing an idea of a millenary tradition. In short, I believe it is precisely the combination of realism and intermediality that gives Jia’s cinema its political strength, and that a geological investigation can venture below its cartographies (inside and outside China) in order to unearth its meaningful historic and poetic layers. This book, therefore, aims to bring an original approach to Jia Zhangke’s work by interrogating the very nature of the cinematographic art, located between its realist impulse and its impure essence. Grounded on an interdisciplinary approach and interweaving issues relating to cinema, painting, architecture, opera, pop music, literature, geography and history, it sees Jia Zhangke as the quintessential film-maker of today, able to produce, with each new work, an acute diagnosis of our times.

Garments and memory I would like to finalize this introduction with a film whose own structure seems to suggest the same desire to go beyond and below the surface, moving from geography to geology. Useless, from 2007, is, in fact, a promotional film commissioned by fashion designer Ma Ke and produced through Jia’s XStream Pictures and Ma Ke’s own company Mixmind.19 It is not, however, simply a promotional film, but rather a documentary which delves deep into a multifaceted world of fashion and garments, sewing, dressing and undressing. Ma Ke, whose line ‘Exception de Mixmind’ has dressed Zhao Tao in Jia’s films on more than one occasion, is a successful Chinese fashion designer with more than 60 shops across the country. Her handmade haute couture and her prêtà-porter collection spring from a belief in the importance of individuality and

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

self-expression, and Ma’s philosophical discourse on the role of clothes and fashion in people’s lives punctuates the first part of the film. It is worth recalling how for years Chinese people were made to wear what could almost be described as a uniform:  the so-called Mao jacket (known in Chinese as the Sun Yat-sen-style jacket/ 中山装 zhongshan zhuang, for it was first worn and popularized by Sun Yat-sen – also romanized as sun Zhongshan – in the 1910s and 1920s)’. accompanied by baggy trousers. These jackets or suits came mainly in grey, olive green and navy blue, and the idea was to promote egalitarianism and to manufacture enough cheap clothes affordable by all. Especially during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, the Mao jacket became ubiquitous across the country. Ma Ke’s gesture of promoting independence and individualism through her line of clothes thus acquires a deeper dimension when contrasted with the uniformity that pervaded the world of clothes in the country until not too long ago. Useless starts with workers in a textile factory in the city of Guangzhou, perched in their workbenches sewing clothes for Ma’s Exception. From there, as if in a Marxist decoding of reality, the film moves to high-street shops where those very clothes are being sold. Ma Ke is then seen in her studio where she meditatively explains the rationale behind her new independent brand, soon to be launched in the Paris Fashion Week of 2007: it is called ‘Wuyong’, that is, ‘Useless’. From the automatic sewing machines, rendered through elegant tracking shots across the factory floor, the film shifts to a line of female seamstresses in Ma’s studio, working in rudimentary weaving looms. This is a ‘back to basics’ movement that in turn leads to nothing, or to uselessness: the garments produced are enormous and too heavy to be worn; they were buried in soil for months so that time could leave its marks on them; and they emerge at the Paris launch show, set in a sports gymnasium and reversing the customary order of things by placing the models in static altars while the audience moves around them. So far the film has travelled from factory to high street in Guangzhou, from art studio in Zhuhai to the city of Paris, but when it reaches Fenyang in Jia’s native Shanxi province, things get a bit more complicated. This comes with a cut from the Paris show, where models stand like terracotta-army statues illuminated by a spot of light, wearing the useless garments once buried in earth, to a wide shot of a coal mine in the landscape, reminiscent of Antonioni’s opening of Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, 1964), and anticipated in

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19

the soundtrack by a whistling northern wind. Shots of this dusty location are then replaced by a road, where Ma Ke is seen driving in her car. Here, midway through the film, she delivers her last meditation: I choose places which are far away from the city, isolated regions, the mountains and the plateaus. Places where the environment and the lifestyle have nothing to do with the city. In this environment, while observing people’s lives, I feel like an amnesiac who slowly recovers the memory of the past.

Ma Ke will carry on driving but the camera will soon abandon her to linger on a man standing by the roadside. He is carrying a pair of trousers in a plastic bag and is on his way to the local tailor for repairs. What shifts the film towards a new direction is the trope of the road and the theme of memory, directly alluded to by Ma Ke’s self-definition as ‘an amnesiac who slowly recovers the memory of the past’. The past is Fenyang with its imposing coal mine, its dirt roads and coal workers smoking in their illuminated hard hats by the side of the road (Figure  1.1); its old tailor shop with needles and threads; the amazing cave

Figure 1.1  Coal miners in Fenyang (Useless). Reproduced with kind permission from Jia Zhangke.

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

dwellings where one-yuan green notes are handed over to pay for a needle service; the clothes hanging in lines outside and inside dim-lit rooms; and the young lad who used to be a tailor but now works as a coal miner, talking to camera next to his wife in one of the most impressive sequences in Jia’s cinema. The film has come a long way from the Louis Vuitton shop in Guangzhou, where customers wearing Louboutin shoes sat chatting about the latest fashion in handbags. In Fenyang, Jia observes faces and gestures by taking his time, creating portraits marginally reminiscent of Lindsay Anderson’s Every Day Except Christmas (1957). Yet Jia speaks from both an insider and an outsider’s point of view, for even if he is now a world-renowned film-maker he is still at home in Fenyang, where his cousin and regular actor Han Sanming used to go down the pit. And that is where the film is headed, finally revealing a metal door through which a number of workers go through, moving downwards towards the underground coal mine. What follows is an extraordinary sequence in which the workers shower naked and rub their bodies with rags to get rid of the black dirt after work. If before a group of female fashion models in Paris were seen getting dressed in dirt-covered clothes and having their faces rubbed with black make-up, the film now reveals an opposite movement, by which male workers get undressed and rub their bodies and faces in a communal shower room (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). Their dirty clothes hang on a wire on the other side of the room, and the camera lingers on them through another tracking movement, scanning the space.

Figure 1.2 Model in Paris (Useless).

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Figure 1.3  Coal miner in Fenyang (Useless).

In his seminal essay ‘Down the Mine’ from 1937, first published in The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wrote: Our civilisation . . . is founded on coal, more completely than one realises until one stops to think about it. The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly depended upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil. (2001: 18)

Just as it is possible to see the landscape of today’s China in L.  S. Lowry’s paintings of the industrial North West of England in the mid-twentieth century, China’s accelerated form of economic expansion creates an insatiable appetite for coal consumption that also recalls industrial Britain. Shanxi province leads in coal production, with a much publicized and discussed impact on the environment. It is not by chance, therefore, that the hardships endured by coal workers in China are reminiscent of those of coal miners in England and Wales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, captured so vividly by Orwell. Contemporary Chinese artistic expressions have not been unaware of the importance and impact of coal mining and consumption in the country.20 Most notably, the film Blind Shaft (盲井 Mangjing, 2003) by Li Yang, adapted from the short novel by Liu Qingbang, is set in the illegal coal mines in the north of China, where two professional con artists prepare their next scam.21

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

Li’s film features a scene in which the miners bathe to remove black coal dust from their bodies. Useless could have found its inspiration there, or perhaps in Wang Bing’s shower room scene in West of the Tracks (铁西区 Tiexi qu, 2002), but it is a film about clothes and not about coal. For the purposes of this analysis, what matters most is the intentional shift promoted by the film from a geographic perspective in the first half, connecting China with Paris, to a geological perspective in the second half. The act of going down the pit takes the film below the surface, and Ma Ke’s evocation of memory in the opening of the Shanxi part composes with the mine an image of Freudian overtones. As Laura Mulvey explains in her definitive reading of Citizen Kane’s (Orson Welles, 1941)  childhood sequence, ‘in Freud’s theory of the unconscious, a memory that is apparently forgotten is also preserved, to return, if called on, at a later date’ (2000: 54). In her turn, Giuliana Bruno ties memory and clothes by evoking Kierkegaard’s phrase ‘recollection is a discarded garment’:  ‘The discarded garment enacts recollection, recalling for us the person who inhabited its surface  – the lively body that animated it’ (Bruno 2007b:  3). In Useless, memory cannot be found above ground, in the white and pastel unworn clothes hanging in the high-street shop in Guangzhou. And it is under threat in the old tailor shop about to be knocked down to make way for new buildings in Fenyang. Rather, it is to be found underground, buried in coal, in torn and dirty garments, where Freud and Kierkegaard would have remembered to look. It can be a genuine memory like the dirt that inhabits the miners’ attire, or perhaps a prosthetic one, like the earth where Ma Ke buries her useless clothes. For the grim note to her gesture of interment is made evident when one thinks of the thousands of miners who die in the rush to dig from often unsafe and illegal coal mines in China every year, interred in their clothes and with their memories. Useless has often been described as a triptych, starting with the industrial world, moving towards the artistic and ending with the artisanal. This reading, corroborated by Jia Zhangke, facilitates a link between Ma Ke’s search for old ways to produce clothes and the world of traditional tailors in Shanxi, leaving the assembly line in Guangzhou, with which the film opens, as the odd one out: The first problem with editing is deciding which section should go first. So I  decided to start with the assembly line in Guangzhou because those workers seem to form the lowest strata of the clothing industry. Ma Ke and

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Introduction

23

the artisanal workers in Shanxi have a relationship. They form a social circle, but the assembly workers seem to be separated from the rest. (Jia quoted in Bourne 2007)

Interestingly, this praise of artisanal practices chimes with pioneering Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong’s observations on peasant life in China in the 1930s: To me, the most important thing is that men should not be the slaves of machines. In other words, machines should be owned by those who use them as a means of production. . . . My other conviction is that the silk industry has been, and should remain, a rural industry. My reason is that if we attract the industry away from the village, as has been done by many industrialists and is so easy to accomplish, the villagers will in fact starve. (1983: 97–8)

Regardless of this possible reading which sees a kinship between the artist and the artisan, it is still hard to completely avoid the thesis–antithesis suggestion hiding behind the duality between Ma Ke and the world of coal mining. Moreover, as Isaac Pipano (2012) notices, Ma Ke’s work is contained within the same environment that it wishes to criticize, that is, the world of globalized fashion shows, fashion boutiques and mass-produced clothes. But Jia Zhangke is a complex artist, and as Jean-Michel Frodon notices ‘the éloge to individual creativity which dominates the first part of the film is not contradicted or undermined by the second part, rather opened towards the immense profundity of the land and its people’ (Frodon and Salles 2014: 237). Therefore, perhaps rather than part of a dialectic structure, the film’s move to Shanxi aims to peel away at the surface to find new layers of significance, enlarging meaning rather than contradicting it, changing the focus and looking at different aspects of a complex reality. Useless is punctuated by two pop songs, the first one called ‘情人’ (Qingren/Lover) by Hong Kong group Beyond, played over the closing shots of the factory sequence that opens the film in Guangzhou, and sung in Cantonese. This is a love song, bringing a melancholy tone to the migrant workers’ routine of scissors and sewing machines, and adorning the ‘scanning camera’ movements inside the factory space. Towards the end of the film, another song plays over a sequence ending with a group of young boys riding motorcycles across the industrial landscape of the outskirts of Fenyang.

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

To the tune of ‘爱的劳工’ (Ai de laogong/Labour of Love, 2001) by Zuo Xiao Zuzhou (左小祖咒), they are seen revelling in the wind and in the beauty of effortless speed. A young man waves his T-shirt and shouts to the skies. In this song, delivered in Zuo Xiao Zuzhou’s peculiar hoarse singing mode, he begs his sister to wear his ‘coat of happiness’ and his ‘coat of craziness’, finally asking her: ‘How does it feel?’22 The garment metaphor employed by Zuo Xiao Zuzhou could not be more fitting in this film about clothes and memory. The singer’s voice, laden with controversy not least for his close musical and filmic collaboration with Ai Weiwei, contrasts or rather adds to Beyond’s soapy tune heard in Guangzhou. And it brings in a new, freer and more anguished form of melancholy to a film that grows by calling on the memory of worn, begrimed garments. This book’s structure does not follow a strictly chronological order nor does it focus on films individually per chapter. My mode of procedure involved breaking the films down into points of commonality relating to particular instances of an intermedial engagement with the real. Historical, social and cultural background was also assessed through a dialogic interaction with Jia Zhangke’s oeuvre and informs each chapter, but always in connection to the films. Along the individual chapters, however, Jia’s trajectory from a film student in Beijing to a worldrenowned film-maker and producer will be traced. Specially, Chapters 2, 3 and 4, which deal mostly with his ‘hometown trilogy’, and Chapter 6, dedicated to A Touch of Sin, a film which comes at a particular juncture in his career, will include some biographical sections, intertwined with considerations into his role as a filmic auteur. Gradually, what will hopefully emerge is how Jia developed from a young artist eager to express his individuality through film to a mature artist imbued with a mandate to speak on behalf of his people, and moved by a social concern about his role within China’s cinema landscape: When I started making Xiao Wu, it was merely out of a love of movies and a desire to make them. I also wanted to express all the thoughts and feelings I had suppressed. Now I feel more of a sense of social responsibility. A movie can be a fantasy or it can be a realistic depiction of society. At the same time, a film is a memory. At this point, I’m most interested in emphasizing cinema’s function as memory, the way it records memory, and how it becomes a part of our historical experience. (Jia quoted in Chan 2009)

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Chapter 2 focuses on how memory is articulated in Jia’s cinema as both a spatial and present-tense phenomenon, and on how the loss of space entails the loss of memory. To the background of China’s intense spatial transformation, my aim is to investigate how architectural structures function as signifiers of the passage of time and as containers of individual and collective memory amid an unstable real. I argue that Xiao Wu, The World and Still Life promote slow architectural journeys through mnemonic walls, marked by inscriptions and made of layers of superimposed temporalities. These walls carry the marks of the subjective memory of those who lived within them but face the threat of the character ‘chai’ (拆 demolition), written in various buildings in Fenyang and in Fengjie as a sign (an index) of their imminent destruction. Chapter 3 expands the analysis of the interbreeding of cinema and architecture to include a discussion about the significance of filming on location in the historically preserved city of Pingyao, located near Jia’s hometown of Fenyang in Shanxi province. The main focus is the film Platform, where the splendid city walls of Pingyao suggest not only the immobility and entrapment experienced by a group of young artists during the 1980s but also the past and the weight of history, which is the ‘slow’ or ‘still’ counterpart to the fastness of the present. These city walls once again reappear in some of the most significant moments of A Touch of Sin and Mountains May Depart, which look at the present state of violence in China and its new landscape of globalization, but never fail to invite the past into it, in the most material way possible. The chapter ends with a reflection on what I call an ‘uncanny historicity’, felt in some moments during Mountains May Depart and The Hedonists, where reconstructed or recreated structures show how history is very much a matter of architectural fact and imagination in China today. Chapter 4 turns to the intermedial role of pop music in Jia’s cinema, with a special emphasis on Platform, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. It argues that the many pop songs that punctuate these films are on one level fragments of the film-maker’s individual and authorial memory, transformed into important pieces in his effort to reconstruct a collective memory through film. On another level, the impact of such songs in the 1980s and 1990s in China is related to a great extent to their novelty, given that they came from abroad (notably Hong Kong and Taiwan) and employed the first person singular pronoun ‘I’, until then practically absent from the ubiquitous revolutionary/

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

propaganda songs in praise of communist ideals and Chairman Mao. Thus, the use of pop songs in these films functions as a complex authorial mark related to the emergence of the individual in the landscape of social and economic transformations in the People’s Republic of China from the 1980s onwards. In Chapter 5, I consider in greater detail the film Still Life from the point of view of its relationship with Chinese landscape painting and philosophy. I propose that Jia’s discovery of a real landscape and a vanishing cityscape in this film, shot on location in the region of the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River, shares aesthetic qualities with the tradition of Chinese landscape painting, mounted on hanging or hand scrolls. A focus on this particular instance of intermediality leads to a reflection on cinema’s spatial organization in light of current revisions in film and audiovisual theory, which suggest that filmic space and its spectatorial experience should be considered above all from the point of view of touch and movement. I also suggest that the affinity between Jia’s cinema and landscape painting allows for film and philosophy to intermingle, since the principles of landscape painting bear a cultural bond with Daoist Philosophy and, to a lesser degree, Confucian Philosophy. The chapter explores these connections and offers a fruitful parallel between Still Life and Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (黄土地 Huang tudi, 1984), a classic from the fifth generation and the film that allegedly made Jia Zhangke decide to become a film-maker. Chapter 6 analyses the interbreeding of operatic theatre and cinema in A Touch of Sin, a film built around Chinese cinema’s long-term affection for the opera. I suggest that this form of intermediality once again functions in Jia’s cinema as an invitation for the past into the present, and I explore two correlated hypotheses. The first suggests that the relationship between cinema and opera promotes, in lieu of an alienation effect, a heightened form of spectatorial identification, thus revoking the Brechtian proposition, in part inspired by the operatic performances of Mei Lanfang, that tends to equate the anti-naturalism of this form of art with reflexivity. The second hypothesis expands on this reflection in order to suggest that the operatic modes and references in A Touch of Sin function as allegories – not of the Chinese nation as an ‘imagined community’, but as an ‘imagined civilization’, a term which I propose as more apt to describe an idea of China. 24 City opens the debate on the relationship between Jia Zhangke’s cinema and photography in Chapter 7. In this documentary with fictional overtones,

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27

shot in 2008 in the city of Chengdu, the inexorable passage of time, seen in the destruction of an old factory, contrasts with a desire to arrest time through an aesthetic interest in photographic ‘poses’. I argue that this instance of intermediality highlights cinema’s own origins as a series of still images that appear to move seamlessly through the projection, as well as the very loss of stillness brought about by the introduction of digital technology. The relationship between film, photography and intimations of death is then further investigated in the films I Wish I Knew, Dong and Still Life, and the chapter closes with a discussion on Jia’s painterly interest in ‘still lifes’, thought to hold the ‘secrets of life’. In Chapter 8, I return to architecture to propose an analysis of The World and Cry Me a River from the point of view of their spatial practice, leading to a reflection on cinema’s impurity through its affinity with Chinese garden architecture. These films promote a form of spatial practice where dislocation through space creates a series of views and a series of emotions in the visitor/ tourist/viewer, interconnecting an external and an internal landscape. The first part of the chapter introduces the spatial relationship between film and gardens, including a brief summary of the history and the main defining features of a classical Chinese garden. The second part focuses on The World’s spatial organization in relation to two imperial gardens, built during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), leading to a reflection on the rapport between gardens and the history of China, both ancient and recent. The third part, dedicated to Cry Me a River, investigates the idea of film as promoting an emotional mapping of a garden city, loaded with subjective and collective memories. The book concludes with an afterword (Chapter  9) on I Wish I  Knew, a film that creates an essentially cinephilic appreciation of the city of Shanghai, allowing for the emergence of Jia Zhangke’s passion for cinema through an at once contemporary, retrospective and affective gaze over the three Chinas (Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) and its cinemas. The focus will finally shift from intermediality to intertextuality, understood here as the co-presence of two or more texts/films in the form of quotations or allusions (Genette 1982), and thus referring to cinema’s relationship not with other media but with itself. I Wish I Knew is a film that leans on other films in order to unearth personal memories and historical events, and by doing so it combines poetry and history, bringing forth the actuality and the political force of cinema.

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2

The walls of China: Between ephemerality and permanence

Jia Zhangke’s first feature film, made in 1997, is titled after its main character, Xiao Wu, played by Wang Hongwei. It was shot in 16 mm in 21 days, entirely on location in Fenyang, Shanxi province. Xiao Wu is a charmingly gauche pickpocket who, during the course of the film, is rejected by his friends and family, being finally arrested by the police. As Jia Zhangke recalls (2009b), Xiao Wu was born out of his wish to capture his hometown in the process of radical spatial transformations in the mid-1990s. In fact, it is not hard to imagine how the site of old buildings and entire neighbourhoods being knocked down impacted the young film-maker going home for the Spring Festival in 1997, after graduating from the Beijing Film Academy (BFA). At that time, he had in mind to shoot another film, but once he arrived home, his father advised him to go for a walk around town so he could see the scale of change. The Fenyang he knew from childhood and adolescence was being transformed, and so he had a change of heart: his first film should be set there, within this unstable, soon-to-be amnesiac environment. Memory and architecture have been intertwined in Jia Zhangke’s mental landscape from an early age. When he was born in 1970, his family lived in an old brick house with thick walls, cave-style arches and a kang bed-stove (炕). There were other houses in the vicinity, not separated by gates but interlinked by brick walls and with a communal courtyard, in the style of the typical courtyard vernacular architecture of northern China. Jia’s childhood experiences and memories are thus very much connected to and a product of this architecture: his mother likes to joke that he was raised by a hundred families, for as a child he enjoyed constantly moving around the houses of his neighbours. The courtyard was for him a public space that congregated a

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The Cinema of Jia Zhangke

particular community to which he belonged, including people from different walks of life. As a young child, Jia also significantly recalls running around and accidentally bumping into walls, whose green hue would later filter through into his filmic style.1 Jia Zhangke’s childhood memories are also necessarily a product of a particular historical period, that is, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. His father, who could not attend college as he was deemed a ‘landlord’, was a quiet schoolteacher, while his mother worked in a local shop. His older sister went to school and displayed an artistic nature by singing and playing music with a theatrical troupe. During the Cultural Revolution, his family was not immune to the hardships that assailed the whole country. Especially on his father’s side, they suffered persecution:  his grandfather was a doctor before ‘Liberation’ in 1949. He had worked for a while in Tianjin, an important port city near Beijing in the northeast of China, and later went back to Fenyang to open his own clinic. With time, the clinic became a hospital, and his grandfather made money enough to buy some land. As Jia recalls, When the Cultural Revolution came, my grandfather had already died, but my grandmother was not spared. She lived with my parents, and my father told me that one day they put dazibaos (大字报)2 in front of our house demanding her to leave the town and to go to the country village. She had no choice, despite her old age and the fact that she had bound feet. My dad put her on his bike and took her to the country. She went through re-education there, wiping the streets every day. Later my uncle was put in jail and tried to commit suicide; he left with a mutilated leg. His kids, my cousins who were all older than me, were all sent to re-education in the country. . . . During his youth, my dad kept a diary, and those were unearthed during the Cultural Revolution. He mentioned in his diaries that he suffered a lot for not being able to go to university because of political persecution against his family, so he was arrested and sent to dig air raid shelters for re-education. (Jia quoted in Frodon and Salles 2014: 78–9)

It was only in the 1980s that things started to change for the better for Jia and his family, and the special peculiarities of this crucial decade were captured by him in his second feature Platform. Coming of age, and as he was not such a great student to compete in the high-league Chinese universities, Jia decided to go to Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province, to study fine

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31

arts. As a young man, his artistic aspirations were in the field of poetry and painting. The cinema was a form of entertainment and a way of finding out about the world, but not yet regarded as a viable means of artistic expression. This started to change when he saw Old Well (老井  Lao Jing, 1986)  by Wu Tianming in the late 1980s in Fenyang. The film, shot in a very poor area in Shaanxi province, tells the story of a village worker who tries to dig up a well in his village. Wu Tianming, a Shaanxi native, was one of the leading directors of the fourth generation and head of the Xian Film Studio, having played a big role in encouraging and producing the early films of the fifth generation in the 1980s. Jia remembers that the landscape and poverty depicted in Old Well felt familiar to him; and he was also very impressed by Zhang Yimou’s performance in the film! Yet it was in the early 1990s, as an art college student in Taiyuan, that Jia saw the film that would change his life, as he has recalled numerous times ever since: One day during that year at Shanxi University I went to a movie theatre next to our art studio where we did our painting. It was called The Highway Movie Theatre (Gonglu Dianyingyuan), because it was run by the Department of Roads and Highways – it was actually their social club. They used to screen a lot of films and the tickets were dirt cheap, just a few cents to get in. They were all domestic films. On that afternoon in question I went in and they happened to be showing Yellow Earth. Yellow Earth was actually made in the mid-eighties, but I had never seen it. So I bought a ticket and went in – I didn’t have the slightest notion who Chen Kaige was or what Yellow Earth was about. But that film changed my life. It was at that moment, after watching Yellow Earth, that I decided I wanted to become a director and my passion for film was born. (Jia quoted in M. Berry 2005: 185)

Yellow Earth is largely seen as one of the inaugurating films of the fifth generation of Chinese cinema. It was produced by Guangxi Studios in the south of China, where its director, Chen Kaige, had been sent to work after graduation from the BFA. In the early 1980s, relatively new film studios were set up with meagre resources in isolated regions of the country. Young filmmakers, fresh out of the BFA, were sent out to work in these studios, and they soon realized they could count on a certain level of freedom precisely for being so isolated. In the case of Chen and his director of photography Zhang Yimou,

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freedom was found not in Guangxi but in Zhang’s native province of Shaanxi, in the north of the country, west of Shanxi, a land covered in yellow earth from the Loess Plateau and crossed by the Yellow River. Theirs were to become the main names of this generation that appeared in China in the early 1980s, and would change the direction of Chinese cinema through a conscious desire to modernize its language. The fifth generation emerged from the ranks of the BFA as the first group to enter and graduate after its reopening two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1978.3 There they had had access to Italian neorealism, the French nouvelle vague and other important Japanese and Soviet films, as well as to books on film theory recently translated into Chinese (Xie 2016). The fifth generation of Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, as well as of Tian Zhuangzhuang, Huang Jianxin and Zhang Junzhao, produced very diverse films that could hardly be grouped by a style or a main theme. Yet they were united in rejecting the tradition of socialist realism that had ruled over film production in the past decades. By doing so, they also brought a renewed popularity to Chinese cinema abroad. Chris Berry (2004; 2008) has located the emergence of what he termed ‘a post-socialist cultural sensibility’ in Chinese cinema in the films of the late 1970s, running up to Jia Zhangke’s work but assuming different modes. Berry explains that ‘whereas socialist realist cinema is forward-looking, linear and progressive’, fifth-generation films tend to be ‘retrospective and analytical, working from a vantage point in the present and using a historical story set in the past as a parable or metaphor’ (C. Berry 2008: 254). Yellow Earth is a good example of this emerging post-socialist cultural sensibility in Chinese cinema. It is set in the 1930s, and it tells the story of a soldier from the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party’s Eighth Route Army who goes to a poor village in Shaanxi to collect folk songs. Its style, use of location, long takes and strong documentary overtones differed radically from previous ideological films, and they left a deep impression in the young Jia Zhangke, who decided to abandon his art course in Taiyuan to apply for the BFA. Not knowing how to prepare for this entrance exam, he went to the local library but found only two books about cinema, a volume II from a double edition on Italian neorealism, and another one about aesthetics with a small section on the cinema. He recalls how in his first interview at

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the BFA the examiner decided to talk about Godard, to which he replied ‘Oh I like Godard very much.’ He had not seen any films by Godard, so when the examiner asked him ‘why’ he simply replied ‘because I feel that I do’. Needless to say, he failed the exam, but after two more trials he was finally admitted in 1993, only to the film theory department and not to the directing department as he had envisioned. The BFA’s educational system had been largely based on that of VGIK’s in Moscow – the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography, allegedly the oldest film school in the world founded two years after the Russian Revolution in 1919 (Xie 2016). Therefore, it comes as no surprise to find out that Jia’s first contact with foreign cinema was through Soviet films. He recalls being very impressed with Eisenstein and with Soviet classics such as The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli, Mikhail Kalatozov, 1957) and Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate, Grigori Chukhrai, 1959). He then discovered Bazin and neorealism and fell in love with De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948). Later, he saw the cinema of Antonioni, whose mysterious use of space impacted him in a definitive manner, and that of Robert Bresson, whose mastery of cinematic time proved to be equally inspiring for him. Finally, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Boys from Fengkuei (風櫃來的人 Fenggui laide ren, 1983) struck him as a less dramatic filmic experience, more concerned with the everyday and with the value of personal experience in a time of gradual political opening in Taiwan. These and other important films by Nagisa Oshima, Yasujiro Ozu, as well as Chinese classics such as Yuan Muzhi’s impressive Street Angel (马路天使 Malu tianshi, 1937) became the foundation of his cinephilia, one of Jia’s most prominent authorial marks. At the BFA, he and other film colleagues formed what they first called the ‘Youth Independent Film Group’. Jia had come across a book entitled Independent Cinema (独立电影做 Duli dianying zuo) and decided to use the idea for his collective, but when a teacher warned him against using the term ‘independent cinema/独立电影  duli dianying’  – deemed a little too ‘sensible’ – they agreed to change it to ‘Youth Experimental Film Group/青年电影实验小组/qingnian dianying shiyan xiaozu’. It was under this banner that he made his first student films, starting with the now lost One Day in Beijing (有一天,在北京 You yitian, zai Beijing, 1994):

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One Day in Beijing was my first effort as a director, and I  also served as cinematographer on the shoot. It was shot on Betacam, and it was really the first time I looked at the world through a lens. . . . The shoot lasted for only a day and a half, but that first experience of describing the world through the perspective of the camera was simply riveting. There is really not much to say about the work itself, as it is a relatively naïve film. (Jia quoted in M. Berry 2005: 187)

Jia’s second effort was Xiao Shan Going Home, starring his BFA colleague and friend Wang Hongwei in the main role of Xiao Shan, in what was his official screen debut. The film, which runs approximately one hour, follows Xiao Shan, a migrant worker in Beijing, who wishes to return home to Anyang in Henan province for the Spring Festival, but who cannot find a companion to go with him. Xiao Shan Going Home anticipates a lot of the themes dealt with more carefully in Jia’s subsequent films, such as internal migration, urban life, romantic frustration and prostitution. It also makes creative use of written material from TV listings and pager messages. Prominently, the film displays one of Jia’s authorial trademarks in its incorporation of pop and rock music, featuring Western hits that would later disappear from his cinema until the recent inclusion of the Pet Shop Boys in Mountains May Depart.4 Most importantly, the film’s main theme, that is, the character’s rootlessness in Beijing and his search in vain for a way to return to his hometown, would later reflect on Jia’s decision to embark on a Hometown Trilogy. Michael Berry comments on this particular feature with an acute eye for the ‘geological’ significance of Anyang in the film, a city which, as well as being Wang Hongwei’s real hometown, is ‘generally regarded as one of the cradles of early Chinese civilisation’, its long history traced back to the Stone Age and its centrality ascertained by its status as the first capital city in Chinese history during the Shang dynasty (1766–1050 BC). In Berry’s insightful reading, therefore, Anyang is not simply ‘Xiao Shan’s hometown, but the ontological hometown of the Chinese people’ (M. Berry 2009: 14). Xiao Shan ‘premiered’ in Jia Zhangke’s room at the dorm of the BFA, but failed to strike a chord with his friends. As he recalls, the event attracted lots of people, but most remained smoking in the corridor, going in and out of the room. After the screening, one of his friends turned to him and said: ‘Zhangke, you can never show this film again!’ He admitted that, faced with this fiasco,

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he considered giving up on film-making to become a film critic, but then he and Wang Hongwei decided – against his friend’s admonition – to show the film in other universities in Beijing. To their surprise, the film was much better received, and that gave them great encouragement. Around this time, Jia heard of Hong Kong’s Independent Film Festival and decided to submit Xiao Shan for the 1996 edition, in a move that would shape his future in a decisive way. The film was selected and won an award, and, as mentioned in the introduction, it was there that he met Yu Lik-wai (Yu Liwei), until today his most important creative collaborator. Yu was also a young film-maker attending the festival with his documentary Neon Goddesses (美丽的魂魂 Meilide hunhun). They saw each other’s films and bonded over a mutual appreciation (M. Berry 2005:  198), as well as over their excellent music taste, which included Joy Division and the Velvet Underground. On this occasion, Jia also met producers Chow Keung (Zhou Qiang) and Li Kit-ming (Li Jieming), who, together with Yu Lik-wai, would become, in his words, ‘the core of my creative team. We decided to make films together’ (Jia quoted in M. Berry 2005: 186–7).5

The dialectics of realism and Xiao Wu’s urban drifting Jia Zhangke’s first efforts in film-making reveal characteristics that distinguish his films from the work of fifth-generation film-makers, despite his initial devotion to Yellow Earth. His interest in filming in the city and his use of the urban space, as well as a strong trait of amateurism that shapes his gritty style in Xiao Shan, all place him in proximity to the early work of sixth-generation mavericks Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiaoshuai, such as Mama (妈妈 Mama, 1990), Beijing Bastards (北京杂种 Beijing zazhong, 1993)  and The Days (冬春的日子 Dong chun de rizi, 1993). If the fifth generation of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige privileged universal time and the discovery of ahistorical landscapes in the 1980s, the sixth generation of post-Tiananmen (1989) filmmakers replaced them with a historical and urban landscape and with a focus on contemporary issues (Xudong 2010). Instead of abstract reflections or the exhibitionism of Chinese culture and history, the sixth generation revealed a penchant for images and themes that expressed feelings of alienation, anguish, a certain revolt against the status quo, and dealt with contentious issues such

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as alcoholism, prostitution, sex, drugs and violence. This emphasis on a youth subculture was hitherto largely absent from Chinese cinema, and it is no wonder many of these films were banned in China while being secretly taken to Europe to be shown in festivals. Although he might prefer the term ‘independent film-maker’, Jia Zhangke was nevertheless comfortable with his position within the sixth generation of Chinese film-makers alongside his older colleagues Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai and Lou Ye (Jia [2010] 2014), with whom he shares commonalities.6 Looking at the films of both generations, and regardless of their multifaceted nature, it would be fair to evoke John Hill’s lesson about the dialectic inherent to realist turns in the cinema: ‘Realist innovations . . . take place in a kind of dialectic with what has gone before, underwriting their own appeal to be uncovering reality by exposing the artificiality and conventionality of what has passed for reality previously’ (1986: 127). This dialectic, as explained by John Hill, functions under the revelatory principle which, as mentioned before, characterizes every form of realism. Hill makes his point in reference to English post-war cinema, but it also elucidates the passage from the fifth to the sixth generation in China, for both were distinguished by their high degree of realism. Therefore, the sixth generation’s realist turn can only be understood in relation to what had come before, following the dialectical principle by which a new wave is realistic in relation to what it succeeds. Still in the subject of realism, Jason McGrath rightly contends that The realist impulse in contemporary Chinese cinema had in fact manifested itself from the very beginning of the reform era, as imported theories of realism in film were linked to the ‘modernization of cinematic language’ and many new realist elements appeared in the major films of the 1980s. With the turn of the decade, however, a more radical wave of cinematic realism appeared, taking at least three forms:  the documentary video movement rising out of Beijing’s marginal artist colonies; the related phenomenon of low-budget independent cinema exemplified by Zhang Yuan’s early directorial career; and finally even a turn toward a new sort of realism among established Fifth Generation directors by the early 1990s. (2007: 84)

McGrath is referring here to landmark films Bumming in Beijing (流浪北京 Liulang Beijing, 1990)  by Wu Wenguang, the aforementioned Mama and Beijing Bastards by Zhang Yuan and The Story of Qiu Ju (秋菊打官司 Qiu

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Ju da guansi, 1992)  by fifth generation’s star director Zhang Yimou. Qiu Ju and Not One Less (一个都不能少 Yi ge dou bu neng shao, 1999)  display neorealist credentials in the use of non-professional actors, location shooting with natural light and the resort to hidden cameras which grant the films their documentary aesthetic, in some ways closer to the sixth generation’s aesthetic than to the fifth. The crucial difference perhaps between Zhang Yimou’s new realism in the 1990s and that of Zhang Yuan and Jia Zhangke’s first films, as well as the documentary film movement, has to do with censorship. Qiu Ju, for instance, was selected as the Chinese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 65th Oscars (it was not accepted as a nominee). While Jia’s first three films were never released in his country, Not One Less was a commercial success whose domestic release was accompanied by an official campaign aimed at promoting the film and cracking down on piracy. So even if the realist impulse of the 1990s was not confined to the sixth generation and to independent documentary film-makers, they still occupied a different position to that of Zhang Yimou, being very much outside official film production and distribution channels and severed from the mainstream public. Jia’s debut into feature film-making is very much a reflection of this outsider status. Made without official approval by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT),7 responsible for censorship of audiovisual content in China, Xiao Wu, Platform and Unknown Pleasures never received national commercial distribution and yet were screened and acclaimed in film festivals abroad. They were all shot in his hometown province of Shanxi, mainly in Fenyang, Pingyao and Datong, and became known as ‘Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy’ (贾樟柯故乡三部曲). This also sedimented a relationship between the artist and his land: ‘Shanxi Province is “my true China” ’, he said to Evan Osnos in 2009. ‘My focus, my concern, my emotional world is there’ (2009: 90). This trait was captured through great sensitivity by Walter Salles, who shot great parts of his documentary Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from Fenyang (Jia Zhang-ke, um homem de Fenyang, 2014)  in Shanxi, in a search for the seeds of Jia’s sensibility in the people and the landscape of his province. As mentioned at the start of the chapter, Jia’s trilogy was indeed kickstarted by a return to the hometown of Fenyang in 1997 for the Chinese Lunar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival. This is when the world sees its biggest annual human migration, undertaken by the hundreds of millions of

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homeward-bound migrant workers going away on what is, for many, their only annual holiday. For some, it is also the only chance in the year to see their children, left behind to be raised by their grandparents in the countryside. Yet if on the one hand the New Year means the occasion for a happy family reunion, on the other hand the long periods of separation and the intense transformations ravaging the country have meant that, more often than not, homecoming in China has become a source of serious generational conflicts, as seen, for instance, in Fan Lixin’s documentary Last Train Home (归途列车 Guitu lieche, 2009). Within this landscape of migrations, abandonments and awkward returns, the notion of the hometown acquires a less idealized connotation, and this is certainly perceptible in Jia Zhangke’s ‘Hometown Trilogy’. Here, Michael Berry explains how Jia’s trilogy indeed represents a challenge to previous notions of ‘hometown’ or 故乡(guxiang) in China’s art history: In early Chinese literature, the hometown was often the object of longing, written about by scholars, poets and literati while fulfilling court duties far away from home, in exile or in retreat from affairs of the world. For these individuals the hometown became an idyllic, often idealized, site upon which to project one’s hopes and nostalgia. Perhaps the most famous example is the Tang poet Li Bai’s short poem, ‘Quiet Night’ (Jing je, also Jing ye si) The moon shines brightly on the floor before my bed It appears like frost coating the floor I raise my head to gaze at the moon I lower my head and think of my old home. The poem is not only regarded as one of the masterpieces of Chinese poetry, it is also the first poem most Chinese children learn in school. The presentation of the hometown as an idealized site one dreams of on moonlit nights is thus one that remains indelibly etched on the Chinese psyche. (M. Berry 2009: 14–15)

For Jia Zhangke, the idealized hometown was found to be eroding, both literally and metaphorically, under the force of 拆 chai, as he recalls in his emotional essay ‘My Border Town, My Country’ (‘我的边城,我的国’/Wo de biancheng, wo de guo) (Jia and Zhao 2010a:  3).8 Sheldon H.  Lu explains how ‘chai [tearing down] . . . points not only to the physical demolition of the

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old cityscape but also, more profoundly, to the symbolic and psychological destruction of the social fabric of families and neighbourhoods’ (Lu 2007: 137–8). Xiao Wu reflects this relationship with an unstable space where architectural destruction also means the disappearance of an old way of life. Drawing from films about marginal characters such as Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Raj Kapoor’s Indian classic Awaara (1951), as well as from his own experiences as a semi-delinquent teen whose friends sometimes turned to pickpocketing, Jia decided to centre his first film around one such character, a pickpocket with a good heart, always willing to return his victim’s ID cards by placing them in mailboxes around the city. This choice of protagonist was indeed a provocative one, especially when seen from within the perspective of Chinese cinema’s long history of propaganda films, aimed at inspiring a particular ideology. Conversely, Jia always believed that artistic expression is not fit for moral judgements, hence the choice of a pickpocket for his first cinematic hero, following realism’s revelatory and dialectical principles. Xiao Wu is structured around the perambulations of the central character through the town of Fenyang. Linda Chiu-Han Lai called it ‘a digressive method that allows the drifter to make random connections with events and people’ (2007:  209). As she explains, the enunciating subject in Xiao Wu descends from the height occupied by the ‘voyeur’ and stands at street level, shoulder to shoulder with the ordinary city dweller (2007:  219). If in his upcoming films Jia progressively assumes a dual position, alternating between the urban landscape seen from above and the street level, in Xiao Wu, except for a brief scene in which the character observes the main street from a balcony, Jia sees and listens to Fenyang from his hero’s height and through his gaze, in often subjective and semi-subjective shots that unveil the space. The town of Fenyang, the film’s raison d’être, exerts a structural and aesthetic influence over it. There is an urgency that derives from shooting in an unstable present, conditioning the film-maker and the film’s style. This results in a realist spatial practice, with Xiao Wu appearing as a reflection of the very instability of the city. Hence his oblique, evasive gaze, protected by thick blackrimmed glasses, and his hesitant, dance-like gait. Jia’s dynamic remapping of Fenyang is mediated by Xiao Wu’s gauche ways and is thus mostly fragmented, noisy, disorienting.

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The film has an easily detectable tripartite structure, evident in its original title ‘Jin Xiao Yong’s mate, Hu Mei Mei’s patron, Liang Zhang’s son:  Xiao Wu’ (靳小勇的哥们儿,胡梅梅的靠山,粱长有的儿子:  小武). Xiao Wu, the charismatic pickpocket, is progressively rejected by his childhood friend Jin Xiaoyong (Hao Hongjian), now a successful businessman in the cigarette business; by the prostitute Mei Mei (Zuo Baitao), working in a KTV called Little Shanghai, with whom he has a brief affair but who leaves town without saying goodbye; and finally by his family, being expelled from home by his father in the third part of the film. Xiao Wu ends up being arrested by the local police, and the film, built around movement, finds its narrative ending in immobility. In spite of a structure punctuated by rejections, Xiao Wu does not display a strong narrative forward drive. This derives mainly from the influence of neorealism and from its relation with real space. The film employs a circular structure by which the key events are not distinguished by a narrative advance, serving instead to put the character repeatedly back in the same place, that is, in exclusion, be it outside the city (at the start) or imprisoned by a policeman (at the end). Xiao Wu was filmed with a 16 mm camera, a format that in the 1960s became associated with new definitions of realism, thus becoming crucial to the underground cinema and documentary movements of that period. The use of the 16 mm camera in Xiao Wu has something of this utopian quality, allowing for less conspicuous shooting on location, less expensive equipment and greater mobility than the 35  mm. This means the revelatory and representational impetus of its realism is also a matter of form, manifested mainly through what I would call the aesthetic consequences of the real city. Thus, the intensity of this disorganized, busy space, constantly crossed by an intense traffic of cars, buses, bicycles, motorcycles and pedestrians, is reproduced by an agile camera, frequently mounted on vehicles or handheld, resulting in dynamic and blurred images. Fenyang appears as an almost indomitable city, imposing its contingency in every shot. Yu Lik-wai recalls how filming on the streets always attracted large groups of people (M. Berry 2009:  26). This meant the crew had a hard time distracting the crowds, sometimes hiding the camera, other times filming as quickly as possible, or finally practising the curious technique of the ‘piranha ox’,9 whereby a fake camera is used as a decoy while the real shooting happens elsewhere. Yet oftentimes the recalcitrance of the real city

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proved irresistible, leading Jia to incorporate its curious looks, which added a new layer of realism to the film. Xiao Wu begins and ends with such curious looks. The film opens with the long shot of a young man standing by the side of a road. He looks off-screen and then moves his eyes towards the camera, staring directly at it. Once again he looks off-screen and then back at the camera, in the meantime yawning and stretching his back. The second shot reveals his family standing next to him, while the soundtrack plays famous Chinese TV comedian Zhao Benshan’s (赵本山) rapping in a comic skit (说唱 shuochang).10 Xiao Wu is then seen after the initial credits along the same road. He is presented by two metonymic shots of his hands (he is, after all, a pickpocket), holding a cigarette packet with Shanxi (山西) written on it – this had been done by Jia himself as a way of localizing the film. Xiao Wu then takes a bus to the city and dodges the conductor by claiming he is a police officer. He then swiftly snatches a wallet from the passenger sitting next to him, the close-up of his hands in action followed by a shot of an effigy of Chairman Mao hanging from the rear-view mirror of the bus. This is, of course, a cut charged with myriad connotations and open to interpretation. On this subject, it is worth pointing out that Mao’s effigies hanging from rear-view mirrors are not uncommon in China to this day. In fact, the figure of Mao Zedong is a lingering presence that still exudes a religious-like aura: statues of the former leader are easy to find across the country, his portrait is still hanging in Tiananmen and his embalmed body, on display in the Mausoleum across the square, draws crowds of Chinese tourists everyday. More ironically, Mao and money have been directly interconnected in China since 1999, when new RMB notes were issued with the former leader’s portrait on the obverse. If during the first two decades of opening it would seem that Mao would increasingly lose his appeal, today his presence is still intensely felt. So, cutting from the skilfulness of the pickpocket to the watchful eyes of a hanging portrait of Mao in 1997 in some sense anticipates the migration of that figure from the rear-view mirror to the banknotes inside the wallet, with all the connotations this might entail. From the roadside bus stop and the bus ride into town, the film – architected under the sign of mobility – ends with an emblematic fictional immobility, the arrest of Xiao Wu, symbolizing the end of the film’s journey. The last shot is a long take lasting two and a half minutes, going from an ‘establishing shot’

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(the policeman and Xiao Wu leave the police station and cross the street) to a ‘medium shot’ (the policeman handcuffs Xiao Wu to a pole) and finally to a ‘close-up’ of Xiao Wu squatting in discomfort in the pavement. Here, the camera – which remained for most of the film at his height – also takes the crouching position. Slowly, seen in deep focus, a few curious figures start to gather and watch Xiao Wu from behind. He does not notice this but his discomfort gradually grows and, still within the same long take, he looks up off-screen, the camera following closely and revealing in front of him an even larger group of curious bystanders. For one minute and fifteen seconds, the camera stares at those who are staring back, first at Xiao Wu and ultimately at us, the viewers. I believe that one of the merits of this sophisticated long take is to bring together the two types of looks observed during the film, the oblique gaze of Xiao Wu and the direct and curious look of the crowd. Here, curiosity also acquires a connotation of disapproval, as it promotes the humiliation of Xiao Wu in the public space of the street. Jia Zhangke comments that I felt that in some way, this crowd could serve as a kind of bridge with the audience. Like the audience, the crowd are also spectators, but there is a shift in perspective. As soon as I thought of it I felt a feeling of excitement take over. Naturally, I also thought of Lu Xun’s conception of the crowd. (Jia quoted in M. Berry 2005: 203)

Jia suggests a parallel between his use of the crowd and that in The True Story of Ah Q, Lu Xun’s famous 1922 novel adapted to the cinema in 1958 and 1986. Michael Berry discusses and expands on this parallel: The brutal conclusion to Xiao Wu on the one hand seals its hypertextual connection to The True Story of Ah Q; at the same time, the context also points to a new twist on Lu Xun’s tale. Lu Xun’s original story was set during the time of tumultuous political and social change  – the end of the last dynastic era, the rise of the Republic, a rush towards westernisation and a time of social and economic uncertainty – The True Story of Ah Q is very much a portrait of Ah Q’s struggle to gain a foothold against a backdrop of political revolution where even his own identity seemed to be at stake. Seventy-six years later, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu is set during a new revolution, but rather than political, it is an economic revolution, and one that has

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proceeded to shake the spiritual, moral and even physical foundation of everyone in and around Fenyang. (M. Berry 2009: 48).

Sequences of public humiliation are recurrent in Chinese cinema and literature and actually occurred in the country until at least 2010, having been very frequent during the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). By shackling his protagonist on the kerb, under the curious and critical looks spontaneously drawn by the camera, Jia is also alluding to this history and to the porousness between the public and private spheres in the everyday life of Chinese cities. And perhaps more importantly, this final long take also accounts for the different layers of realism present in the film. In relation to the subject matter, Xiao Wu promotes a social extension of representation by electing a pickpocket and his environment as the main focus of representation. Thus, this realism is directly linked to the revelation of something previously hidden or ignored, and the real location plays a decisive role in allowing itself to be ‘revealed’ by the camera, imposing itself into the film’s style. In addition, the use of the long take with deep focus preserves the space– time continuum in a Bazinian impulse, resulting in an aesthetic realism of neorealist inspiration. Finally, by incorporating the curious looks, the long take also plays on the anti-illusionism of the direct address to the camera, functioning as an instance of Brechtian reflexivity that relates to the reality of the cinematographic event (Nagib 2011). Of course, these looks can also be seen as integral to the plot since those who break the fourth wall and face the camera are the passers-by, not the actor who plays Xiao Wu. But it is hard to escape the force of the direct address, even if it is integral to a subjective shot of the main character. Laura Mulvey observed the way in which Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, Roberto Rossellini, 1953) unfolds in two endings, a ‘Hollywoodian’ one (the couple’s embrace) and a ‘documentary’ one (the movement of people in the procession): ‘Life goes on. One ending halts, the other flows’ (2006: 122). In Xiao Wu, even if the main character’s immobility means the immobility of the camera and the immobility of the film, that is, its narrative ending, life also seems to flow in the inquisitive looks of the crowd. These looks open and close the film by breaking the fourth wall, prevailing over the oblique gaze of Xiao Wu, curved by the city whose weight leaves him squatting in the end.

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Touching the past with your hands So far I have suggested that the city of Fenyang exerts a formal influence over Xiao Wu, placing it firmly within the reality of China in the 1990s and within the style of the sixth generation of urban film-making. There is, however, another dimension to the film’s spatial/architectural practice that lends it depth and complexity. In the spirit of a geological approach, I will attempt to peel away at the realism of this film set in contemporary times to unfold new layers of significance. In addition, I will suggest that the metaphorical configuration identified in Xiao Wu reverberates across Jia Zhangke’s films The World and Still Life, gaining a prismatic quality that reveals much about the film-maker and his country. This stems first from the use of architectural structures that function as signifiers of the passage of time and as containers of individual and collective memory, against the backdrop of an unstable reality. As will be discussed, the films mentioned promote slow architectural journeys through vernacular walls, marked by inscriptions and made of layers of superimposed temporalities, but slowly progressing towards disappearance. In Xiao Wu, one such place is the house of his old friend Xiao Yong (Hao Hongjian), previously a fellow pickpocket, now a semi-successful businessman. His upcoming wedding is the talk of the town and attracts the attention of the local TV station. Xiao Wu finds out about the grand occasion but soon realizes that he is not invited to the party. This betrayal will be the first disappointment faced by the increasingly marginalized character, and, as mentioned before, the failure of their friendship finds a parallel in the spatial instability of the city, whose process of intense transformation brings about a loss of reference. The character 拆 chai can be seen painted on various buildings and walls of the city, and an eviction warning at the start of the film reveals how Xiao Wu’s cousin’s shop will soon be knocked down, along with all the buildings in the street. But if the character chai can be seen in the walls of Fenyang as a sign of spatial destruction, instability and ephemerality, so typical of China’s contemporary era of fast transformations, the memory of Xiao Wu and Xiao Yong’s friendship is also inscribed on the brick wall of Xiao Yong’s house, pointing towards the permanence of a past that insists on emerging against the speediness of change.

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These traces appear for the first time in a scene that shows Xiao Yong speaking on his mobile phone just outside the door to his courtyard house, in front of a brick wall. At the end of the conversation, he stops to observe a few marks on this wall, which are the marks of his and Xiao Wu’s evolving height through the years. For a brief moment, he pauses, touches the wall and then walks out of frame. A few moments later, a long take, which shifts from a subjective to a semi-subjective shot, shows Xiao Wu on his way to his old friend’s house. He walks by the same place, then backtracks, noticing the same marks. He stops and touches the wall in a parallel gesture. The traces on the wall are an index of the special bond that used to exist between Xiao Yong and Xiao Wu. A similar index of this bond can be found in the dragon tattoo that both have in their arms, and that together form the couplet 有福同享 有难同当 youfu tongxiang, younan tongdang (in times of happiness share the good fortune, in times of sorrow share the misfortune).11 As will be revealed, Xiao Yong has tried to reinvent himself as a businessman, not wishing to be associated with his old friend anymore. Yet the past lingers in his arm, in the matching tattoo that tells him to ‘share joys and sorrow’, something that is clearly not true anymore of a relationship whose marks paradoxically resist the passage of time, one carved on the wall, the other engrained on the skin. In the sequence described above, Jia Zhangke unites Xiao Yong and Xiao Wu through a shared memory. By doing so, he emphasizes the present nature of this past memory against the background of a transient and amnesiac urban space. Here, it is worth recalling how Bertrand Russell, in The Analysis of Mind, describes the memory of a past event as being contained, or having a causal connection, with the present: Everything constituting a memory-belief is happening now, not in that past time to which the belief is said to refer. It is not logically necessary to the existence of a memory-belief that the event remembered should have occurred, or even that the past should have existed at all. . . . Hence the occurrences which are called knowledge of the past are logically independent of the past. (Russell 1924: 159–60, original emphasis)

Memory, seen here by Russell as contained in the present, independent from the existence of the past, emerges in Xiao Wu in the form of indexical

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traces left on the walls of Xiao Yong’s residence, bearing an existential link between the objects (the two friends) and their representation (the traces that signal their height). In the present tense, memory’s spatial dimension is thus highlighted, for as Edward Casey suggests, the embodiment as a necessary condition of remembering points towards a place: ‘As embodied existence opens onto place, indeed takes place in place and nowhere else, so our memory of what we experience in place is likewise place-specific’ (Casey 2000: 182, original emphasis). Memory is thus a point of connection between the event remembered, the person remembering it and the place of the remembered. This understanding of memory as an event that belongs in the present rather than the past, and that exists in space rather than in time, can be extended, as Giuliana Bruno points out, to its relationship with architecture: Let us recall that the art of memory was itself a matter of mapping space and was traditionally an architectural affair. In the first century A.D., more than a hundred years after Cicero’s version, Quintilian formulated his architectural understanding of the way memory works, which became a cultural landmark. To remember the different parts of a discourse, one would imagine a building and implant the discourse in site as well as in sequence: that is, one would walk around the building and populate each part of the space with an image. Then one would mentally retraverse the building, moving around and through the space, revisiting in turn all the rooms that had been decorated with imaging. Conceived in this way, memories are motion pictures. (Bruno 2007: 20)

Still, according to Bruno, the difference between Quintilian’s art of memory and, for instance, Plato’s wax tablet or Freud’s ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ is that the kind of inner writing related to the mnemonic activity in Quintilian is architectural: ‘Places are used as wax. They bear the layers of a writing that can be effaced and yet written over again in a constant redrafting. Places are the site of a mnemonic palimpsest’ (Bruno 2007: 21, original emphasis). In Xiao Wu, the present and spatial nature of memories is made even more evident through the gesture adopted by the estranged friends when faced with their past. Both walk by the wall, slow down, stop, walk back, look at the traces and touch the wall, before moving forward again. The touch – as well as the brief pause – unites them and seems to give this memory a shape, to make it

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present, spatial, palpable: a memory at hand’s reach.12 It should also be noted how this spatial dynamics of memory, akin to cinema’s own spatial dynamics, is recurrently conveyed in long takes associated with a handheld camera, employed to traverse the meandering corridors, side streets and patios that make up the web of courtyard residences still standing in the heart of Fenyang. Here, yet another dimension of this memory emerges, for the wall that carries the subjective memory of Xiao Wu and Xiao Yong belongs to a traditional courtyard cave dwelling, known as guyao (箍窑). The traditional guyao is a type of cave-style dwelling (窑洞 yaodong) that originally results from the particular geographic qualities of the Loess Plateau (黄土高原 huangtu gaoyuan), the ‘yellow earth’ of the north of China: Loess means a very fine wind-borne silt. China’s loess deposits, which were probably blown in from deserts to the north and west, are the world’s greatest. . . . The fine loess particles, when compacted, bond together almost like cement. And so we see the housing change from the rock and brick near Beijing to the ‘rammed earth’ architecture typical of north and west China. . . . Also, caves can be cut easily into loess, and the hillsides across China are pocked with entrances to dwellings that have been dug even in recent times. (Gore 1980: 301 and 304)

There are three different types of cave-dwellings in northern China, namely the kaoyayao (靠崖窑) or Cliffside Yaodong, built on hills, the dikengyao (地坑窑) or Sunken Yaodong, excavated from an underground courtyard, and the mixed form guyao or Hoop Yaodong, built outdoors on ground level, featuring an arched adobe edifice and spreading through walls and courtyards (Shan 2010:  9). These architectural structures, traversed like a labyrinth by Xiao Wu, are today quickly disappearing, together with the other typical Chinese vernacular dwelling called siheyuan (四合院), the famous quadrangular courtyard houses of Beijing and the Northern provinces, including Pingyao, the location for many of Jia’s other films. In Fenyang, most of the courtyard houses, be they guyao or siheyuan, have been destroyed, along with the ancient city walls. Therefore, by inscribing the trace of the characters’ memories and of their old friendship in the wall of a guyao, Jia is able to bring together the individual and the collective, the house and the city, past and present, all within the same indexical trace, carved into the wall and into the filmstrip.

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Here, I would like to stress the mnemonic and affective value of the indexical trace as defined by Philip Rosen: When Bazin compares cinema to such indexical signs as a fingerprint, a mold, a death mask, or the Holy Shroud of Turin, his examples consistently turn out to be the kind in which the referent was present in the past. I will call this subcategory the indexical trace. Photographic and filmic images have normally been apprehended as indexical traces, for their spatial field and the objects depicted were in the camera’s ‘presence’ at some point prior to the actual reading of the sign. The indexical trace is a matter of pastness. (Rosen 2001: 20)

Following this line of thought, the 16 mm celluloid could be seen as a modern wax tablet, able to produce indexical images and to carry the indexical trace on its surface through the photochemical reaction provoked by the incidence of light through the camera lens. And the indexical nature of the traces on the wall, soaked in memory, is related with the indexical nature of the cinematographic image, equally charged with a pastness and at once a container and a producer of memories (Bruno 2007). It is thus that not only the temporal but also the spatial politics of the indexical trace are imbricated in cinema’s materiality and in its ability to articulate the eternal and the ephemeral.

A half-green wall and a deathbed note If in Xiao Wu the indexical and mnemonic trace is the image of the past brought to the present through architecture and cinema, in The World the inscription on the wall could at first glance be seen as more prosaic, whereas in fact it is as charged with a pastness and the weight of history as the traces on the brick wall. Shot entirely in digital by director of photography Yu Likwai, The World is concerned with the lives of a group of friends who work and live in Beijing’s World Park, mainly Zhao Tao (Zhao Tao), her boyfriend Chen Taisheng (Chen Taisheng) and his hometown friends Sanlai (Wang Hongwei) and Chen Zhijung, nicknamed Erguniang (Little Sister), who travel from Fenyang to Beijing to look for work. In the film, Sanlai and Erguniang are examples of China’s post-1978 so-called floating generation, formed by

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millions of internal migrants who travel inside the country in search of work opportunities. Typically, the two friends from Shanxi find a job in construction; not long after, Erguniang has a serious work accident and dies in hospital. His parents and his cousin Sanming go to the capital from Fenyang – they are the ‘people from Fenyang / 汾阳来的人 Fenyang lai de ren’, as revealed by the intertitle included in the Chinese version of the film in reference to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film The Boys from Fengkuei (Fengkuei lai de ren). Once in Beijing, Erguniang’s parents receive compensation money for their son’s death, handed to them in a thick stack of 100 RMB notes. The handling of real money is later contrasted with the burning of joss paper or ghost money (金纸 jinzhi)13 by Erguniang’s friends in the construction site. The theme from Ozu’s Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953) plays on the soundtrack, adding to the overall melancholic tone of the sequence. Before dying, Erguniang had scribbled a note on a piece of cigarettewrapping paper and given it to his friend Taisheng, who later emerges from the bedroom and meets Sanlai crouching down in the hospital’s corridor, devastated by the tragedy. He hands him Erguniang’s note and the camera slowly pans right to face a half-green wall. Still in the same long take, the contents of the note slowly appear in the green surface through the use of a digital effect, disappearing soon after. The note consists of a list of the rather meagre debts owed by Erguniang, ending with ‘3 yuan to the noodle stand in front of the school’: 欠 qian 刘书和 35元 liu shuhe 35 yuan 志刚 18 元 zhi gang 18 yuan 王建军 7 元 wang jianjun 50 yuan 老邵 50 元 lao shao 50 yuan 六子 40 元 liuzi 40 yuan 丽玲 15 元 li ling 15 yuan 小学门口卖抹面的3元 xiaoxue menkou mai momian de 3 yuan 陈志华 “二姑娘” chen zhihua ‘erguniang’

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Through this brief sequence, it is possible to observe how Jia Zhangke has once again employed a wall as a vehicle and a container of a character’s subjectivity. However, in The World it is not the case of an indexical trace since the inscription on the wall appears through a digital effect. Would this be a commentary on the crisis of indexicality brought about by digital technology, which allows for the creation of images with no referent in the real world? This thought derives from the fact that Jia, while choosing to inscribe Erguniang’s note on the wall, making it public and somehow more permanent, is equally quick to erase it. The digital inscription is therefore ephemeral, a bit like the character himself who dies with no further explanation, and not unlike so many of other floating-generation workers in China today. But it might not be wise, as Philip Rosen advises (2001), to think of the digital as the ‘other’ of analogical technology. In fact, The World, despite being shot in digital, and regardless of its use of flash animation, electronic music and the location itself  – the park where everything is simulacra  – does not support the idea of a division between ‘real’ and ‘artifice’  – something which could favour a simplistic reading of the film as a critique of the latter. Rather, it seems to point towards a confusion between both, corroborating the point made in the introduction about the coexistence of contraries, so typical of the reality of China’s cities. The half-green wall of the hospital harks back to the communist era, and appears frequently in Jia Zhangke’s films in public offices, schools, waiting rooms, cinemas, theatres, factories and hospitals. As mentioned earlier in the chapter, the emphasis on green, which even comes to dominate the chromatic tonality of his film 24 City, is related to the director’s own childhood memories, who remembers bumping on green walls and later seeing the same green in public buildings. Thus the green wall, like the wall of the courtyard house before it, is at once a personal and a collective memory. It unites the whole country under the same pattern of green, but cannot carry the digital trace of Erguniang’s note for more than a few seconds. This might also be because this memory is somewhat dislocated: it belongs to an internal migrant, hence out of place in Beijing, floating, uprooted, far from his native province and from the brick walls of his hometown Fenyang which, contrary to the green wall of the hospital, have sustained for years the traces of Xiao Wu and Xiao Yong.

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Ruined walls It is not by chance that the same green wall reappears in Jia’s next feature film Still Life, winner of the ‘Golden Lion’ for Best Film at the Venice International Film Festival of 2006. The film, one of Jia’s most highly regarded works, is set in a disappearing cityscape, against the backdrop of an ‘immortal landscape’. Fengjie, located on the banks of the Yangtze River (长江 Chang jiang), is on the brink of being submerged by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. The film follows Han Sanming (Han Sanming) and Shen Hong (Zhao Tao), who come from Shanxi to Fengjie in search of their estranged partners. As they arrive, the old city is being torn down to allow the new waterway to be fully navigable, as well as for the recycling of bricks and other construction material. Their quest, thus, unfolds against the backdrop of derelict buildings, collapsing walls and piles of rubble and rocks. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam has been a hot media topic since it started in the late 1990s, attracting the interest of artists who went to the region to reflect and reflect on its transformation. In fact, Jia Zhangke was partly inspired to make this film by the documentary Before the Flood (淹没 Yan mo, Li Yifan and Yan Yu, 2005), which he saw and really appreciated in the Festival ‘Cinéma du Réel’ in Paris in 2005, where he acted as a jury member: ‘It’s as strong as West of the Tracks: it shows both catastrophe and the dissipation of conflicts between people because of the catastrophe. As if we opened different windows one by one, the film traces the portrait of each villager in order to give birth to a collective one’ (Jia quoted in Burdeau and Tessé 2005: 33). This ‘catastrophe’ finds within the landscape of the region during the building of the dam a visual presentation in the form of ruins. As Yingjin Zhang observes, ‘set in the ancient town of Fengjie, Still Life is a painterly – and increasingly painful  – study of ruins and survival, of the translocal flows of capital and labour, and of immeasurable costs of a mass migration and the irreversible disappearance of nature and a culture specific to a locality’ (2010: 94). Sheldon Lu suggests a play of words in which ‘chai-na (literally, the act of “tearing down”) is truly the proper name for contemporary “China”, as all Chinese cities have witnessed the destruction of old buildings and the construction of new structures’ (2007: 137). The motif of ruins has in fact been recurrent

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in contemporary Chinese cinema and visual arts, with studies ensuing in proportion (see, e.g., Lu 2007; Zhang 2009; Nie 2009; Liu 2009). In one sense, Jia’s interest in ruins not only places him within contemporary China’s geopolitical and artistic landscape but also harks back to the aesthetics of post-war neorealist cinema. Both Bazin and Deleuze have associated the idea of urban ‘desertification’, ‘horizontality’ and ‘stagnation’ to the birth of cinematic modernity in the post-war period. The ruins of Berlin, for instance, feature extensively in Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (Germania anno zero, Roberto Rossellini, 1947). Ruins were linked then not only to death and destruction, to stasis and the end of history, but also to the year zero that would restart the counters, prompting the resurgence of the new. As mentioned before, Jia Zhangke’s cinematic style has much to do with aesthetic resources related to cinematic realism typically employed in post-war European cinema (especially Italian neorealism). In Still Life, his exploration of a landscape of ruins brings him even closer to this aesthetic, as Lúcia Ramos Monteiro points out: ‘We can find in Still Life sequences of emblematic modern European films from directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini’ (Ramos Monteiro, 2015). Monteiro parallels frames from Germany Year Zero and Still Life in which characters are seen framed by broken walls, thus demonstrating how a neorealist aesthetic of ruins reappears in Jia’s film set in contemporary China. Despite the importance of neorealism to the aesthetics of Still Life, I believe that the European dichotomy classical-modern is perhaps of little use to an understanding of Jia Zhangke’s cinema. In fact, Lúcia Nagib’s contestation of this very dichotomy shows how the motif of ruins is hardly a guarantor of cinematic modernity: Given the recurrence of war in the history of humanity, however, there would be scope to investigate the combination of ruins and modernity before World War II. In fact, Johannes Von Moltke (2010, 396) finds ruins in the very origin of cinema, for example, in the film of the brothers Lumière entitled Demolition of a wall (Démolition d’un mur, 1895), which shows the destruction of a wall and its immediate reconstruction obtained with the simple trick of projecting the film backwards. (Nagib 2014: 17)

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If ruins are present in the very origin of cinema, the ruins of war appeared in Chinese photography and cinema earlier than they did in Europe for the simple fact that the Second World War started in China years before. A photograph such as ‘Bloody Saturday/血腥的星期六’ by H. S. Wong, for instance, where a little baby sits and cries amid a bombed-out railway station in Shanghai on 28 August 1937, reveals the ruins of China under increasing aggression from the Japanese invaders in the 1930s. Similarly, a film like The Big Road (大路 Dalu, Sun Yu, 1934) revolves around construction and destruction, starting with a little musical number where workers sledgehammer away to open the path to a new military road of strategic importance – in similar blows to those struck by the workers in the demolition of Fengjie in Still Life, and with pans across mountains being dynamited. Finally, the most important reference can be found in the architectural ruins of an old bourgeois residence in Fei Mu’s classic Spring in a Small Town (小城之春 Xiaocheng zhichun), from 1948, featuring as a symbol of the main couple’s failed relationship. The patriarch of the family, Liyan (Shi Yu), is first seen in the film sitting in the ruined garden of his residence, the camera advancing through a hole in the wall to reveal his frail figure taking the morning sun. The film also features prominently the ruins of the old city walls through which the main character and film’s narrator Zhou Yuwen (Wei Wei) takes her daily walk, and where she later meets her old fling. In this film, which is largely considered one of the finest ever made in China, and which has been another important reference to the work of Jia Zhangke, the story indeed unfolds among the ruins left by the devastating effects of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). But here these are also the ruins of old Republican China, soon to give way to the new People’s Republic of Mao Zedong. These references denote the complexity of the motif of ruins in Still Life, and to this I will add David Lei-wei Li’s insight relating to their contemporary specificity: Still Life explicitly recalls the memory of Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, but the film goes beyond representations of the ruins caused by natural phenomena or the destruction of world wars. The choice of showing the workers repeated hammering and the sound of their haunting echoes emphasizes, by means of image and sound, the impression that the scenes

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of ruins are nothing but the desolate chronicle of the incessant ‘process of creative destruction’, according to the classical definition of capitalism by Joseph Schumpeter. (Li 2008: 79)

It does seem fitting to evoke Schumpeter’s notion of ‘creative destruction’, formulated in 1942, in relation to Still Life. According to Schumpeter, creative destruction describes the ‘process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one’ (1994: 82–3). He believed this creative– destructive force to be endemically linked to the capitalist system, being eventually the force that would lead to its demise as a system. Still Life’s ruins have something of a creative–destructive force quite typical of China’s gradual embracing of a capitalist economic system, in its implementation of a ‘socialist market economy’. Interestingly, the oxymoron contained in this denomination relates to the very in-betweenness of Schumpeter’s term, pointing to the indistinctness between construction and destruction that defines the ruins of Still Life and of a whole country caught between destruction and creation, in what seems to be a perennial cycle of transformation. Within this landscape of creative destruction, the camera finds many other half-green walls that are quickly being torn down. In a scene that again quotes Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The Boys from Fengkuei, and that brings to mind Spring in a Small Town, the half-green wall itself is almost completely destroyed. This scene is in some ways anticipated by a shot of Shen Hong in what is possibly the skeleton of a building under construction (or perhaps ‘under destruction’), talking on a mobile phone with the view of the city stretching beyond her. Now, it is Sanming and his wife who stand by a hollowed wall, barely sustained by a derelict building, floating on air and opening towards the city. It is, like most of the walls seen in Still Life, a broken wall, fractured, precarious, soon to disappear completely like the building that is seen collapsing in the distance thanks to the use of computer-generated imagery. A  progression towards disappearance can be observed here, from Xiao Wu to The World and Still Life: in Fenyang, the guyao wall can still hold the indexical trace; in Beijing, a few years later, the hospital wall can hardly sustain the digital inscription; and in Fengjie the wall itself is no more (Figures 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3).14 And while indexical traces are in fact still seen in other walls of Fengjie, they are but the red traces marking the phases of the dam project, painted in various buildings

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Figure 2.1  Indexical memories on the brick wall (Xiao Wu).

Figure 2.2  Digital memories on the green wall (The World).

to show the expected water level and thus indicating not the persistence of a memory but its imminent destruction. Lastly, in Fengjie, collapsing walls also mean the end of life for Brother Mark, found by Sanming underneath a pile of bricks. His ‘death by burial’, unlike that of the coal miners, does not happen underground. And it is not, as in Erguniang’s case, a construction accident. It is an assassination that, quite literally, serves in the film to approximate the

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Figure 2.3  The intangible wall (Still Life).

force of 拆 chai – the destruction of walls and of memories – with violence and death.

Mnemonic walls, amnesiac walls In December 1978, two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, freedom of speech seemed to be blossoming in Beijing in the form of what became known as the ‘Democracy Wall’. People used the wall that appeared spontaneously in Xidan district, not far from the Forbidden City, to post everything from accusations of the extraordinary abuses of the Cultural Revolution, of government corruption and all other sorts of personal grievances. These were sometimes written in similar big-character posters that had served only a few years before to denounce those seen as detractors of the revolution. People crowded in front of the wall to avidly read the posters and letters: ‘Democracy is the fifth modernization!’, decreed Wei Jingsheng’s courageous response to Deng Xiaoping’s ‘The Four Modernizations’, but ‘Democracy Wall’ was not to last long: it was shut down in 1979 and Wei Jingsheng duly arrested. As the example of ‘Democracy Wall’ shows, vernacular walls can indeed be containers of memory, yet they are also easily destroyed. Their fragility symbolizes what Jean Ma saw as a paradox between contemporary Chinese

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cinema’s ‘obsession with memory’ and a ‘sense of profound loss as it contemplates a past always on the verge of slipping away beyond the grasp of a perspective that is barely able to discern it’ (Ma 2010: 11). As well as being a distinctive trace of contemporary Chinese cinemas and of Jia’s in particular, the search for memory can equally be seen as an exaggeration of one of cinema’s oldest vocations, as Giuliana Bruno explains: Cinema and memory have been linked since the inception of film history and theory. They are bonded in the very archaeology of the moving image and the spaces of its exhibition. In his 1916 pioneering study of cinema, Hugo Münsterberg introduced a model of theory that accounted for the intimate binding of film to affects and memory . . . . Film is a medium that can not only reflect but produce the layout of our mnemonic landscape. It is an agent of intersubjective and cultural memory. (Bruno 2007: 4)

The medium of film becomes in Jia Zhangke’s hands an architectural, geological and emotional exploration of spaces; it is interesting to see how, in the examples discussed above, he excavates architectural layers by allowing his cinema to interbreed with the structure of vernacular walls, be them from ancient courtyard dwellings, from the Communist era or those no longer there. His cinema, working as ‘an agent of intersubjective and cultural memory’, seems to search for the indexical trace that remains within these walls, or for the shadow of those that have already been erased. It does, in this sense, watch destruction to find out what remains of it, embarking on an architectural search for memory, this strange amalgamation of subjectivity and history.

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3

Pingyao’s city walls: On-location filming and the weight of history

The interbreeding of cinema and architecture in Jia Zhangke’s cinema is intimately linked to the changes that China has been facing in the past three decades. If, on the one hand, this means a path towards disappearance, as seen in Chapter 2, on the other hand, an opposite movement can be observed, signalling not only the preservation of a past but also the (re)construction of tradition. In this chapter, I will suggest that Jia Zhangke’s cinema’s relationship with architecture is multifaceted, offering a poignant insight not only into China’s destruction but also its preservation and construction of the past. In order to do so, I will first consider the significance of filming on location in the historically preserved city of Pingyao, situated near Jia’s hometown of Fenyang in Shanxi province. The main focus is the film Platform, where the splendid city walls suggest not only the immobility and entrapment experienced by a group of young artists during the 1980s but also the past and the weight of history, which is the ‘slow’ or ‘still’ counterpart to the fastness of the present. These city walls once again reappear in some of the most significant moments of A Touch of Sin and Mountains May Depart, which look at the present state of violence in China and its new landscape of globalization but never fail to invite the past into it, in the most material way possible. Finally, I will suggest that in both Mountains May Depart and The Hedonists, cinema witnesses and articulates not only permanence and impermanence but also the reconstruction/recreation of history and tradition. It does so by featuring newly constructed architectural structures that look old and historical, rising from the ruins of old buildings or sometimes from nothing at all, and showing how history is very much a matter of architectural fact and imagination in China today.

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Pingyao’s city walls Platform, released in 2000, is the second film in Jia Zhangke’s ‘Hometown Trilogy’, preceded by Xiao Wu and followed by Unknown Pleasures. It marks the start of the other two long-standing and crucial collaborations that make up the core of Jia Zhangke’s creative team, alongside Wang Hongwei and Hong Kongers Yu Lik-wai, Chow Keung and Li Kit-ming. The first refers to Japanese producer Shozo Ichiyama, who had previously worked with Hou Hsiao-hsien and who came on to produce Platform in the late 1990s, remaining to this day one of Jia’s main producers. The second refers to Zhao Tao, who was a dance teacher in Taiyuan when Platform began preproduction and who ended up playing one of the main characters in the film, subsequently acting in every one of Jia’s films. The pair married in 2011 and continues to work together. Named after an eponymous 1980s Chinese pop song, Platform follows the lives of four friends who are members of a state-performing troupe from the town of Fenyang. The film focuses on the gradual changes affecting the lives of these young artists, evident in the very nature of their performances. Starting as the Fenyang County Rural Cultural Work Team, delivering propaganda plays and songs in praise of Chairman Mao, they end up, after privatization, as the Shenzhen All-stars Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band, specializing in renditions of pop hits and sassy dance numbers. Jia thus chooses to look back and comment on a crucial decade of contemporary Chinese history through a sort of reduction, drawing a parallel between the country’s fate and the fate of the troupe, built from his own recollections of life in Fenyang before he moved to Beijing in the 1990s. Dedicated to the director’s father, Platform is not an autobiographical work, but is laden with autobiographical references, as Jia himself acknowledges: Platform takes place over the years between 1979 and 1989, a period when the greatest change and reform took place in China. That decade was also very important for my growing up. In China, we have a tendency to connect national fate with individual fortune, political condition and human situation. We experienced a great deal in the past ten years, during which much has been secularized from the loss of revolutionary ideal to the coming of the consumer age. (Jia 2000)

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The coming of the consumer age referenced by Jia is directly related to Deng Xiaoping’s implementation, from December 1978 onwards, of Zhou Enlai’s 1960s economic goals known as the Four Modernizations, which marked the beginning of the reform era in China through the emphasis on four areas:  agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology. This happened just over two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution with the downfall of the ‘Gang of Four’ and Chairman Mao’s death in 1976. In the 1980s, China gradually began to cultivate better relations with the rest of the world and to open its economy to foreign investment. Internally, it reversed the collectivization of agriculture, privatized much of the industry and allowed the emergence of private businesses. Coupled with economic reforms there was a relaxation of certain restrictions such as the need for official permission for domestic travel, which coincided with a significant expansion of the country’s rail network. Since then, China has become increasingly crowded with travellers, criss-crossing the country in search of new opportunities, returning home or going on holidays, an unprecedented phenomenon in the country’s modern history. Platform offers a poignant commentary about the beginning of China’s economic reforms by articulating the tension between mobility and immobility that permeates the lives of the young artists in Shanxi in the 1980s. In order to do so, the film relies heavily on its intermedial connection with architecture, to the point of electing as location the city of Pingyao, China’s best preserved historical city, now listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site for, among others, its impressive fourteenth-century city walls.1 In Platform, Pingyao stands in for neighbouring, less conserved and less attractive Fenyang. In fact, it was precisely the city walls that prompted Jia to film certain sequences in Pingyao rather than in Fenyang, for they compose a type of metaphorical configuration that is integral to the film’s style and narrative structure. This happens mostly in relation to the characters Cui Mingliang, played by Wang Hongwei, and Yin Ruijuan, played by Zhao Tao, who live an unfulfilled romance during the first part of the film, concretized in the film’s last shot where they are seen as a married couple with a baby. The walls of Pingyao serve as the stage for Cui and Yin’s secretive meetings during the snowed winter that dominates the first years of the decade, and, as Michael Berry (2009) points out, the immovable and traditional presence of the walls is linked to the impossibility of their relationship, strongly opposed by Yin Ruijuan’s authoritarian father.

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So what was exactly the appeal of Pingyao’s walls and how does Platform derive and communicate meaning from this essential intermedial connection with architecture? The city’s historical significance is almost inescapable, harking back to Neolithic times when the area where Pingyao now stands began to be populated. It exists as an urban settlement since the Western Zhou dynasty – when it already featured rammed-earth walls as fortifications built during the reign of King Xuan of Zhou (周宣王 Zhou Xuan Wang, who reigned from 827/25 to 782 BC). In 1370, during the reign of Hongwu Emperor (洪武), founder of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), the city grew considerably, gaining a new layout, new buildings and a new strategic importance. It was also in 1370 that Pingyao started fortifying its rammed-earth walls with black bricks, more resistant to gunpowder attacks. These are the walls that have been preserved to this day, stretching for six kilometres and featuring six enclosures for defence, 3000 battlements and 72 watchtowers along its length, which stand for Confucius’s original 3000 disciples and his seventy-two sages, that is, those who actually mastered his teachings. Today, it retains features from the Ming and Qing Dynasties spanning eight centuries. It is, therefore, an outstanding example of the historical evolution of a Chinese city in its cultural, social and religious aspects. Moreover, Pingyao was in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the banking centre of the country, and it retains buildings that account for its financial and economic history. The significance of Pingyao’s walls extends beyond the city’s own history to include a whole urban architectural style once prevalent in the majority of the cities across China. For walls are a mark of Han urban architecture since at least the Tang Dynasty, as Cai and Lu explain: During the Tang Dynasty, for the convenience of administration as well as to ensure public security, Lifang, an ‘enclosed-structure’ system was adopted for overseeing the cities, whereby residential streets and market areas were clearly segregated by the square-grid network of roads. Furthermore, every single street and market area had its own wall and gate, along with a gatekeeper, with the gates opening at dawn and shutting at night. The approach greatly inconvenienced people’s lives and also limited society’s economic progress. (Cai and Lu 2006: 4)

During the Song Dynasty (960–1279), this extensive system of walls and gates was relaxed, but the habit of building enclosed cities protected by walls and

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gates remained for centuries. Originally built with rocks and rammed earth and intersected by wooden gates and fences, city walls all over China were gradually layered with bricks, as the example of Pingyao shows, and after the Ming Dynasty brick-fortified walls were a common feature of cities across the country (Cai and Lu 2006:  21). Inside these walls, the system of courtyard dwelling, the siheyuan (四合院), prevailed in the north of the country and in certain parts of the central plains, the Shandong Peninsula and areas of the south (Shan 2010: 3), adding to the plethora of brick walls, enclosed features, symmetrical corridors and grids that make up China’s square-shaped, wallenclosed cities. Today, much of what remains of these historical structures and of the quadrangular city planning are the names of towns that often include the characters for ‘fort’, ‘barracks’ and ‘checkpoint’ (Hessler 2003: 9), as well as street names, gates to public parks, universities and other sites commonly designated by cardinal points. The significance of walls within China’s architectural history says much about the country’s overall mindset during the Ming and especially the Qing Dynasties when an increasing fear of invasion finally led the Empire to its demise. A  famous anecdote from 1793 reveals much about the country’s isolationist mentality. That year, a British envoy, Lord McCartney, arrived at the court of Emperor Qianlong hoping to open an embassy and to end the restrictive commercial system in place in Guangdong, opening new ports for trade. At that time, China accounted for one-third of the global GDP. Lord McCartney and his massive entourage of almost one hundred people bore gifts, but was met with Qianlong’s polite but direct refusal, in the form of an edict to King George III: ‘As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures’ (Gentzler 1977: 25). The British of course returned to China in 1830 with gunboats, and thus began what the latter sees as its descent into humiliation throughout the nineteenth century. China’s fortified walls, therefore, tell a long history of self-imposed isolation, of an effort to fortify and protect a massive country that for a long time did not see any advantages in global trade, maritime explorations and cultural exchange. Chinese cinema has established significant intermedial connections with city walls, most prominently in the previously mentioned Spring in a Small Town, in which broken walls become the stage for Zhou Yuwen and Zhang

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Zhichen (Li Wei)’s encounters. She is the unhappy wife, whose voice-over guides the narrative in Fei Mu’s classic, inhabiting a ruined residence with her husband, his young sister and an old servant. Every day she walks atop the ruins of the city wall, taking the long way home from her grocery shopping: ‘When I’m walking on the city wall’, she says, ‘it’s just like I’m floating out of this world. My eyes see nothing. My mind is empty’. To her, the life they lead is as ruined as the surrounding piles of rubble, and her depressed husband is in many ways – much like their house – beyond repair. The war left them ravaged, but when her old lover returns to visit she experiences a flicker of hope. One day, the whole family goes for a walk and ends up by the old walls. Zhang furtively holds Zhou’s hand when Liyan is distracted, their love reawakening amid the ruins. They later meet twice again by the ruined walls. Zhou leans against them and her voice-over says: ‘There is a feeling of helplessness atop this broken-down and hollowed-out old city wall.’ This is, after all, the place where their unfinished love affair could rekindle, but their encounters are filled with uncertainty, awkwardness and silence. They move around but avoid each other’s eyes, unable to see a way out. Platform alludes to Spring in a Small Town by setting Cui Mingliang and Yin Ruijuan’s encounters atop or by Pingyao’s city walls. However, the crucial difference is that in Fei Mu’s film the walls are the ruins of old China, while the choice of location in Platform, the unmovable, unchanging city of Pingyao, suggests permanence at a time when the country is changing at an unprecedented pace. Cui and Yin meet atop or by the wall on three occasions during the first part of the film, that is, before Yin leaves the travelling theatre company. In the first one, Cui climbs the wall and looks across into Yin’s house. She sees him from her window and sneaks out to meet him. Together, they climb down into a hidden corner to avoid Yin’s father’s watchful eyes  – he is, after all, a policeman, and strongly opposes their relationship. Within this enclosed space, against the enormity of the city wall and adorned by imposing brick arches, they awkwardly stand across each other, exchanging furtive looks and hesitant words (Figure  3.1). This is shown in an establishing shot and through a long take, with the two friends pacing around each other, engulfed by the architectural structure behind them. They gossip about their friends Zhong Ping (Yang Tianyi) and Zhang Jun’s (Liang Jingdong) romance; Cui complains about Yin’s father’s authoritarian attitude, ironically comparing him

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Figure 3.1  Cui Mingliang and Yin Ruijuan by Pingyao’s city wall (Platform).

to a KGB agent; and finally Yin says, provocatively, that her auntie will introduce her to a young dentist the next day, in an arranged marriage proposal. Cui dismisses this once again with ironies: ‘Oh nice, they arrange everything for you; a dentist, a college graduate, that’s great.’ Finally, a bonfire appears to grow from inside one of the arches, contrasting with the snowy ground and cueing in Yoshihiro Hanno’s melancholic leitmotif, used very sparsely and thus very effectively through the film.2 Not by chance, another bonfire cues in the same leitmotif later on in the film, as the theatre troupe, now already without Yin, camps out in the wilderness between shows. Here, it is the memory of her that rekindles the fire and the music, first connected in the long take by the city walls, when Cui begins to realize the impossibility of their love. The second sequence by the city wall happens some time later and during a relatively warmer season. Yin walks on top of the wall and Cui follows behind in his bicycle, until she turns a corner into an enclave formed by a watchtower. He rides past it but soon returns to talk to her. Their conversation is then conveyed in a beautifully choreographed long take of over three minutes, framing them in a middle shot, with the wall taking over almost the entirety of the background. A corner angle is used as a sort of stage curtain, with the

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actors/characters coming in and out of it while the camera sits still. In all his gaucheness, Cui asks Yin about the nature of their relationship. He seems hopeful, yet she remains unsure. In the final sequence by the wall, she will finally tell him that she does not think they are a good match. It is the summer, the sun is shining and the pair is back in the same place where they met in the first sequence, with the arches projecting a shadow over Cui’s and Yin’s figures. He is of course crushed by this rejection, and climbs up towards the top of the wall, retracing his steps from the first sequence when, at the height of winter, the two had climbed down together. This is again conveyed in a three-and-a-half minute long take, ending with Yin quietly calling to him and then walking towards the arches, standing alone by them, the frame opening up to a long shot. The sound of military training can be heard in the background, and finally, a loudspeaker announcement invites passengers to board on a coach. From these three sequences, it is possible to see that the city wall in Platform is poignantly used as the main stage for the encounters between Cui and Yin, ending in heartbreak for Cui. Yet, in a reversal of events, the last shot of the film reveals the two as a married couple living in Yin’s father’s house. She waits for the kettle to boil and nurses a child while he sleeps idly in the armchair. Cui’s youthful dream has turned into entrapment, and the sight of the city wall seen from the door is a reminder of their immobility, both physical and emotional. The significance of the trope of the wall in Platform, moreover, can be extended to include not only Cui and Yin’s entrapment but also that of their colleagues, who despite travelling around Shanxi and Inner Mongolia with the theatre troupe never really leave their hometown of Fenyang. Still bound by China’s Hukou (户口) system  – an ancient system of household registration that during the Maoist period was mainly enforced as a means to contain mass migration from the country to the city, and that is still in place today albeit in attenuated form – moving to another city permanently was but an intangible ambition. Ultimately, Platform’s insurmountable city walls, which as Michael Berry (2009:  80) observes stand ‘as the direct antithesis to the train motif that continually recurs and is alluded to in the film’s title’, signal the entrapment of a whole 1980s generation caught between reform (改革 gaige) and closure, opening up (开放 kaifang) and enclosure.

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But here it is crucial to once again ponder over Jia’s choice of location, which forcibly leads beyond the symbolism of the characters’ isolation, imprisonment and immobility. Although it has witnessed a sea of change throughout the centuries, Pingyao’s basic infrastructure of city walls, streets, dwellings, shops and temples is still in excellent condition. The spatial experience it provides, therefore, both physically and filmically, is unique for it constantly throws the film and its characters back into the past, imposing itself over an everchanging present. Not by chance, Jia Zhangke revisits this location in his films A Touch of Sin and Mountains May Depart, once again allowing his cinema to interbreed with architecture in order to create new layers of temporality and meaning. In A Touch of Sin, the character Da Hai (played by Jiang Wu) wanders around his mining village and Fenyang/Pingyao, with the sight of architectural structures behind or around him always signalling the presence of the past. In Jia Zhangke’s words, ‘In Jiang Wu’s [Da Hai] scenes, hundredyear-old buildings such as temples and walls were like stages not removed. Modern people play stories of ancient people’ (quoted in Kaufman and Serfaty 2014:  254). In one poignant establishing shot, for instance, Da Hai is seen walking along in the distance against the background of Pingyao’s city walls. The same shot with the exact same framing reappears in the film’s epilogue when the character Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao) relocates to Shanxi province to look for work after slaying a man in her native Hubei. She walks along the same path Da Hai once walked, with the city walls providing the stage for her plight, and suggesting that her story, so firmly located in contemporary China, resonates across past centuries. Similar instances of architectural intermediality occur in Mountains May Depart, in which the main character Tao (Zhao Tao) is also seen on a number of occasions against the backdrop of Pingyao’s city walls, and where the streets of the city are also used as a location for the characters’ wanderings in the first part of the film. The importance of this centuries-old structure is made even more evident when contrasted with the architectural and engineering structures of contemporary China, seen mainly in A Touch of Sin in the form of newly built airports, railway stations, motorways, saunas, clubs and factories. In the film’s closing episode, the factory dormitory where Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) lives stands in contrast with the Pingyao seen in the first episode, and soon to be revisited in the epilogue. The dorm – a precarious barracks-style building – is

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a place of impermanence, where Dongguan’s workers come and go, sleeping in rooms packed with bunks, leaving jobs without notice to float around Guangdong’s industrial cities in search of work. It is also a place where workers from all over China live in almost complete isolation from the townspeople, unable to communicate in Cantonese and thus creating their own unstable, transitory microcosm, as far as possible from the tradition and the immobility of their hometown’s walls.

An uncanny historicity The contrast between permanence and impermanence suggested by A Touch of Sin’s creative use of architectural structures should, however, be approached with caution, for the issue of historic preservation in China can be enormously complex. The case of the country’s most famous wall is paradigmatic in that sense. The Great Wall was constructed to ward off invading hordes from Mongolia and Central Asia, but it was unsuccessful in preventing Mongols under Kublai Khan of conquering much of China and establishing the Yuan dynasty in 1271. During the Ming Dynasty, construction of the Great Wall was revived and replaced rammed earth with bricks and stones, thus making it more permanent and effective as a defence barrier. Yet, as Peter Hessler (2003) explains, after the end of the great push in construction during the Ming Dynasty, the wall became largely neglected from the seventeenth century onwards, despite the exaggerated descriptions from European visitors to China throughout the centuries. It was only in the twentieth century that the idea of a unified Great Wall turned into a symbol of national pride: ‘Both Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong used the Wall to represent the nation, and in 1984 Deng Xiaoping commanded that patriotic Chinese should restore the structure. His proclamation became a well-known slogan:  “Let us love our China, let us restore our Great Wall” ’ (Hessler 2003: 29). Hessler, thus, accurately contends: The Great Wall has become a symbol for China, and yet it has been consistently misunderstood over the past century. In the popular consciousness, the Great Wall is a unified concept, but in fact northern China is criss-crossed by many different walls built by many different dynasties. It wasn’t until

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modern times, through a combination of foreign misconception and Chinese patriotism, that the ancient walls were symbolically linked by the use of a singular term. Many of the Great Wall’s supposed characteristics – that it is continuous, that the entire structure is over 2,000 years old, that it can be seen from the moon – are false. (Hessler 2003: 8)

I evoke China’s Great Wall here as an example of the country’s recent ambition to recreate history through architecture. In ‘China’s Memory Manipulators’, Ian Johnson (2016) comments on how, on the one hand, history in China has today been partially suppressed, existing only in old names of places, streets, squares and towns, while on the other hand History is not just suppressed:  it is also recreated to serve the present, appropriated to further overt ideological ends. In China, this has followed the CCP’s near self-destruction in the Cultural Revolution, which led to a desperate search for ideological legitimacy. At first, this was mainly economic, although already in the 1980s the Party encouraged veneration and respect for national symbols, such as the Great Wall. Yet following the June 4th Massacre [Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989], the Party began to promote itself more aggressively as the defender of Chinese culture and tradition. (Johnson 2016: 312)

What culture and tradition it is that the Chinese government has been trying to preserve seems to be a composite of both fact and imagination. This serves a historical narrative that is in great part both suppressed and recreated to fit in with the political requirements of a certain time. The ‘White Paper on China’s Peaceful Development’, published by The Information Office of the State Council in September 2011, reveals how this narrative unfolds to create an almost seamless path of five millennia, where ‘people of all ethnic groups in China, with diligence and wisdom, have created a splendid civilization and built a unified multi-ethnic country’ (2011). This was interrupted briefly by the so-called century of humiliation beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, which saw the country invaded by Western powers, transformed into a semicolonial and semi-feudal society, and become weak, poor and subjugated. The first attempt at reform came in 1911 with the proclamation of the Republic, but that was not enough to bring the country out of its misery. Finally, in 1949 the Communist Party of China lived up to the people’s expectation and founded the People’s Republic of China: ‘This marked the realization of

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China’s independence and liberation of its people and ushered in a new epoch in China’s history’ (2011). This new epoch, at first, meant an abrupt rupture with the past, a manifest disregard of all that existed before the New China, such as old traditions and customs. This obsession with building a new country under a new system came to its pinnacle with the first years of the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards took up the streets determined to oppose the ‘four olds’ (old customs, culture, habits and ideas), and frequently turning to violence in order to achieve their purposes. It is true that the isolated and feeble China of the 1960s and 1970s should not be seen as the complete opposite of the global power that it turned into after the 1990s (Kraus 2012). It is also true that older Party leaders such as Chairman Mao himself still enjoyed and cultivated some of the traditional Chinese arts and crafts, including opera, literature, poetry and calligraphy. However, it would be wrong to disregard how the government’s discourse on history has somewhat taken a new direction in recent decades, one more interested in the recovery of real and invented traditions that speak of continuity and progress. This in part explains the disarray caused by the broadcasting on China Central Television of the six-part television documentary series River Elegy (河殇 Heshang) in 1988, portraying what its creators saw as the decline of traditional Chinese culture. What seems to have accorded this series its impact was precisely its suggestion that this decline had not started in the nineteenth century due to outside forces disrupting China’s internal peace. Rather, the building of the Great Wall and Ming Dynasty’s abandonment of its maritime explorations explain how the country was so easily defeated by the modern European powers, paying a high price for a history of isolationism and backwardness. The series goes even further by taking China’s beloved Yellow River, known affectionately as ‘mother river’ (母亲河muqin he), the cradle of its civilization, as an analogy for its Confucian conservatism, and suggests that change must come from the sea, its blue waters washing away the sediments of the stagnated river. River Elegy was shown twice in 1988 and fomented a debate at different spheres of the country’s public life, especially among university academics and students, and government officials. It remains to this day symbolic of a certain moment in recent Chinese history, being in tune with student protests that had started to spark in Shanghai in the 1980s, and in many ways anticipating the unrests of 1989 up to Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing.

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That a television series with a particular view of history and a particular discourse should cause such controversy says much about how important the construction of history is to the Chinese government. In this respect, architecture has been playing a very important role since the era of reforms gained strength in the 1990s. Ian Johnson recalls being at university in Beijing in the 1980s and cycling around the city with his friends in search of historical and cultural monuments that they found in an old Swiss guidebook from the 1960s. He remembers particularly one trip to the Five-Pagoda Temple, built in the fifteenth century and partially destroyed in the conflicts of the turn of the nineteenth century. The 1960s guidebook assured them that the five pagodas were still standing, but they did not exist in the 1980s maps. When they finally located them all they saw was a pile of rubble, hiding behind the gates of a factory. Yet, says Johnson, ‘if you go back to the Five-Pagoda Temple today, you will find a completely renovated temple, not a brick or tile out of place. The factory has been torn down and replaced by a park, a wall, and a ticket booth’ (2016: 301–2). Similarly, in a visit to Datong in 2013, I witnessed the partially reconstructed city wall that contrasted deeply with the rest of the city, both inside and outside its perimeter. Once China’s coal capital and one of the most polluted cities in Shanxi, Datong now faces a declining economy with the end of the coal boom. Jia Zhangke shot In Public and Unknown Pleasures in the city before the start of the wall (re)construction by controversial Mayor Geng Yanbo, under whose orders over 140,000 households were demolished to make way for the new/old structures, aimed at turning Datong into a sort of Pingyao.3 In fact, brand new old-style walls, pagodas, temples, towers, streets and buildings are everywhere in China today, a country where reconstruction of faithful copies of an imagined Chinese past exists alongside architectural copies of European monuments and cities, just as piracy and fake IDs are integral to the country’s still huge informal economy. Johnson once again sums up this feeling of what I would call an ‘uncanny historicity’, born from within a historical and cultural tradition of five thousand years: Walking the streets of China’s cities, driving its country roads, and visiting its centres of attraction can be disorienting. On the one hand, we know this is a country where a rich civilisation existed for millennia, yet we are overwhelmed by a sense of rootlessness. China’s cities don’t look old. In many cities there exist cultural sites and tiny pockets of antiquity amid

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oceans of concrete. When we do meet the past in the form of an ancient temple or narrow alleyway, a bit of investigation shows much of it to have been recreated. (Johnson 2016: 301–2)

This disorienting feeling where the old, the reconstructed and the new co-inhabit and create pockets of uncanny historicity pervades some of the sequences of Jia Zhangke’s more recent films Mountains May Depart and The Hedonists. Here, his cinema once again relies on the interbreeding with architecture, but its use of architectural structures incorporates a new dimension, both incidentally and purposely, reflecting an experience that is unique to China today.

A leaning pagoda and an imperial village Mountains May Depart is set in three different periods of time and follows the lives of three childhood friends from Fenyang:  dancer Shen Tao, ambitious young entrepreneur Zhang and mineworker Liangzi. During the first part, set in the year 2000, Tao weighs up the attentions of the two friends and ends up marrying Zhang, to Liangzi’s distress. In 2014, Zhao and Zhang have divorced, and Zhang is living in Shanghai with their son Dollar. In the third part, set in the future in 2025, Dollar and his father have relocated to coastal Victoria in Australia (though the film was shot in Bunbury, Western Australia), and Fenyang is but a distant memory. In the film, each time period is carefully composed by Jia Zhangke and Yu Lik-wai to acquire a different format and image texture. The first part employs the 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio to match the traditional television, computer monitor and video frame size prevalent in the 1990s and in the cinema up to the 1950s. Here, Jia also incorporates documentary footage he had shot in the late 1990s in Fenyang with his first digital camera, matching in aspect ratio but differing in texture to those shot especially for the film. There is an air of youthfulness and hope in this first chapter, and the song that opens the film, The Pet Shop Boys’ version of Village People’s ‘Go West’, sets a brighter mood, followed by a shot of fireworks celebrating the New Year in 1999. In the second part, the frame widens to 1:85:1, the common widescreen format, bringing an impression of familiarity to the story now happening in the present. In

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the third part, the aspect ratio changes to 2:39:1, the anamorphic widescreen format, granting the image a certain strangeness in tune with its place in the future. The evolution of ratio and image quality corresponds to a degradation of the emotional ties between the characters, going from warm familiarity to cold distance. One of the main architectural features in the film, alongside the city of Pingyao and some of its imposing watchtowers, is a Wenfeng Pagoda in the city of Fenyang (汾阳文峰塔). The 13-storey pagoda dates back approximately 400 years and is the oldest brick pagoda in China. It was, however, severely damaged by an earthquake in the 1920s and remained so until 1998, when it was fully reconstructed. It is now leaning considerably and requires propping-up structures to keep it safe. Old-style buildings surround the pagoda to provide a more enjoyable touristic experience, and there is no accurate information about whether they existed at any time in the past 400  years, or if they are simply a recent addition. Mountains May Depart makes ample use of the background of this architectural complex, starting in the first part of the film when the three friends drive by it and sing a song about Fenyang that mentions the famed pagoda. A similar shot reappears later, only this time it is Tao alone in her moped who drives by the same road, and as she disappears on the right side of the frame the camera lingers on a group of young men who light a firework, always with the imposing pagoda in the background. In the second part of the film, Wenfeng Pagoda makes another appearance as Tao drives her son back home, following her dad’s funeral and a trip to the Yellow River. Finally, in the third part, the pagoda finds a parallel in the monolithic limestone structures in Victoria’s coastal road in Australia, and reappears in the film’s last shot, back in Fenyang, where Tao dances to the same tune that opened the film, the Pet Shop Boy’s ‘Go West’. She makes waves with her arms, an allusion to her own name Tao 涛 – big waves, dancing under the falling snow and the protection of the pagoda (Figure 3.2). The reiterated use of this historical monument in a film about loss and impermanence could be seen in a first instance to signify the precise opposite, that is, tradition and permanence. This would be in tune with the film-maker’s suggestions that the sight of Fenyang’s Wenfeng Pagoda always oozes a feeling of home for him (Yang and Jia 2015). This, as I have suggested in the first part of this chapter following Michael Berry (2009), is in great part the function

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Figure  3.2  Tao dances to the Pet Shop Boys with Wenfeng Pagoda in the distance (Mountains May Depart).

of Pingyao’s city walls in Platform, where their immobility contrasts with the changing present. However, the Wenfeng Pagoda of Jia’s hometown, more so than the city of Pingyao that also features in the film, could be seen in Mountains May Depart as a symbol of instability, a historical façade of sorts. At the beginning of the film, the town of Fenyang is getting ready for its New Year celebration. Lion dance performers are seen walking the streets, fireworks go off in every corner and Tao joins a group of amateur artists in a dressing room, getting ready for the big event. In the evening she is seen on stage, in a replica of her first appearance in Platform over a decade before, but now, rather than a song about Chairman Mao’s hometown, she sings a song about Fenyang to usher in the new century: ‘Our hometown is Fenyang/By Dragon’s Gate/Famed for our mountains/ and for our rivers/A purple haze rises/From Wenfeng pagoda/We step proudly/Into the new century’ (家住汾阳龙门地, 表里山河留美誉。文峰塔上升紫气,迈步走向新世纪。 ). This song is repeated soon after in the scene where the three friends take a ride in Zhang’s brand-new red VW Santana, driving past the pagoda. The film, however, will contradict whatever auspicious omens the purple mist4 rising from it could have brought to the three characters. This is, after all, a leaning pagoda, destroyed and rebuilt many times over, and it is as easily the sign of home as it is the sign of an absence of home, of memory and of history. The film’s title also speaks of instability and loss. It comes from the Chinese aphorism ‘It is possible to change mountains and rivers, but harder

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to change human nature’ (山河易改,本性难移 Shanhe yigai, benxing nanyi). If human nature does not change as easily as the landscape, how will it deal with the loss of reference and the loss of memory? Beyond China, I find an echo in Baudelaire’s Le Cygne/The Swan’s lamenting verse ‘the old Paris is no more (The form of a city changes faster, alas! than the heart of a mortal)’ (1964:  107).5 Writing at the time of the Second Empire (1852–1870) and faced with the radical changes promoted by the mayor of Paris Georges Haussmann, Baudelaire captured the very instability of urban space in his ‘Tableaux Parisiens’, traversing the city that was leaving behind its medieval past and stepping into modernity. Baudelaire contrasts the changing form of the city with the unchanging heart of the mortal, who suffers at the sight of change, unable to accept it as it wipes away memories and history. He could almost be evoking the Chinese aphorism, drawing attention once again to the spatial nature of memories. In contemporary China, mountains and rivers are indeed ‘departing’ everyday amid the country’s accelerated economic expansion. In his article on ‘China’s Instant Cities’, Peter Hessler wrote about the astonishment he found while spending time in Zhejiang province in the mid-2000s, at the height of its economic boom. He explains how, as a funding strategy, cities had been establishing factory zones by clearing out land and selling it at reduced rates, giving investors tax breaks. For instance, in Lishui, a city in Zhejiang, the new factory zone was able to attract 200 plants and 30,000 migrant workers in a short time: Lishui’s zone occupies what was previously rugged farmland. Director Wang told me that approximately one thousand peasants had been relocated, as well as exactly 108 separate mountains and hills. He said simply:  ‘We lowered the higher places and raised the lower places’. (Hessler 2007: 104, my emphasis)

Moving mountains took a lot of dynamite, and when the first factory of Boss Wang was opened in the area it was duly commemorated with the ignition of two boxes of fireworks (Hessler 2007: 104). In this same area, at least a year later, there was talk of expanding the factory zone. Boss Wang mentioned to Hessler that they would have to move more than 400 mountains and hills this time (2007: 117). They would need a lot of dynamite and fireworks.

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Dynamite and fireworks appear prominently in Mountains May Depart, a film about economic, social, language and identity change. In the first part, the three friends drive to a section of the Yellow River close to Fenyang during the Spring Festival. There, they set off fireworks from the frozen surface of the water, in celebration of the New Year. Lyotard (1986) famously associated cinema with fireworks in his 1973 essay ‘Acinema’, where he suggested that the pyrotechnic mode would hold the key to the renewal of cinema’s industrial modes. Following Adorno, who regarded fireworks as the prototype of the arts, Lyotard proposed an ‘acinema’, analogous to the experience produced by fireworks, capable of engendering a sterile form of fruition, unrelated to the production of something else, incapable of representing an idea, necessarily ephemeral and empty. Fireworks and other flying objects appear frequently in Jia Zhangke’s cinematic skies. These gestures are somewhat reminiscent of Antonioni’s The Night (La notte, 1961): I really like the meditative stroll in The Night. Leaving the book fair, the heroine roams the streets until she reaches the suburbs. Following her, we see all sorts of spaces. I  remember a particular scene that really touched me, in which she sees young people lighting up fireworks. When one of these fireworks went up, I  thought I  had seen surreal elements, even aeroplanes, spaceships. It was an intuitive sensation that revealed the secret of space. I understood then how space could contain emotions and precious information. (Jia quoted in Frodon and Salles 2014: 172–3)

There are echoes of The Night’s fireworks in Mountains May Depart, but such acinematic eruptions are also related to the Chinese habit of lighting fireworks as a traditional form of celebration. During the Spring Festival, for instance, people light fireworks all over the country for days on end, making an incessant noise that is supposed to scare away the monster Nian (年/year), who is afraid of noise and of the colour red. But despite this mythical purpose, the joy of lighting fireworks is in fact of the order of the non-productive, empty fruition. And they have something of the phantasmagorical, appearing and disappearing, with no regard to duration. Jia’s cinema is full of acinematic moments where what matters most is the ephemeral explosion in the sky, or perhaps a flying saucer and a strange rocket that cross the clouds from ‘out of the blue’. This,

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in fact, can also be associated with his cinema’s Bazinian impulse, for as Lúcia Nagib suggests, ‘Bazin’s realist proposal would, at least partially, resonate with [Lyotard’s acinema’s] anti-utilitarian stance’ (Nagib 2016: 137). Stretching this commentary a bit further, it could also be argued that Jia’s Bazinian credentials hark back to his childhood when he and his family derived great pleasure from sitting around the fire and, quite simply, watching the moving image.6 The at once acinematic and cinematic characteristic of this immemorial practice finds a way into his films’ love of fireworks, fire-eaters, chimney fires, as well as of strange objects that cross the sky, for they suggest a twinkling of jouissance, soon to fade away. In Mountains May Depart, jouissance is indeed ephemeral, and fireworks, which opened the film and reappeared in the celebrations by the three friends in the banks of the Yellow River, are appropriately replaced by dynamites. Tao and Zhang are now alone in the same section of the river and she finds in the boot of his car a load of dynamite sticks. Zhang confesses – to Tao’s astonishment – that he had intended to blow up his romantic rival, Liangzi. She then convinces him to get rid of the dynamite, and they lay it across the frozen river, lighting the fuse from a safe distance. The explosions break off the ice, and if before fireworks meant celebration, now dynamite suggests destruction and disappearance, significantly happening, of all places, in China’s ‘mother river’. Later on in the film, Tao talks to her son atop a bridge over the Yellow River and painfully says to him: ‘You are better off with your dad, stay with him in Shanghai, you can go to international school and then abroad. Your mama is of no use to you.’ She then looks away into the distance, Yoshihiro Hanno’s tune cues in and what follows are two 4:3 ratio shots of the explosions in the ice, accompanied by Tao’s final asseveration: ‘Nobody can stay with you forever, we are fated to part.’ The explosions hark back to Tao’s past and suggest the loss of the mother through the detonation of the ‘mother river’ – a river that today, in many of its sections, is plagued by deadly pollution, ill-conceived dams, consumed by multiple factories, cities and farms along its course and that, on some years, even fails to reach the sea. Therefore, together with the leaning pagoda, the explosions appear in the film a harbinger of separation, both of the couple, of a mother from her son, and of a whole country where mountains are departing. The new century did not bring prosperity or permanence, and the broken surface of the Yellow River,

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along with the reconstructed pagoda now threatened to collapse, is perhaps its most appropriate symbol. Finally, Jia seems to further and deliberately elaborate on the pagoda’s architectural comment by shooting his short The Hedonists in an area recently built in Fenyang, aimed at attracting tourists and where Jia himself opened a Mountains May Depart-themed restaurant in 2016 and an arts centre in 2018. This area of around 180 acres, inaugurated in early 2016, is called ‘Fenyang Jiajiazhuang Jiajie 汾阳贾家庄贾街’ and is made up of streets built in the traditional Ming and Qing Dynasties style, filled with shops, restaurants, theatres and art galleries. This provides the experience of stepping into the past, only this past is entirely built from scratch. In The Hedonists, three unemployed friends, played by ‘veterans’ Han Sanming, Liang Jingdong and Yuan Wenqian, roam around Fenyang trying to find a job. They finally do so in ‘Jiajiazhuang Jiajie’, the newly built old-style area in town, where they will be playing members of the imperial court, all dressed in traditional attire. The film wittingly pokes fun at the prevailing fakery of it all: when Liang points out that the colour of their imperial vestments is wrong he is scolded by his boss, who had previously warned them that ‘Jia’s Village Shanxi Folkland has cost many millions to build’, and therefore they should take their jobs seriously. The inaccurately dressed imperial court was seen earlier walking through the complex to the sound of traditional Chinese instruments, the image of Han Sanming wearing an orange vest, an elaborate helmet, thick make-up and with a cigarette dangling from his mouth being exemplary of the comical nature of their new job as Ming or Qing courtesans, or soldiers, or whatever they might be trying to represent (Figure  3.3). ‘I’ve never dreamt we could be in show business’, says Liang, and beautiful aerial shots of Jia Jiazhuang endorse the notion of an uncanny, money-making and made-up past. In The Hedonists’ architectural explorations, history has become show business. In conclusion, the three main films opened up for analysis in this chapter rely significantly on their interbreeding with historical architecture, be it the city walls of Pingyao, the Wenfeng Pagoda in Fenyang or Jia Jiazhuang’s oldstyle folk village. Ultimately, architecture plays a role in interweaving different temporal layers in Jia’s films, from the 1980s to the authentic Ming walls that still entrap Cui Mingliang and Yin Ruijuan, from the Ming Wenfeng Pagoda, now reconstructed but leaning dangerously over Tao, Zhang and Liangzi in

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Figure 3.3  History as show business in The Hedonists.

the 2000s, all the way to a complete Ming and/or Qing village, where three unemployed friends will join the show business of China’s economic reform. It is worth evoking here Stephanie Donald’s notion of an ‘idea of China’: ‘It is atemporal, in that it supposedly refers to a collective historical psyche founded on the concept of China as a necessary and consistent cultural entity over five thousand years, yet it is also demonstrably historically produced and reproduced’ (Donald 2014: 268). The at once atemporal and historical idea of China clarifies how the country can be changing fast while staying the same, clinging to a tradition that is also newly built. This dialectics of atemporality and historicity, of fact and imagination, of continuity and rupture, exists at the core of the architectural journeys articulated by Jia Zhangke’s cinematographic experiments. What he says about contemporary China and about the past is thus configured in these films via an instance of intermediality that lends a deeper, more complex and therefore more relevant contribution of both artistic and political dimension.

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4

Pop music’s sonic memories

The supplement ‘Culture & Idées’ from Le Monde, published on 29 September 2012, dedicated its cover story to the young Chinese writer, pilot and now filmmaker Han Han, under the suggestive title ‘Han Han: China and me – writer, race pilot, he is the most widely read blogger in the world. He embodies the new Chinese dream: self-fulfilment’ (Pedroletti 2012: 1). The article, motivated by the release of a collection of his texts in French (Blogs de Chine, 2012), traced a profile of the writer/pilot and described him as the incarnation of youth, independence and success. Han Han comes from Shanghai, the city that perhaps best symbolizes the growing internationalization of China and its economic expansion in the last three decades. His brief but accelerated trajectory into success has found him a place among those interviewed in Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew, a documentary composed by testimonies filled with personal memories and impressions that paint a portrait of the city from the 1930s to today.1 It is also not by chance that Han Han’s popularity in China in the new century – as well as his arrays into the world of racing – has turned him into the ideal publicity face for Japanese car brand Subaru, which has long stamped the first page of Han Han’s blog with the slogan ‘I follow my own way’ (我行我路 wo xin wo lu).2 Individuality and freedom are also behind the campaign for the Chinese Internet apparel brand Vancl, whose publicity video featured images of Han Han and the on-screen text: ‘I love surfing the web, I love freedom, I love thrill-seeking . . . I am no icon, nor am I a mouthpiece, I am Han Han, I only represent myself.’3 The paramount image of this video seems to be that of Han Han holding a banner with the big Chinese character 我 (wo – I) stamped on it. I chose to start this chapter with Han Han because I believe he is an excellent example of a complex phenomenon, not too easily defined, and that appears

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in connection with the period of historical, social and economic transition that China has been living through since the 1980s. In a country traditionally based on the primacy of collectivity, this phenomenon refers to a growing emphasis on the individual within the country’s social tapestry, something that could be described as ‘the emergence of the I’. The reiterated use of the first person singular and the character for ‘I’ in the article for Le Monde and in the publicity campaigns described above testifies to the very novelty of this phenomenon. In ‘The Rise of a “Me” Culture in Postsocialist China’, Sima and Pugsley shed some light on these changing currents: Born between 1978 and 2000, most members of China’s ‘Generation Y’ have come of age as computer technologies and the Internet have emerged. More affluent and better educated than their parents’ generation, with most growing up in only-child families (a result of stringent population controls), they consider individuality a highly sought-after quality. This focus on self has given rise to a ‘me culture’ (ziwo wenhua) that is firmly linked to mass entertainment and consumerism. In this decidedly postsocialist China, individual expression, achievement and pleasure have taken over the arguably ‘collective interest’ mentality that marked the older, Mao generation. (Sima and Pugsley 2010: 1)

Not by chance, Han Han also attributes the emergence of a ‘me culture’ to the one-child policy enforced in China from 1979 onwards – and only recently (from 2015 onwards) starting to be officially phased out. Here he defends himself against attacks from the older generation who find themselves at odds with a new sort of behaviour: To be self-oriented is actually not a bad thing, and many expressions of this focus on the self are a direct consequence of the one-child policy. I  don’t think that problems resulting from the births of so many only children can be blamed on the youngsters who just happened to be born under that program. (Han Han 2013: 1–2)

Jia Zhangke was, of course, born before the start of the one-child policy, but he has lived through the decade that saw the beginnings of this social change, the 1980s. He is, therefore, in some ways – as other members of his generation – able to stand in two different positions, and to see things from two different perspectives. This privileged position is perhaps one of the defining marks of

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his cinematographic authorship, emerging from a combination of objectivity and subjectivity, of hypermediacy and an original gaze towards reality. One of the main vehicles towards the awareness and development of this individual and authorial voice was of course cinema, which first entered Jia’s life through the video stores of Fenyang, where one could go watch VHS tapes in private booths, as seen, for instance, in Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures. He remembers watching myriad wuxia 武侠 – martial arts – pictures such as Jet Li’s first success The Shaolin Temple (Shao Lin Si, Chang Hsin-Yen, 1982), and later the films of King Hu and Chang Cheh.4 He claims to have become acquainted with Buddhism only through such films, and locates in this the reason for his primary interest in the natural world of plants and animals and in philosophical issues relating to ‘time’, such as life’s four phases as predicated by the Buddhist timeline, the question of fate and the mysteries of existence. This has become one of his authorial marks, made tangible in his penchant for filming inside the ponderous and contemplative space of a railway or coach station waiting room (sequences abound in almost all of his films), where different people watch time go by, meet loved ones, say goodbye, amble around or simply wait. Another highly influential video-store moment for Jia was watching the American film Breakin’ (Joel Silberg, 1984), a musical focusing on the then-trendy breakdance style. This is worth noting as it awakened in him an interest in hip-hop culture and in practising the breakdance. Through this, he ended up landing a slot on a regional tour of a local song-and-dance troupe. On this tour, where he performed the breakdance, he remembers crossing the Yellow River and venturing into Inner Mongolia, the province north of Shanxi and south of the border with Mongolia. Travelling and spending time with other artists had a definitive impact on the young Jia. He became gradually anxious to express himself artistically and says that during that time he used to write ten love poems a day. Furthermore, his time as an itinerant performer ignited in him a desire to be on the road, and itinerancy was to become another one of his authorial marks. When back in Fenyang, he enjoyed looking at the cars on the main road, perhaps imagining their destinations, and entertained the idea of becoming a train operator. During the 1980s, therefore, Jia’s experiences with films and music from Hong Kong, Taiwan and abroad, as well as his real travels and love for mobility and transport, were gradually shaping him into the cinematic auteur he was

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to become from the 1990s onwards. His artistic voice was coming out in the form of poems and novels, but these expressions were perhaps too solitary and subjective for his temperament. For Jia, objectivity was always to be a necessity, and this realist impulse is reflected in his camera shots, always kept at a relative distance from his characters in an effort to preserve perspective, with a very sparse use of close-ups. According to this early worldview he would probably say that his camera ‘shouldn’t lie’, and here I am echoing the book My Camera Doesn’t Lie, published in 2002 in China, and which bore the subtitle ‘a document of the avant-garde filmmakers born between 1961 and 1970’ (Cheng and Huang 2002).5

Authorship and hypermediacy Needless to say, Jia’s camera often ‘lies’, and the question is not at all how faithful or objective it is, can or should be, but how Jia’s authorial impulse contains in its core both the realist and the intermedial impulse mentioned from the beginning of this book. I have also been trying to locate the emergence of his authorial voice and investigate its nature by focusing on the historical moment between the collective excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the emergence of the ‘I’ or the rise of a ‘me’ culture in the new millennium. The other question that emerges from this speculation relates to the nature of authorship in China, and to the use I am making of the concept of the cinematographic auteur. This was of course proposed as a politique in 1950s France by the ‘Young Turks’ in the pages of the Cahiers du Cinéma, and has since then been much debated, defended or rebuffed. But the notion of auteur I evoke here is closer to the notion of subjectivity to which Jean Epstein already referred to in the 1920s, and not so much that which gave the politique its shocking appeal at the time: the wish to find the ego or the ‘I’ in the type of cinema that would seem to annul it, that is, Hollywood cinema (Bernadet 1994).6 At first glance, the transition to a more individualist society could lead to the reinforcement or to the very appearance of the concept and the value of the auteur in the Chinese cinema landscape, starting timidly during the fifth generation and more openly with the sixth. The rise of a ‘me’ culture in China indeed chimes quite well with Truffaut’s declaration in The Films in My Life

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that young film-makers should express themselves in the first person singular, and with his pun in La Nouvelle vague: 25 ans après (1983) ‘La Règle du je’ in lieu of (Renoir’s) La Règle du jeu – both je (I) and jeu (game) sounding the same in French (see Bernadet 1994).7 In this sense, Jia Zhangke could easily be described as an auteur, writing almost all of his film’s screenplays, working repeatedly with a similar cast and crew, and displaying a very distinctive style and thematic preoccupations that are indissociable from his own personal experiences. Not surprisingly, following the architects of the politique des auteurs Truffaut and Godard, and their quintessential auteur Hitchcock, Jia has often imprinted his authorial signature in the most material way possible, that is, through cameo appearances in his films, from a longer part in Xiao Shan Going Home to a discreet two-line part in Xiao Wu, and from the oddball opera singer intoning La Traviata in Unknown Pleasures to the seedy brothel customer in A Touch of Sin. Other direct references appear as inside jokes, such as the scene in Unknown Pleasures where Wang Hongwei tries to buy the pirated DVD of Xiao Wu and Platform from Bin Bin, enquiring also about some of Yu Lik-wai’s directorial features, and in a mention to Yu Lik-wai as a wanted criminal in a loudspeaker announcement in Platform. Yet, even if the notion of the auteur is important here, it is not an idea widely relevant to my analysis of Jia Zhangke’s cinema. While a discussion of authorship necessarily entails subjectivity and the expression of the self, it can also oversimplify and contradict what is essentially a collective art form. The importance of collaboration with some key individuals in Jia’s career is evident, so calling him an ‘auteur’ has to necessarily contemplate how whatever authorial marks he displays will still remain the product of a collective voice. Moreover, in a collectivist society such as the Chinese, one should always embrace the notion of authorship with caution. Perhaps it would be wise to suggest, following Caughie (1999), that authorship is more a practice than a theory, and as a practice, it is always essentially collective in the cinema.8 The other apparent complication to the notion of authorship in the context of this study is, of course, its espousal of cinema’s impurity and its search for the intermedial impulse within Jia Zhangke’s cinema. In his early but blunt opposition to literary adaptations, for instance, Truffaut’s politics of authorship seems to also oppose impurity, preferring to search for cinema’s specificity away from its promiscuity with the other arts. This nowadays seems

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rather anachronistic. It could be argued, as mentioned in the introduction, that cinema’s impure nature is not only largely accepted but also championed over any preoccupations with purity that might still exist. Moreover, as I will suggest in this chapter, not only does impurity not oppose Jia Zhangke’s auteur status but also it has become one of his most distinguishing authorial marks, with intermediality being an essential component of his cinematic style. And it is precisely within a world increasingly defined by the logic of hypermediacy – understood here, as explained in the introduction, as that which acknowledges multiple acts of representation and makes them visible – that the auteur finds his original voice. So, just as hypermediacy does not oppose immediacy, in the same way that realism and intermediality/impurity are not incompatible, the voice of the auteur does not exist in opposition to all the other voices and artistic regimes around it; rather, it becomes the space for a democratic encounter with them all. In this chapter, I  will focus on memory as an intermedial phenomenon emerging through Jia Zhangke’s cinema in the form of hypermediacy, with a special emphasis on the use of pop music in the films Platform, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. Examples of hypermediacy are the use of television broadcasts, extracts from other films, mobile phone, computer and tablet screens, karaoke pop videos, radio broadcasts and pop music, interwoven into the narrative of his films with varied effects, although never with the intention of distracting from the real. These are, in fact, in tandem with the growing experience of hypermediacy in our day, and can also be understood, as I have been trying to describe in the biographical notes included in this book, as an integral part of Jia’s experience of growing up in China in the 1980s, when gradually mediation and remediation found their way into people’s homes and lives. The memory of the 1980s and the experience of contemporaneity, therefore, are markedly hypermediatic, and this characteristic of the real is impregnated in the form and content of Jia Zhangke’s authorial oeuvre. In Platform, for instance, Jia attests to his affiliation to the cinema of Hou Hsiao-hsien, who frequently employed radio broadcasts in his films in order to situate them historically, by including radio/loudspeaker broadcasts announcing the posthumous rehabilitation of Liu Shaoqi and the 35th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which happened in 1980 and 1984, respectively. And, towards the end of the film,

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Cui Mingliang’s mum is seen watching Wang Husheng (Song Xue) tell Liu Huifang (Zhang Kaili) that he loves her, in an early episode of the very popular Chinese soap opera Yearnings (渴望 Ke Wang), thus leaving no doubt that the time of the action is 1990. In Xiao Wu, Jia includes news about Hong Kong’s handover, in this case happening there and then in 1997. Unknown Pleasures relies even more on a hypermediated structure, referring to both national and local events through television broadcasts – all of which had impacted Jia Zhangke deeply around that time. These include China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, Beijing’s successful bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics, the Hainan Island incident, issues relating to the crackdown on the spiritual practice Falun Gong (法轮功 falun gong), a factory explosion and a new motorway linking Datong to Beijing. And finally, in A Touch of Sin, itself inspired by real stories circulated through the Sina Weibo microblogging in recent years, there is a reference to the notorious Wenzhou train collision in 2011, shown in a video news report playing on a tablet. The mention of a sensitive issue is, of course, a direct provocation which certainly contributed to the film’s ban in China in 2013. Besides the inclusion of these and many other topical references in Jia Zhangke’s films, hypermediacy also manifests itself intertextually – a critical term employed here to refer specifically to the co-presence of two or more texts of the same media in the form of quotations or allusions (Genette 1982). This specific instance of hypermediacy is, in Jia’s case, quite often the expression of the director’s cinephilia, and reaches its peak with the 2010 documentary I Wish I  Knew, a film that approaches Shanghai’s twentieth-century history through its cinematic and cinephilic connections. Before that, though, intertextuality had already become a mark of Jia’s authorial input. The act of going to the cinema, for instance, is observed in Platform, where the friends go see the 1951 Indian comedy musical Awaara by Raj Kapoor, who plays the Chaplinesque vagabond in what was said to be Chairman Mao’s favourite film. The extract shown is that of Kapoor singing the hugely popular song ‘Awaara Hoon’ (‘I am a vagabond’). The film had been re-released in China in the late 1970s, during the first years of reform. It became hugely popular (Sarkar 2010: 51), with many people, including Jia Zhangke and his Fenyang friends, still able to sing its title song today. Another film that is mentioned through music in Platform is Little Flower (小花  Xiao hua, Zhang Zheng

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and Huang Jianzhong, 1979), whose opening tune can be heard over a striking establishing shot of the town’s main square and film theatre, where friends gather in bicycles and on foot in an image reminiscent of Hendrick Avercamp’s ‘Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters’ (c. 1608). Little Flower later reappears more prominently in 24 City, being watched on a television screen and with the presence of none other than Joan Chen, who starred and began her career with this propaganda film of experimental overtones. In 24 City, she plays the role of a factory worker being interviewed for a documentary, and who looked like Little Flower from the film, that is, like herself. Other films that appear intertextually in Jia’s cinema, be it in the form of extracts from ‘on-screen screens’ or in the soundtrack, include The Killer (喋血双雄 Diexue Shuangxiong, 1989) and A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色 Ying xiong ben se, 1986) by John Woo, heard and seen in Xiao Wu and Still Life, respectively; Exiled (放逐 Fong juk, 2008) by Johnnie To and Green Snake (青蛇 Ching se, 1993) by Tsui Hark, seen in A Touch of Sin; as well as a curious family planning propaganda video seen in Platform.9 Within this hypermediated world, the medium of pop music can be said to occupy pride of place, becoming within Jia’s cinema more than incidental or integrated occurrences, and thus rising to the status of intermedial gestures. One reason for this, as hinted at before, is the fact that Jia came of age in the 1980s: I was born in the 1970s, so I was in my formative years in the early 1980s when popular music really began to take root in China. I grew up with pop music. Popular music played an enormous role in the lives of people of my generation as we matured and came of age. At first it was all from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and only later did Western music start coming into China. One of the reasons popular music was so important was that before this, China really didn’t have any “popular culture” to speak of. The closest thing we had were revolutionary model operas and things made in that mould. (Jia quoted in Berry 2005: 190)

The centrality of pop music to Jia’s creative output is often explicit in his choice of film titles, both in Chinese and in English. The prime example of this would be the film Unknown Pleasures, which is the title of Joy Division’s first record, and whose original Chinese title, Ren Xiao Yao (任逍遙), comes from

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a song by Taiwanese singer Richie Jen. Platform is also the name of a popular song from the 1980s in China, other examples include the English title of his 2008 short 河上的爱情 Heshang de aiqing, Cry Me a River, taken from the 1953 American song by Arthur Hamilton recorded by Julie London in 1955, and the English title of his 2010 documentary feature 海上传奇 Hai shang chuan qi, I Wish I Knew, taken from the 1945 American song by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon, immortalized by Dick Haymes.10 Pop music is a feature in almost all of Jia’s films, starting with Xiao Shan Going Home (see Chapter 2) and gaining prominence in Xiao Wu. In his first feature, the four main songs heard are ‘Farewell My Concubine’ (霸王别姬 Ba wang bie ji) by Tu Hong Gang 屠洪纲, ‘Raining Heart’ (心雨 Xin yu) for KTV in the duet version by Yang Yuying 杨钰莹 and Mao Ning 毛宁, 爱江山更爱美人/Ai jiang shan geng ai mei ren by Lily Lee 李丽芬, ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ (爱江山更爱美人/ Ai jiang shan geng ai mei ren) by Lily Lee 李丽芬, and ‘Sky’ (天空 Tian kong) by Wang Fei 王菲, sung by the character Mei Mei. These songs were all 1990s hits, popular in KTVs around China, and were chosen precisely because they captured the spirit of those times. Another song that can be heard discreetly in the film, and that reappears conspicuously in 24 City, is ‘My Drunken Life’ (浅醉一生 Qian zui yi sheng) by Sally Yeh 叶倩文, the main theme from John Woo’s The Killer.11 Sally Yeh reappears in Jia’s cinematic landscape with her 1990 hit ‘Treasure’ (珍重 Zhen Zhong) in Mountains May Depart. The song provides an emotional link between the film’s three parts:  it captures Tao’s heart in 1999, leading her towards marrying Zhang; in 2014, she plays it to her son Dollar during their last train journey together; and in 2025, in Australia, it becomes a Proustian involuntary memory for Dollar when he hears it during his Chinese language class. The song is played in a CD player in the first part, in an iPod in the second part and, significantly, in a record player in the third, the fashionably nostalgic move appearing in conjunction with the song as a vestige of the past, still alive in the future and far away. While the desire to capture the spirit of a certain era and to activate memory can explain Jia’s use of pop music, it is also important to consider what happens when the qualities of a pop song are introduced in a film. The question here is, what are the medium-specific qualities of a pop song and how do they engage in an intermedial relationship with film? How does this effect a character’s

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relationship to memory and the film’s mode of address? Music and film are, of course, intertwined, and pop music has been employed very often by cinema since its inception in the mid-1950s. But to speak of intermediality requires the observation of at least two different phenomena. One refers to the lyrical or verbal/vocal quality of pop music, directly related also to its presentness. Generally speaking, a pop song creates its own narrative, it tells a story, and this quality evidences its roots in the English and American traditions of folk poetry and music. Therefore, when pop music is employed emphatically in a film, inevitably its musical narrative will become integrated into the film’s narrative, which means that the emotions, desires, intentions and references, as well as the historical context, in short, everything springing from the lyrical subject, will impose itself over the film’s own narrative. This combination will necessarily lead to a certain effect, be it complementary or dialectic, ironic, comic or tragic, but always significant. The second phenomena related to the intermedial use of pop music in film refers to the pop video quality of this insertion, that is, to how the musical rhythm, as well as its lyrics and melodic qualities, will affect the editing and the meaning of the images and sounds on the screen. So both strands, the memorial/ historical and the aesthetic/narrative, explain why pop music in the cinema, and specifically in Jia’s work, can be described as a privileged form of intermediality. As I will suggest, this crystallizes in a particularly poignant form in the Platform, where pop music is employed as a historical, memorial, narrative and aesthetic tool, able to create different journeys and passages across geographies, moving between the individual and the collective, and within oneself.

Outbound and inbound journeys, and a long and lonely platform Platform, unlike the rest of Jia’s work, is entirely situated in the past time, between 1979 and 1990, and casts a retrospective look at this crucial decade of the country’s recent history by articulating a number of intertextual and intermedial references. This results in a hypermediated filmic universe relating to both the director’s memories and those of his generation in the form of a collective memory. At the centre of this network of references are the various

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pop songs that punctuate the film, configuring something more than a series of incidental insertions, related as they are to the auteur’s subjectivity, as well as to a form of collective memory and filled with aesthetic, narrative and political implications. As mentioned previously, the theme of memory in Chinese cinema has given rise to important debates in theory and criticism in recent years. But if in a first moment the question of memory appears in the Chinese cinema of the fifth generation of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige through a reconnection with themes from the past and the discovery of the great landscapes in the country, in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution’s suppression of the past, in the cinema of the sixth generation (and beyond), memory tends to emerge as both a collective and personal experience, enunciated in the first person and fragmentary in its essence. As far as Jia Zhangke’s work is concerned, it would be fair to say that the relation between cinema and memory emerges as an authorial signature capable of creating bridges between the individual and the collective, between personal memory and historical experience, as well as being linked to a faith in the cinema as the most suitable form of art to record and articulate this encounter. If memory appears as one of the main impulses behind Platform, the numbers related to the film indicate how Jia Zhangke embarked on this memorial process unhurried:  the first cut of the film was over four hours, shortened to two-and-a-half in the final version. Platform is still the director’s longest film and had the longest production time, the shoot spanning more than a year to cover its four seasons. Finally, the dominant style of the film, structured upon a Bazinian aesthetic realism of the 35  mm long take, strengthens the impression of an inherent fidelity to duration. At the same time, this chronological, meteorological and phenomenological preoccupation with the passage or perception of time seems to be constantly challenged in Platform through the refusal of a linear and systemic development. The film, which relies on frequent temporal ellipses, resists the temptation to explain each event and instead embraces the fractures, the pieces that do not fit together, the details. Thus, the narrative contains loose ends, unexplained events, others just mentioned and not shown, a feature analogous to the unstable nature of personal memory. Xiao Jiwei extends this comment to include Jia Zhangke’s cinematic style as a whole:

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Memory, showing time in distended form, is best to convey the texture, rhythm, and psyche of everyday life – the reality of ordinary people which is at the core of Jia’s realism. As one sees in almost all of his films, the story unfolds not in a linear and logical development of events but in elliptical yet concentrated moments, not in well-structured plots but in lyrical depiction of details, not in spectacular acts of heroism but in awkward everyday crises and dilemmas. (Xiao 2011)

This anti-systemic impulse that permeates the film must also be seen as a political gesture. For, if the relaxation of cause and effect relationships appeared in Italian neorealism mainly as a counterpoint to the coherence and linear narrative of classical Hollywood cinema, thus marking a moment of fundamental inflection in the history of cinema parallel to the moment of historical transition at the end of the Second World War, in Platform a fluid narrative appears in opposition not only to the classical narrative but also to what could be called the ‘great communist narrative’. This is because the memory enunciated in the first person of the auteur inevitably complicates the official narrative promoted by the regime in its attempts to rewrite China’s history from the year zero of 1949, erasing the past and promoting a progressdriven timeline. With the emergence of mass consumption culture and the process of globalization, this ‘classical narrative’ is now disturbed by a higher notion of the existence of other spaces and temporal simultaneity, producing a new experience of time related to daily life and the contingent, and gradually causing a concussion and a fracture in the national narrative. As Jia Zhangke puts it, ‘remembering history is no longer the exclusive right (tequan) of the government. As an ordinary intellectual, I  firmly believe that our culture should be teeming with unofficial memories (minjian de jiyi)’ ‘(quoted in Yingjin Zhang 2010: 105). The issue of memory and time, so central to Platform, finds its main vehicle in the vast network of intermedial and intertextual references fostered by the director. The list of references is quite long and includes Chinese and American television series, Indian cinema, propaganda music, pop music from Taiwan and Hong Kong, radio plays, French novels, new fashions such as perms and flares, among many others that gravitate in and around the young performers’ everyday lives. At the heart of this network is the relationship between cinema and pop music, and this can be observed sharply in three

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sequences where the director incorporates pop music to present complex mnemonic journeys central to his characters’ lives. In the three sequences in question, the songs are conveyed through a crucial shifting positionality, that is, from the diegetic source (a cassette player, a radio, a car stereo) to the extra-diegetic (playing over the landscape or the city streets). The use of the diegetic and non-diegetic music works in the film as an aesthetic translation of the bridge between the individual and the collective memory, and thus pop music gains an even deeper significance in Platform through the editing. Ultimately, it shows how the cinema of Jia Zhangke leans on intermediality to explore changing notions of Chinese identity and history, and how it, in turn, bestows upon the seemingly banal medium of pop music new layers of significance. As mentioned in Chapter  3, Platform follows the comings and goings of a troupe of itinerant artists from Fenyang including friends Cui Mingliang, Zhang Jun, Yin Ruijuan and Zhong Ping. If at first the travels of the troupe seem to suggest freedom and a forward movement, it nevertheless paradoxically exacerbates an enormous sense of isolation. The artists, instead of being on a road with a certain destination, seem to actually move in circles, traversing vast empty spaces punctuated here and there by small villages, distant from the great cities and the coast, and which always take them back to Fenyang. The audacious Zhang Jun will be the first to break this isolation by visiting his aunt in distant Guangzhou, located in the south-east of the country north of Hong Kong. From there he sends a postcard to his friend Cui Mingliang, in which a photo of Guangzhou comes accompanied by the suggestive message proclaiming ‘The world outside is incredible!’ Later, Zhang Jun returns to Fenyang dressed in fashionable clothes and carrying a tape recorder with the new hits from Taiwan and Hong Kong brought from the big city. It is worth remembering that places like Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as the four Special Economic Zones – Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen – set up in the early 1980s in Southeast China on the Pearl River Delta to attract foreign investment and technology, functioned as an open door to the world. It is therefore significant that, after its privatization, the travelling troupe decided to rename itself the ‘Shenzhen Allstars’, lending the name of the largest of the Special Economic Zones as a symbol of novelty and the freshness of the maritime air, so far from Shanxi.

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The return of Zhang Jun to Fenyang functions as a first indication of the wave of transformations that will affect the lives of the young artists of the province. His orange blouse, sunglasses and flares make him stand out from other friends, whose garments still vary little from the ubiquitous Mao jackets of the 1960s and 1970s. Even more important is the presence of the cassette recorder, a device that became extremely popular during the 1980s and that is characterized by a personal and introverted mode of listening (see Huang 2012:  27).12 This feature becomes even more evident in counterpoint to the blatant use of loudspeakers in Chinese cities at least until the 1980s. Present in the streets, factories, dormitories and other public spaces, the speakers served to broadcast everything from official announcements from the Central People’s Broadcasting Station to propaganda songs extolling the wonders of Communist China and the radio callisthenics series. This mode of public listening provided by the loudspeaker, imposed on the population as a voice coming from a superior instance, finds in the cassette player its antithesis. The portability of the device and its ability to tune the radio and play tapes thus meant a freedom of choice, a personal and intimate listening that contrasted with the public and official imposition of the collective voice. Arriving in Fenyang full of news, Zhang Jun is greeted by his friend Mingliang, who jokingly points a shotgun at him and shouts ‘you foreign devil!’. Soon other troupe colleagues surround him, including his girlfriend Zhong Ping and the more timid Yin Ruijuan, barely containing the myriad questions about the trip and about the ‘world out there’. The cassette player draws special attention and finally someone presses ‘play’, giving rise to the diegetic use of a song brought by Zhang Jun directly from Guangzhou (Figure 4.1). The song is ‘Genghis Khan’ (成吉思汗 Cheng ji si hen), the Cantonese version by popular Hong Kong singer George Lam (林子祥 Lin zi xiang) for the song ‘Dschinghis Khan’ by the German group of the same name, which competed in the Eurovision Song Contest of 1979. This strange disco-era song, coming from Hong Kong via Germany to mainland China, permeates the next two scenes:  in the first, friends dance in a small room; some, such as Mingliang, rather clumsily, others, such as Yin Ruijuan, more timidly; in the next scene the song continues to be heard extra-diegetically, while the group fix shards of glass to protect the wall of a house. The song reappears later in the film in a night scene, in which an inebriated Zhang Jun

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Figure 4.1  Dancing to the tune of ‘Genghis Khan’ in Platform. Reproduced with kind permission from Jia Zhangke.

stacks bricks in front of a door after the end of his relationship with Zhong Ping, singing a jangling Mandarin version of ‘Genghis Khan’.13 There is no doubt that Jia Zhangke chose this song by George Lam – and not another hit of the times such as ‘Ali Baba’, for ­example  – aware of the implications of its title. ‘Genghis Khan’ is, after all, the dreaded thirteenthcentury Mongol emperor, still seen by many today in China as a barbarian invader. Therefore, when arriving at Fenyang, this time coming from the south on the tapes of Zhang Jun and in the voice of George Lam, ‘Genghis Khan’ is at the same time the novelty that begins to infiltrate the isolated universe of the town and, as Kin-yan Szeto points out, an ironic comment, since it fuels the dance of the young friends for the promise of freer days: The irony could not be sharper:  under Deng Xiaoping’s socioeconomic reforms, young people dance to freedom, empowerment and mobility in the name of a 13th-century Mongolian political and military conqueror! The

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song plays again. Zhang Jun drunkenly sings the song as Zhong Ping leaves the troupe and ends their romantic relationship. The song moves from irony to pathos, lamenting the failure and weakness of the film’s protagonists and their dreams. Through the experience of travelling from the rural to the urban – or from socialism to marketization and liberalism – the characters are liberated but also emotionally damaged. (Szeto 2009: 99–100)

It should also be noted that Genghis Khan’s grandson Kublai Khan took over his grandfather’s invasions by supplanting the walls that the Chinese Empire built for centuries to preserve its isolation. The trope of bricks and fortified walls appears in conjunction with the song that refers, not by chance, to the Khans who transposed them, just as China begins to open its borders to the rest of the world. Jia thus weaves a sophisticated commentary on the desire for individual freedom that emerges with the gradual violation of the economic and cultural ‘walls’ of his country in the 1980s. If ‘Genghis Khan’ is exemplary of what can be called an outbound journey, coming to Fenyang from Guangzhou and referring to a foreign invader, the Taiwanese pop songs of Teresa Teng (邓丽君 Deng Lijun) and Julie Su (苏芮 Su Rui) suggest the possibility of another type of journey. It is known that the exposure to romantic songs in mainland China after the end of the Cultural Revolution, especially those of Taiwan, had a great impact in the country because they represented a novelty of style in relation to the communist propaganda songs. Sheldon Lu explains:  ‘The soft, sentimental, private, and humane melodies found in popular culture struck a note that contrasted with the official language of revolution and class struggle’ (2001: 198). These songs came mainly through radio broadcasts, whose sound waves supplanted the distance between China and the ‘renegade province’ of Taiwan. So popular was Teresa Teng in the 1980s that a phrase was coined: 白天听老邓 晚上听小邓 (Deng Xiaoping by day, Teresa Teng by night)14

There are several moments in Platform when the young artists listen to Taiwanese radio shows, broadcasting hits by Teresa Teng such as ‘美酒加咖啡 Mei jiu jia kafei’  – or ‘good wine and coffee’. In addition to representing this important cross-sea connection between the two Chinas and the attractions of the outside world, the immense popularity of these songs was

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due to their innovative use of the first person enunciation, with the personal pronoun ‘I’ replacing ‘We’. As Jia Zhangke recalls: When I was a child we used to always sing ‘We Carry on Communism’ or ‘We are the New Generation of the 1980s’, both of which highlighted ‘we’ – the collective. But Teresa Teng’s songs were always about ‘me’ – the individual. Songs like ‘I Love You’ and ‘The Moon Represents My Heart’ were something completely new. So people of my generation were suddenly infected with this very personal individual world. (Jia quoted in Michael Berry 2009: 125)

This change in the musical world and mental landscape of the Chinese youth of the 1980s appears in a remarkable sequence in which the character Yin Ruijuan listens to a romantic song by Taiwanese singer Julie Su, entitled ‘是否 Shi fou’ – ‘Is It True’. Ruijuan had left the theatre group after its privatization, preferring to settle in Fenyang as a tax collector for the city hall. In this sequence, made up of three shots, she is first seen alone in her office, standing by her desk behind a row of metal files and listening to the radio. After a brief announcement, it begins to play Julie Su’s song ‘Shi fou’. Ruijuan continues to organize some papers on her desk and to water a potted plant on the window sill, as if unaware of the transmission. Then she slowly starts to rehearse dance movements, eventually letting herself be carried away by the music and indulging in the dance (Figure 4.2). This is shown in a long take of just over three minutes, followed by the song being played extra-diegetically over a dolly-out shot of Ruijuan driving her moped, and finally over a dolly-in shot of a lorry driving away, with Cui Mingliang sitting alone at the back. The sequence is choreographed and moves between different points of view, giving room for Ruijuan’s individuality to emerge through her dance, and uniting the star-crossed lovers in two dolly-in and dolly-out shots that bridge the diegetic and the extra-diegetic sound. Ultimately, it encapsulates, through cinema’s intermedial use of pop music, the tension between mobility and immobility, freedom and repression, the coast and the interior, old and new, and ultimately between the ‘We’ of communism and the ‘I’ of the new China. The voice of Julie Su sings about heartbreak – ‘Will I really leave you this time/Will I stop crying this time/How long will I struggle with loneliness/ And suppress the tears in my chest’ – and it comes from a portable radio, not a loudspeaker. More so than ‘Genghis Khan’, ‘Shi Fou’ appears as opposed to

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Figure 4.2  Dancing to ‘Shi fou’ in Platform. Reproduced with kind permission from Jia Zhangke.

songs like ‘The workers have strength – 咱们工人有力量 Zanmen gongren you liliang’, which plays over the loudspeakers in a scene early on in the film where Cui Mingliang and Zhang Jun try on their new flares – very impracticable trousers to work in, as Mingliang’s father points out. It would thus be fair to say that the presence of pop music gives rise not only to the emergence of new temporalities through an outbound journey, as in the case of the previous sequence, but also to the emergence of new subjectivities through an inbound journey. In this unique and memorable sequence, four ‘I’s emerge and converge: the ‘I’ of the song of Julie Su, the ‘I’ of Ruijuan, the ‘I’ of Cui Mingliang and finally the ‘I’ of the auteur, Jia Zhangke, who at that time was still filming without the Chinese government’s endorsement. The final sequence I wish to bring to this analysis, rather than journeying outbound or inbound, stays on the platform, waiting. It revolves around the 1980s Chinese hit ‘Platform’ (站台 Zhantai) – the song after which the film

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is titled. Sung by Liu Hong 刘鸿, ‘Platform’ was one of the first pop hits in mainland China, included in the album ‘Crazy 87’ (87狂热), regarded as a landmark of the country’s opening to the influences of foreign culture (it included various versions of international songs and only one original Chinese song, ‘Platform’). The lyrics of the song speak of a long and lonely wait: ‘The long platform, an endless waiting . . . on the lonely platform . . . my heart waits, always waiting.’ In Platform, the song appears when the members of the privatized ‘Shenzhen Allstars’ troupe see a train for the first time in a secluded and deserted region. Mingliang is sitting inside their small lorry and places a cassette in the stereo. He is wearing a pair of goggles and discreetly shakes his head to the tune of ‘Platform’, but is soon interrupted by shouts of ‘train, train’ from his colleagues. They all run off towards a long bridge that crosses the ravine, climbing up in hopes of catching sight of the train, with the song now playing extra-diegetically over the long shot of the landscape. Finally, they reach the top just as the train has finished crossing the bridge. They shout and wave at this sudden novelty (Figure 4.3). Train travel in China was indeed a great novelty in the 1980s. In fact, the country came late to railroading, and the earliest lines to be built, the first a demonstration one built by a British merchant in Beijing in 1864, and the second also laid by the British near Shanghai in 1876, failed to impress the Qing government and were completely dismantled. Always suspicious of all

Figure 4.3  Standing on the platform (Platform).

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things foreign and of technology, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the government began granting concessions to European powers and to the United States to lay railroads inland. When China was declared a republic in 1911, Sun Yat-sen envisioned railroad expansion, but due to increasing unrest, conflicts and later the war this was not achieved. After the Communist Revolution in 1949, railroading became once again a priority and the PRC invested quite heavily in its construction. Yet it was not until the 1980s that the lines began to be modernized and that train travel really became a common practice in the country. As Paul Theroux noticed during a monthlong train journey across China in 1988, the impact of rail travel in the country was manifold and long-lasting: The Chinese are delighted by this speedy food distribution, and they are consequently healthier. They visit their relatives more often, they carry on their businesses more profitably (buying clothes cheaply in Guangzhou  – Canton – and selling them in the free markets in the north), and they have become tourists themselves  – complete with sunglasses and cameras. The train represents a whole new way of living, and travelling is one of their most important freedoms. (Theroux 1988: 298)15

In Platform, the appearance of the train brings with it a whiff of freedom, speed and change to the friends from Fenyang. It is a passage that evokes the classic sequence in Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece Pather Panchali (1955), where Apu and his sister Durga run across a field to catch a glimpse of a train.16 The recurrent trope of the train in both films unites India and China in their common experience of modernity (see Mello 2014c: 349), and is a felicitous reminder of cinema’s ability to converge towards a ‘collective unconscious’. In that sense, the train also echoes the first cinema of the Lumière brothers, who in 1896 captured the paradigmatic image of movement, that of a train coming towards the camera, positioned on a platform (L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat). The train as a symbol of movement and speed also appears in all its might in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929), a film-symphony that starts with a city awakening by the passage of a train, seen from the point of view of the camera placed in a hole between two railway sleepers. The affinity between cinema and the train extends therefore to their modern origins, both appearing in the nineteenth century and being loaded

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with symbolic connotations that make them synonymous with modernity. As Giuliana Bruno explains, The word cinema, from the Greek term kinema, signifies both motion and emotion. Not by chance the origin of cinema corresponds to that of the train as a means of transportation. The train offered cinema a visual model:  landscapes flow before our eyes at fast speed, as we look at them through a rectangular window frame. Overtime, that rectangle has remained a constant. By putting before us framed images of virtual places and landscapes, cinema opens windows onto the world, and creates inside us, precisely as architecture does, mental and emotional maps. (quoted in Broggi 2005: 23–4)

Bruno creates an analogy between the movie screen and the train window based on their rectangular shape, which frames a moving image placed before a body that is both mobile and motionless. The image of the train in motion is then, in the final analysis, an instance of the ephemeral, of that which passes but does not remain, of fleeting time and the absence of certainties also typical of modern experience. Platform corroborates the affinities between the train and the cinema through multiple references that appear from its first shot, a black screen accompanied only by the sound of a train whistle. Then, standing on a dark stage, Yin Ruijuan announces the presentation of the 1970s propaganda piece ‘Train to Shaoshan’. But if at the beginning the train seemed to have a fixed destination – Shaoshan, the hometown of the great leader Mao Zedong – and a clearly revolutionary and propagandistic project, already in the second half of the 1980s it seems to follow the unknown, the unexpected, passing so quickly it barely leaves traces. In the sequence in question, the camera is placed on the platform and observes the group of friends that gradually arrives on the bridge, some still shouting and waving, others already out of breath. The music, muffled by the noise of the train, ends up giving way to the silence of waiting – no longer the homogeneous time of the nation, no longer the certainty of departure or arrival, only the expectation and the fluidity of memory. But it was from memory that Jia Zhangke was able to evoke and produce what appears to be the synthetic image of the film, of the Hometown Trilogy and perhaps of all the Chinese cinema of the sixth generation: off the train (towards Shaoshan?

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towards progress? towards the future?), standing on the long platform – the start or the end of a journey  – Cui Mingliang, Zhang Jun, Zhong Ping and their colleagues are waiting, aware that the transformations that have come to reshape their country do not necessarily entail the promise for freer days.

Free and easy wandering, two butterflies and a question of ringtones Pop music assumes a similar centrality in Jia Zhangke’s next feature film Unknown Pleasures, only this time it is not so much an expression of his memories but a wish to capture the spirit of the times, at the turn of the millennium. Appropriately, this will be Jia’s first feature film shot entirely in digital by Yu Lik-wai, following their first experience with the format in In Public, the documentary essay shot in Datong previous to Unknown Pleasures. Jia remembers buying his first digital camera in 2001 after shooting Platform (Codelli and Niogret 2003: 28), and some of the images he then recorded ended up in his most recent film Mountains May Depart, clearly distinguishable in their mini-DV graininess. Since then he has not returned to celluloid, and in fact has not mourned in any way the old format, embracing digital technology not as a replacement but in all its specificity: In the same way that in the past they accused photography of killing painting, they now accuse digital technology of killing cinema. . . . I regret this, because the digital seems to me very well suited for showing China today, a China that is going into a consumer society. The lights of the city are more luminous today, while landscape in the country is increasingly grey and dark. Between these two extremes, I think that the digital has a special place. (Jia 2004: 21)

Jia’s rapid adaptation to and creative use of the digital is of course greatly due to the work of Yu Lik-wai, one of the most important and talented digital directors of photography today, constantly experimenting and taking digital cinematography into new directions. On the one hand, they knew how to explore the digital’s ability to blend in with real life in ways that differed greatly from the cumbersome nature of 35 mm, thus incorporating immediacy and the

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exploration of challenging spaces such as crowded or tight rooms, oftentimes under inclement weather. What perhaps they realized soon enough – and the fact that his collaboration with Yu Lik-wai began in the second half of the 1990s, the start of the digital turn in China, certainly played a role in shaping their pioneering contribution – was that the digital was able to produce not only a more immediate, documentary-like image but also a more abstract one. In relation to Unknown Pleasures Jia says: Digital film also seems to bring a certain degree of abstractness when shooting in public spaces. This required some readjustment on my part because when I was first experimenting with digital video my impression was that the medium would bring a new life to public spaces, but in actuality the result was an abstract quality. (Jia quoted in Berry 2005: 200)

For the film, Yu Lik-wai was able to manipulate the camera’s resolution in order to create a quality of image that was not too clear or too defined as that produced by their digital HD camera’s normal settings. Aiming for a more expressionistic texture, he created a grainier image that seemed more in accordance with the environment the film was trying to capture, that is, the lives of unemployed youth living in the depressed city of Datong. Cécile Lagesse analyses the abstract quality of the digital in Jia’s work with a special emphasis on Still Life, where once again Yu Lik-wai was able to push the boundaries of digital photography. She quotes Bazin’s insightful contention that ‘on one hand the cinema allows us to see directly the essence of things by showing us their appearance and, on the other hand, by exhibiting this appearance as if it was a phenomenon never seen before, by stripping it of what our eyes, worn by habit and culture, had laid upon it’ to suggest that ‘the digital camera allows us to go even further in this direction’ (Lagesse 2008: 80). In this case, it could be said that Yu Lik-wai’s explorations of the digital image contribute to an understanding of cinema’s connection to the real that is akin to Bazin’s, that is, the production of an image that is both familiar and unfamiliar, both immediately readable and strangely uncanny. Unknown Pleasures’ uncanny nature stems to a great extent from its location, the prefecture-level city of Datong in northern Shanxi. Datong 大同 means Great Harmony, alluding to an ideal society, but the city of over

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2000 years, on two occasions the capital of the Empire,17 has been facing the dire environmental consequences of the coal industry, hitherto the basis of its economy. It also suffered from the construction of a new dam in neighbouring Inner Mongolia, which caused its river to run almost completely dry for most parts of the year. Known in the recent past as one of China’s most polluted cities, Datong has now been trying to revamp itself as a touristic destination, as mentioned in the previous chapter, aided by some impressive ancient structures in its vicinities, namely the Yungang Grottoes (云冈石窟460–494 AD), seen briefly in all their grandeur in Jia’s short Black Breakfast (2008), and the Hanging Monastery (悬空寺), built into a cliff and ‘hanging’ 246 feet above the ground in Hengshan Mountain since the late Nothern Wei (386–535 AD). This search for new directions has meant that the city is being transformed, the ‘old city’ becoming a tourist attraction and the ‘new city’ (outside the old/ new city walls) focusing on services and new, cleaner industries. At the time of filming, Datong was still a mishmash of new, old and ancient, revealing its scars from the declining coal industry alongside piles and piles of rubble from the incessant tearing down of its streets and walls, making way for the new (and the old). In the film, Zhao Tao, in her second collaboration with Jia, plays Qiao Qiao, a dancer who joins the publicity campaign for 蒙古王酒 Meng Gu Wang Jiu, or Mongolia King Liquor. She catches the attention of unemployed youngster Xiao Ji (Wu Qiong), who develops a romantic interest in her, thus attracting the ire of her boyfriend and ‘agent’ Qiao San (Li Zhubin), a sort of local gangster. Xiao Ji rides around in a motorcycle and hangs out with his best friend Bin Bin (Zhao Weiwei), who spends most of his time with his high school girlfriend Yuan Yuan (Zhou Qingfeng) in KTV rooms. His mum, a proponent of Falun Gong and factory worker, urges him to do something with his life, but once he decides to join the army he fails the test after being diagnosed with hepatitis. Towards the end of the film, the two friends  – inspired by Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) – plan to rob a bank with a fake explosives vest, but their plan is so amateurish that once Bin Bin announces the robbery no one takes him seriously. He ends up caught by the police and is taken handcuffed to the station, while Xiao Ji, who had been waiting outside the bank for the getaway, leaves in his motorcycle, riding through the

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yet-unfinished brand-new Datong-Beijing motorway, only to run out of petrol just before a heavy rain starts to fall. Unknown Pleasures focuses on a new generation that emerges in China after the enforcement of the one-child policy in 1979 and is directly related to the issues discussed in the first part of this chapter. If Platform opened a window into the 1980s generation, still not affected by the policy, in Unknown Pleasures the three main characters are decidedly single children, living solitary lives between a search for freedom and the aimlessness of youth. The film closes the ‘Hometown Trilogy’ and is the last one made by Jia without official approval by the censors.18 As mentioned before, the film’s hypermediated structure conveys the main events happening in 2001 through a series of television broadcasts in Bin Bin’s house, at the hairdressers or out on the streets, thus setting the film very much in the ‘here and now’. It also establishes a crucial intertextual dialogue with Pulp Fiction, one of the defining films of the 1990s and a watershed of an exaggerated mode of reflexivity, hypermediacy and irony that characterized that decade’s cinematographic output. Tarantino was of course influenced by Godard but took homage and pastiche to new levels, making what some consider to be the quintessential postmodern film. Unknown Pleasures consciously plays with its own references to a film that is in itself referential: Qiao Qiao wears a Mia Wallace-style (Uma Thurman) black wig, Xiao Wu – reappearing here as a small-time loan shark – buys a pirated copy of Tarantino’s film from Bin Bin, Xiao Ji tells Qiao Qiao about having watched an American film with a great robbery scene, and soon after they dance in the nightclub to a remix version of Pulp Fiction’s once omnipresent theme. But finally, in the disastrous and pathetic bank robbery attempt by the two lowlifes inspired by Tarantino’s film, Unknown Pleasures seems to laugh at its own inability or impossibility of ever adequately copying or being Pulp Fiction. The film’s use of pop music could also be related to Tarantino’s excellent command of this intermedial device, but as suggested this is also one of Jia Zhangke’s most distinguishing authorial traits. Unknown Pleasures – like Xiao Shan Going Home, Xiao Wu and Platform before it, features myriad pop songs including ‘The Mongol’ (蒙古人 Menggu ren) by Inner Mongolian singer Tengger; a remix version of the hit 赤裸裸 (Chiluoluo – Stark Naked) by Zheng Jun 郑钧, which plays in the nightclub scene; 家乡 (Jiaxiang – Hometown) by singer Han Hong (韩 红); and a karaoke rendition of 女人是老虎 (Nüren shi

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laohu – Women Are Tigers). Among all these, the most important song in the film is, of course, 任逍遥 Ren xiao yao, written by Johnny Chen (小虫) and interpreted by Taiwanese artist Richie Jen, which gives the film its title. This was one of the most popular hits of that time in China, frequently sung in KTVs all over the country. The lyrics speak of a hero who will not be discouraged by his humble origins, and who, regardless of life’s sufferings, will always strive to wander free. Significantly, the title of the song ‘Ren Xiao Yao’, which means ‘to wander free and easy’, echoes Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi’s (庄子 ca. 369–286 BC) first chapter of his masterwork of the same name, Zhuangzi, entitled ‘Free and Easy Wandering’ (逍遥游 Xiao Yao You). Zhuangzi employed the characters ‘逍遥 xiao yao’ to describe the ideal of freedom, as Lin Shuen-Fu explains: ‘ The title “Free and Easy Wandering” metaphorically expresses the idea of spiritual freedom, which is not only the central theme of the chapter, but also a major theme in the entire Zhuangzi’ (2004: 124). The Daoist thinker suggests that there is ‘a fantasy world named “Wuheyou zhi xiang” (无何有之乡) – which literally means “a village where there is nothing whatever”, . . . a perfect world in which one can do free and unrestricted (xiaoyao 逍遥) roaming or simply do nothing (wuwei 无为)’ (Lin 2004: 124). The song ‘Ren Xiao Yao’ is heard in the film on various occasions, and notably when sung by Bin Bin and Yuan Yuan in the KTV. This is where they usually go on dates, although they are never shown kissing or even properly hugging. Rather, they sit next to each other and mostly talk facing the television screen, sometimes singing together, sometimes watching a cartoon version of the Monkey King’s Journey to the West. This reinforces the symbolism contained in the Ren Xiao Yao–Xiao Yao You connection. The Monkey King, whose name is Sun Wukong, is one of China’s most important and well-known mythological figures, appearing in a number of legends since the Song Dynasty (960–1279). In the sixteenthcentury classic novel Journey to the West, he features as the main character, a monkey who was born from a stone and who developed supernatural powers through Daoist training. He rebels against Heaven and is trapped under a mountain by the Buddha. In the second part of the novel, Monkey accompanies the monk Xuanzang who, instructed by Guanyin, embarks on a journey to India – the West of the title, looking to retrieve Buddhist sutras and bring them back to the East – China.

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There is irony and at the same time sorrow in the intermedial references entwined inside the KTV room. Bin Bin enjoys watching the adventures of the Monkey King, and at one point he says to Yuan Yuan, who is worried about her politics exam and China’s entry into the WTO: ‘Look at Monkey, no parents, no control, all day he does as he pleases. He doesn’t give a damn about the WTO.’ He sings about wandering free from inside a small, dark and claustrophobic KTV room in Datong. His girlfriend is young and focused, and ends up leaving him to pursue her studies. Finally, the last sequence of the film confirms the ironic sorrow of Bin Bin, and by extension of Xiao Ji and Qiao Qiao, and echoes the ending of Xiao Wu. At the police station, a TV announces the opening of the new motorway that will bring prosperity to the region. Bin Bin stands handcuffed and finally acquiesces to the policeman’s request to sing a song, delivering a gloomy rendition of ‘Ren Xiao Yao’. One of Zhuangzi’s most famous passages, contained in the final part of the second chapter ‘齐物论 Qi wu lun’ or ‘The Adjustment of Controversies’, is that of the ‘Butterfly Dream’. It tells of Zhuang Zhou falling asleep and dreaming he was a butterfly and then waking up to find out that he did not know if it was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. In consonance with the title’s reference to the Zhuangzi, Unknown Pleasures also relies on the butterfly motif as an oblique intermedial reference charged with historicity and legendary echoes. This motif appears through Qiao Qiao, who at the beginning of the film wears a blouse with butterfly motifs, dancing to the sound of ‘Ren Xiao Yao’. She later wears a black top with a big orange butterfly sown into it. Finally, a direct reference to Zhuangzi is made when she goes into a hotel room with Xiao Ji. Leaning against a mirror, she slowly draws a butterfly on a piece of paper (Figure 4.4). She then asks Xiao Ji if he knows about Zhuangzi, and about ‘Xiao Yao You’. She proceeds to tell him that Zhuangzi meant that one should do and live as one wishes. He then asks her how she got her butterfly tattoo, to which she replies: ‘It just landed there on its own.’ In the next scene, Qiao Qiao is sitting on a bus, wearing a top that reveals her shoulder and the butterfly tattoo. Xiao Ji is then seen riding topless on his motorbike, with the butterfly picture drawn by Qiao Qiao stuck to his chest, in what seems to be a freshly made tattoo. He seals his affection for her in a way that echoes Xiao Wu and Xiao Yong’s complementary tattoos in Xiao Wu. But, just as the two friends’ tattoos

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Figure  4.4 The Butterfly Dream (Unknown Pleasures). Reproduced with kind permission from Jia Zhangke.

were hardly a guarantee of a lifelong friendship, the motif of the butterfly also contains something of the ephemeral: the butterfly is, after all, the last stage of an advanced insect’s life cycle, which goes from egg to larva to pupa before opening its wings. No adult butterfly lives longer than a year; in fact, most do not live longer than two weeks, while a few will not last more than two days. Hence, the butterfly that could be Zhuang Zhou can only wander free for a short time, doomed as it is for a hasty disappearance. Not by chance, butterflies recur in Still Life, coming in through the 2003 pop song ‘Two Scalewings’ (兩只蝴蝶 Liang zhi hudie) by Pang Long 庞龙, a romantic tune about two lovers flying together like butterflies and seeing the troubled world below them. Interestingly, this song also harks back to another of China’s famous tales from the past, the ‘Butterfly Lovers’ (梁山伯与祝英台Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai), which ends with ill-fated lovers Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai dying and turning into butterflies. In Still Life, Shen Hong travels to the Three Gorges to search for her estranged husband Guo Bing (Li Zhubing), who had himself ‘flown away’ three years before. The song ‘Two Scalewings’ first appears in the film in a diegetic rendition by a boy who is seen roaming the ruins of Fengjie and the barges

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of the Yangtze. In reality, Jia decided to incorporate him into the film as he always seemed to be hanging around the shoot, singing aloud to cast and crew. Jia asked him whether he could sing any Teresa Teng. He could not, but he knew all the hits of the moment by heart, and so he brought them into the film through his piercing and precise singing voice. These include ‘Mouse Loves Rice’ (老鼠愛大米 Laoshu ai dami) by Xiang Xiang (香香) and ‘Two Scalewings’, whose first part he sings aboard a river barge where Hong travels in search of her husband. This is then followed by a shot of Hong crossing a busy street in Yichang, the soundtrack then picking up from where the boy had stopped and laying the recorded version of the song extra-diegetically. Here, it is once again evident how the use of pop music attains a complex intermedial equation in Jia’s cinema, going from the individual to the collective by way of the editing between diegetic and extra-diegetic sources, capturing the spirit of the times through the use of popular songs from a particular year or era, and relating equally to the past through subtle irony and sorrow. Other songs appear in Still Life, among which ‘Moist Heart’ (潮濕的心 Chaoshi de xin) by Gan Ping (甘萍) and ‘Any Old Wine Bottles for Sale’ (酒干倘卖无 Jiugan tang maiwu), a 1980s Taiwanese pop song whose lyrics ‘no land, no home’ echo the feeling of the internal migrants working in demolition in Fengjie (Szeto 2009:  104). I  would, however, like to end this chapter with a comment on another sequence laden with hypermediacy and intermedial references, entwining two songs, two popular television shows, a film by John Woo, the wuxia genre and Bertolt Brecht. This is conveyed in a striking long take of Han Sanming and Brother Mark (Zhou Lin) sitting across each other at a quadrangular table in a modest restaurant. The shot opens with a slow pan to the right, moving from a small round table where a thermos, plates and utensils are placed, forming one of the film’s many ‘still lives’ (see Chapter 7). Mark is a sort of a local ruffian who fashions himself after Chow Yun-fat’s characters in John Woo’s films. His name indeed comes from Mark Lee in A Better Tomorrow, a film whose impressive credits sequence had been shown before on a television set in the guesthouse where Sanming lodges in Fengjie. There, Brother Mark had lit his cigarette with a flaming piece of paper, just as Mark Lee had done with a fake dollar bill in John Woo’s classic. Later, he was found by Sanming trapped inside a small zipper bag over a pile of rubble: ‘It’s every man for himself in the underworld’, he says. He uses the term

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jiang hu 江湖 to refer to this ‘underworld’, thus evoking the fictional milieu where wuxia 武侠 stories are set, a sort of alternative universe, coexisting with the historical one, and where criminals and heroes roam (see Chapter 6). The two friends eat peanuts and drink Baijiu (白酒), while the camera slowly dollies in. Sanming explains how he had travelled from Shanxi to Fengjie in search of his wife, whom he had ‘bought’ a few years back. He shows Mark her address, written – as Erguniang’s deathbed note in The World – in a piece of cigarette wrapping paper. Mark picks it up and notices how the cigarette brand – Mango – does not exist anymore. Not surprisingly, neither does her address, already submerged by the Three Gorges Dam. Mark then says to Sanming ‘you’re nostalgic’, followed by a line from John Woo’s The Killer: ‘Present-day society doesn’t suit us because we’re too nostalgic.’ Brother Mark in Still Life employs the term ‘society’ (社会 shehui), but in The Killer Ah Jong, played by Chow Yun-fat, significantly uses jianghu to refer to the world of triads in Hong Kong, thus sewing a relationship between the wuxia universe, the triads and the ruins of Fengjie. The new friends then decide to swap mobile numbers. Mark rings Sanming’s phone, and his ringtone plays the melody of one of the theme songs of the soap opera Yearnings, seen before in Platform as a sign of the new types of entertainment going into people’s homes in the 1990s in China. The soap spans two decades, from the Cultural Revolution years to the 1980s, chronicling the story of two families, the Wangs, more intellectual and rich, and the Lius, more traditional and hard-working. Yearnings was actually influenced by the structure of Brazilian soap opera Isaura the Slave Girl (Escrava Isaura, 1976), which was one of the first soaps to be shown on Chinese television in the 1980s, and which turned Brazilian actress Lucélia Santos into a star in the country (Wang and Singhal 1992). Yearnings played a year and a half after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and Lisa Rofel suggests that the key to understanding its reception ‘lies in the way it was suffused with reimagined possibilities of national identities, or what Benedict Anderson famously called “nation-ness”’ (2007: 33). This song from Yearnings heard through in Sanming’s ringtone is entitled ‘Bless the Good People’ (好人一生平安 Hao ren yi sheng pin an), and it was very popular across China in the early 1990s. Brother Mark laughs at how outdated it is in 2006. Moreover, he says, there are no good people in Fengjie. The reference here is, of course, the title of the film in Chinese, 三峡好人San

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xia hao ren, or ‘The Good People of the Three Gorges’, which in turn alludes to Brecht’s The Good People of Setzuan (1941). Setzuan is the old spelling of Sichuan, the province where Chongqing and Fengjie used to be located before Chongqing itself became a separate municipality. The old address for Sanming’s wife still says Sichuan, denoting how outdated it is. Following this, Brother Mark plays his ringtone back to Sanming with pride: it is the theme song from The Bund (上海滩 Shanghai Tang), another popular soap opera, this time from Hong Kong but focusing on the Shanghai Mafia in the 1920s. The song, performed by Frances Yip (叶丽仪Ye Linyi), became a great hit and is still quite well-known across the country. It talks about ‘flowing, pounding waters’ and ‘thousands of miles of river that run ceaselessly, washing away the world’s troubles’. Interestingly, this soap was shown in 1980, ten years before Yearnings, but is still considered by Brother Mark as being a lot more up-to-date. His mobile’s true tone certainly makes Sanming’s monophonic ringtone sound oldfashioned. The soap starred none other than Chow Yun-fat, who in Still Life travels from A Better Tomorrow on the television to The Killer in Mark’s quote, finally arriving in The Bund by way of his ringtone. This four-minute long take ends with a cut to the TV set, showing a news programme about people being forced out of their homes to give way to the dam. The song plays over the TV images diegetically, but soon becomes extra-diegetic in the mode of the other sequences analysed in this chapter. This comes with a cut to tracking shots of the actual Yangtze and its margins, taken from a moving boat. The margins, as many of the city’s walls, have traces – not of the height of friends growing up, as in Xiao Wu, but of the phases of the dam’s flooding, an index of their imminent disappearance, analogous to the character 拆 chai. The song plays on to the image of Sanming standing on a terrace overlooking the river, dressed in his underwear. The camera slowly approaches him, the song dies down and he notices a flying saucer appearing amid the clouds. It crosses the overcast sky, leaving Sanming behind and picking up on Hong, who also observes the UFO, now disappearing towards the other side of the city. This sequence once again attests to the complex temporalities and time zones at play between China, Hong Kong and Taiwan in Jia Zhangke’s use of pop music. In Platform, journeys between the three Chinas are traced and suggested through tape recorders and radio waves from Hong Kong and

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Taiwan, but the characters remain waiting on the platform. In Unknown Pleasures, the Monkey King and the butterflies dance to the sound of a Taiwanese hit song, but find little room to wander free in Datong. And in Still Life, Shanghai Tang becomes more up-to-date than Yearnings’ nostalgic evocation of the good people, absent from Fengjie’s jianghu. By interweaving a web of references and themes, Jia is once again able to demonstrate, through cinema’s unique intermedial and intertextual nature, how uneven and relative time can be in relation to space and politics. Moreover, by relying on the medium of pop music, he creates bridges between subjectivity and collective memory, personal stories and a sense of history. Hypermediacy in Jia Zhangke does not distract from the real; rather, as Pethő has observed in relation to our everyday experience (2009), it is a constituting part of this real, and thus becomes integral to Jia Zhangke’s original realism – a realism that is moved, in Oosterling’s terms, not by the ‘utopia of the Gesamtkunstwerk’, but by the ‘heterotopia of intermediality’ (2003: 38).

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5

Landscape painting, Chinese philosophy and the aesthetic innovation of Still Life

Jia Zhangke’s highly acclaimed Still Life is set in a vanishing cityscape against the backdrop of one of China’s most famous landscapes, the three gorges of the Yangtze River. It shares aesthetic qualities with the tradition of landscape painting (in Chinese 山水画 shanshuihua  – mountain water painting), mounted on hanging or hand scrolls. Connections between Still Life and Chinese landscape painting are manifold, and they can be fathomed from both an aesthetic and a political point of view. In this chapter, I will suggest that a look into this indirect form of intermedial practice leads to a reflection on cinema’s spatial organization in light of current revisions in film theory, which propose that filmic space and its spectatorial experience should be considered, above all, from the point of view of touch and movement. It also allows for film and philosophy to come together in Jia Zhangke’s poetics, since the principles of landscape painting bear a cultural bond with Daoist Philosophy and, to a lesser degree, Confucian Philosophy. These fundamental philosophical concepts found on the basis of the art of painting are related to cosmology, human destiny and the relationship between the human person and landscape. The chapter explores these connections and offers a fruitful parallel between Still Life and Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, the film that inspired Jia Zhangke to go into film-making while still an art student in Taiyuan, as observed in Chapter 2.1 Still Life is Jia Zhangke’s fifth feature film and his second made with the approval of the Chinese government. The film employs a subtle tableau structure, separated by the titles ‘Cigarettes 烟 yan’, ‘Liquor 酒 jiu’, ‘Tea 茶 cha’ and ‘Candy 糖 tang’ superimposed over the image. These items appear more or less throughout the whole film but gain a certain prominence in each of the

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corresponding parts, either retrospectively or prospectively. They represent common gifts in China, usually offered to relatives and friends over the New Year or in other special occasions in order to establish a good ‘关系 guanxi’, that is, a good relationship or connection – guanxi being a central concept in Chinese society whose cultural implications are difficult to translate. They are also commonly shared between people as a sign of friendship and goodwill, as in the practice of offering cigarettes to those around before lighting one up. In Still Life, cigarettes are exchanged quite often between the workers who are carrying on the demolition of Fengjie. Some are local but others have come from afar, attracted by work opportunities. This is obliquely the case of Sanming, who has gone to Fengjie to find his estranged wife, but who becomes a migrant worker for the duration of the film. He is first seen arriving in the city on board a powerboat in the Yangtze, sitting in the stern with his bag on his lap. Incidentally, this is the same Beijingmotif bag that reappears in Mountains May Depart, when a broken-hearted Liangzi  – another unwilling migrant worker from Shanxi  – leaves Fenyang to find work in the coal mines of Handan. In Sanming’s case, he leaves the coal mines of Fenyang and lands a job in demolition in Fengjie, while in the meantime trying to locate his wife. Upon arrival, he finds a lodge in a very modest inn called ‘Guest House of the Great Tang People’ (唐人阁客栈 Tang ren ge kezhan). As Yan Haiping points out, there is an irony implicit in the name of the inn, for it ‘suggests a dwelling that insists on its ancient history (since the Tang Dynasty) and claims to such a long history as it caters to travellers cognizant of their transitory state of being, just as its own imminent vanishing’ (2014: 214). Apart from the connotations surrounding the reference to the Tang Dynasty (618–907), a point to which I will return further on, the inn is indeed demolished towards the end of the film, and its occupants are set forcibly on the move once again. In the film’s penultimate sequence  – a long take of Sanming’s informal send-off – the transitory state of being of the migrant worker is openly acknowledged between gulps of baijiu and puffs on cigarettes. Sanming is moving back north and hopes to return to coal mining, his original occupation. His demolition friends ask him if there is any work in coal, and decide to go find him in Shanxi as soon as they are done in Fengjie. They are part of the floating generation, moving across the country governed by the whim of job opportunities.

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The setting for Still Life is Fengjie, a city of thousands of years located on the banks of the Yangtze River, now on the brink of being submerged. From the outset, it is evident that the film wished to reflect upon a disappearing cityscape and its displaced population. In the mid-2000s, the eyes of the country were indeed turned towards the Three Gorges, located in the central part of China. The reason was the construction of the Three Gorges Hydroelectric Dam (三峽大坝 Sanxia daba) on the Yangtze River. One of the greatest works of modern engineering, the dam was a dream of China’s leaders for decades, conceived originally to control the flooding in the Yangtze, the cause of many disasters and displacements for centuries. It was first proposed by the founder of the Chinese Republic Sun Yat-Sen and later prospected by Mao Zedong in the 1950s. Construction finally began in 1994 and was completed in 2012, inundating over 600 square kilometres of land  – including archaeological and historical sites  – and displacing over one million people. It is the most powerful dam ever built, standing 607 feet and stretching for more than a mile. The reservoir, in turn, is 370 miles long and operates a complex system of locks. The Three Gorges has surpassed the binational Brazil–Paraguay Itaipú, generating power equivalent to 18 nuclear plants, with 26 turbines. Needless to say, for all its might, not everyone in China was enthusiastic about it, least of all journalist Dai Qing, who openly opposed the project in her 1989 book Yangtze! Yangtze!, which cost her ten months in prison. One of the main reasons for opposing the project was, of course, related to the issue of evictions: at least one million people were forced out of their often ancestral homes during the process, and several burial places, which hold extreme importance in Chinese culture and religion, had to be moved or were lost. The other huge impact caused by the project was environmental. As Arthur Zich observes, drowned in the dam’s reservoir was the habitat for endangered animals like the Chinese river dolphin (Zich 1997: 9). Great stretches of fertile land were lost, and problems with sedimentation and sewage led to the killing of countless aquatic species. Finally, the number of relics in an estimated 8,000 unexcavated archaeological sites lost to the dam has proven incalculable: In 1997, Li Liang  – Director of Sichuan Work Station, Cultural Relics Preservation Team, National Cultural Relics Bureau  – and his team had discovered 1,208 historical sites that faced certain inundation, among which

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where Ming temples, stone carving from the Han dynasty, more than thirty stone-age sites 30,000 to 50,000 years old, amongst others. (Zich 1997: 21)

In Still Life, Wang Dongming (played by Wang Hongwei) is an archaeologist working on a dig in Fengjie, a city that was an important Communist base in the 1940s but whose history goes back at least 4,000 years, having belonged to the ancient Ba state, conquered by the Qin in 316 BC. When Shen Hong asks Dongming ‘what are you digging for’, he replies ‘we just found some artefacts from the Western Han Dynasty’. The Han (汉朝 Han Chao – 206 BC–9 AD) is the second dynastic period in Chinese history, and its importance can be gauged from its name, Han 汉, until today used to designate the Chinese people (汉族 han zu) and the Chinese characters (汉字 han zi). The Yangtze basin is indeed seen as the other of China’s birthplaces alongside the Yellow River, and its historical and archaeological significance could not be overstated. In Still Life, however, the gestures employed by those working in the archaeological dig sometimes mirror those of the demolition crews, despite serving the opposite purposes of unearthing and annihilating the past. Seen from a distance, their rhythmic and graphic similarities are a strange indication of the futility of their work in the face of the enormity of the surrounding destruction.

Mountains and water The notoriety of the project and of its overstretching impact on the region was equally related to the fact that the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River (三峡 San xia) make up one of China’s most iconic landscapes. The first of the three – and also the narrowest and shortest – is Qutang Gorge (瞿塘峽 Qutang xia), which stretches for five miles and whose entering point is known as Kuimen Gate (夔門 Kuimen). The other two gorges are known as Wuxia (巫峡, 25 miles long) and Xilingxia (西陵峡, 47 miles long). Qutang is considered the most beautiful of the Yangtze gorges, and its combination of striking canyons, high mountains and green water has earned it a place on the 10 RMB banknote – a point to which I will return in the final part of the chapter. Qutang Gorge and Kuimen have also become integral to the country’s cultural and collective memory thanks to their recurrent presence in classical poems and paintings

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from the Tang, Song and Yuan Dynasties. Prominently, Tang poet Li Bai (李白701–762) found inspiration in the dramatic scenery of Qutang Gorge, immortalizing it in his verses. His classic poem ‘Trip to Jiangling’ is quoted in Still Life inside a tour boat leaving Fengjie to Shanghai, as it passes through Kuimen: 早发白帝城 朝辞白帝彩云间 千里江陵一日还 两岸猿声啼不住 轻舟已过万重山。 Trip to Jiangling (Translated by Qiu Xiaolong) I left the city of the White King in the morning, in the midst of the colourful clouds, sailing thousands of miles to Jiangling, all in a day’s trip, the monkeys crying non-stop along both banks, and the light boat speeding through mountains. (Qiu 2009: 69)

The poem refers to the crossing of the Three Gorges, leaving from the village of Bai Di (White Emperor City), located very close to Fengjie up on a hill on the northern shore of the Yangtze. Bai Di is famous for its poetry, having inspired some of China’s most celebrated poets, including not only Li Bai but also his contemporary Du Fu (杜甫, 712–770), who resided in Bai Di for a few years. Today, it sits on an island formed by the rising water level. Most of its old temples have been submerged, while a few were moved up the hill and preserved. As well as Bai Di, most of Qutang’s other historical sites, which existed along the riverbanks, have also been submerged. The iconicity of the Three Gorges landscape has to be understood in light of its main constituting elements, that is, the Mountain and the Water. In the

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Chinese language, the expression ‘Mountain-Water’ (山水) means, by way of a synecdoche, ‘landscape’. Landscape painting is thus known as Mountain-Water painting, that is, shanshuihua (山水画). As Wing-Tsit Chan has observed, ‘landscape is the crowning art of China in which the fundamental principles of art are embraced and the greatest artistic talents have been immortalized’ (1967: 23). The earliest examples of shanshuihua are found in the Han period (202 BC–220), but it was not until the Tang Dynasty (618–907) that it became an independent genre. It was also during the Tang that the scroll format was fully embraced, either vertically or horizontally, and in detriment of wall painting. Finally, during the Northern Song (960–1127) and in the realm of court art, landscape painting came to occupy a higher position, thanks especially to the masterful work of Guo Xi (郭熙, c. 1000–c. 1087) (see Clunas 2009: 48–55). Confucianism and Daoism provided the philosophical basis for landscape painting, even though their approaches to nature were not exactly the same. As François Cheng (1991) explains, mountains and water constitute to the Chinese the two poles of nature. According to the Daoist tradition, the female Yin is identified with the fluid receptivity of water, and the male Yang is identified with the mountains and the hardness of stone, among other elements. In addition, according to the Confucian tradition, these two poles correspond to the two poles of human sensibility, the heart (mountain) and the spirit (water). From this, it is possible to infer that to paint a landscape is also to paint the portrait of the human spirit. Mountain and Water are thus more than terms of comparison or simple metaphors, for they incarnate the fundamental laws of the macrocosmic universe and its organic links with the human microcosm (see Cheng 1991: 92–3). The essential connection between human sensibility and the landscape in the shanshuihua tradition lies at the core of the influential essays on art by eighth-century poet-painter Wang Wei (王维, 699–759), as Cai Zong-qi explains: In his famous essay, ‘Xu Hua’ 叙画 (Discussion of Painting), Wang Wei presents a theory of landscape painting that corresponds to the practice of the shanshui poets. He stresses a genuine appreciation of landscape and explores the dynamic interaction between landscape and the mind/heart within the xuanxue cosmological framework  . . . . Wang Wei admirably

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demonstrated the complex pattern of interaction between wu and ‘you 有’, landscape and the mind/heart, in the process of contemplating landscape. Born of such intense contemplation, Wang believes, a landscape painting can not only achieve the likeness of nature’s outer forms, but also reveal the numinous spirit (ling 灵) or the innermost spirit of nature. (Cai 2004: 11)

Cai Zong-qi refers here to what is known as ‘landscape poetry’ or shanshui shi (山水诗), a poetic tradition that appeared during the period of the Six Dynasties (220–589 AD). in opposition to a more metaphysical poetry (玄言诗 xuanyan shi or ‘poetry of metaphysical words’). This shift, which was very much in tune with the new aesthetic debates of the time, confirms the centrality of landscape painting in China and its enduring influence on other artistic manifestations such as poetry and garden architecture. Its central principle, as Wang Wei’s essay confirms, is a belief in the essential exchanges at play between the exterior and the interior landscapes, that is, between the natural world and human nature. And the laws governing both macroand microcosmic universes are based on the principle of complementary opposition, expressed in Daoism by the Yin and Yang dynamic forces. Still Life’s intimations of the art of painting – apart from those explicit in its English title (to be further explored in Chapter 7) – can indeed be found in the origins of the project. Jia first went to Fengjie to shoot the documentary Dong (东, 2006), dedicated to the work of his friend, collaborator and renowned painter Liu Xiaodong. This is now a sort of companion piece to Still Life, but in its own right a truly intermedial film, where Liu – one of the main exponents of the so-called Chinese New Realism of the 1990s – is observed composing two large-scale collective portraits, the first of migrant workers in Fengjie and the second of a group of women in Bangkok, Thailand. While his distinctive style is indebted to the Socialist Realism of twentieth-century Chinese arts – via the USSR, Liu is very much conscious of the landscape painting tradition that weighs upon him by the banks of the Yangtze. And it was as if observing his friend paint that Jia Zhangke – alongside Yu Lik-wai – was able to perfect a unique filming style in Still Life, embedded in pictorial traditions and in history. As well as having an intermedial film in its origin, it should be noted how Still Life was spontaneously conceived, as Xiao Wu before it, from the encounter of the film-maker with the location. Arriving at the region to shoot

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Dong, Jia was taken aback by the iconicity of the landscape, and by the chaotic nature of the cityscape: When you approach the town of Fengjie by boat, it’s like taking a trip back to ancient China. The landscapes have been written about and painted so much that they really do seem to have come out of a Tang Dynasty poem. As soon as the boat docks, though, you’re thrust back into the modern world. It’s extremely chaotic. (Jia 2008: 7)

It is easy to see how Fengjie and the Three Gorges of the Yangtze functioned as a source of inspiration to Jia, providing the film with its sophisticated superimposition of temporalities. The region was, after all, both a reflection and a symptom of the new China that emerged from the ashes of the Cultural Revolution, as well as the concretization of both a Republican and a communist dream, and a site of cultural heritage, thus encapsulating not only the dreams and aspirations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries but also two millennia of Chinese art history, at the centre of which is landscape painting (Figures 5.1 and 5.2).

Cinema, painting, space The affinity between cinema and painting stretches back to the very origins of the new art. Ismail Xavier (2007), among others, has noted how the cinema

Figure 5.1  An immortal landscape (Still Life).

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Figure 5.2  An ephemeral cityscape (Still Life).

was indeed in tune with the artistic concerns of the end of the nineteenth century, which, in his words, ‘sought a connection with an unstable world, with the fugacious occurrences found in nature or in modern urban life’ (Xavier 2007). The Impressionist Movement became emblematic of modernity and its aspirations by electing light and air as pictorial objects, trying to grasp the instant and to make it visible, something that cinema somehow accomplished. In L’oeil interminable:  cinéma et peinture (1989), Jacques Aumont borrows from the dialogue in La Chinoise (1967) the title to one of his chapters, ‘Lumière, “le dernier peintre impressionniste” ’ (‘Lumière, “the last of the impressionist painters” ’), thus corroborating the affinity proposed by JeanLuc Godard between early cinema and painting. Departing from what could almost be described as an ontological bond, a vast field of possible connections between cinema and painting opens up, ranging from more theoretical studies of intermediality to more specific analysis of direct interactions, such as those observed during the avant-garde movements, and more recently focusing on how the digital pixilated image transforms the cinema into a subgenre of painting. For the purpose of this analysis, my aim will be to first draw a parallel between cinema and Chinese landscape painting before investigating the nature of Still Life’s intermedial configuration. The understanding of cinematic space that allows for this configuration derives from a reassessment of the theory of the cinematographic apparatus (Baudry

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1986) and the notion of spectatorship as analogous to the regression to the mirror stage as defined by Lacan (Metz 1982), proposed in the 1960s and 1970s by structuralist, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theories. In the early 1990s, Steven Shaviro (1993) put forward a radical criticism of this model and brought to the fore the active and corporeal elements of the cinematographic experience. His revision was undoubtedly influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze who, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2 (1987) with Félix Guattari, and in his study of the work of painter Francis Bacon (2005), evidenced the tactile function inherent to vision. This tactile function became known as haptic, a word of Greek origin that designates any form of communication involving touch. It was first used in the field of aesthetics by Austrian historian Alois Riegl, the curator from 1887 to 1897 of the textile art sector of the Imperial and Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry (today the MAK Vienna: Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/ Contemporary Art). As noted by Giuliana Bruno (2007: 247), Riegl referred to the haptic experience as an evolutionary step in modern perception towards the optic, the latter not requiring proximity and thus able to guarantee scientific objectivity. It was Walter Benjamin who subverted this logic, suggesting that modern perception would, in fact, be a haptic experience. Moreover, Benjamin linked the modern haptic perception to the novel experience provided by the cinema in his famous 1936 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’: The distracting element of [the film] is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. (Benjamin 1999: 231)

An emphasis on the haptic nature of the cinematographic experience thus challenged understandings of cinematic space as proposed, for instance, by Pascal Bonitzer (1985), Jean-Louis Comolli (1971–2) and Stephen Heath (1976). These were in tune with the tradition of a semiotic and psychoanalyticinspired film theory, and saw the flat surface of the film screen as comparable

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to the illusory three-dimensionality of painting. As Philip Rosen explains, Comolli and Heath made claims for the dominance of Renaissance perspective in image technology (from the Renaissance camera obscura to ‘normal’ cinema lenses). They connected this perspective to the appeal of a ‘centred’ subjectposition, whose geometrical construction in perspective they understood through certain kinds of historical materialism and psychoanalysis. (Rosen 2001: 14)

Rosen goes on to explain how, for Comolli and Heath, the idea of perspective was linked to ‘a visualized epistemological ideal manifesting a standard of reliable visual knowledge and the imagination of a stable subject position’ (2001: 14). In cinema, however, one has to account for the camera movement, for the constant changes in scale and types of shot, and ultimately for what Kuleshov termed the ‘creative geography’ of montage. Still, 1970s film theory largely believed in the permanence of perspectival composition regardless of the inherent mobility of cinema, with classical narrative, according to Heath, working as a guarantor of a coherent filmic space. The process of theoretical revision concerning the issue of, among others, cinematic space included David Bordwell’s (1985) proposition for a cognitivist understanding of perspective and Jonathan Crary’s (1990) rejection of the idea of a single objective position of knowledge in film. More recently, the writings of Giuliana Bruno expanded on the sensorial quality of the cinematographic experience as identified by Gilles Deleuze (1986; 1989), as well as on the affinity between cinema and architecture (Eisenstein [1938] 2010a), to suggest that cinema should be considered above all as an art of space: The English language makes this transition from sight to site aurally seamless. Site-seeing, too, is a passage. As it moves from the optic into the haptic, it critiques scholarly work that has focused solely on the filmic gaze for having failed to address the emotion of viewing space. . . . Locked within a Lacanian gaze, whose spatial impact remained unexplored, the film spectator was turned into a voyeur. By contrast, when we speak of site-seeing we imply that, because of film’s spatio-corporeal mobilization, the spectator is rather a voyageur, a passenger who traverses a haptic, emotive terrain. (Bruno 2007a: 15–16)

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Bruno’s work follows that of Crary and Bordwell, and it would be fair to say that nowadays the idea of cinema as a direct heir of Renaissance perspective, based on the optic paradigm, has been fully rebuffed. In its place, the cinematographic experience has emerged as an essentially mobile and emotional one, with Bruno significantly approximating the words ‘motion’ and ‘emotion’. My analysis of Still Life follows to a great extent Bruno’s understanding of cinema as a spatial as much as a temporal art. Moreover, I take space to be defined by its dynamic characteristics and by movement, divorced from the idea of representation or of a static moment in time. As Doreen Massey argues, following Henri Lefebvre’s notion of space as product, ‘no spaces are stable, given for all time; all spaces are transitory and one of the most crucial things about spatiality . . . is that it is always being made’ (Massey and Lury 1999: 231). From the premise that sees the cinematographic experience as promoting a journey through spaces, Still Life can thus be understood as a spatial practice, departing from a real space and resulting in a new one, the filmic space, woven from the urban/landscape sites/sights and sounds in movement, and through which the characters and the viewers travel and feel.

Shanshuihua and Still Life: Intermedial connections If cinematic space can no longer be seen as an inheritor of Renaissance perspective, the affinity between cinema and Chinese landscape painting, an art that was founded on the notion of a mobile and multiple perspective much before the appearance of cinema, becomes suddenly more evident. As explained by Linda C. Ehrlich and David Desser (1994), Asian pictorial arts do not rely in any significant way upon the vanishing point or upon the horror vacui (the fear of empty space) that characterizes Renaissance art. This suggests that the type of spatial organization of Chinese landscape painting is closer, in principle, to the type of spatial practice of film and audiovisual media. This approximation, though, requires some caution. As Jerome Silbergeld (2012) points out in his essay ‘Cinema and the Visual Arts of China’, it could be dangerous to bring together cinema and landscape painting without any sort of prior consideration as to the specificities of this relation. What paintings, for

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instance, and what periods should form the basis for this comparison? Should the focus lie on an investigation about vague cultural affinities between cinema and painting or on a direct historical and artistic influence? Would it be fair to say that the use of the tracking shot in East Asian cinema derives primarily from the scroll painting tradition of China and Japan? But is this aesthetic resource not simply common currency, employed not more or less in Asian cinema than in world cinema in general? Taking Silbergeld’s questions into consideration, as well as trying to avoid a strict binary opposition between Western and Chinese art, I  would like to propose an analysis that is not concerned with a search for specificities or singularities; quite the contrary, it aims to find within the art of Chinese landscape painting certain theoretical and aesthetic traits that are transmuted into Jia Zhangke’s film as a political gesture. Moreover, while running the risk of over-simplifying the issue, I  believe it is still possible to think of a regional or maybe even a national notion of cultural heritage. Many of China’s fifth-generation directors such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou, as well as Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi and Jia Zhangke himself, have all corroborated this vision by commenting on how they were influenced by traditional Chinese and Japanese landscape painting. This authorial intentionality, frequently associated with the directors’ biographies (many studied painting before making films), certainly does not serve as a ‘seal of approval’ to the supposed parallel between cinema and landscape painting, but it at least raises another fundamental question: Why was this aesthetic interrelation important, and what is the consequence of this influence in their films?2 I would suggest that the connections between cinema and landscape painting in Still Life are intertwined with its sophisticated spatial practice and with its narrative structure. Three main points will be investigated, the first relating to the issue of perspective as a mental organization in landscape painting, the second drawing on the notion of ‘empty space’ (留白 liu bai) and the third, in the final part of the chapter, relating to the Yin–Yang (阴阳) binomial that enters landscape painting through Daoist Philosophy. I believe that a focus on this specific instance of intermediality, stemming once again from a ‘geological’ approach to the cinema of Jia Zhangke, brings a historical and political dimension to a film so decidedly located within the landscape of contemporary China – the

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country of massive public works and extreme transformations. Moreover, it allows me to investigate aspects of cinema’s relationship with painting that do not come through as a strict form of intermedial practice. This means that painting does not appear as a separate medium within the film, in the way that pop music, architecture, opera, photography and gardens do in other examples. I will refrain, however, from defining this intermedial practice according to one of the many categorizations of intermediality that have appeared since the 1990s (see, e.g., Wolf 1999; Rajewsky 2010; Elleström 2014). Suffice it to say, it is an oblique but nonetheless poignant intermediality, residing in as well as subverting the very communal philosophical and artistic principles that turn painting into poetry and into cinema within the Chinese tradition. The first point of connection between Still Life and the shanshuihua concerns the issue of perspective, directly related to the critique discussed above of an understanding of cinematic space as an heir of Renaissance three-dimensional illusion. As François Cheng observes, perspective in shanshuihua is, above all, a mental organization of the elements that are being depicted, and through which everything becomes a matter of balance and contrast: Differently from a linear perspective which pre-supposes a privileged point of view and a vanishing point, Chinese perspective is qualified both as aerial and cavalier. It is, in fact, a double perspective. The painter, in general, is supposed to stand on a high point, thus enjoying an overall view of the landscape (in order to show the distance between different elements floating in an atmospheric space, he uses contrasts between volume, form and tonality); but at the same time he seems to move around the painting, espousing the rhythm of a dynamic space and contemplating things from afar, from up close and from different angles . . . More than an object to be looked at, a painting is to be lived. (Cheng 1991: 101)

Cheng substantiates his lessons on perspective by quoting from Song Dynasty’s illustrious painter Guo Xi, who famously wrote that a landscape painting is to be contemplated, traversed, lived in and strolled through: ‘The painting should create in the beholder the desire to be there’ (quoted in Cheng 1991:  102). Guo Xi was, in fact, one of the greatest innovators of the technique of multiple perspectives, rejecting a static mode of appreciation and calling for a moving visuality.

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If shanshuihua invites the eye of the spectator to adopt different points of view and to traverse the painted landscape, its spatial organization seems to be much closer to the cinematographic experience, as understood by Giuliana Bruno and others, than the vanishing point and the three-dimensional illusion of Western Renaissance perspective. In Still Life, Jia strives to achieve a multiple-perspective spatial practice akin to that of traditional Chinese painting by employing a type of découpage that often shifts from a voyeur position that inspects space from a vantage point of observation, to a streetlevel view of the city with the camera placed at the height of a person’s shoulder. The whole film employs this alternation of points of view and so it becomes key to a sophisticated spatial practice. Additionally, the multiple perspective emerges in Still Life in the prolific use of the tracking shot, oftentimes associated with the Bazinian long take, one of the marks of the film’s realist style. This, in turn, relates to the scroll format of traditional Chinese landscape painting, which can be seen to provide a protocinematographic experience to the viewer. Chae Youn-Jeong explains: Another distinctive characteristic of the traditional Chinese landscape painting is its scroll format, particularly the horizontally long hand scroll which not only allows for the expanse of spatial and temporal modes of painting directly related to cinematic representation but also provides a totally different way of viewing experience: as you slowly unroll it with the left hand while rolling with the right, the views of nature are slowly exhibited in front of your eyes. In terms of spatial discourse, the important point is that the scroll form allows for the direct involvement of time with space – the duration of viewing time, which is often accomplished with the inclusion of a title verse or a prose inscription on the top. (Chae 1997: 25)

The experience of the hand scroll described by Chae is indeed quite distinct from the contemplative mood invited by the framed canvas, before which one could, as Benjamin saw it, abandon oneself to one’s associations (1999: 231). As well as offering multiple points of view, the scroll provides a haptic experience by bringing together the eye and the hand, sight and touch, within the same folding and unfolding movement. The use of the tracking shot as an aesthetic echo of the scroll painting tradition has been studied in the cinema first and foremost in relation to the

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work of Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956). Noël Burch (1979), often in tune with Tadao Sato and based on the idea of decentring and in the self-reflexivity innate to Japanese art, coined the term ‘scroll-shot’ in order to describe the type of tracking shots employed by Mizoguchi, aimed at emulating the mobile experience of a traditional Japanese scroll painting, known as the e-makimono.3 In Sisters of Gion (Gion no shimai, 1936), Burch first identifies what he calls the use of the internal editing conveyed by a tracking shot. It is, however, in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Zangiku monogatari, 1939)  that he sees the apex of what he called the ‘Mizoguchi system’, that is, a new mode of spatial organization based around the long take. Burch refers to the sequence that shows aspiring Kabuki actor Kikunosuke Onoue (Shotaro Hanayagi), the son of one of Japan’s most famous Kabuki actors in the late nineteenth century, talking to Otuko (Kakuko Mori), his nephew’s wet-nurse. Their encounter is life-changing as Otuko speaks frankly to Kikunosuke about his acting shortcomings, suggesting that he should work hard to overcome them. After this encounter, Kikunosuke falls in love with Otuko and will attempt to follow his career away from his father’s shadow. Their talk – crucial to the film’s narrative – is conveyed through a five-minute scrolling long take (a tracking shot), running the approximate length of the 35 mm roll, and framed in low angle, with the two actors observed from a distance (Burch 1979: 234). Burch saw Mizoguchi’s aesthetic option for the ‘scroll-shot’ in opposition to the classical découpage or continuity editing of Hollywood cinema, given that the long take in a lateral movement (the tracking shot) dispensed with the spatial decomposition of shots and their subsequent amalgamation in the editing. Mizoguchi could thus be seen as a modern director avant la lettre, before modern cinema emerged as a notion or as a trend in Europe and the United States, challenging as such the traditional binary opposition of Classical versus Modern in film history and theory. However, it would not be advisable to define Mizoguchi’s ‘scroll-shot’ as an act of resistance to this system, since he was probably not too concerned with the shot–reverse shot or with the rules of classical editing when he made his masterpieces. His vision must be understood through other parameters, other influences and another type of spatial and temporal organization that constitutes an original style, influenced by, among others, Japanese scroll painting.

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If Mizoguchi’s use of the ‘scroll-shot’ was mainly an aesthetic option directly connected with the e-makimono and other Japanese artistic traditions, in Still Life it appears in combination with vantage points and street-level views in order to convey the relationship between the human figure and its surroundings, bringing to the fore the superimposition of temporalities that define Fengjie and, ultimately, the whole country. As a result, the main characters in the film are seen contemplating a space, traversing a space, as well as being themselves ‘traversed’ by the camera gaze that moves across spaces and provides a multiple and moving perspective in the style of a scroll painting. In this sense, Jia Zhangke follows Mizoguchi and other directors such as his compatriots Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige by attributing this aesthetic choice to the influence of the scroll format: ‘The river, the mountains and the fog are taken from the fundamental elements in Chinese painting. That is why I use those panning shots, recalling the gesture of unrolling a classical scroll painting, opening it out in space’ (Jia 2008: 15). The film’s credit sequence is an excellent example of this aesthetic gesture in Still Life. It unfolds as a series of tracking shots moving from left to right inside a riverboat. The deck is packed with travellers, men and women, old and young, playing cards, drinking, smoking, talking, eating, arm wrestling, palm reading or, simply, as Sanming does, contemplating the Yangtze. The motif of the boat is anticipated by the sound of a horn over a black screen, echoing the train whistle that opens Platform. This is followed by the sound of the boat knocking against the waves and a distant chatter, with the initial credits appearing over the black screen. Soon, Lim Giong’s exoteric music will fuse in with these sounds and will play over three different shots connected by three fades, moving in the same direction towards the stern of the boat. This sequence sets the tone for what is to come, rehearsing the movements that will reappear systematically in Still Life, referencing the opening of a scroll. Alongside the scroll-shots and the multiple perspective afforded by the alternation between the voyeur  – who sees the space from above, and the voyageur  – who travels on street level, Still Life broadens its intermedial practice by drawing from the notion of ‘empty space’, as central to the Chinese system of thought as that of the Yin–Yang (Cheng 1991: 45). The idea of ‘empty space’ in Chinese Philosophy exists since I Ching – The Book of Changes (易经 Yijing), the earliest work of Chinese thought, but the first philosophers who

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made emptiness central to their system of thought were from the Daoist school. In painting, it means an area in the visual composition that exists between other major elements such as the mountains and the water. As François Cheng explains, in certain paintings of the Song and the Yuan Dynasties ‘empty space’ occupies two-thirds of the scroll. Yet ‘empty space’ is not inert, for it is crossed by souffles that bring together the visible and the invisible worlds. That is how an element such as the cloud can be seen to perform a link between the Mountain and the Water by occupying large areas of a painting. Moreover, the ‘empty space’ between these two elements is seen as necessary to avoid a rigid opposition between them. This means that ‘shan’ and ‘shui’ have to go through the ‘empty space’ in order to become one another, in an incarnation of the dynamic laws of Daoist Philosophy (Cheng 1991:  47). ‘Empty space’, therefore, breaks the static opposition between different entities and allows for the creation of souffles that engender the necessary internal transformations in the world. As well as in shanshuihua, François Cheng locates the use of ‘empty space’ in Chinese poetry’s frequent suppression of particles  – that is, a system of writing that elides certain characters like pronouns or verbs, leaving the verse more open to interpretation, and other techniques that stem from a unique aesthetic thought, thus confirming the kinship between the two forms of art within the Chinese tradition. Ultimately, ‘empty space’ serves a similar purpose in different artistic expressions, that is, to provide a reciprocally transformative relationship between man and nature inside the work of art and, complementarily, between the spectator and the work (Cheng 1991). But how does the notion of ‘empty space’ manifest itself in the cinema, and more specifically in Still Life? In a sort of inter-semiotic translation, I believe that it appears, to employ a term coined by Laura Mulvey (2006) in relation to the cinema of Abbas Kiarostami, in the form of a ‘delayed’ narrative style, one which allows time for what appear to be ‘moments of emptiness’. Accordingly, what may seem in Still Life a ‘narrative halt’ is, in fact, the time devoid of any action, when the characters are allowed to simply take their time, to be by themselves, to think and to feel (Figure 5.3). These ‘empty moments’ also allow the spectator to embark on more reflective thoughts, free from the pressure and constraints of a narrative of cause-and-effect, slowly filling in the gaps with their own reflections and emotions.

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Figure 5.3  Empty space and Jia Zhangke’s ‘cinema of delay’ (Still Life).

Landscape, humanism and a question of scale A film such as Still Life indicates clearly that philosophical speculations about the nature of man’s relationship with landscape and society are still at the core of Chinese visual arts. This is mainly due to humanism being the keynote of Chinese philosophy, whereby ethical and political discussions have largely overshadowed metaphysical speculations. As Wing-tsit Chan (1967) explains, it was Confucius (551–479 BC) who brought Chinese humanism to its climax and who is responsible for its endurance:  When asked about the nature of knowledge, for instance, he said it was to ‘know man’. In another celebrated passage, Confucius declared: ‘It is man that can make the Way great, and not the Way that can make man great’ (15:28). This does not mean that there is an indifference to a supreme power in Heaven or nature within Chinese philosophical thought; rather, it favours a spirit of synthesis that suggests the unity of the human with heaven. Yet, in the broad spectrum of Chinese painting, the first impression one might have is that little attention is paid to the human figure, frequently overshadowed by the motifs of flowers, birds and other animals. In landscape painting specifically, the human figure is sometimes completely absent and, when it does appear, it is subordinated to nature, engulfed in the landscape,

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looking small and insignificant. This could seem at odds with the fact that many of the principles behind Chinese landscape painting bear a cultural bond with Daoist and Confucian Philosophy, aligned with the Chinese humanist tradition. But Chan advises that the answer to this question lies in understanding the relationship between landscape painting and poetry, alluded to at the beginning of this chapter. As Song painter Guo Xi put it, ‘Poetry is formless painting, and painting is poetry in visual form’ (quoted in Chan 1967: 23). This means that in Chinese painting there is always poetry and that in Chinese poetry there is always painting: The two arts are not only related but identical as far as their ultimate functions are concerned, [which are] none other than to express human sentiments of joy and sorrow, happiness and anger, and feelings of peace, mobility, loneliness, and so on. Chinese artists paint landscape for the same reason poets describe scenery in their poems. Their purpose is to refine the feelings, stimulate the mind, and created a mood so that when the reader or onlooker emerges from the mood, he becomes . . . a better human being. (Chan 1967: 23)

The human being, therefore, is always central to poetry and painting, for these artistic systems operate under the principle of unity and synthesis between the human and the natural worlds. An insight into this perspective and into the affinity between poetry and landscape painting can be attained through the evocation of Wang Wei’s poem ‘Deer Park’ (鹿柴 Lù Zhài): 空山不见人, 但闻人语响。 返景入深林, 复照青苔上。 Nobody in sight on the empty mountain But human voices are heard far off Low sun slips deep in the forest And lights the green hanging moss (Wang Wei 1991: 27)

In ‘Deer Park’, Wang Wei describes a walk through the mountains as an at once physical and spiritual experience of emptiness and of communion with

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nature. As François Cheng elucidates, the first verse should be interpreted as such:  ‘In the empty mountain, I  do not encounter anyone; I  only hear echoes of the voices of other wanderers.’ But by suppressing the personal pronoun and other place pronouns, as is the norm in Tang Dynasty regularstyle poetry lü-shi (律诗), the poet identifies himself directly with the mountain, and he becomes the ray of the sun (Cheng 1996: 40). So it is by removing himself from his verses or from the landscape that Wang Wei becomes, paradoxically, even more present in the poem, for he is at one with the natural world. That being said, the conciliation between philosophical humanism and the issue of the landscape in painting and poetry still leaves open the question of scale, linked to the vastness of the landscape and to the smallness of the human figure. This, I believe, lies at the heart of two sequences that, when seen in parallel, allow me to go further into my analysis of Still Life’s intermedial practice. The first is from Yellow Earth, a monumental work largely seen as being responsible for triggering the debate on visual aesthetics in Chinese cinema. The film, set in the 1930s, tells the story of Gu Qing, a Communist soldier from the Eighth Group Army who travels around Shaanxi province in search of traditional folk songs, whose lyrics would then be adapted to serve propaganda purposes. On his travels, he meets sister Cuiqiao and brother Hanhan, who live with their old widower father in a cave dwelling in the Loess Plateau, under dire conditions. The film speaks of the contradictions between a respect for traditional culture and the desire to adapt and change it to fit the new emerging ideology of communism. One of the reasons the film has received a lot of attention both in China and abroad has to do with its cinematography by Zhang Yimou. As Esther Yau points out, Aesthetically speaking, Yellow Earth is a significant instance of a nonWestern alternative in recent narrative filmmaking. The static views of the distant ravines and slopes of the Loess Plateau resemble a Chinese scroll-painting of the Chang’an School. Consistent with Chinese art, Zhang Yimou’s cinematography works with a limited range of colours, natural lighting, and a non-perspectival use of filmic space that aspires to a Taoist thought: ‘Silent is the Roaring Sound, Formless is the Image Grand’. (Yau 1991: 64–5)

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While I would hesitate to call Yellow Earth a ‘non-Western alternative’ – a view of world cinema that contradicts the polycentric approach embraced by this book – there is no doubt that Zhang Yimou’s cinematography for Chen Kaige offered a ‘radical departure’ from previous experiences in Chinese cinema, directly linked to its use of classical Chinese aesthetics and particularly the landscape painting tradition of the Chang’an School. Chris Berry and Mary Ann Farquhar explain these connections further: Like landscape painting, Yellow Earth emphasizes the natural over the human world, imagery over narrative, and symbolism over (socialist) realism. . . .If we see the film’s imagery as cinematography (or brushwork in the terminology of painting) and add colour/lighting (ink) to composition, we have the three key principles in the theories of traditional Chinese painting and the precise references which Chen and Zhang use to discuss the making of Yellow Earth: brushwork, ink and composition. Furthermore, Zhang Yimou links these principles to the regional style of the Chang’an school of painting. Chang’an is the ancient name for Xi’an, capital of Shaanxi, and the School’s style employs bold brushwork, warm tones, and high horizons to depict the loess plateau of the region. (1994: 84–5)

The Chang’an School, founded by Zhao Wangyun in the 1960s, displayed a regionalist penchant in its concern with the landscape and themes of Shaanxi province. Despite their strong artistic individuality, the main artists connected to the school, including Zhao Wangyun, Shilu, He Haixia, Kang Shiyao, Fang Jizhong and Li Zisheng, all shared an interest in painting as related to everyday life and the landscape and live in cave dwellings in the Loess plateau, as those seen in Yellow Earth (see Wang 2010). Berry and Farquhar go on to analyse in detail the place of brushwork, ink and composition in Yellow Earth, taking cues from what the film-makers themselves have explained about the creation of the film. In relation to brushwork, the authors highlight the centrality of the idea before the trace. The film explores, through the female character Cuiqiao, the power of Yin. Images of the yellow river and the yellow earth, as well as the darkness and death which prevail in the end, are all associated with Yin (Berry and Farquhar 1994: 86). In relation to ink, Berry and Farquhar emphasize the importance of the yellow colour of the land and of the paintings of the Chang’an School, highlighting Zhang Yimou’s wish to give this yellow a particularly warm, maternal hue, linked to the idea of the region as the cradle

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of Chinese civilization. Finally, in terms of composition, the film is seen to reinforce how people belong to the land, being often swallowed by or emerging from it, and thus creating a ‘sense of maternal intimacy’ (1994: 94). These aesthetic choices can be observed in the film’s opening sequence, which has been seen to sum up its bold and pioneering style. Yellow Earth begins with the credits and the historical introduction over a black screen, written, as Silbergeld points out, in the archaic clerical Chinese script ‘so as to reinforce the timelessness of place and social condition that the film describes’ (1999: 43). The commentary ends with the phrase ‘In this ancient place, the melody of the Xintianyou hangs in the air throughout the year’, and finally indicates 1939 as the time of the story. The emphasis on the ‘ancient’ and the folk music of Shaanxi, known as Xintianyou 信天游 (rambles in the sky), prepares for the images that follow. The first is a static shot of a yellow mountain, leaving a very small stretch of blue sky on the top of the frame. This is followed by a scroll-shot of the same mountainous yellow earth, which dissolves into its opposite, that is, a static shot of the sky with a very small stretch of earth in the bottom of the frame. A tiny human figure appears on the horizon, walking towards the camera. This is the pattern that will be followed, with scroll-shots of the earth and sky dissolving into the shot of the soldier moving forward. At one point the scroll-shot tilts up to reveal the moon, suggesting the passage of time and linking Heaven and Earth.4 Finally, the soldier comes closer to the camera and another dissolve fuses his figure with the yellow earth, in what Berry and Farquhar have described as a sense of maternal intimacy. Silbergeld writes that ‘the visual style of Yellow Earth is in many ways as old as China’s age-old landscape arts and constantly works against soldier Gu Qing’s modernist agenda’ (1999:  43). Along the same lines, Chae draws parallels between both horizontal and vertical scroll paintings and the opening sequence of the film: The shots dominated by the loess plateau maintain horizon lines high in the frame. On the other hand, these shots resemble the compositional strength of a vertical hanging scroll, particularly that of the Northern Song painting, evoking, for instance, the composition of Fan Kuan’s Traveling Amid Mountains and Streams in which the high rising cliff dominates the hanging scroll and leaves only a little space on the top. (Chae 1997: 108–9)

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The debt to the Chang’an School harks back to Chinese landscape painting and its philosophical principles in that the film, in tune with the historical significance of the region, recuperates some of the main pictorial elements of shanshuihua, especially the mountains and water that are constituent to it. It also significantly replays the scale between man and landscape, between nature and the human figure, found at the heart of this tradition. In the opening shots of Yellow Earth, as well as in many other sequences, the human figure is dwarfed by the magnitude of the landscape, so it cannot but be seen as in relation to this landscape. It is not by chance that Still Life, made twenty-two years after Yellow Earth, displays a similar concern about the relationship between man and landscape – Chen Kaige’s film was, of course, decisive in Jia Zhangke’s decision to switch from painting to film-making. In fact, the two main characters in the film, Shen Hong and Sanming, are constantly seen in relation to the landscape, and on a first instance it would appear that they are equally engulfed by it, as Yan observes: The magnitude of such productive decomposing as part of a still larger recomposing, carefully filmed with a documentary bent on an objective rendition of the world, looms so large on the screen that it dwarfs Han Sanming, the human figure whose presence therein serves to measure or reveal the massiveness of such phenomena. (Yan 2014: 214)

Yet, it seems to me that in Still Life the question of scale becomes rather complex when the very ‘immortal’ notions of landscape in Chinese culture, present in numerous popular sayings as something eternal, permanent, a container of cultural memory, are seen as being under threat by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. As Fabienne Costa has pointed out, Still Life shows not only how the building of the dam has impacted the lives of those living in the region – and the natural landscape surrounding them – but also how it has violently disrupted the ancestral Chinese notion of the landscape (2007: 46). This can be observed in one of its most poignant sequences, where Sanming holds a 10 yuan banknote against the actual landscape of Kuimen Gate, the entering point to Qutang Gorge. Before that, he had been chatting with his work colleagues in the ‘Guest House of the Great Tang People’. They asked him if he had arrived in Fengjie by boat, and if he had gone through Kuimen. He

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says he does not remember it, so one of them takes out a 10 yuan banknote, pointing it out to him. A cut to a close-up reveals the banknote in his hand. Sanming then shows his friend a 50 yuan banknote, this time with his part of the country or homeland (老家 laojia) stamped on it, represented by the Hukou Falls (壶口瀑布 Hukou Pubu) of the Yellow River. This is seen in the next shot in the hands of his friend, revealing a banknote from the older series which circulated in the 1980s and 1990s. This dialogue is then followed by three shots, the first showing Sanming against the backdrop of the real landscape of Kuimen, followed by two close-ups of the actual banknote, the first showing Chairman Mao’s figure, which as mentioned before is stamped in all the banknotes in China, and the second showing the representation of the real landscape. Kuimen Gate is seen here as a miniature landscape on the hands of a man, in a reversal of the opening of Yellow Earth, where man was himself the miniature engulfed by the landscape (Figures 5.4 and 5.5). In Still Life, therefore, Jia responds to the reality of transformation and disappearance by turning the majestic landscape of the Three Gorges into a banknote: small, lightweight, a piece of paper meant for circulation and something onto which the human figure can no longer be inscribed, as the landscape painting tradition mandates. From the epic grandeur of the fifthgeneration landscape cinema to the urban generation of the 1990s and 2000s, the shanshui has been disturbed, and something seems irretrievably lost.

Figure 5.4  Miniature man in Yellow Earth.

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Figure 5.5  Miniature landscape in Still Life.

A similar commentary about the unbalance of aesthetic forces and laws caused by the construction of the dam can be perceived in Still Life’s association with the notion of Yin–Yang, which lies at the basis of Daoist philosophical thought. The principle of opposition and complementariness that defines the binomial is structural to the art of landscape painting, whose main constituting elements, mountain and water, are the two poles of nature that correspond to the powers of Yin and Yang. As François Cheng (1991) explains, the female power of Yin is seen wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, emptiness or darkness – it is the defining power of the water. The male power of Yang is at work in hardness, assertiveness, force and light – and it is the defining power of the mountain. However, everything in the world is made of the combination of Yin and Yang, of their mutual tendency to advance and retreat, always changing into one another, thus bringing a sense of flux to the conception of reality in the Dao. The bamboo plant in this sense is significant in that it is at once flexible and hard, containing both Yin and Yang. In Still Life there are of course two main characters, one man and one woman, who occupy different portions of the film. This structure is heir to that of the documentary Dong, where, as previously mentioned, Liu Xiaodong paints a group portrait of working men in the Three Gorges, and later a group portrait of Thai women in Bangkok. Both films, therefore, employ a Yin–Yang/ Female–Male composition. In Still Life, Sanming and Shen Hong never actually

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meet, but they seem to be roaming around the same spaces, as indicated by the flying saucer seen at once by both in the skies of Fengjie. They are opposed and complementary, a man looking for a woman and a woman looking for a man. Shen Hong locates her husband Guo Bin first, after counting on the help of Dongming. They meet against the backdrop of the almost completed Three Gorges Dam, located in Yichang, around 150 miles downstream from Fengjie. The huge structure is reminiscent of the walls of Pingyao in Platform, where Cui Mingliang and Yin Ruijuan separated years before. Now, Shen Hong and Guo Bin walk by the shore lined up by massive blocks of rock. They engage in a strange dance to the faint sound of music, and finally break up. In his turn, Sanming locates his wife towards the end of the film, living on a river barge in Fengjie and looking after an old man. He finds out that their daughter is now a migrant worker in Guangzhou (could she perhaps be working in the textile factory seen in Useless a year later?). The couple then agree to stay together, but first Sanming has to pay the old man some compensation money, ironically ‘buying his bride’ one more time. He will return to the coal mines of Shanxi to work and save up, and that is where he is seen again, in the first part of A Touch of Sin, ready to travel south to visit his wife for the New Year. In examining these two sequences in parallel, it is possible to see how Jia employs the Yin–Yang binomial in Still Life in a subtle and yet complex way. In Yichang, it is not by chance that the first couple separate by the Three Gorges Dam. This is indeed a colossal engineering work, undertaken for over a decade by thousands of workers. In the end, it managed to put a stop to the flow of the Yangtze, thus disrupting the force of Yin. The rocks that tower over Shen Hong and Guo Bin are also intent on containing the power of the river, and ultimately that of the landscape and of nature. And the song heard in the distance as they dance in an at once mechanical and melancholic way is, of course, not incidental; rather, it is ‘满山红叶似彩霞’ (Man shan hongye shi caixia – meaning ‘red leaves in the mountains like rosy clouds’) from the film When the Leaves Turn Red (等到满山红叶时 Deng dao man shan hong ye shi), directed in 1980 by Tang Huada and Yu Benzheng, and set in and around the Three Gorges. Now, its main theme provides the soundtrack to the break-up of Shen Hong and Guo Bin, happening within the same location only 26 years later. Back in Fengjie, the waters might still be flowing, and the estranged couple agree to reunite on the river barge. Yet that portion of the

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river is set to become a reservoir. The city will disappear and the waters will stagnate. Once again no balance can be achieved.

From miniature landscape to an earthly moonscape The sort of lament rehearsed in these sequences is made ever more poignant by the fact that the river whose course is halted is none other than the mighty Yangtze, the longest in China, central to its economic and social development for millennia. In addition, the banknotes passed around in the inn contain not only the Yangtze but also, significantly, the Yellow River. This means that the two cradles of Chinese civilization have been transformed into miniature landscapes, stamped with a monetary value, and reduced to an exchangeable piece of paper. The money motif explored in this sequence is of course central to Jia Zhangke’s filmography and suggests an allegiance to the Marxist theory of commodity fetishism, where money is seen as transforming social and human relations into economic relations between objects. In Jia’s China, commodity fetishism increasingly thrives and buries away the last traces of its communist past. As early as in Xiao Wu, scenes with banknotes abound, from the owner of the brothel checking banknotes against the light to Xiao Wu’s weighing of a stack of cash that he hopes to give to Xiao Yong as a wedding gift, inside a ‘red envelope’ (红包 hong bao). In Unknown Pleasures, Bin Bin’s mum and other characters repeat the same gesture as the owner of the brothel by checking banknotes against the light  – something that happens quite often in China where counterfeit money is a common problem. Myriad other references to currency appear in the film, most notably a scene in which Xiao Ji’s dad is marvelled by the one-dollar bill that comes as a gift hidden inside the lid of the Mongolia King Liquor bottle  – he will later try to exchange it at the local bank, to no avail. In The World, Erguniang’s family receives a pile of 100 yuan notes as compensation for his death, as discussed in ­chapter  2. More recently, A Touch of Sin features prominently the currency motif, as will be discussed in Chapter 6. Finally, in Mountains May Depart, Tao provides piles of cash to help her old friend Liangzi pay for his medical treatment. And the money motif is stretched even further when Tao’s and Zhang’s son is named

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‘Dollar’ – he should, as a friend jokes in Australia, have been called Renminbi (人民币), a much stronger currency in 2025. In Still Life, as well as the sequence described above and the previous insertion of A Better Tomorrow on the TV set, a film which revolves around a counterfeit money operation, the currency motif is present from the very outset. Before disembarking in Fengjie, Sanming gets dragged by Brother Mark into a magic show on the ferry, where the performer announces that to flow on the river one needs cash, and proceeds to turn blank paper into Euros, and then into RMBs. As soon as he finishes his trick, his partner goes around collecting payment for the show. Sanming ignores it and tries to leave, but the tricksters stop him and take his bag apart, revealing his very meagre resources. The scene appears to suggest that Sanming and other travellers must pay a toll in order to enter the city of Fengjie, a strange land introduced by scroll-shots and esoteric music, a magic show and a fire eater, and where money would seem to dictate people’s moves. Here – taking the cue once again from the film, the landscape and the inn of the Great Tang people, I would like to evoke Du Fu’s poetry written during the time he was living in the Three Gorges, more precisely in Bai Di, the White Emperor City from where his friend Li Bai had travelled in his verses. Du Fu had been living a largely itinerant life after the break of the An Lushan Rebellion in December 755, which lasted for about eight years and caused great turmoil in the country. When he finally settled in Bai Di in 766, he was already quite ill, but his two years in the Three Gorges was a period of great creativity, in which a lot of what he saw while roaming the war-ravaged country was transmuted into verses. In his poem ‘White Emperor City’ (白帝Bai Di, 766) he describes a dangerous landscape of torrential rain and the devastation from war and poverty that he sees around him: 白帝 白帝城中云出门 白帝城下雨翻盆 高江急峡雷霆斗 古木苍藤日月昏 戎马不如归马逸 千家今有百家存

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哀哀寡妇诛求尽 恸哭秋原何处村 At Bai-di clouds leap from the gates. Below Bai-di, it rains, as from an upturned tub. High water, narrow gorge, lightning and thunder battle. Green trees, gray vines, sun and moon, dusk. War horses, not so quiet as a horse returning home. A thousand families once, now just a hundred left. Sad, sad widow, taxed and labored out, Grieving, crying for what village on that autumn plain? (Cheng 2016)

Du Fu speaks of dislocation and of the social inequality that he sees in the Three Gorges, where a sad widow suffers from unjustly high taxing, grieving and crying. Almost ten years earlier, he had written of ruins in his celebrated ‘Spring Prospect’ (春望 Chun wang, 757):  ‘The country is broken, though hills and rivers remain 國破山河在’, the poem which includes one of the most cited verses in Chinese poetry: ‘Family letters are worth ten thousand pieces 家書抵萬金’. But in ‘White Emperor City’, it seems that even the hills and rivers are under threat, as if Du Fu could foreshadow its almost complete disappearance in our century. This threatened landscape described by Du Fu, tainted with the unfairness of taxation, abandoned and ravaged by war and weather, finds an echo in Jia Zhangke’s cloudy, humid and semi-destroyed Fengjie. National Geographic reporter Arthur Zich, who travelled along the Yangtze in 1997 as the Three Gorges project was finally being launched, uses phrases like ‘moonscape of granite palisades reduced to gravel’ and ‘construction cranes dangle over like sci-fi movie insects’ to describe what he saw in the region (Zich 1997: 8 and 15). In Still Life, Jia seems to display a similar response to this monumental space where ‘the country is broken’, and the hills and rivers can hardly remain: the dam interrupts the flow of the Yangtze and the reservoir turns Bai Di into an island, changing the landscape of the Three Gorges forever. In Fengjie, men dressed in white astronaut suits walk through the ‘moonscape reduced

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to gravel’, spraying what could be an insecticide, passing through walls with faded posters and writings that have just about resisted the force of ‘chai’ (拆 – demolish). Sci-Fi-allusive sounds such as glitching beeps play over in the soundtrack. Later, three opera actors sit in a restaurant: two of them stare at their mobile phones while the third looks away into the distance. A real-life monument, built to resemble the shape of the character Hua (华 / 華 in the traditional script), meaning ‘China’, is built in Fengjie as a memorial to those who had to move out: once the waters of the reservoir flood in, it will remain, sticking out from the surface of the lake. In the film, this strange monument, seen from Dongming’s balcony, one day magically turns into a rocket and takes off. Meanwhile, a flying-saucer crosses the sky, and a building collapses in the distance, all thanks to CGI. The film’s final image, that of a tight-rope walker negotiating the distance between two derelict buildings, appears as Sanming and a group of workers walk through the rubble carrying their bags, floating away one more time. Lim Giong’s esoteric music returns and Sanming stops to observe the strange occurrence, finally leaving the frame. Still Life’s sophisticated intermedial practice both leans on and negates the Chinese landscape tradition and its underlying philosophical principles. Multiple perspectives, scroll-shots and empty spaces allude to a past that is being lost, and the reversal of scale between the human figure and the landscape, as well as the disruption of the balance of Yin and Yang, confirm this loss. The man in the tightrope, in his turn, may still be engulfed by the landscape, but his position is fragile, and at any moment he could fall. One of Jia Zhangke’s greatest merits in this film, therefore, is to show how the disruptive force of the dam extends well beyond geography into archaeology, geology, cosmology and history. And this is achieved through a combination of cinema’s realist and intermedial impulses, which allow it to capture the real while at the same time incorporating painting, poetry and philosophy into a unique style, and resulting in a vehement form of political intervention.

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6

Opera, wuxia and China’s imagined civilization

I love to imagine that one day, fifty or a hundred years from now, someone could stage an adaptation of A Touch of Sin. Jia Zhangke After Still Life, from 2006, Jia Zhangke took a relatively long break from fiction film-making that ended in 2013 with A Touch of Sin. In this chapter, I will investigate how his ninth feature is built around a close dialogue with Chinese cinema’s long-term affection for the opera, this form of intermediality working as an invitation both for the past into the present and for an element of performance into cinema’s realism. A Touch of Sin belongs to a long lineage of films that display an affinity with the opera in its various regional and national meanings, starting with the first film allegedly made in China in 1905. Here, I  believe that an initial effort is needed to see cinematographic art as attuned not only to the Western experience of the first modernity but also to proto- and pre-cinematographic forms that have contributed to the formation of various local and national cinematographic modernities (Nagib and Jerlev 2014), among which shadow play, literature, painting, architecture and, in the specific case of Chinese cinema, the country’s operatic traditions. The intention is, therefore, to seek in the history of Chinese art the elements indispensable for a conceptual hybridization, able to approach the notions in question and of introducing new historical configurations and new understandings of Jia Zhangke’s cinema. The affinity with Chinese opera displayed by A Touch of Sin has been largely acknowledged by Jia himself, who found inspiration in characters and modes of past legends and in the wuxia (武侠) tradition to address the

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current issue of violence in his country’s society. Given this aesthetic and narrative choice, I will explore two main hypotheses deriving from A Touch of Sin’s intermedial nature. The first suggests that the relationship between cinema and opera promotes, in lieu of an alienation effect, a heightened form of spectatorial identification, thus revoking the Brechtian proposition, in part inspired by the operatic performances of Mei Lanfang, that tends to equate the anti-naturalism of this form of art with reflexivity. The second hypothesis expands on this reflection in order to suggest that the operatic modes and references in A Touch of Sin function as allegories – not of the Chinese nation as an ‘imagined community’ – but as an ‘imagined civilization’, a term which I propose as more apt to describe an idea of China. A Touch of Sin features four loosely interrelated stories set in contemporary China. The first focuses on Hu Dahai (Jian Wu), who one day decides to take the law into his own hands and goes out on a revengeful killing spree. The second follows the criminal Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang), who returns home for the New Year but soon resumes his routine of violent robberies. The third reveals how Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao) reacts against humiliation and violence with more violence. Finally, the fourth brings in a young factory worker, Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan), who turns violence against himself. The title of the film in Chinese is 天注定 tian zhu ding, which could be translated as ‘the mandate of heaven’, ‘determined by fate’ or ‘doomed’, thus alluding to the extreme circumstances in which these four characters find themselves. At the same time, if fate was the only determinant factor in their tragic denouements, the film perhaps would not have touched a nerve with the censors in China. For Jia Zhangke had hoped the film would be released in his country in 2013, but things did not go according to plan. As mentioned before, Jia has since The World in 2003 been making films under the strict approval of the Chinese government. Some of his films have been released commercially in his country, albeit to meagre box office results, and, in the case of The World, Still Life and 24 City, in more or less different versions than those circulated abroad.1 A Touch of Sin was scheduled for commercial release in China on the 9th of November 2013, after a round of foreign film festivals. It had been approved by the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) in its final cut before being sent to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2013, where Jia won the award for best screenplay.

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Just a month before, in October 2013, Philana Woo had written in her column on the Jing Daily an article entitled ‘A Touch Of Sin: Subversive, CensorFriendly, Or Both?’, in which she stated that there were several reasons why the film would be shown in China, suggesting that it had ‘complied with government censorship to gain funding and distribution’ (Woo 2013). According to Woo, the fact that the film did not reference the government’s omission or active participation in its stories of injustice and abuse demonstrated how A Touch of Sin’s criticism of accumulated wealth and the nouveau riche decadence of its ‘villains’ was in fact quite in tune with Xi Jinping’s current anti-corruption campaigns. Moreover, as Jia himself had pointed out, the film was based on real stories that had already been largely circulated in the country through Weibo, so censuring them would not make much sense. Finally, Jia’s increasing participation in film and advertisement production in China, as well as his withdrawal in 2009 from the Melbourne Film Festival in protest against a documentary on Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer,2 should indicate that he had won favours with the decision makers at SARFT and that his film would get the green light. However, came November 2013, when Walter Salles was in China filming the documentary Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from Fenyang, a leaked directive from the Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Bureau ordered journalists not to write or comment on A Touch of Sin. At the same time, Jia Zhangke was asked to present his passport to the government, which made it impossible for him to travel to Taiwan, as was originally planned soon after the end of Salles’s shoot. Jia released a statement on Weibo saying he had cancelled his trip for ‘personal reasons’, and avoided talking to the press. This sad moment was captured by Salles in a poignant scene in which Jia sits with constant collaborators Yu Likwai and Zhang Yang in a café near Mudanyuan in Beijing. There, he ponders whether it might be time to stop making films. A Touch of Sin was never released in China, for reasons that remain unclear. But Jia of course carried on making films, and Mountains May Depart’s commercial release and good box office results have signalled a new relationship between him and the Chinese government and public. Still, I believe the subtitle to Evan Osnos’s revealing profile of Jia Zhangke for the New Yorker in 2009, ‘Can China’s archly political auteur please the censors and himself – and still find a mass audience?’, is still pertinent today. Accusations

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of ‘betrayal’ of the neorealist spirit of his early films and of how he chose to relinquish freedom in pro of government approval abound in his home country (see, e.g., Hu, Pu and Wang 2015: 32–3; Osnos 2009: 94–5). There are certainly populist ambitions within Jia’s authorial impulse, and his appearance in advertisement campaigns in his country, as, for instance, the one for a milk brand from Inner Mongolia （蒙牛） in the Beijing Metro, with the suggestive slogan ‘Ten years ago I wanted to use cinema to change the world, ten years later I use the world to change cinema’ (十年前我想用电影改变世界 十年后我想用世界改变电影), could be interpreted as less scrupulous as those purveyors of pure art should wish for. Add to that the (unsuccessful) campaign to nominate Mountains May Depart as China’s 2016 entry for the foreign language category in the Oscars, led by Jia and Zhao Tao and fought hard over the world of social networks, and you have an auteur who unashamedly wishes to represent his country in, of all places, Hollywood. But, as I have been trying to argue, Jia Zhangke’s cinema does not sit well with notions of purity, simplicity and ideologies. It is impure, complex and contradictory, and this is where its great wealth lies.

Weibo, webs and the real A Touch of Sin is a film seen by many as representing a departure towards a new filmic style by Jia Zhangke in 2013. It is indeed a work that takes him into new territories, including quite prominently the depiction of graphic violence. It also employs the multi-plot convention, the cause-and-effect narrative forward drive and two well-known film and TV stars in China, thus making it more palatable for a larger audience. All of this adds a veneer of contemporaneity to the film that can seem to weaken the Chinese opera connection. In order to clarify how threads can be pulled from the present into the past, and from realism into intermediality, I will start by analysing the film’s connections with China’s unflinching reality of progress and with the new stories that, while unfolding against this background, still allow the film to move deeper into the country’s history. The screenplay for A Touch of Sin was based on real occurrences that had had a wide repercussion on social media platform Weibo in the twenty-first

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century. Not by chance, Jia Zhangke’s increasing popularity in his country also had much to do with his embracing of social media platforms for communicating and advertising his own work. He recalls that the switch towards a more accepting view of such platforms came after he interviewed Chinese business magnate Pan Shiyi for the Yulu Project, a portmanteau film/ advertorial documentary entitled Words of a Journey and produced by Jia Zhangke for Johnnie Walker in 2011: I used to take the Internet as something simple. I checked e-mails and read the news. I couldn’t realize and accept the increasing importance of social media. Why would someone pay attention to the screen rather than to the real world? I started doing so after the interview with Pan Shiyi on the Yulu project, when he warned me by saying that rejecting Weibo meant moving away from contemporary life. The instant when the untold by traditional media and censored things flock onto Weibo, we could realize China is more astonishing than it used to seem. I believe Weibo users tell the truth. (Jia quoted in Serfaty and Kaufman 2014: 257)

Jia refers to the spreading of news through Weibo and to the impact of this bypassing of censorship in a country where the media is strictly controlled by the government. Another effect of Weibo in spreading the news has meant that local occurrences could now become nationwide events almost instantaneously, thus changing the geography and the impact of the news on China. So the effect is twofold:  people know more and news spread wider. Within this new informational landscape, Jia noticed that episodes of violence were arising more frequently – or perhaps becoming more noted – in different parts of the country. He saw a pattern in people willing to fight for their dignity and recurring to violent means as a response to the very violence they had been victims of. This is when he had the idea to write a film dealing with this issue, wishing to treat violence aesthetically in order to contribute to ways of making sense of it, and of the Chinese world today. For him, it was important to dramatize violence in order to look for its essence, and to this intent he had to, once again, rely on facts and on imagination. The first story that inspired A Touch of Sin happened in 2001. It concerned Hu Wenhai (胡文海) from Shanxi province, who revolted against the corruption scheme orchestrated in his village during the privatization of their coal mine and, after over a year of fruitless protests and petitions, killed 14

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people, finally being arrested and executed in 2002. The other real stories behind the film were those of Zhou Kehua (周克华), a notorious criminal from Chongqing suspected of being behind at least nine murder and robbery cases in the region; the so-called Deng Yujiao Incident (邓玉娇事件), where a 21-year-old pedicurist working in a hotel in Hubei province reacted against the sexual harassment from a local businessman and stabbed him to death after being hit several times in the face with a stack of cash (see Branigan 2009); and the ‘Foxconn suicides’, which happened in the Foxconn industrial park in Shenzhen and other Foxconn facilities in the country, totalling 18 attempts and 14 deaths (see Chan and Pun 2010). The four real stories and their protagonists became the four ‘chapters’ of A Touch of Sin, meaning that the film was structured as a multi-plot narrative happening in different parts of the country. It, therefore, employs what could be called a cartographical perspective, moving from Shanxi province in the north through to Chongqing in the south-west, Hubei province in central China and ending up in Dongguan in the southern province of Guangdong. There is here a movement from the backlands of Shanxi, where the coal mines rule, towards the more industrial south, closer to the sea, and where the new factories dominate the landscape. The screenplay, incidentally, was written on the move during a trip to Datong and speaks of the itinerant spirit of the director mentioned in the introduction. The four stories happen in chronological order, following one another with subtle connections. The first one takes place during the winter, just before the start of the Chinese New Year holiday, around January or early February. It is set in Shanxi and shot around Fenyang and Pingyao, telling the story of Dahai, a single middle-aged man who used to work in the communal coal mine but who became deeply dissatisfied with its irregular privatization, an operation that turned the new owner Shengli into an overnight millionaire, complete with private airplane and a retinue of sycophants. At some point in this first chapter, the now familiar Sanming makes an appearance, telling a workmate he will travel to the Three Gorges for the New Year to see his wife. A stunning cut from the coal mine in Shanxi to Kuimen in the Three Gorges marks the start of the second story. In a shot that mirrors Still Life, Sanming is seen travelling in a barge down the Yangtze, but as he disembarks, the camera leaves him and ‘picks up’ Zhou Shan, a professional robber and killer. He was first

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seen in the film’s opening sequence, travelling on a motorbike near Fenyang and reacting against an attempted robbery by killing his three attackers. In Chongqing, he visits his family over the New Year holidays, before resuming his life in crime. After committing a robbery at gun point in broad daylight, he flees on a long-distance coach. The bus – as the boat before it – is a means of transport that literally transports the film into another story. Inside it travels Xiao Yu’s lover, who gets off at a service station in Shennongjia Forest District, Hubei, to secretly meet her. She works in a local sauna as a receptionist and reacts violently against a customer who mistakes her for one of the sauna’s sex workers. From her traumatic encounter, the film moves to the warmer south, and the link provided this time comes from a television programme watched by Xiao Yu while working at the sauna. The commentary explains how animals are also able to commit suicide, and this will be the destiny of young Xiao Hui, a migrant factory worker in Guangdong province who for a while works in a high-class brothel and falls in love. The film’s epilogue neatly travels back to Shanxi at an undetermined point in the future, where Xiao Yu is seen looking for a job, in search of a new life. The attentive spectator of A Touch of Sin is able to pick up on many subtle connections and clues included in the script by Jia Zhangke, which invite recurrent viewings of the film. The green foliage wallpaper that is used in the credits sequence, for instance, reappears in the sauna where Xiao Yu works and finally as real foliage in Dongguan in the final chapter. A fruit knife similar to that used by Zhou Shan to peel an apple for his son in the second chapter becomes the murder weapon used by Xiao Yu in the third. And when she is finally seen in Shanxi in the film’s epilogue, she applies for a job in a factory owned by the widow of Shengli, the coal mine chief assassinated by Dahai in the first chapter. Most notably, the monetary reasons behind each tragic occurrence is a constant in the four chapters, be it the illegal accumulation of money, the act of robbing and killing for money, simply refusing money for sex and finally not having any money. This is materialized once again as a recurrent motif, bringing to mind how commodity fetishism, as mentioned in the previous chapter, makes injustice somehow more visible and palpable in Jia’s cinema. Dahai, for instance, lies in hospital after having been severely beaten up by one of Shengli’s henchmen. Surprisingly, his attacker pays him a visit and places a big stack of 100 yuan notes over his bed, as if to say ‘here is

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your compensation, do not pursue the matter any further’ – which he of course will. In the second chapter, Zhou Shan’s brothers come to see him after New Year and their mother’s birthday party, which they had organized during the holiday. His older brother accounts for the party’s costs and then divides the meagre remainder equally into three parts to the minutest penny, including a half-smoked cigarette package. In the third chapter, money becomes a weapon with which Xiao Yu is beaten by a customer (Wang Hongwei) after refusing sexual services. He holds a handful of 100 yuan notes, spread like a fan, and repeatedly smacks her face with it. Finally, in the last chapter, Xiao Hui receives a tip and tastes the pleasure of holding a note of Hong Kong dollar in his hand while working in the brothel, but later on, after leaving this job to work in an electronics factory, he is seen going into a cashpoint and leaving without any, having to explain to his hysterical mum on the phone that he will not be able to send her money that month. The motif of money and other occurrences mentioned before suggest that A Touch of Sin was very much built from the web of themes, characters and places that turn Jia Zhangke’s filmography into a familiar territory. He revisits Shanxi – and notably Pingyao’s walls and Fenyang’s streets, the Three Gorges and the Guangdong textile factories last seen in Useless. Sanming, the coal mine and the scroll-shot in the Yangtze are also there. Certain gestures are also familiar, such as Dahai’s throwing a tomato up and down in the opening sequence  – mirroring Xiao Wu’s playing with an apple in Xiao Wu; the repetitiveness of Xiao Yu’s slapping in the sauna  – harking back to Unknown Pleasures, and her act of covering herself with a veil, seen in the final sequence in Pingyao and relating to various other sequences in previous films. And it is important to notice the reappearance of another recurrent trope in Jia’s cinema, that of immobile vehicles, first noted by Michael Berry in Jia Zhangke’s ‘Hometown Trilogy’ (2009: 116). The immobile car and van in Unknown Pleasures and a bus-turned-restaurant in In Public precede the immobile airplane in The World; a military airplane and rocket stationed outside factory 420 in 24 City; and in A Touch of Sin the motif of the train  – central to Platform  – is significantly revisited through, on the one hand, the Wenzhou train disaster and, on the other hand, as a train-themed bedroom in a high-class brothel, where Lianrong (Li Meng) entertains a customer dressed as a train attendant.

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For all its recurrences, A Touch of Sin also introduces a new motif that had, until then, been largely absent from Jia’s filmography, and that is the physical or implied presence of animals in the four chapters. There is the bull which appears in Zhou Shan’s Chicago Bull’s hood and later materializes at the end of the third chapter; a tiger stamped in Da Hai’s towel that roars like the real beast, in a powerful faux raccord previously staged in I Wish I  Knew with the statue of a stone lion;3 a horse, repeatedly abused by his owner in the first chapter (alluding to a similar scene in the film Night Train/ 夜车 Ye che by Diao Yinan, 2007); a duck, slew on New Year’s Eve in Chongqing; a troubling of goldfish, set free by Lianrong and Xiao Hui in Guangdong; and a monkey and myriad snakes encountered by Xiao Yu in Chapter three. The snake motif – aside from 2013 being the year of the snake according to the Chinese zodiac – bears an oblique connection with the ‘Legend of the White Snake’ (白蛇传 Bai she chuan), one of China’s most famous folktales. Xiao Yu crosses paths with snakes three times in the film. The first happens after her lover’s wife and two henchmen come to the sauna to beat her up. She runs out and hides inside an ambulance van-turned-fortune teller tent – another immobile vehicle – where a mysterious looking girl sits with her legs inside a glass box surrounded by snakes. The van, adorned with lights and with the characters ‘灵蛇转世’ (ling she zhuan shi  – clever snake reincarnation) written on it, had been seen previously as Xiao Yu walked to work. Outside it a man called customers to step inside where their fates would be read, repeating the film’s title ‘Tian zhu ding’: ‘See the holy snakes, see the beauty’, he shouts. ‘Come see your destiny, the holy snakes foretell weal and woe.’ In the next sequence, Xiao Yu rests inside the sauna in a room with comfy chairs where the workers relax between jobs. Number 11 is called and one of the girls stands up, preparing to go to work. Tsui Hark’s Green Snake is being projected for entertainment, and the Green Snake Xiao Qing (小青, played by Maggie Cheung) – Bai Suzhen’s (白素貞) companion, appears on the screen and sticks out her snake tongue to catch a fly. Xiao Yu has her eyes closed, but the connection is established. Finally, she is walking up on a mountain road and sees a snake crossing it. Her destiny might have been intertwined with the snake, a Yin animal with the fire of Yang, which does not attack unless it is molested, and which looks soft from the outside but is tough on the inside.

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This account of A Touch of Sin’s highly sophisticated structure of recurrences and connections is important since they were carefully woven in the screenplay in order to show how episodes of violence in response to violence are by no means isolated events, appearing in different parts of the country as symptoms of a social malaise. In a similar vein, the option for the multi-plot derives in part from the source of these stories, Weibo and the Internet, where one navigates across different spaces and times creating new, previously unthought-of, connections. It could also be related to the four stages of narrative in Chinese literary tradition, as Jia Zhangke explains: Of course, for me, this experience with Chinese literature would also come to influence my scriptwriting, or, in fact, it would influence how I choose to narrate my films. For example, the traditional Chinese literary work requires a narrative structure of “introduction, development, transition and conclusion” (起,承,转,合  – Qǐ, chéng, zhuǎn, hé). This is difficult to translate into English, but it shows the four steps of a narrative. This method exercised an invisible and formative influence on me, and I would even unknowingly follow this structure in the making of a film. (Jia quoted in Mello 2014c: 345)

It could thus be argued that A Touch of Sin is in fact concerned with one unified story. The introduction presents the disparity between the rich and the poor; the development elaborates on this by focusing on interpersonal relationships and on poverty; the third story provides a transition by going to the core of violence and showing how it is ultimately related to dignity and self-respect; and finally the conclusion shows how violence can be turned against oneself. The multi-plot structure also relates to the shanshuihua tradition discussed in the previous chapter, meaning that it paints a panorama of the country at a time when it is being reshaped by internal migration and the flow of money, thus breeding new sorts of relationships between people and between people and the landscape. Therefore, by observing his characters against the new landscapes of contemporary China, made up of roads, viaducts, bridges, blocks of flats, saunas, karaokes, railroads and gas stations, Jia recuperates once again the long tradition of investigating the nature of human being’s relationship with landscape and society, and attempts to create a picture of the whole country through his acute observation of the present-day phenomenon of internal migration and violence.

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Taking all these considerations into account, I  now wish to look at how A Touch of Sin, as well as establishing structural connections with literature, painting, folk legends and Jia’s own filmography, finds its main intermedial connection with the traditions of Chinese opera, also filtered through the wuxia cinema tradition. This derives from the challenge of treating violence aesthetically, and from the connection seen by Jia between the world of wuxia and the real stories behind the screenplay. In wuxia, there is usually an individual who revolts against oppression, and this burst of individuality combined with a wish to restore dignity was also the impulse behind the four characters’ violent actions in A Touch of Sin. The title of the film in English, A Touch of Sin, which of course references King Hu’s classic A Touch of Zen (侠女 Xia nü, 1971), and the choice to film in Hubei province, one of wuxia’s quintessential locations, reinforce the wish to both reference and update an artistic and cinematic tradition.

Chinese cinema’s operatic modes and the wuxia tradition Throughout its century-old history, Chinese cinema has displayed a particular affinity with Chinese opera in its different regional and national varieties. Broadly speaking, Chinese theatre can be divided into two different types. The longest and most traditional is known as xiqu (戏曲) – a kind of operatic theatre, while the second is known as xiju (西剧), the imported form of theatre with Greek origins. The xiqu is a form of dramatic and musical theatre which harks back to Chinese antiquity. Starting off as a relatively simple performative art, it gradually incorporated other artistic expressions such as music playing, singing, dancing, martial arts, acrobatics and a whole catalogue of stories deriving from Chinese classical literature. It gained maturity during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and developed into a great number of regional variations, each incorporating their own specificities such as the use of masks, different face paints, different singing styles, instruments and themes. Peking Opera or jingju 京剧 developed from the Qing Dynasty onwards (1644–1911) and became the most popular and well-known form of Chinese operatic theatre around the world.

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The first film allegedly made in China in 1905, Conquering the Jun Mountain (定军山 Ding Junshan, Ren Jingfeng), brought to the screen a performance by the then most famous Peking Opera star, Tan Xinpei, sponsored by the Empress Dowager Cixi herself.4 In the film, which is said to have travelled around China and attracted great popularity, Tan Xinpei plays the role of General Huang Zhong from the opera based on the cycles 70 and 71 of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Conquering the Jun Mountain is the first example of how cinema, an imported art/technology at the time, tried to become more Chinese by incorporating the opera. At the same time, it set the trend for filming opera scenes as a guarantor of success for the cinema in China, where a vast array of classical stories that came from oral tradition, moved to literature and then to opera, could now nourish cinema, thus turning this foreign art into a more popular and familiar medium (Berry and Farquhar 2006). This amalgam allowed at the same time for the dissemination of operatic pieces beyond their regional origins and their linguistic barriers. Cinema thus emerged as a lingua franca, and from then on the relationship with the opera has never been abandoned, taking on different forms and functions throughout history. Berry and Farquhar (2006) called this the ‘operatic modes’ of Chinese cinemas, which can emerge from specific local cultures and are hybrid and impure. One of these forms is the so-called wuxia cinema that flourished as a genre especially in the 1960s and 1970s in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The wuxia  – meaning ‘martial arts’ or ‘swordsman’, designates a fictional genre in China, originating in literature and having since spread to other media such as the opera, the cinema and television, the world of comic books, animation and video games. The highly stylized and rhythmic choreographies of action sequences in the wuxia cinema, as well as its anecdotal repertoire, are heirs to the opera. Not by chance, director King Hu, the master of Hong Kong and Taiwan wuxia cinema, often employed a martial arts choreographer, Han Yingjie, trained in and a star of traditional Peking Opera, capable of designing a highly sophisticated interchange of stasis and movement in the Kung Fu fighting sequences. John Woo’s Hong Kong cinema in the 1980s, with its diligently choreographed action sequences, is considered part of the lineage of operatic traditions in Chinese cinemas (Bordwell 2000). During the same period in mainland China, where the wuxia genre had been banished as apolitical and retrograde and the traditional Peking

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Opera had come under attack, a new form of artistic expression emerged, called the jingju yangbanxi 京剧样板戏 or Peking Model Operas. In 1966, the growing belief among Maoists was that a Cultural Revolution in the arts was needed since the 1949 Revolution had not truly empowered the working class. Therefore, there was a call for a new art that would be truly proletarian in form and content. The creation of the revolutionary model theatrical works or operas was led by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, who had been a film actress in the 1930s. The eight model works, which included five operas, two ballets and one symphonic suite, ruled alone in the first years of the Cultural Revolution and were effective propaganda pieces that found a very large and popular audience throughout the country. Its formula aimed to modernize Peking Opera through the inclusion of new topics, gender equality values and militarization, and by incorporating Russian and Western elements at the service of the revolution. The idea of the model, something which can be adapted into different artistic manifestations, suggests an understanding of the revolutionary operas as the apex of the intermedial work of art. Interestingly, prior to coining the term ‘impure cinema’, André Bazin hypothesized about the notion of the ‘model’ work of art in his 1948 essay ‘Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest’: The (literary?) critic of the year 2050 would find not a novel out of which a play and a film had been ‘made’, but rather a single work reflected through three art forms, an artistic pyramid with three sides, all equal in the eyes of the critic. The ‘work’ would then be only an ideal point at the top of this figure, which itself is an ideal construct. (Bazin 2014: 50)

This single work, an idea, a model, would be fit for adaptation by different art forms, and thus perhaps the Cultural Revolution Model Operas could have anticipated Bazin’s vision by more than 80  years. A  similar drive moves Jia Zhangke’s idealization of A Touch of Sin as a film that could be adapted in the future, as observed in this chapter’s epigraph, a point to which I will return.

Jia Zhangke’s operatic modes Operas appear incidentally in Jia Zhangke’s films since at least Unknown Pleasures.5 In this film, Qiao Qiao is seen a few times in a dingy theatre

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watching operatic performances.6 Opera insertions reappear in Cry Me a River (Kungqu Opera), Still Life (Sichuan Opera actors sitting in the restaurant) and 24 City (Yue Opera), but in no other film is it as significant as it is in A Touch of Sin. This also means that the film establishes meaningful connections with literature, as most opera stories were adapted from literary sources, mainly from one of China’s classic novels known in English as Water Margin (水浒传 Shui hu zhuan). This novel, generally attributed to Shi Nai’an (施耐庵 ca. 1296–1372) from Suzhou, is, in fact, a collection of oral tales and legends collected into manuscript copies in the late fourteenth century, and appearing as a complete printed edition with one hundred chapters in 1589. It tells the story of a group of 108 outlaws during the Song Dynasty, who, living in exile, decide one day to form an army and, after securing amnesty from the government, join the fight against corruption, rebellions and foreign invasions. Water Margin introduces some of the most popular characters in the Chinesespeaking world, and has served as a source of stories for the Chinese operatic theatre and later for the cinema, with the Shaw Brothers Studios in Hong Kong producing the majority of adaptations of the novel in the 1970s. In fact, the world of wuxia interconnects again with the opera through Water Margin, and this intermedial connection lies at the base of A Touch of Sin’s own intermedial impulse. The desire to approximate contemporary China’s stories of violence to the world of wuxia–opera involved the representation of the film’s protagonists, themselves based on real people, as characters from these worlds, in a sort of inter-semiotic translation. The character from the first story, Dahai, was inspired by Lin Chong (林冲), one of the best-known outlaws from the Water Margin. In fact, the two ‘cross paths’ in the film when Da Hai stops briefly to watch an outdoor performance by the Shanxi Opera Company of Lin Chong Escapes at Night (林冲夜奔 Lin Chong ye ben), itself based on a ‘spin-off ’ story from Water Margin, ‘Story of a Precious Sword’ (宝剑记 Bao jian ji), written by Li Kaixian (李开先, 1502–1568). Lin Chong actually inspired another famous opera entitled Wild Boar Forest (野猪林 Ye zhu lin), which tells the story of how he became an outlaw. This was adapted to the cinema in 1962 by Chen Huaiai and Cui Wei in mainland China, at a time when productions of traditional operas were still accepted. Lin Chong Escapes at Night differs from the original story from Water Margin but the main characteristics of

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Lin Chong, an oppressed individual who is unfairly accused of committing a crime and runs away, remain the same. In A Touch of Sin, the opera performance has a subtle yet decisive impact over Dahai. He is seen walking through the old town where he lives, surrounded by brick walls and historic buildings, and the opera music can be heard in the distance. He walks towards the stage that is surrounded by people watching the opera performance, the camera following him from behind. Someone shouts out ‘Mr Golf ’, the nickname he received after having been beaten by Shenglin’s henchmen with a golf club. The camera moves forward and sideways to reveal his face, still patched up from his wounds. He turns right and walks away, and the next two shots reveal the performance, with Lin Chong singing ‘I, Lin Chong, unsheathed my sword and, in anger, slew two of Gao Qiu’s henchmen. Fortunately for me, Officer Chai gave me a document, which enabled me to come to Mount Liang’ (Figure 6.1). Here, Lin Chong is referring to his crime in self-defence and his escape to Mount Liang, where he will join the ‘outlaws of the marshes’. What Dahai does next is in no way dissimilar. He goes home, still accompanied by the opera music, removes the patch around his face, looks at himself in the wardrobe mirror and opens it to reveal a shotgun. He takes it out, loads it and points it to his own reflection in the mirror. The camera then pans down and reveals the tiger towel over a chair. With the tiger roar, Dahai leaves the house, dressed in military clothes, the towel wrapped around the shotgun, placed over his shoulder. Like Lin Chong, Dahai will have to run away after the killing spree. Fleeing, being on the move, migration and an endless roaming are also common tropes

Figure 6.1  Lin Chong Escapes at Night (A Touch of Sin).

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in opera and wuxia stories. Dahai’s one ends in Jia Zhangke’s script with the following verses: ‘望家乡, 山遥水遥。望北方, 地厚天高。’ (Wang jia xiang, shan yao shui yao. Wang bei fang, di hou tian gao), meaning approximately ‘Facing home, mountains and water seem far away; facing north, the land is thick and the sky is high’ (Jia 2014:  42). Dahai/Lin Chong will now join another realm, the same where Zhou Shan, who will now become the focus of the story, lives and roams. He is in his turn inspired by Wu Song (武松), another character in Water Margin, famous for slaying a tiger. The film’s opening credits sequence suggests a kinship between the two outlaws. Starting with an image of Dahai standing next to his motorbike by a turned-over lorry once full of tomatoes, now spread all over the ground, and with the sound of a howling wind, it then cuts to Zhou Shan riding up a mountainous and remote road on his motorcycle. He encounters three small-time thieves on his path, trying to accost him with a machete, and slays the three. A bit further up the road he crosses paths with Dahai and the overturned tomato lorry. Dahai idly throws a tomato up and down, and the camera reveals the dead body of the lorry driver stretched on the road. As Dahai prepares to eat the tomato an explosion happens in the background, sending fire up to the sky. This sequence highlights, among other things, the importance of landscape in A Touch of Sin, something that Jia attributes very much to his appreciation of King Hu’s wuxia films made in Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s. In them, the master of the genre, unable to film in mainland China for political reasons, found his idealized Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) in the island’s mountains and coastline, and filmed stories of people who roamed the land. Jia’s fascination with the concept of landscape in wuxia and especially in King Hu appears in A Touch of Sin in that both Zhou Shan and later Dahai and Xiaoyu inhabit the realm of jianghu 江湖. As explained in Chapter 4, this fictional underworld is where wuxia stories are set, and where criminals and heroes roam. It is a land filled with water, the marshes, whose concept can be traced back to Zhuangzi and through to Water Margin, also translated as Outlaws of the Marsh. In modern days, the term jianghu is frequently used to refer to the triads and the secret societies of gangsters, as seen in The Killer’s quote by Brother Mark in Still Life, itself a film that seems set in a sort of jianghu. In A Touch of Sin, this jianghu is presented from the start as the mountainous road where two outlaws meet. In the third part, the film moves

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to quintessential wuxia territory, the province of Hubei, whose landscape King Hu tried to reproduce in Taiwan and Korea. This is where Xiao Yu lives, a character inspired by the heroine Yang Hui-zhen (Hsu Feng) in King Hu’s classic A Touch of Zen. She wears her hair in a ponytail, elongated with the help of a wig, and her white shirt, adorned with a black vest, lends her a tall, heroic allure (Serfaty and Kaufman 2014: 254). She too will join the jianghu once she slays her attacker, and is seen covered in blood, holding her knife, walking up another mountainous road at night. Xiao Hui, the young man in Guangdong, is perhaps the least chivalrous of the four characters, but the connection between him and the wuxia world came, according to Jia Zhangke, in his simple outfit, a blue shirt opened at the top, inspired by the heroes in Chang Cheh’s films (Serfaty and Kaufman 2014: 254). Xiao Hui does not find the jianghu, a place where he could have roamed free, and tragically ends his life.

A cinema of attractions Beyond the thematic and aesthetic intermedial practices mentioned above, A Touch of Sin’s relationship with Chinese opera and wuxia can also be felt in the persistence of the principle of ‘attractions’ within its narrative thread. Tom Gunning (1990; 1995) termed ‘cinema of attractions’ the predominant mode during the first decade of cinema production. The principle of attractions, contrary to the narrative principle, produces an essentially exhibitionist cinema, which evidences its visibility and that is willing to solicit the attention of the spectator, inciting curiosity and offering pleasure through a show, whether fictional or documentary. Early cinema, instead of developing a narrative, tended to focus on the performance that occurred before the camera. Unlike the psychological involvement that occurs with the narrative, the cinema of attractions does not allow an elaborate development, only a brief engagement, a surprise, a shock. Despite its decisive narrative inclination, the cinema never completely abandoned its attraction modes, and moments of a brief narrative suspension are frequent in certain cinematic genres such as musicals and action films. The emergence of moments of attraction occurs in A Touch of Sin, for instance,

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with the opera performances, which for a brief moment suspend one narrative to present, directly to the camera, an extract of another. Explosions and fireworks could also be seen as attractions in the film, but perhaps the most paradigmatic moment is that of Xiao Yu’s attack in the sauna. The scene is carefully choreographed and acted by Zhao Tao. She swings her blade across Wang Hongwei’s body, then both begin moving around the room while the camera draws a semicircle around them. The scene cuts to a reverse shot, revealing Xiao Yu’s bloodied face while she performs her last movement, slashing her attacker’s eyes. This and other moments of violence seem to display a mixture of trickery and reality, and work in the film as brief narrative suspensions, where a stylized form of violence becomes an attraction. The exhibitionist mode, which often materializes through the actor’s gaze to the camera, relates to the breaking of the fourth wall as proposed by Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s. As is well known, Brecht’s epic theatre was based on the encouragement of the active spectator, on the rejection of voyeurism and on the so-called alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt). Brecht proposed some techniques to achieve these goals, such as the use of sketches in a way analogous to the music hall, resulting in a theatre of interruptions, non-organic and anti-Aristotelian. He also proposed a style of performance that rejected empathy or psychological identification, aimed at creating distances between the spectator and the character, and the actor and his character. This would be inductive of an active and thus political mode of spectatorship (Brecht 2005; Stam 2000). Brechtian propositions and practices were very influential at the time of the emergence of new cinemas around the world in the late 1950s and pointed to new possibilities within the cinematographic art, less attached to the conventions and imperatives of the classical narrative. Exhibitionism relates to Brecht, but the origin of the term ‘attraction’ refers both to the universe of the vaudeville, the circus and the amusement park, the cradle of cinema in the first modernity in the late nineteenth century, and to the Eisensteinian proposition ‘montage of attractions’ (Eisenstein 1999a). Evoking Eisenstein is useful here as his notion of attraction derives, at first, from his work with the revolutionary theatre during the early years of the Soviet Revolution, the Moscow Proletkult, which rejected the naturalist methods of Stanislavsky and embraced the biomechanical approach of Vsevolod Meyerhold. The desire to break with the illusionist project proposed by Brecht in the 1930s, therefore,

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finds in Eisenstein and Meyerhold important predecessors, and the cinema exhibits the same anti-illusionist credentials in its origins. In addition to the biomechanics of Meyerhold, Japanese language and artistic traditions, notably the Kabuki theatre, had a great influence on Eisenstein’s development of his taxonomy of montage, culminating in his notion of a dialectical montage (Eisenstein 1999b; Mello 2014d). Brecht also finds in East Asia a source of influence for his revolutionary propositions in the 1930s, and for the first time uses the term Verfremdungseffekt in an essay entitled ‘Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting’ (in the original ‘Verfremdungseffekte in der chinesischen Schauspielkunst’) (Brecht [c. 1936] 1978). In this seminal essay, Brecht locates a type of performance not based on spectatorial identification and proposes that his Epic Theatre should embrace a similar distanced mode. Another essay appears around the same time, ‘To the Magician of the Pear Orchard’, written by Eisenstein in 1935 (2010b: 56–67)’. and also dedicated to the Chinese method of acting. The fact that Brecht and Eisenstein wrote two contemporary essays on the Chinese method of acting is not a coincidence, since their reflections were aroused by a Chinese opera performance of Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), which they had the opportunity to attend together in Moscow in the spring of 1935, accompanied also by Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and other artistic personalities of the time. Mei Lanfang is considered one of the greatest Chinese opera actors of all time – performing in the female role dan (旦) – and he is largely responsible for making this art form known in the West through seasons in the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Therefore, Brechtian alienation and Eisenstein’s attractions find a common root in the appreciation of the exhibitionist and anti-naturalistic nature of Chinese opera or Japanese Kabuki, and in the genius of Mei Lanfang. Brecht’s alienation effects, however, are not easily translated into the Chinese cinematic context. The lingering effect of operatic traditions in Chinese cinema, both during the Cultural Revolution and afterwards in the 1990s, suggests that these works have been promoting, in lieu of an alienation effect, a heightened form of spectatorial identification, thus revoking the Brechtian proposition that tends to equate the anti-naturalism of this form of art with reflexivity. If Brecht saw in Mei Lanfang’s performances a form of distanciation, which he then proposed as a weapon for politically progressive

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art, I believe that, within the context of China, opera performances produced a privileged form of identification, operating between actor and character, between actor and the public, and between the character and the public, in a psychological, corporeal and collective level. In Japanese cinema studies, Lúcia Nagib’s definitive work on Nagisa Oshima (1995, 2011)  has already demonstrated how the notion of distanciation as proposed by Brecht and his epic theatre, however revolutionary, was still based on established Western philosophical traditions, such as the Christianinflected dualism mind–body, going back to Kantian metaphysics (Nagib 2011: 200). Nagib explores what she calls the ‘eroticized apparatus’ in Nagisa Oshima’s cinema, demonstrating that the marks of enunciation in his films, seen as responsible for the suspension of the so-called cinematic illusionism and spectatorial identification, worked in fact as an antidote to the reason– emotion/mind–body dichotomies, combining alienation with identification/ emotion. In agreement with Nagib, I  suspect that very little can be achieved by considering the relationship between film and opera in China under dualisms such as reason–emotion, mind–body and their translation into the Brechtian epic theatre and the notion of distanciation. It should nevertheless be noted that Brecht’s thoughts and theories transformed during the 1930s and 1940s. As Bela Kiralyfalvi demonstrates (1990), while Brecht started off by rejecting any emotion-based aesthetic, which he perhaps superficially equated to Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, he came to modify his allegiance to a reason– emotion dualism by stating in letters and diary entries, and finally in his ‘Short Organum for the Theatre’, that Epic Theatre does not deny or renounce emotion altogether, only ‘empathy’, which would be inductive to passivity (Kiralyfalvi 1990:  28–9). So emotion came into the equation especially in his later plays, only a type of emotion not tied to a character’s psychology but related to more generalized concepts such as the sense of justice and the importance of freedom. Brecht, however, continued to equate empathy with catharsis and thus continued to reject what he thought of as the Aristotelian dramatic theatre. So the suggestion that operatic performances produce psychological identification through empathy means posing a conundrum to the Brechtian-inflected aesthetics which refuse identification as politically backwards.

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As mentioned before, opera was absorbed by Chinese cinema in order to make it more understandable, more popular, more ideological, more Chinese and often all at the same time. This notion is corroborated by the positive response from the audience that, as Berry and Farquhar (2006) point out, often enjoyed this interaction to the point of knowing by heart the operatic numbers and singing along during the performances and projections, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Therefore, the opera, despite its anti-naturalistic essence, entered Chinese cinema not as a distancing effect but as an element of identification, or that perhaps the terms ‘distancing effect’ and ‘identification’, anchored as they are within Western critical thinking, should be rethought in the face of the artistic and cultural specificities that permeate the history of Chinese cinema. This brings me to the final scene in A Touch of Sin, where once again a character is faced with another fictional character standing on an opera stage. This is the moment when Xiao Yu, walking by the imposing city walls of Pingyao (once again appearing as Fenyang), stops by to watch a performance of The Story of Su San (玉堂春 Yu tang chun) (Figure 6.2). This opera, adapted from a chapter of the Ming Dynasty collection of vernacular stories by Feng Menglong entitled Stories to Caution the World (警世通言 Jingshi tongyan, 1624), tells the tale of Su San, who is sold by her poor family as a prostitute. In the brothel, she meets the scholar Wang Jinlong, and the two fall in love. He does not possess the funds to buy her liberty, so he decides to study for the civil service examination, hoping to then be able to secure a high-ranking job

Figure 6.2  The Story of Su San by Pingyao’s city walls (A Touch of Sin).

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and marry her. In the meantime, however, Su San is sold to a local magnate as a concubine. His jealous wife tries to poison her, but he accidentally drinks the poison and dies. The murder is blamed on Su, who is unjustly imprisoned. She finally faces a retrial and, to their mutual surprise, the court judge is none other than Wang Jinlong, who had come top of his class in the imperial examination. The Story of Su San, interestingly, was King Hu’s first feature film back in 1964, made for the Shaw Brothers Studio in Hong Kong. Zhao Tao’s character in A Touch of Sin is called Xiao Yu 小玉 after the opera and the film, and in the final scene, she will finally ‘meet’ her namesake. By the city walls, Xiao Yu moves through a crowd standing in front of an open stage where Yu Tang Chun is being performed. Su San sings: ‘He brands me, Su San, as a murderer, I cannot defend myself, I am forced to confess, my tears flow.’ Finally, a cut reveals the operatic performance previously heard in the soundtrack, with Su San kneeling and facing the audience, with the county magistrate sitting at a high table behind her (Figure  6.3). As soon as she finishes singing he yells to her: ‘Su San, do you understand your sin?’ (你可知罪? Ni ke zhi zui). A  close-up of Xiao Yu follows and the question is reiterated twice by the magistrate. Xiao Yu lowers her head and looks up again. A moment of silence precedes the following shot, revealing the crowd standing in front of the stage, staring back at it, at the camera, at us. The music resumes and the image cuts to black, bringing the film to an end (Figure 6.4). The ending of A Touch of Sin, perhaps one of the most extraordinary moments in Jia Zhangke’s filmography, references the ending of Xiao Wu discussed in Chapter 2. The crowd stares at the camera and at the audience,

Figure 6.3  ‘Su San, do you understand your sin?’ (A Touch of Sin).

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Figure 6.4  The crowd as opera spectators in A Touch of Sin.

and the question posed remains unanswered. Xiao Yu does not only feel for Su San; rather, she stands there in complete empathy and identification with the unjustly accused prostitute on stage, even if she is dressed, painted and acting in wholly anti-naturalistic ways. The crowd, in its turn, look on as either accomplices or accusers, guilty or innocent, unable to answer the question and throwing it back to us, the audience on the other side of the screen. ‘Do we understand our sin?’, the film seems to ask, extending the identification and empathic mode to all of us, the crowd watching the opera, Xiao Yu, the cinema audience and Su San.

National allegories and invented traditions A Touch of Sin’s highly intermedial structure suggests yet another hypothesis that could also be argued more broadly in relation to Chinese cinema’s operatic modes. This relates to this chapter’s epigraph, taken from the following statement by Jia Zhangke on the style he sought to employ in his film: It was a new form for me because it is different from what I did before, but, in fact, it is a form that seeks to be inscribed in a tradition. A tradition that comes from folktales, of what in China is called shuoshu (说书 oral narrative), which I liked very much in my childhood. It is a popular art, whereby stories of our ancestors are transmitted from generation to generation. Even today we hear shuoshu on the radio. Since Still Life my vision of my profession has evolved, and more and more I see myself as a shuoshu artist. More precisely,

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having identified the four accounts that would compose A Touch of Sin, I was struck by their resemblance to the popular novels of the classical period, and especially to the chivalry novels such as Water Margin. There too, in the face of unbearable social situations, people resort to violence. This novel inspired numerous adaptations for theatre and opera, adaptations that are still staged, which proves that it describes phenomena that remain current. I love to imagine that one day, fifty or a hundred years from now, someone could stage an adaptation of A Touch of Sin. Among my references were also classic martial arts films, which are the continuation of these short stories, novels and plays. (Jia quoted in Frodon and Salles 2014: 156–7)

Around the same time, he replied to another question with a similar statement: I made a speech after A Touch of Sin was played at Busan International Film Festival. I ended the speech with the following words ‘My job is more and more similar to ancient people. Just like Shi Naian’s, who used to write novels, Chinese opera writers’ and storytellers’ we read about on books. Film is just a contemporary media but we actually have the same duties. We transmit our experiences from older generations to younger generations’. At last, I said: ‘I take myself as a storyteller. I tell the stories of people from the People’s Republic of China. Even if Shi Naian used to tell the stories of the Song Dynasty and I tell the stories of the People’s Republic of China, we actually do the same things.’ (Jia quoted in Serfaty and Kaufman 2014: 254)

I have quoted extensively from Jia Zhangke above because it seems to me that, with A Touch of Sin, he avidly thought to make a film that would be born a classical work, able to inspire other works across different media in the future. In this avowed desire, leading him to compare himself with the author of Water Margin, I see an authorial aspiration that springs directly from the intersection between the realist and the intermedial impulse I  have been trying to locate in Jia’s filmography. His film needs to speak of the present and to articulate a reality that cannot be overshadowed, and this is where it finds its stories. At the same time, it relies on a number of past traditions in order to not only incorporate multiple temporalities but also to be inserted into an age-long Chinese tradition of intermedial and intertextual works of art, both continuing it and setting a new standard. Here, it would perhaps be possible to expand the reflection on the identification effect that lies within the anti-naturalistic performance of

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Chinese opera, in its different manifestations in the cinema, to suggest that these works, precisely because of their impurity, produce a collective form of identification and function as allegories not of a nation but rather of an ‘imagined civilization’, a term I propose as more apt to address the relationship between cinema and an idea of China. This form of collective identification begins forcefully from the efforts of the Chinese Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang 国民傥), led by Sun Yat-sen, the father of the Chinese Republic, and by Chiang Kai-shek, his successor, to transform, from 1912 to 1949, local traditions such as the Peking Opera into national traditions. The Chinese opera, which manifests itself in local peculiarities in different regions of the country, came to be recognized as a national form from the specificities of the Peking Opera, transformed from the cultural and political nationalism of the KMT into an expression of the whole country. As a consequence, cinema was employed as a tool in this process of dissemination, as Berry and Farquhar explain: The twentieth-century transformation of opera into film was part of the early KMT Republican nation-building Project in China, which included transforming local forms, such as Beijing opera, into national cultural forms. Hence, opera film is a form of cultural nationalism that may be transformed by state directive into political nationalism. (Berry and Farquhar 2006: 48)

The opera persists as an expression of an aesthetic and a national idea after the Communist Revolution of 1949, which decrees the People’s Republic of China. After the change of regime and ideology, the desire for a revolutionary art is forcefully expressed by Mao Zedong, and later by his wife and leader of the Gang of Four Jiang Qing. This revolutionary art should be expressed through a common language, capable of mobilizing the masses. It should be noted that Mao Zedong had always nurtured an interest in China’s art and culture. During the years of the war against the Japanese, based in Yan’an, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party discussed in pronouncements the importance of creating a ‘cultural army’ in China’s battle against foreign and domestic enemies (Marchetti 1997:  66). The so-called Yan’an Literature and Art Forum (在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话), which took place in May 1942, determined that all art should reflect the life of the working class and regard it as the target audience, serving politics and especially the advance of socialism.

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Expressed in Mao’s speech was the belief in the need to develop a new revolutionary art form that served above all the masses, but which could start from traditional forms found in literature, theatre, opera and Chinese art: ‘[We do not] refuse to utilize the literary and artistic forms of the past, but in our hands these old forms, remoulded and infused with new content, also become something revolutionary in the service of the people’ (Mao [1942] 1971: 259). These guidelines became the basis for Maoist ‘revolutionary romanticism’, responsible for the persistence of Chinese opera’s influence in both the first seventeen years (1949–65) and the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The opera–cinema relationship, after 1949, took on revolutionary outlines, revealing, on the one hand, the desire to make Marxism more Chinese and, on the other hand, the need to transform the proletarian cinema itself into a more Chinese one, fit to speak for a whole country. I believe that Jia Zhangke’s authorial cinema in A Touch of Sin also incorporates operatic modes and leans on tradition in order to, on one level, unify a discourse, aimed at the creation of a work of art that would be panoramic and classical from the outset. Thus, the impurity of the cinema in its relation to the opera manifests itself here in the very bosom of the cinematographic renewal of mainland China, as a guarantor of its ability to dialogue with the ‘Chinese civilization’. It is also embedded in the long history of intermediality that defines the arts in the country, overlapping oral tradition, literature, painting, theatre/opera, shadow theatre and cinema over millennia, through repeated adaptations of narratives considered classic. Jia’s itinerant impulse thus functions here within the country’s territory, through time and across its art forms. So even when he stresses the importance of travel, as seen in the quote about King Hu’s cinema and landscape, this is contained within the Chinese territory – once again real (the panoramic tour he promotes in A Touch of Sin) or imagined (the China that King Hu tried to find in Taiwan and Korea). One question that inevitably arises from this hypothesis concerns the category of national cinema and of a unified discourse to speak of Jia Zhangke’s cinema and A Touch of Sin. Within film theory, much has been debated on the concept and the validity of the idea of national cinematographies. It could be said that during the 1960s the figure of the film-maker often appeared as a spokesperson for a nation as ‘imagined community’, in Benedict Anderson’s terms (2008), engaged in a project of social transformation. Today, however, we

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live in the era of fragmentation and flux, averse to totalizing and agglutinating notions, and producing a critical spirit that has little to do with the political thinking of the 1960s. The ‘popular mandate’ through which the artist was convinced of the legitimacy and value of his work would thus no longer hold true. In this cinematic and theoretical landscape where a myriad of prefixes such as ‘trans’, ‘inter’ and ‘multi’ abound (see, e.g. Appadurai 1998; Naficy 2001; Shohat and Stam 1994; Durovicova and Newman 2010) and become almost mandatory in contemporary cinema and audiovisual studies, it seems important to my reflection on A Touch of Sin and Jia Zhangke to recover not exactly the concept of ‘national cinema’ but rather the notion of ‘national allegory’ suggested by Ismail Xavier in Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema (1993). This, as Andréa França (2003) points out, distinguishes itself from Jameson’s (1986) contentious coinage of the term by uniting the desire for wholeness and organicity to the demystifying fragmentation of contemporaneity. I  propose therefore an understanding of opera in Chinese cinema and in A Touch of Sin as a producer of ‘national allegories’, capable of generating an impression of totality within the reality of fragmentation. The operatic modes of Chinese cinema, in their various forms, seem to constitute a Chinese language at once common and malleable, capable of embracing different ideologies and functions throughout history. This cinema, which seeks to promote an identification not only psychological/ individual but also collective, can be understood from the notion of ‘national allegory’, which counteracts the essential fragmentations that define any country, in favour of a coherent and ahistorical image. For, as Hobsbawm and Ranger explain, the notion of ‘invented traditions’ is ‘highly relevant to that comparatively recent historical innovation, the “nation”, with its associated phenomena: nationalism, the nation-state, national symbols, histories and the rest’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012: 13). This imagined coherence lies in an idea of China, one that is still enacted by the government of Xi Jinping in its official version of a harmonious and peaceful country, inspired by Confucian ideals, in which national integrity and continuity are essential. As for the use of the term ‘nation’ and ‘national allegory’ to refer to China, it might be worth evoking Martin Jacques’s proposition in When China Rules

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the World (2009), by which China must first be considered a ‘Civilization State’ rather than a ‘nation-state’, thus avoiding the application of a concept coming from European modernism and foreign to the complexities of Chinese history. I believe that the idea of Chinese civilization would indeed arise from what Stephanie Donald (2014) suggests as the conjunction of a timeless China, with its 5,000  years of history and cultural and artistic traditions, and the China reproduced historically. Thus, I would like to suggest replacing the expression ‘invented nation’ with ‘invented civilization’, and ‘national allegory’ with ‘civilizational allegory’, whose marks are found in the impurity of A Touch of Sin. This suggestion could seem contentious in that the notion of impurity, the topicality of the real stories, the fragmentation of the narrative, the censorship imposed on the film and the very violence it expresses all point in a different direction. Jia creates a dialogue in A Touch of Sin with his country’s floating generation, but the sort of engagement he proposes with his country and with an idea of China is more complex. In A Touch of Sin, for instance, most of the actors did not speak the local dialects, and Chinese audiences often complained or made fun of Jiang Wu’s feeble attempts at Shanxi dialect. Zhao Tao had a coach to master the Hubei dialect, but it still meant that most of them spoke a hybrid of Mandarin and local accents and dialects. There is no doubt that Jia Zhangke is a film-maker who is concerned with details, so if he had wished to preserve authenticity through language and accents he certainly would have done so. Hobsbawm and Ranger’s comment on how standard national languages, learned in schools and only written and spoken by no more than a small élite, are in fact and to a great extent constructs (2012: 14), is, maybe, true in China more than elsewhere. The modern version of Mandarin, taught in schools in the country and in Taiwan and Hong Kong, is certainly a recent construct of a national/civilizational idiom, which until the early twentieth century had a different written pattern and multiplied orally – as it still does today – in over 200 dialects. Moreover, the fragmented structure of the film, as mentioned before, derives from both literature and painting, and in fact aims at unity, at four parts of a single story, and at a panoramic view of the country. Jia insisted that these stories were not seen as isolated events and the highly complex nature of interrelations he created in the film attest to this desire.

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Lastly, impurity comes through classical literature and the opera, therefore conferring tradition and continuity to the film. Yet the main difference here between Jia’s aspiration for a unified discourse and the official Chinese version of this discourse is that he is not interested in speaking of harmony, national integrity and peace, essential traits in Xi Jinping’s White Paper and his Chinese Dream. Jia’s is not an ahistorical narrative, his stories stem from the real, and they draw a disharmonious, violent and despairing picture of his country, one, however, that also speaks of continuity, tradition and the Chinese civilization, being therefore as complex as their auteur.

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7

Painterly still lifes and photographic poses

China today exports in six hours as much as it did in all of 1978. During the first half of the 2000s, it climbed from the seventh to the third place on the list of the world’s largest economies, and by the end of the decade it had surpassed Japan to become the world’s second largest. Since the late 1970s, the country went from 20 per cent urbanization to today’s 54 per cent, with its urban population growing by more than five hundred million. Six thousand miles of track were built in less than a decade, and the country has already invested in over one thousand high-speed trains. The expressway network of China is the longest in the world, and it has built the largest and mightier hydroelectric power plant in the globe. And all of this happened in just over three decades.1 Within a world that is changing at full speed, and whose numbers never cease to amaze in either admiring or frightening ways, Jia Zhangke has been developing a cinematic style founded on a complex relationship with time and space. As postulated in the introduction, his response to the celerity of change translates into a slow cinematic style, made up of long takes, a slowmoving camera and a focus on the everyday. On the one hand, his cinema is an avowed inheritor of aesthetic resources related to cinematic realism, typically employed in post-war European cinema’s new conceptions of filmic time. Giuliana Bruno explains: Unlike early modernism, which was more interested in speed, velocity, and acceleration, the late modernism that emerged in the postwar period conceived of modernity as inhabiting different, extended temporal zones, and it set out to explore this new shape of modern times. Broadening, expanding, fragmenting, layering, exploring, rethinking time marked a new international filmic movement. (Bruno 2007: 199)

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The emergence of this new international filmic movement has been identified by Gilles Deleuze  – following Bazin’s conception of modern cinema  – as a transition from what he called ‘movement-image’ to the ‘time-image’. Broadly speaking, this transition gained shape through the use of long takes, a slowacting style2 and a focus on the time of non-action, which delayed the efficient narrative of cause and effect crafted and perfected by more commercial cinematic practices. Jia’s cinema in many ways recuperates and updates a preoccupation with duration and an extended notion of time, and within this context, his film In Public appears at once as paradigmatic and innovative. This was, in fact, the first film Yu Lik-wai shot for Jia in digital in 2001, in the city of Datong, and gave rise to his consecutive work Unknown Pleasures. The film was commissioned by the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea, alongside other medium-length digital films by Tsai Ming-liang (A Conversation with God) and John Akomfrah (Digitopia). It is what could be described as a poetic documentary, in Bill Nichols’s terms (1991), a 30-minute sequence of shots, conveyed by slow tracking movements but mostly static, inside four public spaces in the city: the waiting room of a railway station, a bus stop and a bus in movement, a restaurant inside a stationed bus, and an old coach station turned into recreational room, with pool tables and a dance hall. This study of spaces, most of them revisited in Unknown Pleasures, becomes also a slow exploration of time. The film focuses on the time of waiting, be it for a train, for a bus or simply for time to pass. The camera is observational and is sometimes met by the curious or inquisitive gaze of those standing around these spaces. Giuliana Bruno speaks of an ‘aesthetic of temps mort’ to describe the temporal elongation in the cinema of Antonioni, who in the 1960s took the spatial–temporal innovations of Italian neorealism to new heights. Antonioni’s cinema was ‘absorbed in framing and mapping (interior) landscapes, and drawn to the time of non-action, a time when actors stop acting and space tells its story’ (Bruno 2007:  200). In Public is also a film that privileges the time of non-action, ‘fashioning’ – to use Bruno’s term – an aesthetic of temps mort by which space is given time to speak. But, being as it is a documentary, it does not have to concern itself, as Jacques Rancière suggests, with actors and a plot: ‘The privilege of the so-called documentary film is that it is not obliged to create the feeling of the real, and this allows it to treat the real as a

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problem and to experiment more freely with the variable games of action and life, significance and insignificance’ (Rancière 2006: 17–18). So in its desire to observe time, In Public delays it by watching it go by. This disconcerting structure finds an interesting parallel in Humphrey Jennings’s Listen to Britain, a documentary made for Britain’s war effort in 1942. One of Jennings’s most discussed works, Listen to Britain encapsulates much of what his poetic outlook into the art of documentary represented in relation to the Grierson school of the 1930s. The film goes around the country to show a population mobilized and united in their farms, factories, offices, coal mines, railroads, schools, hospitals and ballrooms. It is a film reminiscent of Jennings’s earlier Spare Time (1939), which looked at how workers from three different industries spent their free time. In the case of Listen to Britain, however, the choice is curious: this is a film made for the war effort, but rather than focusing on the home front or in the battlefield, it chooses to show everyday life, in all its prosaicness. In this sense, Jacques Rancière’s reading of Jennings’s film brings to light its crucial aesthetic significance: The paradoxical political choice of showing a country at peace in order to win support for its war efforts succeeds because Jennings makes exemplary use of the paradox inherent to the film fable. The peaceful moments that make up the film . . . are nothing other than the moments of suspension that punctuate fiction films and that invest the constructed verisimilitude of the action and the story with the naked truth, the meaningless truth of life. The fable tends to intersperse these moments of suspension/moments of the real with action sequences. Jennings, by thus isolating them in this strange ‘documentary’, highlights just how ambivalent this play of exchanges, between the verisimilar action characteristic of representative art and the life without reason emblematic of aesthetic art, really is. (Rancière 2006: 17)

It could be said that Jennings’s paradoxical political choice, as identified by Rancière, bears an oblique relation to the aesthetic choices made by Jia Zhangke in In Public, where he promotes an observation of daily life that contradicts head-on the notion of accelerated change that pervades his country’s image and – to a certain extent – its reality. This he achieves by ‘editing out’ the action and ‘leaving in’ the ‘meaningless truth of life’. This allows for the effect of the real to take over the logic of action and deepens his study of cinematic time

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conducted by the observation of spaces that no longer serve their original function, or where time has become suspended. I have chosen to start this chapter about the intersections between photography, portraits and still lives in Jia Zhangke’s cinema with a brief reflection about In Public for I feel it is paradigmatic of his desire to slow down time against the inevitability of cinema’s forward and linear drive, as well as the inevitability of a fast-moving present. Jia’s digital cinema responds to the reality of intense transformations in contemporary China by foregrounding the destruction of old factories and of entire cities, while, at the same time, trying to arrest or delay time through an aesthetic interest in still photography, photographic ‘poses’ and painterly ‘still lifes’. This results in ‘intermedial pauses’ that seem to embrace the contradiction contained in Bazin’s discussion of the cinematographic image, that is, the persistent tension between preserving time and prevailing over it. This formal contradiction becomes manifested in the ‘motion photographs’ and ‘cinematic still lives’ seen especially in the films 24 City and Still Life, which in their turn exemplify the coexistence of the real and the intermedial at the heart of Jia’s cinema. Moreover, rather than revealing a commitment to cinema as duration, these pauses work as a way to integrate other necessary temporal and meaningful layers into the fabric of cinematographic spatial–temporal linearity, interwoven into Jia’s films with an intellectual, reflexive and sensorial dimension. I will start with an appraisal of one of Jia’s most overtly intermedial films, the groundbreaking 24 City, and follow with a discussion of its relationship with photographic poses. This leads into an analysis of the use of still photography in Jia’s cinema, and finally into a reflection on the painterly still lifes in Still Life, which the camera’s scanning gaze seems to hope to unveil.

Factory, history and memory in 24 City Set in 2008 in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, 24 City springs from a conscious wish to reflect on China’s recent history as a means to make sense of the present. The film – and the book that accompanied its release (Jia 2009a) – concerns an actually existing place, State Factory 420, which at the time was in the process of being dismantled. A large complex of apartments, offices and

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other amenities would be erected on the site, dubbed ‘24 City’ (二十四城), a name that derives from an ancient Chinese poem about Chengdu, said to spill over like twenty-four hibiscus-covered cities. 24 City uses interviews to listen to the history of factory workers and their descendants. Three generations traverse the film, through nine testimonies that emerge from half a century of Chinese history.3 The history of Factory 420 has its origins in another factory, the 111, founded in 1958 in Shenyang in the north-east province of Liaoning, and dedicated to the production of turbines for military aeroplanes. In the 1960s, Factory 111 was transferred by 4,000 employees through sea and land routes to Chengdu, south-west of the country, and renamed Factory 420. This transfer occurred in response to Mao Zedong’s policy for the development of the so-called ‘Third front’ in the early 1960s, which began with the separation of China into three areas according to their strategic positions. It also came as a measure of protection to the armaments industries during the Sino-Soviet rupture and against what the government saw as possible foreign threats. Hence the desire to reposition the factory in a more remote and mountainous region, far from the vulnerability of the coastal lands. Factory 420 operated in Chengdu as a city within another city, remaining virtually isolated because of its sheer size and therefore self-sufficiency, and the secrecy of its military production line. Its complex consisted of schools, shops, hospitals and leisure clubs, which served the thousands of families of factory employees working and living in its quarters. In its five decades of productive activity, this microcosm went through several phases of China’s history. Emerging during the ‘planned economy era’, the factory was part of the implementation of socialist reform, which had a decisive focus on ‘basic industry’ during the first five-year plan (from 1953 to 1957). After this period of initial expansion, two moments dramatically blocked industrial development in the country:  the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). Between these two periods, in 1964, Factory 420 had its first ‘golden age’. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping’s series of economic measures leveraged the transformation of the planned economy into a market economy. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese industrial system underwent a major reform that gradually ensured the transfer of state control

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of enterprises to private control. As a result, industries gained autonomy and responsibility for their economic gains and losses and were encouraged to attract foreign capital and advanced technology, leading to a major initial acceleration. During the first half of the 1980s, the 420 lived through its ‘second golden age’. However, from 1995 to 2000 the Chinese industrial park faced a great wave of unemployment, since this economic adaptation led to the bankruptcy of many factories that, being inefficient or overworked, could not adapt to the new market rules. An estimated 60 million workers lost their jobs between 1993 and 2006, and with the transformation of the traditional working class and their way of life, there has been a decisive change in the country’s social tapestry. The nature of this change can be seen, for example, in A Touch of Sin’s fourth segment, where Xiao Hui moves from job to job, no longer attached to the same factory for life. Therefore, it can be concluded that Factory 420 went through, with more or less vigour, several decades of the economic and political history of China, being finally dislodged in 2005 after an investment by ‘China Resources Land’ (CR Land 华润置地, a branch of Hong Kong-listed giant corporation China Resources 华润4) of 2.14 billion RMB into buying its land of about 560,000 square meters, located in a prized region of Chengdu. But, contrary to common assumptions, the 420 did not close its doors; it downsized and constructed a new industrial park based on the profit of the sale of the land. It is also worth remembering that the financing company behind the real-estate project ‘24 City’, CR Land, invested part of the money in the production of Jia Zhangke’s film, complicating the temptation for a simplistic reading that this would be a protest or a libel against real-estate speculation in globalized China.5 The transformation of Factory 420 into ‘24 City’ signified the replacement of one reality by another:  where once there was a factory-city, a new city of services, commerce and entertainment would be erected. As well as documenting this passage, Jia Zhangke seems interested in how decades of socialism have impacted the lives of those living and working in the factory, and how these personal experiences may sound familiar to thousands or millions of others throughout the country. From this stems the wish to listen and to convey these stories, made up of subjective memories, which in turn serve to compose a larger picture, a collective memory  – as the title of his book indicates (Jia 2009a). To this end, the director interviewed more than

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100 people linked to the 420, and from these testimonies selected a few that were neither too tragic nor too specific, thus capable of generating a greater degree of identification. Thomas Austin suggests that 24 City presents itself as a ‘selfconscious intervention into the constitution of cultural memory’ (Austin 2014: 257), employing the interview technique associated with documentaries in order to present a counter-narrative in relation to the great narrative of teleological progress sanctioned by the CCP. In Jia’s film, the past becomes something other than a chronological extension. The ‘mode of listening’ that supports the interview technique is thus employed in 24 City as a means of reconstructing individual and collective memories. I  consciously call this a reconstruction taking into account the necessary degree of performance and manipulation that will lead towards one specific account and impression and not to another. As Ismail Xavier explains, The interview, as a public speech, reveals one’s intimacy and transforms the person who speaks into a ‘character’ in the etymological sense of the word: a ‘public figure’. . . . Despite being a stranger, [the filmmaker] is an anticipated visitor, but there is an observance of decorum on both parts, marking a difference between a filmmaker’s and a psychoanalyst’s mode of listening. (2009: 215)

Xavier’s reference to the interview as a public speech in relation to documentary practice is intrinsically related to what he terms the ‘cameraeffect’ (2009: 213). Speaking in front of a camera will always entail – regardless of all the cultural differences that should always be taken into account – the creation of a public speech delivered by a character, someone who reconstructs a memory through speech. This can be observed in one of 24 City’s most poignant interviews, conducted with Hou Lijun (侯丽君), born in 1955 in Shenyang and removed with her family to Chengdu in the early 1960s. Her parents were workers in the 420 and left their own parents back in Shenyang. The pain of the separation was not fully grasped by Hou Lijun as she was still a child at the time, but she remembers her granny and her mother crying, not knowing if they would ever have the chance to meet again. Hou tells of a 14-year separation before they could return home to Shenyang to see her grandparents, and of another painful goodbye upon their return to Chengdu. Finally, she talks about her work for the 420, and about the hardships she has

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been enduring since being laid off as a result of the gradual downsizing of the factory. The whole interview – the third in the film – happens inside a moving bus at night in Chengdu, but the sequence – which lasts in total nine minutes – begins with a rehearsed scene where a group of workers hastily crosses the street to catch a bus, carrying bags and rucksacks. It looks like the bus is waiting for them at the stop, and Hou Lijun can be seen sitting alone inside it. Just as the workers cross the street, though, the bus leaves without them. The function of this preamble to the interview is, of course, open to interpretation, but what it does decidedly do is call attention to how the film is comfortable in its combination of fact and imagination. As the bus leaves, the interview with Hou starts, and, following a shot of her back and the impression of her name over the image, it rolls as in a long take, with the camera facing her from the same angle. However, this ‘long take’ is interrupted by an intertitle with her year of birth and information about her work at the factory, and then, significantly, three black screens. Finally, a black screen appears and becomes an intertitle with Hou’s final phrase stamped on it: ‘If people have something to do they age more slowly (人有事做 老得慢一点 ren you shi zuo lao de man yidian). The interruption of the interview by black screens is recurrent in 24 City, creating pauses in all of the filmed recollections. These have been interpreted mainly as a dimension of the unspeakable (Donald 2014: 271), as an indication of the time lag between a fast-changing reality and a slow-changing human nature (Wu 2011), and as painterly ‘empty spaces’, which, as discussed in Chapter  5, provide room for reflection (Xiao 2011). In Hou’s interview, as Donald equally points out, the black screens also provide ‘sympathetic breaks’ when she becomes overcome by her emotions (2014: 271). For me, they seem like the prolonged blink of an eye, combined with a deep breath, bringing the spectator and Hou closer together in this narrative. If she needs to breathe and close her eyes, then so the film will also, and so will we, the audience. It is, after all, a long and difficult bus ride, with motion and emotion (Bruno 2007) coming together and spanning decades of Chinese history. In 24 City, the black intermission is sometimes introduced by the fade-in, perhaps a more common, less abrupt and therefore more acceptable transition, but other times it is brought about with a simple cut. And the cut here makes it more obvious,

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more poignant and more significant. Once again, this is a documentary that seems unafraid to reveal its construction, and that will finally question the interview method as a guarantor of truth in the most overt way possible. Research work carried out during pre-production meant that the director spoke to over a hundred people and filmed over fifty interviews with factory workers and relatives who, in one way or another, had their lives affected by the factory and its imminent dismantling (Jia 2009a: 253). The finished film features some of these interviews while at the same time combining details from others into four fictional testimonies, delivered by well-known professional actors Lü Liping, Joan Chen, Zhao Tao and Chen Jianbin. These performed interviews do not differ from the other interviews in their mise en scène or editing structure, so there is nothing that allows one to distinguish them from the others. But rather than trying to fool his audience into believing that all the interviews were conducted with ‘real’ people, the director chose four wellknown actors inside China, and not unknown abroad, to ‘play the role’ of workers and relatives. Lü Liping has worked extensively on Chinese television and was the star in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s classic The Blue Kite (蓝风筝 Lan fengzheng, 1992). Joan Chen is possibly one of Chinese cinema’s greatest stars, having played the heroine in the classic Little Flower and appearing on many international productions since the 1980s, from David Lynch’s Twin Peaks to Ang Lee’s Lust/Caution, and more recently in the Netflix series Marco Polo. Chen Jianbin is perhaps the least-known of the four outside China, but still a popular TV star in his country. And finally, there is Zhao Tao, playing the role of a worker’s daughter. These ‘fictional’ testimonies, precisely for being avowedly so, could be regarded as a distancing technique in reverse, aimed at questioning the value of ‘truth’ and the documentary mode’s ability to represent or to reveal this ‘truth’.6 In fact, 24 City reflects on China’s transition from planned economy to a market economy by focusing on how the microcosm of the factory is a place filled with memories made of both fact and imagination, such stuff as history itself is made on. And so the documentary mode of production, having as it does a stricter, more ethical relationship with the real, seems to doubt its own indexical nature in 24 City by choosing to embrace theatrical modes. This comes at the risk of disrupting accepted notions of fiction and documentary, of redrawing the borders between fact and imagination, between the authentic

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and the representational experience. Interestingly, the film’s staged interviews have an at once theatrical anti-naturalist nature akin to Brecht’s alienation techniques and, paradoxically, a heightened level of intimacy, which seems to draw the spectator in closer. As a result, the ‘fictional’ testimonies in 24 City display a similar dramatic force to the real ones, and are able to elicit a powerful emotional response and, more importantly, identification through empathy, even in those who remain conscious of its fictional nature. Empathy and emotion are therefore not incompatible with reason and social consciousness, and the type of ‘critical engagement’ elicited by 24 City is more at ease with the uncertainty of boundaries between genres, art and reality, the real and the intermedial. 24 City’s fictional gesture could also be said to refer to the social character of enunciation, a notion highlighted by Deleuze and Guattari (2008) indicating the prevalence of a collective discourse in any first-person discourse. By combining several testimonials and experiences in four fictional interviews, the director seems to suggest the very collectivizing element that characterizes any subjective experience. In addition, it should be noted that in Chinese culture this collective character seems inherent in the use of language, often supported, as Ricardo Primo Portugal and Tan Xiao (2013) observe, through the use of myriad chengyu 成语, a term that means traditional idiomatic expressions (comprising popular sayings, literary references and stereotypes), usually made up of four characters, that are seen to contain Chinese wisdom and collective knowledge, thus able to universalize any individual experience, pointing to a past that insists on emerging in the present.

Intermedial memories: Pauses, poses and portraits In his book A Collective Memory of Chinese Working Class, Jia Zhangke describes 24 City as ‘a group portrait’, alluding to the act of remembrance that underlies his project (Jia 2009a:  253–4). From this perspective, it could be argued that the film composes this group portrait from a sophisticated editing structure that interweaves, through both internal and external, horizontal and vertical montage, streams of poetry, music, testimonies, documentary footage of the factory and the city, and documents such as old refectory cards and work

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permits. Therefore, in addition to questioning the boundaries between fiction and documentary, the hybrid nature of 24 City encompasses the intermedial impulse by relying extensively on other forms of art such as poetry, music and photography in order to deal with the complexity of memory and history. In the words of Jia Zhangke, While making this film, I tried to find a method that would put into place different supports. Film’s temporality and its visual continuity allow us to employ different media, interviews centred on the word, poems which bring in the written dimension, pictures and music. In fact, my original idea was to craft a complex phenomenon, multifaceted, through a hybrid of different formats. As soon as I was confronted by these memories, they seemed to me to be terribly complicated. To allow memory to emerge is very complex, it implies a particular relationship between the filmmaker and the interviewees, between the filmmaker and cinema. So I decided to assemble things in their complexity. (Jia 2009a: 258–9)

While facing this challenge, Jia collaborated with celebrated poet Zhai Yongming, who co-wrote the film script with him. Zhai, a Chengdu native, specializes in confessional verse and displays a strong feminist stance in her work. This meant that she could serve as a guide both to the city and into the feminine world of the roles played by Lü Liping, Joan Chen and Zhao Tao (see Chan 2009). It was also she who introduced Jia to the poetry of W.B. Yeats (Jia 2009a: 253), which punctuates the film alongside extracts from a number of Chinese poems, appearing either over the image or through intertitles.7 Adding to this fragmented structure is the customary meaningful use of music, which goes from Lim Giong’s and Yoshihiro Hanno’s original soundtracks to the reiteration of the theme from The Killer, previously heard in Xiao Wu, as well as the insertion of other pop songs, extracts from Chinese opera and communist propaganda anthems such as ‘Ode to the Motherland’, written by Wang Xin in 1950. One exemplary sequence in the film, made of a poignant interaction between cinema, music and poetry, traverses decades of Chinese history and seems to sum up the film’s intermedial and memorial gesture. It comes between the interview with Zhao Gang, the son of an ex-employee at Factory 420 and now a news presenter in Chengdu, and the film’s final interview, performed by Zhao Tao in the role of Nana, a personal shopper whose parents

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also used to work at the factory. The song that accompanies the first part of this sequence is called ‘The World Outside’ (外面的世界 Waimian de shijie), a 1980s hit by Taiwanese singer Chyi Chin. It speaks of a romantic breakup and of the ‘outside world’, so full of new things and possibilities. In mainland China, the content of the song chimed perfectly with the historical moment of opening up and reform in the 1980s, referring to what lay beyond its borders, and thus appealing to the young generation’s desire to transpose them. The sequence plays on to Chyi Chin’s song in a tracking shot through the half-green corridors and walls of Factory 420, already empty and partially demolished. A guard does his rounds inside the building, with a flashlight in hand, until his march and also the music is suddenly interrupted by a stone thrown from the outside through a window, shattering its glass. After a brief pause, he continues to walk, now without musical accompaniment, and the camera follows him in carefully drawn shots, traversing the factory’s space as if in an architectural exploration of memory. This is followed by a series of shots of the building seen from inside and outside amid the demolition process. Finally, the shot of a fully glazed wall, against which stones are thrown, dissolves into a shot of two women sitting down. Incidentally, the final part of this sequence was cut out from the Chinese version of the film, censored for its political connotations. As will be revealed, the two women are part of the choir of the old factory, and together they sing ‘The Internationale’ accompanied by a piano. The camera moves sideways across the room and finally the image cuts to a long shot of one of the factory’s buildings, whose imminent implosion will materialize to the sound of the socialist hymn. White smoke from the rubble invades the screen, and the verses from Yeats’s poem ‘Spilt Milk’ appear one by one (Figure 7.1): WE that have done and thought, That have thought and done, Must ramble, and thin out Like milk spilt on a stone.

The face of Zhao Tao now emerges from the white smoke through a dissolve, and she applies lip gloss in front of a mirror as if preparing to go on stage. In just over six minutes, Jia Zhangke seems to condense decades of his country’s history, relying on the hybrid nature of cinematographic art, capable

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Figure 7.1  ‘The Internationale’ and Yeats’s ‘Spilt Milk’ in 24 City.

of embracing facts and fictions, poetry and history, and to render the film its political dimension. From Taiwan’s pop hit ‘The World Outside’ and the emergence of the ‘I’, resonating with the young people of mainland China beyond its romantic content, to ‘The Internationale’ intoned by former employees of a state factory, one is able to grasp a multilayered transition: from the collective to the individual, from the planned economy to the market economy, and the consequent transformation of a neighbourhood, a city, a region and an entire country. Within this fragmented structure, the film reserves a place for what I would like to call ‘intermedial pauses’. These appear through insertions of what could be described as ‘motion photographs’, by which an individual or a group of individuals stand or sit in front of the camera, posing as if for a picture, and holding the pose for a few seconds. There are over ten different such insertions in the film, sometimes followed by an intertitle with the verse from a poem, both continuing and closing the moment of pause (Figure 7.2). In his analysis of 24 City, Corey Schultz focused in detail on the use of motion photographs in the film, which he beautifully called ‘moving portraits’: Although similar to other portraits in photography and painting, these long-take filmed portraits use time in order to create what I term ‘moving portraits’ – portraits that are moving cinematically as well as emotionally. These moving portraits seem to ‘project’ the living presence of these

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Figure 7.2  Posing for the camera inside Factory 420 (24 City).

subjects, a presence that slowly unfolds during the long takes and becomes increasingly mesmerizing as time passes. (Schultz 2014: 277)

As Schultz explains, these portraits that move both cinematically and emotionally bear a kinship with the art and the gesture of portraiture, opening up a debate on the relationship between film and photographic/painterly portraits. As is well known, a portrait is an artistic representation of a person in which the face and its expression become predominant. The intent is, on the one hand, to display the person’s likeness, and on the other hand to capture her mood, her personality and ultimately her inner world. For this reason, in photography, a portrait is generally not a snapshot, but a composed image of a person in a still position, looking directly at the photographer, placed frontally in order to most successfully engage with the subject. In 24 City, the ‘moving portraits’ are indeed composed images, striking in their frontality, both effectively and affectively engaging with and often reciprocating the spectators’ gaze. Schultz observes how there are two types of gaze in these portraits, the ‘direct gaze’ and the ‘contemplative gaze’, and that both are opposed to the ‘socialist–realist gaze’ of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s communist propaganda films, described by Chris Berry as a sort of ‘looking over and past the camera (and us) into the mists of the future perfect’ (Schultz 2014: 279). Before 24 City, ‘moving portraits’ had appeared briefly in the second part of Useless, when workers from the coal mine in Shanxi ‘posed’ for the film

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camera, mirroring the posing Paris models in the first part. But before Useless, perhaps the closest Jia’s cinema had come to the art of portraiture had been in Dong, shot in the Three Gorges and focusing on the work of painter Liu Xiaodong. In this contemplative documentary that anticipates Still Life, in much the same way as In Public had anticipated Unknown Pleasures, Jia follows Liu Xiaodong as he paints a huge group portrait of migrant workers in Fengjie, to the background of real mountains and mountains of rubble. In this film, the camera observes a work of art in progress, from the arranging of the ‘models’ in a certain pose to the stroke of Liu’s brush in the vast canvas, placed on a terrace overlooking the Yangtze. Still Life rather curiously evokes the poses and portraits of Dong in a brief sequence that was cut off from the Chinese version of the film. In it, Sanming is eating with other demolition workers in a derelict building when a woman asks if he would be interested in the sexual services of one of her girls. From the hollowed wall she calls out to them and they appear through another hollowed wall, one by one, finally posing to the camera as ‘Les Demoiselles de Fengjie’. The main difference, however, is that 24 City incorporates the gesture of portraits as one of its defining aesthetic characteristics, and explores this affinity on more than one level. Moving further in his analysis, Schultz notes how portraits are commonly related to remembrance and commemoration (2014: 277). In this sense, Jia’s understanding of 24 City as a ‘group portrait’ reveals how the film is in itself a memorial of a working class that was once one of the pillars of revolution, and that does not have a place in China’s new economic system. The recourse to ‘moving portraits’ in the film, therefore, works as a way to remember and commemorate the workers and families of the factory, whose lives were deeply affected by it, but who find themselves at odds with a new reality. This feeling of disconnection, of moving at a different speed, appears in the testimony of the sons and daughters of workers, who pursued different careers working as a news presenter and a personal shopper, signalling, as the ‘24 City’ complex does, the rise of a new economic model, more in tune with the pace of times. This impression is also conveyed in the striking shot of a young girl going round and round in her skates in an open rooftop, arms stretched out as if in flight, to the sound of Lim Giong’s appropriately called ‘Where’s the Future’ (未来在哪里 Weilai zai nali), preceded and followed by the big-character sign adorning the front gates of

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the factory being lowered down and carried away. The film had opened with the gates of the factory and its workers going in all dressed in blue, riding their bicycles, in a reversal of the Lumière Brothers’ first film, Workers Leaving the Factory (La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895). Then, the big sign was still up, and slowly through the film it will be removed, bringing to mind Lenin’s dismantled statue being carried downriver in Theo Angelopoulos’s Ulysses Gaze (To vlemma tou Odyssea, 1995). No aesthetic resource in 24 City encapsulates the feeling of temporal dislocation more appropriately than its oxymoronic ‘moving portraits’, for their own temporality stands at the crossroads between those of film and photography. They combine the pose and the pause of photographic portraits  – suggesting stillness, with the movement and fleeting time of the filmic experience. This relates to what Jean Ma has called the ‘paradox’ at the heart of Bazin’s understanding of the ontology of the photographic image, in that cinema’s compulsion to represent time, or rather capture the duration of real life, is intrinsic to its desire to overcome temporality itself: ‘The aspiration to capture life in all its movement, it seems, emanates from a drive to put a stop to the march of time’ (Ma 2008: 106). At the same time, Ma also observes that despite the differences between photography and cinema in both aesthetic and phenomenological terms, both share a common denominator as technologies of temporal dislocation: Just as photography severs a momentary fragment of the past from the continuum of time in order to preserve it within a frozen image, so cinema displaces and reassembles durational segments of the past in its stream of images. Its depiction of life as flow in the present tense of viewing is always shadowed by the other time of inscription. (Ma 2008: 54)

In a similar vein, Mary Ann Doane observes that both photography and cinema ‘produce the sense of a present moment laden with historicity at the same time that they encourage a belief in our access to pure presence, instantaneity’ (Doane 2002: 104). Taking these observations into account, it could be said that 24 City’s moving portraits, rather than opposing the time of cinema with the time of photography, bring to the fore how both are always the result of an image technology of temporal dislocation. As such, they carry the past in them, and so the pausing and posing of photography underline film’s own act

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of technological remembrance. The difference lies in the subtle movements captured by the filmic pose and absent from the photographic pose. These are able to breathe the life still pulsating in the past of the inscription and in the present of projection, while at the same time allowing one to see the fracture created by a technological and historical crisis of temporal dislocation. These intermedial pauses also open space for reflection, for remembering, preserving and honouring that which is, or those who are, soon to disappear. They suggest a latent tension not only between the past and the present but also between that which can and cannot be said. In the film, the interviewees, the poems and the songs speak the portraits’ silence. They are located somewhere between the emotion and its verbal translation, suggesting not only a temporal but also a linguistic dislocation. As such, they function as a constant reminder that certain things will always resist their articulation into language, harking back to cinema’s own technical birthmark of verbal silence. Intermediality thus functions, paradoxically, as a means to return to a pre-verbal stage of the moving image, proving that this is a film that knows when to speak, when to listen and when to silence before that which cannot be translated into words.

The uncanny index and the tiger’s bones Despite their shared feature as technologies of temporal dislocation, between the photographic image and the cinematographic image there is a contrast, as observed by numerous theorists of the image from Bazin and Barthes to Mulvey, between movement and stillness, the first containing emanations of life and the other haunted by intimations of death. In her study of the relationship between photography and film in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness, Jean Ma notes how relying on photographs causes a ‘disruption of temporal flow’ that ‘intimates a death otherwise withheld from the viewer’s gaze. In this regard, A City of Sadness participates in a tendency throughout the history of cinema that turns to the stilled image both as a harbinger of death and as a mechanism of narrative closure’ (Ma 2008: 54). Therefore, when cinema cites photographs, there is a reference to the materiality of the filmstrip and the strangeness of the photogram, this in-between entity, not quite photograph, not quite cinema, whose stillness becomes hidden from the eye during projection.

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In her definitive reading of Vertov’s citing of the photogram in Man with a Movie Camera, Mulvey (2006) observed how movement ascertains the presence of a ‘now’ while the freeze frame evokes the feeling of anteriority, of a past tense. Vertov changes from one register to the other through a single image of a galloping horse that suddenly becomes still. This provokes once again the evocation of Bazin’s fundamental question, ‘what is cinema’, famously answered by Godard in The Little Soldier (Le Petit soldat, 1960) as ‘truth twenty-four times per second’. Mulvey then locates the uncanny in stillness, and complements Godard’s retort with her suggestion that cinema is equally ‘death twenty-four times per second’. Cinema, therefore, must ‘kill’ before it ‘reanimates’ truth, even if the moving image tries to hide this lifeless core from the spectator’s gaze. Vertov attributes this magical power to his wife Elizaveta Svilova, who in the editing room brings the still images back to life. Certainly, digital cinema complicates the evocation of cinema’s temporalities through the photogram, given that it is remediated into numbers and pixels. However, cinema’s evocation of stillness, be it through the freeze frame or the use of photographs, still functions as a reminder of the complexity of its own temporality. Photography is a motif in Jia Zhangke’s films. Interestingly, it appears frequently in his short films, such as in Black Breakfast, where Zhao Tao plays a photographer roaming around sites in Shanxi (Figure 7.3). She starts in the Yungang Grottoes in Datong, pointing her lens to the gigantic Buddha statues carved into the rock, before transitioning to the coal mining town where those around her wear masks and cover their faces with veils. She puts on a surgical mask but later removes it, and her own face turns black from the coal pollution while she eats a bun for breakfast with a group of young miners. In its turn, Our Ten Years (我们的十年, Women de shi nian, 2007)  is made of repeated train journeys where Zhao Tao encounters the same girl over and over again, and on each journey this girl either draws or photographs her in different stages of her life, from travelling alone, being pregnant, with a baby and her husband, finally reaching a time when both sit inside the train wearing face masks. Here, image technology reflects the passage of time beyond the decade to which the film refers (1997–2007), going from drawing on a piece of paper through to an old Rolleiflex, a Polaroid and finally a mobile phone.

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Figure 7.3  Black Breakfast. Reproduced with kind permission from Jia Zhangke.

In Mountains May Depart, once again photographs appear quite frequently. The first one is a wedding picture, taken by Tao and Zhang against the background of the Sydney Opera House, inside a photographic studio. Wedding albums in China, in fact, precede the actual wedding, and the pictures are all carefully composed portraits, later heavily photoshopped, where the bride and groom are seen dressed in all sorts of different attires, from traditional Chinese wedding outfits to the Western style white dress and tuxedo. It is common to see couples in China posing for photographs in famous touristic spots, and the final result is exhibited during the wedding party, an almost unnecessary event after the album has been composed – in fact, it is not rare that couples will invest on the album and forego a big party. The second instance of photography in Mountains May Depart also comes in the form of a portrait, only this time tinted with a certain melancholy, conveying the passage from 1999 to 2014 and following the film’s title and director credit that comes at 46 minutes of running time. A group of men pose in front of a building, following the directions of a photographer. His camera is an old-fashioned device covered with a red cloth, and this long shot is replaced by the camera’s upside down viewfinder image, once again reversed in the next shot of the group. The crowd then disperses, leaving Liangzi standing on the

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stairs alone. What will be revealed is that since having been rejected by Tao in favour of Zhang, Liangzi left Fenyang and moved to Handan – one of China’s most polluted cities  – to work in the coal mines. He finally has to return to Fenyang with his wife and child since he has been diagnosed with lung cancer, and cannot afford his medical treatment away from his province. The photograph of him and the other miners, therefore, is a portent of death, just as the wedding photo’s artificiality – the fake wallpaper, the overly produced outfits and the exaggerated posing – carried with it the fragility of the couple’s relationship – soon to be confirmed in their wedding’s dissolution. Photographs appear a third time in the film in Tao’s son Dollar’s iPad, flickered by his estranged mum who is conspicuously absent from all of them. Mountains May Depart, in fact, exemplifies how photography is often intertwined with absence, loss and death in Jia’s filmography, as if in a confirmation of Barthes’s famous conception of the photograph as ‘an image which produces Death while trying to preserve life’ (Barthes 1981: 92). Mulvey (2006) noted how, in his theoretical reading of photography, Barthes came close to Bazin’s ontology essay but failed to acknowledge it. Their discourses meet in that both understand photography through the physical connection it establishes with the real in the form of a trace or inscription, while at the same time locating a ‘thereness’ in its temporal articulation that bears a relationship with death. Still according to Mulvey, this is where Bazin and Barthes diverge, for while the first is interested in photography’s ability to overcome death, the latter stresses the production and acceptance of death. Still, it is difficult not to see how Bazin in certain ways accepted death in his seminal essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, by calling traditional family portraits ‘shadows, phantomlike and almost indecipherable’, or ‘the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment of their duration, freed from their destiny’ (Bazin 2002: 14). What interests Mulvey in her re-reading of Barthes and Bazin – and what I  believe relevant to an investigation into the use of photography in Jia’s filmography – is how photography’s uncertain temporality produces a sense of the uncanny in the core of the indexical trace: The index, an incontrovertible fact, a material trace that can be left without human intervention, is a property of the camera machine and the chemical

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impact of light on film. A  sense of the uncanny, often experienced as a collapse of rationality, is a property of the human mind and its uncertainties. (Mulvey 2006: 55)

By recuperating Freud’s understanding of the uncanny as arising from a confusion between the animate and the inanimate, death and the return of the dead, Mulvey suggests that ‘the photograph’s suspension of time, its conflation of life and death, the animate and the inanimate, raises not superstition so much as a sense of disquiet that is aggravated rather than calmed by the photograph’s mechanical, chemical and indifferent nature’ (Mulvey 2006: 60–1). This sense of disquiet produced by photography’s conflation of life and death can be felt in a brief moment in Platform, following the first meeting of Cui Mingliang and Yin Ruijuan by the city walls. The long take of the illfated couple, ending with Yoshihiro Hanno’s poignant leitmotif, is followed by the close-up shot of a photography shop window, revealing a picture of Yin Ruijuan. This, as will be revealed, is a point-of-view shot of Mingliang, standing in the dark street in front of the lit shop window, looking at his loved one. The insertion of the photograph here indicates absence and unfulfilled love, as in anticipation of their outcome in the next two meetings by the wall. It also posits photography as a souvenir, a memory, thus distancing Mingliang from Ruijuan even if they are always seen together.8 In I Wish I Knew, a film built around testimonies of people that in one way or another have a relationship with the city of Shanghai, photography appears poignantly during the interview with Wang Peimin, who only knows her father, underground Communist Party member Wang Xiaohe, from pictures. She was born in Shanghai in 1948, and her mother was pregnant with her when her father was killed by KMT forces in the city. She dedicated most of her life to collecting information about her father. Her interview happens inside a film studio, and the set of Shanghai’s famous Nanjing Road looks just like a picture from the past, signalling how cinema is also engaged in conserving and recreating history. As she talks about her father, four pictures appear on the screen. The first shows Xiaohe held by one guard on each side, a defiant smile on his face. The second and the third are wider shots of Xiaohe being held by the same guards and surrounded by many others; in one he

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Figure 7.4  Photograph of Xiaohe moments before his execution (I Wish I Knew).

seems to shout to the camera (Figure 7.4), in the next he just looks askew. Finally, the last photograph shows his still, dead body stretched face up on the ground. Peimin describes how her mother, who did not know that her father was a member of the Communist Party, was affected by the sudden loss of her husband. Here, the display of still photographs evokes not only death but also the indelible marks of a traumatic experience, left in Xiaohe’s wife and his daughter Peimin. The insertion of these photographs in the film – and in the book which accompanied it (Jia 2010), seems to suggest that photography works as a connecting device, bringing together an absent father and a traumatized daughter. It also reinforces, as Laura Mulvey so beautifully explains, the element of the unspeakable underlining the analogy between trauma and photography: Trauma leaves a mark on the unconscious, a kind of index of the psyche that parallels the photograph’s trace of an original event. This analogy became more telling as photography expanded into news reporting, developing, during the twentieth century, into a record of disaster and death . . . This literal link between trauma and the photograph enabled an element of the unspeakable, Lacan’s Real, to find a place within the still uncertain and unstable discourses of history and memory. Although the Real cannot be grasped or dealt with directly, these photographic images reach out, making a gesture towards the political and social aspects of traumatic experience. (Mulvey 2006: 65–6)

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Following Mulvey, it could be said that the index of trauma in Peimin’s unconscious indeed parallels the photographic trace of her father’s real death, reinforcing how the Real cannot but be grasped through remediation. Finally, both in Dong and Still Life, films shot in the ruins of Fengjie, photography reappears once again in relation to absence and death. In the first, Liu Xiaodong is seen using a photographic camera as a working tool, taking pictures of the models who will later appear in his canvas, be them the demolition workers in the Three Gorges or the beautiful girls in Bangkok. At one point, while still in Fengjie, Liu visits a very poor family whose father/ husband Qingsong had died recently from work injuries. Liu takes gifts for the children and shows the whole family pictures of Qingsong, taken while painting the group portrait. Qingsong’s widow then passes the photograph to her daughter and says:  ‘Look at your father:  you will never see him again.’ This is a striking moment, casually captured by the camera. The at once painful and prosaic phrase uttered by Qingsong’s widow to her child seems to unconsciously but perceptively articulate photography’s crux of life and death, extended, through intermediality, to both painting and cinema. In its turn, Still Life relays absence and death through photography in two moments, the first when Sanming looks at a school picture of his estranged daughter, and the second when he watches over his friend Brother Mark’s dead body, covered in a colourful cloth. On top of a pile of bricks, there is a framed picture of him waving his arm, looking jovial and happy, and Sanming lights cigarettes and sets them up as incense sticks, creating an altar of sorts. This is conveyed through a close-up shot, showing the bricks, the framed photograph, Mark’s mobile phone  – that played the theme song from Hong Kong’s soap opera Shanghai Tang from under the pile of rubble where his body was found – and the three lit cigarettes. Life has become stilled, alluding to the film’s title and to another type of ‘intermedial pause’ that serves to slow down its linear time, defying the force of 拆 chai in a city getting ready to be erased from the map. In Still Life, these ‘intermedial pauses’ appear in the form of shots of inanimate objects, forming a series of compositions that look like stilllife paintings, conveyed in all their stillness through a very slow moving camera, in a reversal of the ‘motion photographs’ observed in 24 City (but equally oxymoronic). These pauses are undoubtedly reminiscent of Ozu’s celebrated ‘pillow shots’ (Burch 1979) which, as well as providing a transition

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in the form of a cutaway, opened a space for reflection through silence and by foregrounding the apparent randomness of everyday life and objects. In Jia’s film, the ‘pillow shots’ do not appear as cutaways for they are either the head or tail of longer ‘scanning’ shots. Yet they also allow for silence and stillness to emerge, away from human agency and its destructive force, away from the sweeping forces of cinema’s linearity and narrative impetus, and drawing on cinema’s impure nature. This impure nature emerges here, once again, through an oblique intermedial practice that approximates cinema to painting, as seen in Chapter 5. And it fuses the unfolding of the ‘scroll-shot’ with the stillness of the ‘pillow shot’ by evoking both the movement of shanshuihua and the immobility of the ‘still-life’ genre, which depicts mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace natural objects (flowers, foodstuff, plants, rocks, shells, dead animals and so on) or man-made ones (vases, plates, glasses, books, fabric, jewellery, coins and so on). Still-life painting emerged as a distinct genre in Western painting by the late sixteenth century, and has remained significant since then. The name of the genre, interestingly, is known as ‘still life’ in English after the Dutch word stilleven, but is largely known in Romance languages as ‘dead nature’. This intimation of death in still-life painting – aside from its obvious association with stillness, found an aesthetic expression in the so-called ‘vanitas paintings’, especially popular in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes. In these, flower and fruit arrangements and other everyday objects  – either natural or man-made, were accompanied by direct or symbolic reminders of death such as a skull, bones, watches and hourglasses, pointing to life’s impermanence.9 In Still Life’s intermedial pauses, everyday objects appear on the top of tables, desks or inside wardrobes, in bedrooms, sitting rooms, old factories and decaying buildings, and always revealed in slow-moving tracking shots. One such moment lingers on Wang Dongming’s desk: he has a collection of watches, placed on a wire as decoration (Figure  7.5). Life’s impermanence is pleonastically suggested, but as is the case with other still lifes in the film something else emerges from this oblique intermedial gesture. Jia Zhangke has called it ‘the secrets of life’, hidden behind the everydayness and the stillness of a person’s objects, and revealed by the moving camera (Jia 2008: 2).

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Figure 7.5  Still life and the secrets of life (Still Life).

If still lifes function as a vector into ‘the secrets of life’, moving slowly in spite of their immobility, 24 City’s motion photographs were equally composed by Jia as a means to ‘capture the subtle changes of expression, to display the intense activities of the inner world’ (quoted in Andrew 2009: 82). To capture ‘the secrets of life’ and to reveal the ‘activities of the inner world’: these seem to be the motivations underlining the intermedial pauses that punctuate Still Life and 24 City, the two films which make the ruins of contemporary China their raison d’être. But, in both films, the ruins preserve traces of the past, and the oxymoronic ‘motion photographs’ and ‘moving still lifes’ signify more effectively a complex temporality:  one where movement and stillness are forever imbricated, unable to disengage, at once superficial and profound. This brings to mind Antonioni’s final statement in his splendid Chung Kuo/Cina, shot in 1972 for television network RAI after he was given unprecedented access to the China of the Cultural Revolution. The three-part documentary lasts 220 minutes and is punctuated here and there by Antonioni’s voice-over commentary in Italian, ending with the following observation:10 ‘China opens its doors, but it is still a remote world, greatly unknown. We’ve given it but a single glance. There is a saying in ancient China: “You can depict a tiger’s skin, but not his bones. You can depict people’s faces, but not their hearts.” ’11 Chung Kuo, in fact, starts with photography, showing a line of people in Tiananmen Square in Beijing posing for pictures taken by a professional

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photographer in front of Mao’s portrait. The film is very much built around a photographic mode in that it employs an observational camera that lingers on people’s faces. Most return the gaze of the camera and stare back, as in the ‘motion photographs’ staged by Jia Zhangke. The focus here is once again on the common man, on the everyday, and perhaps what Antonioni did not realize was that by painting the tiger’s skin he was also, in fact, painting its bones. For, as Peter Wollen elucidates a propos Bazin’s conception of realism, much can be seized from observing the exterior: Realism, for Bazin, had little to do with mimesis . . . It was the existential bond between fact and image, world and film, which counted for most in Bazin’s aesthetic, rather than any quality of similarity or resemblance. Hence the possibility – even the necessity – of an art which could reveal spiritual states. There was, for Bazin, a double movement of impression, moulding and imprinting; first the interior spiritual suffering was stamped upon the exterior physiognomy; then the exterior physiognomy was stamped and printed on the sensitive film. (Wollen 1998: 92)

Antonioni was able to capture spiritual states from allowing his camera to – sometimes secretly – linger on life’s everyday moments and people’s faces in the China of the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps this, and not his European understanding of photography as suggested by Sontag (1978), or the different ‘symbolic superstructures’ of China and the West as suggested by Eco (1977), is what made this film so frightening:  it had the ability to reveal secrets, to penetrate the inner life and to see so much hidden in the interstices or below the surface – so much more than a secretive country like China in the 1970s wished to disclose. And this he found not in the logic of action but in the real life of non-action, in ‘the meaningless truth of life’, in Rancière’s terms (2006: 17), where Bazin’s double movement of imprinting gave him access to what lies within. I believe that in Jia’s In Public, 24 City and Still Life – as well as in Jennings’s Listen to Britain, cinema also looks for the secrets of life and ‘the tiger’s bones’. These it can find in observing everyday objects and people’s faces, in bringing forth the time of photography and the uncanny index, moving subtly or resting still in the midst of a fast-changing world.

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8

Garden heterotopias and the memory of space

In her book Atlas of Emotion, Giuliana Bruno highlights cinema’s ability to set into motion an emotional journey through multiple spaces. Following Michel de Certeau’s premise that ‘every story is a travel story – a spatial practice’, she suggests that ‘film is the ultimate travel story. Film narratives generated by a place, and often shot on location, transport us to a site’ (1997:  46). Film viewing is thus, in Bruno’s terms, ‘an imaginary form of flânerie’ (2007a: 16). In consonance with this understanding of cinema, Jia Zhangke’s films have time and again been generated by specific places, and their spatial practice invariably derives from an interaction with the location. This aspect of his work is evident in two films, The World and Cry Me a River, that take place within places of tourism, designed to be traversed and experienced by the visitor. Both films unfold in garden-like spaces within cities, respectively, the World Park, located on the outskirts of Beijing, and the city of Suzhou, the so-called Venice of the East, whose classical gardens are listed as one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites. An understanding of cinema as a form of spatial practice is in tune with contemporary film and audiovisual theory’s revision of optic paradigms, as explained in Chapter 5. At the same time, Bruno draws some of her thoughts from Eisenstein’s ‘Montage and Architecture’ ([1938] 2010a), written decades earlier in the 1930s. In his pioneering essay, Eisenstein reflects on the apparent paradox of the immobility of the film spectator, confronted with different fragments of the real space, filmed from different angles and brought together in the editing. From this paradox, he then establishes a parallel between the immobile cinema spectator, faced with the mobility of film, and the mobile spectator of architecture, who traverses an immobile site. Both types of

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spectators have in common the experience of moving through spaces, and the consumer of the architectural space would be the prototype of the film spectator (Eisenstein 2010a: 60; Bruno 2007a: 56). Eisenstein thus brings to the fore the importance of the mobile dimension of the apparently immobile gaze that faces the screen, approximating cinema and architecture from the point of view of their spatial journey – a critique of the Lacanian spectatorial model avant la lettre. To speak of the visual sense as possessing a mobile quality is in consonance with a dynamic understanding of space. One can look at a map, a spatial representation, but space is only there when one traverses it, practices it (Lefebvre 1991; de Certeau 1984; Massey 2005). Therefore, in film, space must be understood not as a static representation, but as a mobile element, in constant mutation. This notion of spatial practice becomes clear when one thinks of the movement through a building, an architectural site, a city, a park, a garden. Eisenstein indeed builds his aforementioned essay on explorations of the Acropolis in Athens, conceived to be viewed from different angles and explored on foot, through various possible trajectories: The Greeks have left us the most perfect examples of shot design, change of shot and shot length (i.e. the duration of a particular impression). Victor Hugo called the medieval cathedrals ‘books in stone’. The Acropolis of Athens could just as well be called the perfect example of one of the most ancient films. (Eisenstein 2010a: 60)

This observation can be applied to landscape architecture in general, which creates spaces to be experimented through movement, through passage. In Western garden theory, Giuliana Bruno notes how from the eighteenth century onwards, the idea of motion became more clearly linked with emotion, and on how the garden became a ‘privileged locus in this pursuit of emotive space’: A memory theater of sensual pleasures, the garden was an exterior that put the spectator in touch with inner space. As one moved through the space of the garden, a constant double movement connected external to internal topographies. The garden was thus an outside turned into an inside, but it was also the projection of an inner world onto the outer geography. In a sensuous mobilization, the exterior of the landscape was transformed into an interior map – the landscape within us – as this inner map was itself culturally mobilized. (Bruno 2007b: 24–5)

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In comparison, the ancient art of Chinese garden architecture seems to have been based on the inextricability between the outer and inner landscapes for much longer, and in my view it also constitutes a proto-cinematic experience on many levels. Following these observations, this chapter proposes an analysis of The World and Cry Me a River from the point of view of their spatial practice, leading to a reflection on cinema’s impurity through its affinity with architecture, and more specifically with Chinese garden architecture. As I  will argue, these films promote a form of spatial practice akin to that invited by a Chinese garden, where dislocation through space creates a series of views and a series of emotions in the visitor/tourist/ spectator, interconnecting an external and an internal landscape, motion and emotion. The first part of the chapter will introduce a brief summary of the history and the main defining features of a classical Chinese garden. The second part will focus on The World’s spatial organization in relation to two imperial gardens, built during the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), leading to a reflection on the rapport between gardens and the history of China, both ancient and recent. The third part, dedicated to Cry Me a River, will investigate the idea of film as promoting an emotional mapping of a garden-city, loaded with subjective and collective memories. In both cases, the real and the intermedial fuse within Jia’s cinema and bestow upon it a political dimension.

The Chinese garden There are myriad types of Chinese gardens, varying geographically and in time, but they share some basic characteristics which I will broadly sketch here. As Lou Qingxi (2003) explains, the origins of the Chinese classical garden can be traced back to the country’s ancient period. There are records of Chinese landscape architecture as early as the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC), but it was not until the Qin and Han Dynasties (221 BC–220 AD) that the more specific practice of garden architecture originated. It matured significantly during the ensuing period of the Six Dynasties (220–589 AD), under the influence of new conceptions and the birth of a theory of aesthetics in Chinese art criticism. Cai Zong-qi elucidates:

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This new conception of the garden may be observed in a famous anecdote recorded in the Shishuo xinyu: ‘On entering the Flower Grove Park (Hualin yuan 华林园) Emperor Jianwen looked around and said to his attendants, the place which suits the mind-heart isn’t necessarily far away. By any shady grove or stream one may naturally have such thoughts as Zhuang Zi had by the Rivers Hao and Pu, where birds and animals, fowls and fish, come of their own accord to be intimate with them’. (Cai 2004: 8)

From this record taken from the Shishuo xinyu (世说新语) – written by Prince Liu Yiqing (刘义庆, 403–444) as a compilation of short stories and conversations, it is possible to observe how, in the Chinese tradition, an association between the garden space and emotional pursuits was present from early ‘medieval times’. Cai goes on to explain, by drawing on the Shishuo xinyu, how the garden was conceived as a physical space where different art forms and philosophical principles comingled: To strive for such ‘thoughts as Zhuang Zi had by the Rivers Hao and Pu’ – a suprasensory experience with the Dao  – is an aesthetic activity that is in essence identical to the endeavours to penetrate the innermost human spirit or to capture the calligraphic yi, the musical he, or the shen of painting. The major difference is that the viewers of gardens are those of physical objects – bamboo groves, fish ponds, pavilions, meandering brooks, winding paths, and so on. Arranged into an intricate pattern of yin-yang interplay, these physical objects suggest infinite space (xu 虚, wu 无) and help the viewers to ‘image’ and commune with the Dao. Although calligraphy, painting, music and other arts appear in the garden, they are usually inscribed into and hence made part of these physical objects or blended into the ambience created by them. (Cai 2004: 8)

Cai’s description of the garden suggests an intermedial and an inter-worldly space, composed of a combination of different art forms and the natural world. The final aim of these combinations was to produce, through an aesthetic practice, an experience of harmony with the Dao (道). This was to become the basis for the continuing development of garden architecture in China, which finally reached its apogee during the Ming and Qing Dynasties, allied with important developments in the art of painting and accompanied by the first treatises on garden design (Lou 2003: 21). One of the most distinguishing features of Chinese garden architecture is its conceptual nature. According to Lou, ‘the hills, lakes, plants and buildings,

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and the spaces formed between them, create not only a material surrounding but also a spiritual atmosphere’ (2003:  3–4). The two main elements in Chinese garden architecture derive from the word for landscape, formed by the synecdoche 山水 shanshui. This reveals a kinship with landscape painting, and garden designers were often painters in the imperial court. As explained in Chapter  5, the two elements, the mountain (shan) and the water (shui), refer, according to the Confucian and Daoist traditions, to human attributes. Therefore, to build hills and lakes in a garden is to aspire to these attributes. Different plants such as the lotus and its flower, the pine, the plum tree and the bamboo are also loaded with symbolic value and occupy a special place in Chinese gardens. Designers thus pursue the symbolic and the picturesque when building lakes, hills, paths, promenades and pavilions. In this desire to create a sensorial and emotional experience on different levels, garden designers must take into account the two different modes of appreciating a Chinese garden: the static mode and the dynamic mode (Lou 2003:  125). For the first one, there are strategically located buildings from where to admire a section of or the whole garden, allowing the visitor time to sit down and admire the view. The dynamic mode, which is the predominant one, follows routes that can be meandering  – going up and down, from building to building, from mountain to lake, through corridors and windows that frame different views, with the landscape scrolling in front of the visitor as in a painting. As Pang Laikwan puts it, Just as the experience of reading traditional Chinese paintings is conditioned by the movements of the viewers’ eyes, movement in space is also essential to the aesthetics of traditional Chinese gardens. A core aesthetic principle of the Chinese garden is the orchestration of constantly changing images created by the walking subject. (2006: 6)

This architectural promenade that sets in motion a series of picturesque views is enhanced by the sounds of birds and insects, by the smell of flowers, by the leaves brushing on the skin, by the different pavement designs aimed at producing tactile pleasure, all combined into an intense synaesthesia, in which the movement of the body and the movement of the mind work as a combined experience. The relationship between Chinese garden architecture and cinema gains a new level of significance within China’s early film scene. As Pang

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explains, research by Chinese film historians has revealed that the earliest film screenings in Chinese cities were held in a variety of places, including public gardens, and most commonly inside teahouses located in gardens. Pang investigates how this public space influenced and was influenced by cinema, and how the real movement of the walking subject was gradually replaced by imaginary movement:  ‘As if to catch up with the accelerated speed of capitalist life, the new garden experience had to pick up the pace, but it achieved this by replacing bodily movement with various forms of visual entertainment, including motion pictures’ (2006:  6). It is revealing to see how the ancient art of Chinese garden architecture and the nascent art of cinema crossed paths in the early years of the twentieth century, as if in confirmation of the affinity between what I  have tried to establish as a Chinese proto-cinematic experience and the moving image. This affinity between the garden and the cinema is at the core of Jia Zhangke’s first government-approved film, co-produced by the Shanghai Film Studio and released in China in 2004: The World.

The World: Gardens and history Jason McGrath writes that, despite fears that Jia Zhangke’s first governmentapproved film would have suffered from domestic censorship, ‘the thematic consistency between The World and Jia’s “independent” works has largely exonerated the director of the charge of compromising his vision’ (2007: 107). It must be noted, however, that the film has two different versions, one Chinese (100 min) and one international (140 min). The shorter and slightly more linear version of The World was an intentional, albeit unsuccessful, attempt at reaching a larger audience in China. The following comments refer to both versions unless indicated otherwise. The World is Jia’s second feature film shot entirely in digital (after Unknown Pleasures) by Yu Lik-wai. It is structured in tableau style with the use of intertitles and complemented by sequences of flash animation motivated by text messages, exchanged with frequency by the characters. The director comments on how this ‘digital ambience’ served as a guiding force behind the film:

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Formally, I  have tried to create a digital ambience in all levels:  HD, flash animation, SMS, electronic music etc. From the point of view of the narrative I aimed for a web structure. Instead of following one character in a linear fashion, I wanted to follow several characters, navigating from one to the other, from one’s time to another’s, just as we do online. (Jia 2004: 34)

The characters followed by Jia are the park workers Zhao Tao, her boyfriend Chen Taisheng, Erxiao (Ji Shuai), Wei (Jing Jue), Niu (Jiang Zhongwei), Anna (Alla Chtcherbarkova), as well as Qun (Huang Yiqun), who runs a clothes’ factory, and Chen’s hometown friends Sanlai and Erguniang. True to the director’s aforementioned statement, The World unfolds as a web, suggesting a multiplicity of trajectories within the space of the World Park. Apart from the explicit reference to the Internet as a formal and narrative influence, I will attempt to approach the film’s spatial practice from the point of view of its affinity with the multiplicity of trajectories present in any Chinese garden, which also unfolds as a web, linked by paths, promenades and bridges. The fact that the film was shot almost entirely inside the Beijing World Park (北京世界公园 Beijing Shijie Gongyuan, the Chinese word gongyuan meaning both public park and public garden), located in the outskirts of the capital and where a number of internal and foreign immigrants live and work, informs this choice of approach, in both formal and historical terms, a point to which I will return.1 What kind of space is the World Park? A neon sign glimpsed at some point in the film sums up its bold promise: ‘Give us a day and we will show you the world.’ The park is indeed an ‘Epcot Center’ of sorts, but while its American counterpart has eleven country pavilions the Beijing World Park boasts an impressive 106 reproductions of famous monuments in the five continents, scaled down to one-third of their real size (Figure 8.1). There, the tourist can wander through the Taj Mahal, the Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, as well as different style gardens and reproductions of famous sculptures. In order to see the world, the visitor can take a monorail, largely incorporated by Jia in his film to cross the park from pavilion to pavilion (Figure 8.2). Zhao, for instance, is seen inside the monorail in three sequences, travelling from country to country and talking on her mobile phone. In the first, she is dressed in Indian-style attire, following the dance performance which opened the film. The monorail’s welcome announcement plays on

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Figure 8.1  Beijing World Park. Photograph by the author.

Figure 8.2  See the world by monorail without leaving Beijing (The World).

the soundtrack, and the Eiffel Tower is visible through the window. Zhao answers her phone and says that she is on her way to India, reinforcing the notion of a world at one’s reach. An exterior shot then reveals the monorail passing through from left to right, and Zhao waving to Erxiao from the window, followed by a tilt and pan downwards to reveal a group of security

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men carrying water cooler gallons and crossing the Sahara desert, with the backdrop of the Egyptian Pyramids. The website address of the park (albeit an incorrect one)2 and the phrase ‘See the world without ever leaving Beijing’ are then superimposed over the image of the pyramids, and a final cut reveals the park from a distance, a big lake occupying the foreground of the shot. The director’s name and the film’s title are superimposed over this image. In this sequence, it is possible to observe the type of spatial organization employed by Jia throughout the film: he shifts from the moving perspective of the monorail, lifted above the ground, to the ground level perspective of Erxiao and the other workers crossing the desert, and finally to an establishing shot of the park. The monorail, which as explained by the ubiquitous announcement circles the park in fifteen minutes, is also seen profusely in establishing shots, travelling by in the distance. The presence of this device as a guiding path through the park/garden, complemented by the announcements which reinforce the touristy nature of the ride, relates to the peculiar structure of a corridor in Chinese gardens, which serves as a way of interlinking buildings, separating environments and accentuating the scenery by providing different perspectives to the visitor. The longest of these structures can be found in the last imperial garden built in China, the Summer Palace (颐和园 Yihe yuan), one of the greatest examples of Chinese garden architecture, located in the suburbs of Beijing (Figure 8.3). Its construction started in 1750 by order of Emperor Qianlong (1735–1799), and continued throughout the Qing Dynasty, being revived after its destruction by the Anglo-French allied forces in the nineteenth century by Empress Cixi. The garden occupies over 700 acres, and there are around three thousand different buildings carefully placed around its extension. The Summer Palace is an open space which offers a series of possible trajectories through squares, pavilions, temples, hills and bridges. The Long Corridor, also known as the Long Promenade (长廊 chang lang), guides the multiplicity of possible trajectories within the garden and extends for 728 metres. In its central part, it spreads into four octagonal pavilions which symbolize the four seasons, bringing a temporal dimension to this architectural structure. Here, the mobile spectator of architecture and the immobile film spectator share, to use Giuliana Bruno’s terminology, the same mobile dynamics of site-seeing, becoming a voyageur, an itinerant being who traverses a space.

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Figure 8.3  The Summer Palace in Beijing: China’s last imperial garden. Public domain. 21-Oct-21 19:39:41



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Furthermore, the Long Corridor at the Summer Palace contains a peculiarity that brings it even closer to a proto-cinematic experience: its beams and roof are covered with over 14 thousand different pictures, painted inside semicircles and on different levels, which enhance the impression of depth. Some are reproductions of scenes from South China, painted by a group of artists commissioned by Emperor Qianlong to travel the country and bring different landscapes back to Beijing. Others are images of flowers, fishes and birds. Particularly striking are the series of legends, folk tales and classical Chinese novels represented by these paintings, which offer themselves to be read as a narrative. There, one can find episodes containing the characters from Water Margin that, as analysed in Chapter 6, reappear centuries later in A Touch of Sin: Lu Zhishen fighting in the wild boar forest, Lin Chong sheltering from a snowstorm in a temple, Wu Song beating the tiger, the White and Green snakes and the story of Yu Tang Chun. The immobility of each ‘frame’ gains mobility through the visitor’s dislocation, and as in the cinema, it is the sum of still frames that gives sense to them. But the ‘editing’ here is performed by the movement of the spectator’s body, a travelling body (Figure 8.4).

Figure 8.4  The Long Corridor at the Summer Palace. Photograph by the author.

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In The World, there are recurrent images of ‘travelling bodies’ inside various corridors, followed by the camera in a dolly-in or dolly-out movement. Most prominently, this mobile camera traverses the basement of the park’s theatre, which serves as a massive dressing room for all the performers, interlinked by what appears to be a maze of corridors. The film opens with a three-minutelong take of Zhao moving along one of these corridors, looking for someone to lend her a plaster before going onstage. At least another six corridors will be tracked by the camera in the film, both inside the park and in external locations, such as the hotel in which Zhao and Chen meet and a karaoke bar. It is, however, the monorail which most resembles the Long Corridor, guiding the visitors through space, linking places and opening up views. Another device incorporated by the film’s spatial practice in three different sequences is the lift inside the park’s Eiffel Tower. In the first, Chen travels to the top floor, and from its vantage point, the camera pans to a bird’s-eye view of the park, dwelling on it. Inside the lift, the exact height of the tower is revealed:  108 metres. In a later sequence, Zhao takes the same lift and the recurrent announcement suggests:  ‘We hope this panoramic view will heighten your knowledge of the world.’ Cars and buses are also employed by Jia in The World to convey varied views of the park, or to heighten the spectator’s knowledge of it. Yet the director often shifts from a voyeur position to a street-level view of the park, especially by following groups of visitors on the ground, walking through, taking pictures and enjoying this off-scale world. The profusion of vehicles in the film is related to one of its main themes, that is, the dichotomy between mobility and immobility, epitomized by the desire to contain the world in one space, and by the opposite dream of going abroad. Some characters do indeed manage to travel to other countries: Zhao’s ex-boyfriend takes the train to Mongolia, Qun’s French visa application is successful and the Russian immigrant Anna fulfils her dream of going to Ulan Bator, having had to work as a prostitute to save money, after her passport was apprehended upon her arrival in China.3 Others, however, have never even seen a passport in their lives. No more symbolic presence, therefore, than that of the aeroplane, which features in two crucial sequences of The World. In the first, Zhao, dressed as an air stewardess, kisses Chen inside a static aeroplane, one of the park’s features aimed at reproducing the experience and the ‘profound beauty of air travel’, as the announcement once again explains.

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The aircraft, which ‘before retiring has linked China with the rest of the world for a long period of time’, has been ‘preserved in its original appearance’, now firmly anchored on the ground, working as a visual sign of the mobility– immobility dichotomy. The park, therefore, not only contains the world but also reproduces the experience of mobility, forfeiting the need for the real journey. Curiously, the stationed aeroplane resonates not only with the trope of immobile vehicles in Jia’s cinema but also with the stunning ‘Marble Boat’, anchored forever in the lake inside the Summer Palace. The tension between mobility and immobility is also felt in the second sequence of the film featuring an aeroplane, only this time one that actually flies:  Zhao and Erguniang meet in a vast construction site, standing on the top of an unfinished high-rise, in a garden of sorts, made of armed concrete and rods. As they talk, an aeroplane crosses the sky and they exchange the following dialogue: Erguniang: Who flies on those planes? Zhao:

Who knows. I don’t know anybody who has ever been on a plane.

Zhang Yingjin links the recurrent motif of the aeroplane  – as well as those references to having or not having a passport  – to ‘the migrant workers’ frustrated desires and imagined freedom’ (2010: 88). Zhao, for instance, had expressed to Anna how she envied her for having the opportunity to travel abroad. In her turn, she is only seen inside an immobile plane, flying with Taisheng on a magic carpet in one of the park’s rides, and on her own in an animation sequence: In one of several animated sequences that follow cell phone calls or text messaging, Taisheng is seen in the cockpit as the airplane flies away, passing Tao as she drifts in the air all by herself, still in her flight attendant’s uniform, gliding over a bird’s-eye view of the cityscape of Beijing. Her imagined flight in the sky serves as chilling metaphor for the freedom denied to low-income migrant workers in Beijing. (Zhang Yingjin 2010: 88)

This desire to go beyond China’s borders can be seen as a symptom of the country’s unprecedented opening up towards the world initiated with Deng Xiaoping’s Era of Reforms. And I  would not argue against Zhang Yingjin’s contention that Jia ‘intends The World to be a critique of globalisation’s

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negative impact on the local and the translocal’ (2010: 89). The existence of a park such as Beijing World Park, however, points towards China’s past as a millenary empire, which prized its isolation from the rest of the world in place of the expansionist attitude behind other imperial forces in history. Testament to this defining trait of the Chinese Empire, extraordinarily depicted by Jia in his film, is another Qing Dynasty garden called Yuan Ming Yuan (圆明园), also known as the Old Summer Palace or the ‘garden of gardens’, which was burned down by the Anglo-French forces in 1860 during the Second Opium War (Figure 8.5). This garden, which impelled Victor Hugo to write ‘even all the treasures of all our cathedrals do not compare to this sumptuous and magnificent museum of the East’ (1861),4 brought together architectural characteristics of the Han, Mongolian and Tibetan ethnic groups and reproduced landscapes from different areas of the country. The Yuan Ming Yuan, which while standing served as the official residence of the Qing Dynasty emperors outside the Forbidden City, was formed by over 150 different landscapes, little gardens within one garden, like a museum of the art of garden design. It also referenced Western architecture by including a group of European-style buildings, designed by Jesuits Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist by order of Emperor Qianlong.

Figure 8.5  Yuan Ming Yuan or the ‘garden of gardens’. Public domain.

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Such a garden made of gardens reproducing different parts of the world can be adequately described as an instance of heterotopia, defined by Michel Foucault (1986) as a space which contains all other spaces. Foucault actually includes all gardens – as well as the theatre and the cinema – as instances of heterotopia: Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a twodimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space; but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world . . . The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. (1986: 25–6)

Not by chance, the word ‘paradise’ is derived from the Old Persian ‘paridaeza’, meaning garden, park, enclosure. The garden thus conceived as an enclosed space of ideal existence also brings to mind Zhuangzi’s ‘Wuheyou zhi xiang’ – the realm of vagueness where one can roam free (see chapter 4 in Unknown Pleasures). Moreover, imperial palaces and their parks in the Qin and Han Dynasties, long before the maturity of garden architecture, displayed a heterotopic nature that aimed beyond our world, in search of cosmic space and paradise: As a symbol of the splendors of the empire, the imperial park is a microcosm of the universe. The First Emperor of the Qin constructed his Xianyang Palace 咸阳宫 in such a way that it imaged the Purple Palace 紫宫 of the Lord in Heaven. The Wei River 渭水  meandered through his capital city, representing an image of the Milky Way. And the forms of places and halls of the early Han ‘were patterned after heaven and earth’. (Lin 2004: 133)

Taking these observations into consideration, I  believe that Yuan Ming Yuan’s distinctive quality, mirrored by the Beijing World Park, can be seen as

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an exaggeration of what Foucault has defined as a heterotopic desire: to bring the world to China, rather than to see or conquer the world. This also raises the question of copies within Chinese art history, harking back once again – as Lin explains – to the Qin and Han imperial parks: The emperors of the Qin and early Han demonstrated an unprecedented passion for building magnificent parks of enormous size. It is recorded in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian that whenever the First Emperor of the Qin (Qinshihuang 秦始皇, 259–210 BC) conquered feudal lords, he would build replicas of their palaces in the Qin capital, Xianyang 咸阳, undoubtedly ‘as trophies of his victories’. (Lin 2004: 132)

This compulsion of copying displayed by Qinshihuang – who famously ordered the construction of a replica of his army in terracotta – finds a contemporary correspondence in the trend of architectural mimicry in China and its emerging ‘Copycat towns’, what Bianca Bosker, author of Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China (2013), calls ‘duplitecture’. If today China displays replica of Eiffel Towers and Tower Bridges, Venice’s canals and a whole Austrian alpine village recreated in Guangdong, this springs from a historical desire to bring the world to China – and, it appears, not simply our world but other planets as well, judging by the country’s recent plans to build a 400-million Yuan replica of Mars on a Tibetan plateau (see Phillips 2017). At the same time, it reveals a different attitude towards copying in Chinese art history, as expressed in Xie He’s 谢赫 ‘Liu Fa’ 六法 (Six Laws, ca. 550), the first systematic exposition of painting theory in China (Mair 2004: 81).5 His sixth law can be expressed in modern mandarin as 传移模写是也 (chuan yi mo xie shi ye), meaning ‘transmission of past experiences by exercising copies’. So even if during the Tang Dynasty (618–907) Zhang Yanyuan (张彦远) discouraged copying, an attitude in tune with that period’s relative openness to the outside world, copying was never really frowned upon in the Chinese artistic tradition, and was mainly encouraged as a form of art in its own right. Copying architectural structures, therefore, is correlated to China’s isolationist spirit, to its past as a wall-building empire that believed for centuries to be selfsufficient. Here, Mongolia, landlocked between China and Russia, acquires a special significance in the face of the Great Wall built by the Chinese to protect their territory from invasion. In The World, Zhao’s ex-boyfriend takes a train to Mongolia, and Anna manages to board a plane to Ulan Bator. But in the

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Chinese version of the film the city seems more unreachable, as Anna’s wish is not fulfilled. Ulan Bator exists only in one intertitle, on the television weather broadcast and in a song. The intertitle – Ulan Bator Night – appears significantly at the end of a sequence in which the park workers joke around with a pair of binoculars: ‘Doesn’t Niu look like Columbus?’, says his girlfriend Wei, and the group runs out into the night to admire the city from a roof terrace to shouts of ‘climb to the top to see the new world’. Zhao is then seen on her own, wearing a Russian hat and looking through the binoculars at Beijing, but as the camera pans right into the city’s skyline the words ‘Ulan Bator Night’ appear superimposed, as if she could see Mongolia in the distance, beyond the Great Wall. ‘Ulan Bator Night’ (‘Ulaanbaataryn Udesh’) is, in fact, the name of a Mongolian romantic song, first heard in the film in a scene where Anna and Zhao have a drink together in a small bar. Inside it, a TV set is showing the news, and during the weather forecast Anna picks up the name Ulan Bator amid the Mandarin she cannot understand. Excitedly, she tells Zhao, in Russian, how she dreams of going there to meet her sister. She then sings ‘Ulan Bator Night’ to her friend, significantly finding a way to connect her Russian (incomprehensible to Zhao) and Zhao’s Chinese (incomprehensible to her) through something which comes from between the two, that is, a Mongolian song. This is followed by a long take of the two friends travelling in an openroof vehicle through the park at night. In the international version of The World the song is heard instrumentally, but in the Chinese version it is the Mandarin translation that plays in the soundtrack, in a version sung by Zhao Tao herself.6 Within the context of this analysis, it could be argued that the Mandarin translation of a Mongolian song reconfirms the Chinese habit of taking foreign things and turning them Chinese. This is explicit in the desire to bring the world to China by copying monuments, historical sites, as well as designer clothes and accessories, as seen in Qun’s clothes’ factory, specialized in faking designer labels. One of the triumphs of The World is, therefore, to introduce a historical dimension to the contemporary issue of mobility and immobility pervading the characters’ lives, in a moment when the China of Great Walls and Forbidden Cities opens up to the world. And it achieves this through a sophisticated spatial organization akin to Chinese garden architecture, epitomized by the imperial gardens Yihe Yuan and Yuan Ming Yuan, and by a contemporary equivalent, the Beijing World Park.

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Cry Me a River: Gardens and memory If in The World Jia achieves an insightful diagnosis of China’s contemporary reforms and its imperial past, in Cry Me a River, vaguely inspired by Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town, he introduces the dimension of memory as both a spatial and temporal phenomenon, and as both a subjective and collective experience. Cry Me a River, whose original title in Mandarin translates as ‘river of love’, is a 20-minute film shot in the city of Suzhou, where old friends Ma Qiang (Guo Xiaodong), Zhou Qi (Zhao Tao), Tang Xiaonian (Wang Hongwei) and Bai Yu (Hao Lei) reunite for a dinner in honour of their university teacher, ten years after graduation. Throughout the film, it becomes increasingly clear that the four friends were once two couples, now estranged and leading separate lives with new partners. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the garden-city of Suzhou is one of China’s main tourist destinations, renowned for its picturesque canals – which supposedly reminded Marco Polo of his hometown – and its classical gardens from the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties. This unique location was by no means a random choice, and it plays an important role in the construction of a filmic space conductive of memories as connected to space and movement. On one level, it is the trip back to Suzhou that reawakens subjective memories in the four characters. Apart from the bachelor Ma Qiang, who still lives there and teaches at the University, the other three friends – all married with children – have travelled from other parts of China to attend the event: Zhou Qi from Shenzhen, Tang Xiaonian from Nanjing and Bai Yu from Hefei. Ultimately, though, it is the cinematic journey through Suzhou that will function as a conveyor of memory on more than one level, as the following comments will attempt to demonstrate. In Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, Giuliana Bruno refers to film as an ‘art of memory’: In its memory theater, the spectator-passenger, sent on an architectural journey, endlessly retraces the itineraries of a geographically localized discourse that sets memory in place and reads memories as places. As this architectural art of memory, filmic site-seeing . . . embodies a particular mobile art of mapping: an emotional mapping. (2007b: 23–4)

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In Cry Me a River, Jia Zhangke, assisted by elements of Chinese garden architecture such as pavilions, lakes, paths and prominently the city’s canals, draws an ‘emotional mapping’ of Suzhou through a sort of filmic sight-seeing. It is thus that a film that deals with remembrance and the passing of time promotes an ‘architectural journey’ through a specific place – the garden-city of Suzhou – which works as a vehicle for memory. Cry Me a River unfolds in nineteen shots and eight main sequences, alternating from Ma Qiang’s flat, the university, two different garden pavilions and the city’s canals. The first half of the film sets the tone for the two final sequences, in which the former couples each go a different way and share an intimate conversation. The film opens with two shots of Ma and Tang playing basketball in front of the watchful eyes of Zhou and Bai. The courtyard is surrounded by trees and in the distance it is possible to glimpse Huqiu Tower (aka Yunyan Pagoda) sticking out from Tiger Hill, one of Suzhou’s main tourist attractions. A  faint classical Chinese tune can be heard in the distance, complementing an ambience that points not only to the characters’ past but also to the country’s own past and cultural heritage. The four friends are next seen inside Ma’s flat, taking turns to check their eyesight with an optometrist poster. As Ma and Zhou leave the room, Tang and Bai chat about the journey to Suzhou: Bai:

How did you come?

Tang: High-speed train. Bai:

Your driver didn’t bring you?

Tang: It only takes two hours. Bai:

Two hours? From Nanjing to here? Not four hours?

Tang: You still remember that! Bai:

I have a good memory.

From this brief dialogue, it becomes clear that certain things have changed since the two were in college together: trains, for one, are now twice as fast as they once were. Tang has become a rich man, and might even have his own driver. And the two are not as close as they once were. Bai’s final retort – ‘I have

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a good memory’ – also relates to and anticipates the film’s main motif. Outside the flat, in the communal interlinking balcony, Ma washes his hair in a sink, with Zhou observing from a distance. She finally approaches him and folds his jacket’s hood to prevent it from getting wet. Here, it is her gesture, rather than dialogue, which reveals their previous intimacy, lost over the years. The third sequence consists of a tracking shot of the four friends walking along one of the city’s canals, taken most probably from a boat moving at a similar pace. A faint Chinese classical tune once again plays in the distance, fusing in the soundtrack with the sound of running water. Three shots will then convey the dinner scene, which happens inside a garden pavilion built over a lake. The pavilion is an ornamental building opening towards the landscape and framing its views, and its architectural peculiarities are incorporated by Jia Zhangke into the film in an original way. The first shot, for instance, is a static long take framed by what appears to be a small glass window inside the pavilion opening towards the dinner table. It has an intricate layout of frames (the camera’s, the smaller window in the foreground and the door in the background opening up to the garden), the water outside and the silk curtains inside complementing an atmosphere of recollection. The next two shots of the dinner scene are taken from outside the pavilion. The first one shows the dinner guests through the window, tracking from right to left to reveal two Kun opera singers in traditional clothes, performing on the deck which extends over the lake. In the distance, the sights and sounds of running traffic work as a reminder that gardens are essentially an urban space, located within or just outside cities, and functioning as a bridge between the city and the countryside. A  third shot then reveals a complete picture, the pavilion adorned with lights, the musicians, singers and diners all in the frame, with the intricate architecture of the roof sculpting the night sky and the filmic frame. After dinner, the friends return to their old college to play mah-jong, and their conversation revolves around getting old, their kids and generational differences. Finally, the three final sequences will reveal how the movement through the city in a boat and through the garden sets in motion the landscape within the characters, reawakening their memories which are still in the present and contained in that space. To introduce this ‘architectural journey’, Jia weaves four shots of Ma, Zhou, Tang and Bai travelling down one of the city’s canals inside a traditional boat, in complete silence. Together, these shots

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make for a harmonious composition, starting with a frontal view of their boat in movement, as seen from another boat also travelling down the canal. This cuts to a much closer shot in which the boat’s ornate roof coincides with the film edge, framing the four friends who are absently staring into the distance. With a break of the axis, the next shot brings what could be a subjective point of view from inside the boat, with a frontal view of the canal whose otherwise placid surface is disturbed only by raindrops. Finally, another shot shows the group from the back of the boat, going down a different canal, completing a 180-degree depiction of this introspective journey. As they are silent, it is, in fact, the mise-en-scène that emphasizes the evocation of subjective memories going on as the boat navigates the canal. The temporal element is contained in the movement of the water that makes up the streets of Suzhou, in what could be read as a reference to the Confucian kinship between the passage of time and the flowing of water, connected to the idea of destiny. Yet it is the experience of dislocation through space that seems loaded with memories and emotions. This is corroborated by the two final sequences of Cry Me a River. The first couple, Ma and Zhou, stays on the boat travelling down the canal. Their dialogue is conveyed by a long take of over two minutes, with the camera pans replacing the cuts of a conventional a shot/reverse-shot structure. Zhou tells Ma that she sometimes wonders how he spends his evenings. He, in turn, tells her:  ‘I’m with you every day. In the ten years since we graduated you are the one I  dream of.’ Elsewhere, Tang and Bai walk through one of Suzhou’s famous gardens (Figure 8.6). They come down a path towards a lake and sit inside a pavilion, once again used by Jia as a means of re-framing his characters in a picturesque way. They share a moment of intimacy and open up about their marital frustrations. The element of water is yet again present, but here the placidity of the garden lake is only disturbed by a rock thrown in by Tang, mirroring an action by Zhang Zhichen in Spring in a Small Town, and producing a series of ripples that reverberate for almost one minute. The film ends with a shot of the group inside the boat travelling down the canal. ‘Love Song 1990’ by Taiwanese pop singer Lo Ta-yu (Luo Dayou 罗大佑) then plays over the final credits. It is interesting to notice how for the first time Jia Zhangke focuses on middle-class characters, now leading comfortable lives and travelling for

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Figure 8.6  Gardens and memories in Cry Me a River.

leisure rather than in search of work. Throughout the dinner in honour of Professor Ji, organized and sponsored by a certain Mr Chen, it transpires that the four friends were once idealist students who wrote poetry and edited a magazine called This Generation. Mr Chen comments on how he remembers the magazine – which only had one number – and quotes from Tang’s editorial which read ‘the end of This Generation does not mean the fall of our generation’. He complements by saying he was in college in Wuhan in the 1990s, and that he too was a ‘hot-blooded young man’. Now he is in business and no longer hot-blooded, but claims to have a good heart. As mentioned before, the film deals with the issue of getting old and with frustration on a personal level. However, it becomes increasingly clear that it also touches on the passing of dreams of a whole generation, which were suppressed and replaced by today’s material ambitions. Tang is now a rich man, most of them are married with kids, they no longer write poetry and, despite what the magazine’s editorial proclaimed, their generation also seems to have fallen under the imperatives of money and social conventions. This desire to speak of a generation is also present in Jia Zhangke’s significant choice of actors for the film, Guo Xiaodong and Hao Lei, who appear next to his constant collaborators Zhao Tao and Wang Hongwei. Both Guo and Hao had previously appeared in Lou Ye’s Summer Palace (颐和园 Yihe yuan, 2008) as students from Peking University, embroiled in the Tiananmen protests and

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ensuing massacre of 1989. Lou’s film, not surprisingly, was banned in China, so Jia’s choice was both thematically and politically significant. Cry Me a River, therefore, tackles not only personal but also collective/ generational memories and frustrations. And it goes beyond that by putting the garden-city of Suzhou in the centre of this spatial and temporal journey, back to a time when dreams were still possible. Suzhou appears as a symbol of lost loves, lost ideals, lost poetry, lost dreams and ultimately a lost past, not only of four friends or of a generation but of a whole country. Its millenary gardens, pagodas, pavilions, canals, as well as the Kun opera singers and the classical tunes heard in the distance, all seem to point to China’s past, suppressed by years of a regime which insisted on restarting history and on never looking back. And so it is that the journey undertaken by these friends to a place like Suzhou, where the past is still very much present, reawakens not only love memories but also their youthful political dreams. What the film ultimately seems to suggest, through its emotional remapping of Suzhou, is that China’s new generation of ambitious businessmen risks losing touch with its cultural heritage, or that financial ambition, perhaps as much as political oppression, is incompatible with utopia. To conclude, I  would say that these instances of filmic psychogeography reveal cinema’s impurity through the close parentage with the art of architecture, and in the specific cases of The World and Cry Me a River with the art of Chinese garden architecture. By leaning on gardens, a heterotopic combination of natural world and human creation, somewhere between the city and the countryside, Jia manages to remap Suzhou, Beijing and the ‘whole world’ from the point of view of his characters’ memories and emotions, who traverse and contemplate a real space, reworked into the filmic space. The focus on this culturally specific instance of impurity is helpful to an understanding of these films – made up of layers of different meanings – from a historical, spatial and memorial perspective. It is the combination of cinema’s intermedial and realist impulses, arising from the organic link between form and content, past and present, the individual and the collective, that ultimately transforms these films into a form of political intervention in China today.

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9

I Wish I Knew’s cinephilic journeys (an afterword on intertextuality)

I Wish I  Knew, made in 2010, is the second film in Jia Zhangke’s career in which he ventures beyond mainland China. In 2007, he had shot in Paris with Ma Ke for Useless, although the city itself does not feature in the film. In I Wish I Knew, a film about the city of Shanghai, he travels to Taipei and Hong Kong, bringing the three cities and the three Chinas together in a cinematic, cinephilic and emotional tour of recent history. The film was commissioned in view of the then-upcoming Shanghai World Expo in 2010, but it makes no direct references to the event. Rather, it chooses to focus on how personal stories are interwoven with Shanghai’s history by featuring eighteen interviews with old residents of the city, and with other Shanghainese now living elsewhere.1 This is complemented by contemporary images of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taiwan, a few scenes of dramatic reconstruction, photographs, excerpts from nine different films and finally images of a woman – brought to life by Zhao Tao – who walks through the streets of Shanghai. Jia was entrusted with the mission of making a film about a city that is at the forefront of China’s economic expansion in the new millennium, while at the same time functioning, since the nineteenth century, as one of its main ports of entry. Too much could be said about Shanghai, and the challenge that presented itself was finding an angle of approach. As many of the film’s images and stories will attest, this came with the realization that, if cities are indeed a hyperversion of the dynamic characteristics of space (Massey 2005), made up of an unequal accumulation of times (Santos 2004), then perhaps Shanghai is even more so. In less than one hundred years, it had grown from a fishing village into the city that became known as the ‘Paris of Asia’ during the final period of the Qing and the first decades of the Republic. It was made up of a

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cluster of foreign enclaves that soon became emblematic of China’s increasing state of humiliation by foreign powers. Opium dens, gambling halls and prostitution made its fame: ‘It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,’ said Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s American precode film Shanghai Express, from 1932, sealing the city’s reputation abroad. As well as the symbol of nightlife and decadence, Shanghai also quickly became, because of its international presence, the financial centre of China, its famous Bund adorned with the Art Deco buildings of banks and hotels, still standing today. After ‘Liberation’ in 1949, the new regime was quick to clean up what was then seen as ‘Western depravity’, transforming foreign enterprise, re-educating its approximate 30,000 prostitutes and drying up the opium supply of its 200,000 addicts (see Edwards 1980). Shanghai – the symbol of foreign exploitation, was left to wither, receiving little incentive from the government. The end of the civil war also meant that thousands left their home in Shanghai to start anew in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It was not until the reform era began in the 1980s that Shanghai gradually gained a new life. Significantly, it was elected by the Chinese government to become the country’s financial centre once again. An empty area east of the river Huangpu, called Pudong, became the focus of this expansion, and the increasing number of foreign companies coming to the city tended to open their offices in this new development. A construction fever transformed Pudong so radically that today one can have the experience of time travelling just by standing in the Bund and looking from the west – the Art Deco buildings – to the future just east across the Huangpu. Jia Zhangke was of course very aware of the many facets that make up the city of Shanghai, but as befits his style he became intent on hearing from the people who had their lives affected by these historical waves (Jia 2010: 13). And his angle of approach derived from the realization that Shanghai is above all a city of migration, of to-ing and fro-ing, of constant change. In that, it shares with the two other cities featured in the film – Taipei and Hong Kong, equally located in river estuaries – the trope of boats, ships, barges and ferries, working, as Carolin Overhoff Ferreira points out, as ‘visual metaphors for [Shanghai’s] fluctuating, transnational, identity’ (2013: 52). Overhoff called I Wish I Knew an ‘indisciplinary film’ and employed it as a case study for her notion of ‘indisciplinary cinema’, inspired by Jacques Rancière’s idea of philosophy as an

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area of knowledge that thinks between disciplines. As she argues, this notion could replace that of the essay-film as a category of analysis, and applies here to I Wish I Knew’s heterogeneous address of Shanghai’s identity as transnational, unstable and in constant flux. The issue of migration thus functions as both a structuring and disturbing force within the film’s combination of heterogeneous tracks, testimonies, registers and impressions. At the same time, I Wish I Knew also draws from Shanghai’s history as China’s cinema capital in the first half of the twentieth century, and suggests a kinship between migration and the moving image by creating threads between testimonies and films, emerging from different periods. In the 1930s and 1940s, prominently, the main film studios were set up in Shanghai and a star system blossomed around them, giving rise to the two golden ages of Chinese cinema. As a cinephilic director who frequently embraces an overt intertextuality – meaning the co-presence of two or more texts/films in the form of quotations or allusions (Genette 1982), and thus referring to cinema’s relationship not with other media but with itself  – it comes as no surprise to see how the cinema participates in the construction of Shanghai’s heterogeneous picture in I Wish I Knew. The first filmic quotation is also a provocation of sorts:  images of life in the banks of the Suzhou River – an affluent of the Huangpu, recorded by Yu Lik-wai for I Wish I Knew – are intercut with images of the same river from Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (苏州河  Suzhou he, 2000), separated by ten years (1999–2009 – the time of shooting). The river appears, in all its contrasting textures and atmospheres, as a nod to Jia’s sixth-generation senior, following Cry Me a River’s homage to Summer Palace. Suzhou River was Lou’s second film, and his decision to screen it in Rotterdam without official approval cost him a two-year veto from film-making. The film remains banned in China, so its insertion in I Wish I Knew manages to smuggle through a little bit of Jia’s own dissenting spirit into a government-commissioned film. Other films will appear which have a less direct relationship with the city proper, but which speak volumes of its people and of Jia’s own cinephilia. He interviews, for instance, Wei Wei, the leading actress in Spring in a Small Town, who grew up and began her acting career in Shanghai in 1941. In 1948, after the filming of Fei Mu’s classic, Wei Wei moved to Hong Kong and has remained there to this day. Fei Mu himself also left his hometown of Shanghai

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to Hong Kong in 1949, but died two years later in 1951. One of the main names in both ‘golden ages’ of Shanghai cinema, Fei Mu is evoked in I Wish I Knew by both Wei Wei and his daughter Barbara Fei, and, most importantly, by the ruins of the city wall where Zhou Yuwen walks and rekindles her love. Here, the insertion of an extract of Spring in a Small Town also alludes internally to Platform, Still Life and Cry Me a River, films with which it also has a strong intertextual rapport. Jia once again quotes Spring in a Small Town in his twominute segment made for the anthology film Venice 70:  Future Reloaded, sponsored by the Venice Film Festival in 2013, thus confirming his reverence towards Fei Mu’s film through a recurrent intertextual movement. Another Chinese cinematic genius, Xie Jin, is cited by Jia Zhangke in I Wish I Knew, this time through two very different films. The first is Huang Baomei (1958), a documentary shot during the Great Leap Forward, a period when new studios were set up in different parts of the country and the production of propaganda documentaries was encouraged. Huang Baomei is, in fact, a docudrama of sorts, referred to in China at the time as an ‘artistic documentary’ (艺术性 纪录片 yishuxing jilupian), meaning a hybrid genre where real people re-enacted their own life experiences. In this particular case, model-worker Huang Baomei from Shanghai’s No. 17 Guomian Cotton Factory plays herself in Xie Jin’s film. In I Wish I  Knew, Huang is interviewed and recalls being decorated by Chairman Mao himself in 1956. The second film by Xie Jin that appears in I Wish I Knew is Two Stage Sisters (舞台姐妹 Wutai jiemei, 1964), which tells the story of two sworn sisters whose acting careers in a Yue Opera itinerant troupe are affected by the historical events of the 1930s and 1940s. One of China’s most famous actresses, Shangguan Yunzhu, played an ageing opera star in the film, and her son Wei Ran is interviewed in I Wish I Knew. Two Stage Sisters is cited directly from inside a film theatre, where the ‘woman in white’ watches its projection. Antonioni’s Chung Kuo also makes an appearance motivated by the interview with Zhu Qiansheng, one of the Shanghai crew members for the film. The setting is the city’s famous Yu Yuan Garden and the teahouse located in the centre of the lake, appearing first as a drawing which dissolves into the real one. The garden and the teahouse had been filmed in detail by Antonioni, and so the interview with Zhu Qiansheng is set inside it, allowing cinema, teahouses and gardens to comingle once again. From Hong Kong, I Wish

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I Knew brings Wong Kar-wai’s 1990 classic Days of Being Wild (阿飛正傳 Afei zhengzhuan), featuring singer Rebecca Pan – who had moved from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1949 – in the role of an old Shanghainese prostitute. From Taiwan, Wang Toon’s Red Persimmon (红柿子 Hong shizi) from 1997 is paired with To Liberate Shanghai (战上海  Zhan Shanghai, 1959), a propaganda film by mainland China veteran director Wang Bing. Both films focus on the events of 1949 in the city of Shanghai, the first through an autobiographical reflection on the experience of fleeing Shanghai towards Taiwan, and the other retelling the battle of Shanghai from the point of view of the PLA against the Kuomintang, culminating in the victory of the Communists. Finally, while still in Taiwan, Jia meets one of his masters, Hou Hsiao-hsien, born in Guangdong Province in 1947 and relocated to Taiwan with his family in 1948. Hou’s film Flowers of Shanghai (上海花 Shanghai hua), made in 1998, shows life in the city’s brothels in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911), thus in some ways completing a historical tour of Shanghai through cinema, from the late nineteenth century through to the late 1940s (Spring in a Small Town, Red Persimmon and To Liberate Shanghai), the 1950s (Huang Baomei), the 1960s (Two Stage Sisters), the 1970s (Chung Kuo) and through to the 1990s (Days of Being Wild and Suzhou River). The 1980s, conspicuously absent, appear through the courtesy of Hou, whose interview is conducted inside a train on Taiwan’s iconic Shifen railway, mimicking the start of Dust in the Wind (恋恋风尘 Lian lian feng chen, 1986), and evoking some of his other masterpieces. Jia’s relationship with Taiwan and its astounding cinematographic heritage is evident in I Wish I Knew. Not by chance, it is in Taiwan that he will have the chance to interview fellow film-makers Wang Toon and Hou Hsiaohsien. In both their accounts, there is an underlying sense of loss, a feeling of rootlessness, of never quite belonging, typical of those who were exiled from their country of birth. Even if still small children, their experience of being in Taiwan as members of Chiang Kai-shek’s 1949 migratory wave was one of displacement, and this can be felt in their films. Something of Shanghai’s own migratory waves and the city’s immigrants’ sense of fluidity is perhaps found in Taiwan more than in other places. In the book that accompanied the film (Jia 2010), Jia Zhangke published for the first time one of his poems, appearing discreetly on the back cover. It was written while waiting for a plane

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back to the mainland in Kaohsiung, in the south of Taiwan, after he suddenly felt moved by an uncomfortable sensation. The film’s displacements, its stories of migration and loss, their visual translation in the waterways of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, the airport’s waiting room and Jia’s own cinephilic attachment to Taiwan, all this probably impelled him to write. His verses let on, even if only for a brief moment, his own inquietude: 跃起的刹那 贾樟柯 高雄, 我从北京来, 来见南国, 来见。 林强的摩托车, 撕柀燃的空气, 我们两团燃着的火球, 沿海岸线滚动。 现实完全避让, 海边空无人, 历史结伴而行。 只是没有归路,没有。 停车迎接黑色的天幕, 像迎接命运。 没有结局就没有未来。 于是让摩托车加速, 加入六十年前的那场厮杀。 但, 在跃起的刹那, 我突然忘记了, 我该站在谁的边。 In a Split Moment2 Jia Zhangke Kaohsiung, I come from Beijing,

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I come to the south to see you. Lim Giong’s motorbike, Tears through the air, Our two burning fireballs, Roll along the shoreline. Averting reality, On a deserted beach, with history, hand in hand. There is no return, no way back. We stop to welcome the black sky, As we meet our fate. No end, no future. So let the motorcycle speed up, Joining the fight, sixty years ago. But, In a split moment, I suddenly forgot, On whose side I should stand.

This poem suggests a feeling of displacement, the wish to see things from a different point of view, to stand on different shores, looking in from the outside. It is perhaps no coincidence that it was written around the time of the making of I Wish I  Knew, a film commissioned on the occasion of the World Expo, held on both banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai from 1 May to 31 October 2010. World fairs and expositions have been happening since the mid-nineteenth century, featuring pavilions from different countries as a means to display their latest achievements. The honour befell on Shanghai in 2010, and China invested heavily in its infrastructure and own pavilion. Dislocation, migration and flux are therefore also related to the idea of a World Expo, whose heterotopic, itinerant and impermanent nature means that it changes a city’s life for a limited period of time, leaving some of its marks and moving on to another place.

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China’s contribution to the World Expo 2010 included a large-scale threedimensional animation of Zhang Zeduan’s (张择端 1085–1145) Song Dynasty (960–1279) masterpiece painting ‘Along the River during the Qingming Festival’. The twelfth-century scroll was projected in a 128 × 6.5-metre screen and all its many characters, boats, vehicles and animals moved within it, in a busy hustle and bustle not dissimilar to today’s Huangpu in Shanghai. In her analysis of 24 City, Stephanie Donald parallels the Qingming scroll’s impression of harmony to an official version of history, while in fact that vision of a dynamic and prosperous empire necessarily hides the reality of penury that subsisted at the time. Moreover, Donald suggests that the Chinese government’s decision to include this version of the Qingming scroll in the China Pavilion for the World Expo is telling of its wish to create ‘an official cultural memory that reiterates and incorporates the themes of the Reform era into a systemic appropriation of the golden age of the T’ang and the Sung’ (2014:  274). This would mean, as mentioned earlier in this book, to create an idea of China that is harmonious, unequivocal and unisonous, essentially ahistorical, and able to accommodate both tradition and all the necessary historical indeterminacies. The official and ahistorical façade of China’s pavilion was complemented by two short films, one called ‘The Road to our Beautiful Life’ and the other, inspired by Confucius sayings, called  – rather appropriately (or indeed ironically) – ‘Harmonious China’. For the World Expo in Shanghai – its impressive achievements notwithstanding – was quite simply not a harmonious event, having forcibly displaced, in a controversial move, an alleged 18,000 households for the building of its infrastructures, causing much anger and distress (see Zhang 2017). Donald curiously does not mention these films or I Wish I  Knew in her analysis, but I  believe that Jia’s documentary counters, as much as 24 City, the official version of history that she locates in the animated version of the Qingming scroll, even if it steers clearly of the reality of forced evictions. These, however, find a parallel in the stories of forced migrations that emerge in the interviews, complemented by other registers and edited in ways that challenge the formation of a harmonious cinematic, memorial and historical stream. Moreover, the feeling of displacement, palpable in the film and turned into poetry by Jia Zhangke, finds an ideal filmic expression in the figure that roams around Shanghai’s best-known sites, dressed in a plain white T-shirt

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and khaki trousers, never identified and always silent. In her dance-like, otherworldly movements, she attaches a sense of mystery to the film’s overall documentary atmosphere and displays a similar haptic sense to Antonioni’s female characters (Bruno 2007a:  96). Is she, as Jia Zhangke has claimed, a figure that represents the voice of all those who did not have the chance to tell their stories in the film (Jia 2011)? Does her silence ‘speak’ of that which cannot be said? But what if she is, in fact, a ghost, or a goddess, Guanyin 观音 or Mazu 妈祖, the patron of the sea in Fujian and Taiwan, floating through the city of Shanghai? This suspicion is fuelled by another roaming figure that resurfaces in Mountains May Depart, albeit discretely, linking the film’s three parts. He is the famous Guanyu 关羽, at once a historical figure, a literary character and a revered deity in Daoism and Buddhism. Guanyu’s statues and altars are a common feature in Chinese houses, as seen in both Mountains May Depart and The Hedonists. His trademark is his Guandao 关刀, a martial arts pole weapon, and that is what links the three roaming figures in the film: he is seen carrying one in Pingyao in 1999, later in Handan in 2014 and finally in Australia in 2025, assuming a different form in each appearance, but always – like the woman in white – alone and in movement (Figures 9.1 and 9.2). But perhaps these figures also speak of Jia Zhangke’s own nomadism, of the inquietude that appeared so vividly in his verses. Previous comments on possible metaphorical appearances of the auteur’s condition in his films have included a comparison with the puppy that manages, through great efforts, to

Figure  9.1  Female nomadism and otherworldliness in I Wish I  Knew. Reproduced with kind permission from Jia Zhangke.

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Figure 9.2  Guan Yu 关羽 roams the land in Mountains May Depart.

tear a hole through the sac and bring his head outside, as seen in the six-minute short The Condition of Dogs (狗的状况 Goude zhuangkuang, 2001). Made during the time of the ‘Hometown Trilogy’, the little dog, trapped with lots of other puppies inside a huge sac in the streets of Fenyang, offered perhaps an analogy of Jia’s own efforts to make his voice heard and to find a space to breathe while making films without official approval. Later, in Still Life, the final image of a man walking the tightrope was also oftentimes compared with Jia Zhangke’s own condition: out in the open, making films with official approval in his home country, but having to negotiate a very difficult path. Years later, the roaming figures in I Wish I Knew and Mountains May Depart show how he is now very much free from the sac, and down on the ground. Yet, in his propensity to nomadism, he keeps searching – via the China of Shanxi, and through cinema’s combination of realism and impurity, for his place in the world. In this book, I  have employed an original methodology to the study of Jia Zhangke’s cinema, proposing that his greatest contribution lies in the combination of realism and intermediality/impurity. I  have also located the strand of memory within the crossover between realism and impurity, for

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it is precisely this intersection that allows both a subjective and historical dimension to emerge in the present through an at times architectural, lyrical, painterly, performative and photographic fashion. The effect of such a complex process of intermingling cinematic reality and (re)mediation thus invites the geological/archaeological approach, able to go beyond the cartographies traced by Jia’s cinema (inside and outside China) in order to unearth meaningful intersemiotic and semantic layers at work within a contemporary, filmic world. While offering innovative and challenging scholarship through an in-depth analysis of the work of Jia Zhangke, the methodology used is compatible beyond Jia’s cinema, and can help enrich the study of contemporary Chinese cinema and other world cinemas. This suggestion is more than corroborated by the 2015 groundbreaking conference ‘The Real and the Intermedial’, hosted by Sapientia University at Cluj Napoca, Romenia, and convened by one of the leading scholars in the field of intermediality today, Agnes Pethő. The conference’s call for papers proposed that ‘one of the most puzzling phenomena of contemporary media and film’ is ‘the intertwining of the illusion of reality with effects of intermediality, connecting the experience of a palpable, everyday world with artificiality, abstraction and the awareness of multiple mediations’.3 In fact, as I have argued in the book’s introduction, such a distinction between realism and intermediality can be fallacious, and the work of André Bazin – where both notions are put forward and analysed – is key to understanding how ontology and impurity become intertwined in the cinema. The focus on the hybrid nature of Jia Zhangke’s oeuvre, expressed in its interbreeding with architecture, pop music, painting, opera, photography and garden architecture, thus allows me to open a door into Chinese cinema and culture at a time when the country is at the centre of the world’s attention, while at the same time offering a fresh approach to world cinema theory. Ultimately, to say that Jia Zhangke’s cinema is at once realist and impure is also to say that it creates its own rules. This strikes a harmonious chord with what Jacques Rancière has defined as ‘the aesthetic regime of art’ (2004). Faced with many instabilities – of Chinese contemporary reality, of cinematographic realism and the loss of indexicality, and of the very artistic autonomy of cinema – Jia’s cinematographic style seems to be free from the ‘imperative of having to match a way of speaking to the condition represented’, in Rancière’s terms (quoted in Duarte-Plon 2007). Jia’s cinema, therefore, is political not

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because it denounces a reality or carries a message, but because it sets out to build a new reality through a new ‘distribution of the sensible’, what Rancière terms a ‘dissensus’ (2004). This hypothesis becomes more plausible if one takes into account China’s historical and cultural landscape in the second half of the twentieth century, for the realist and intermedial gesture that moves Jia’s cinema could only have emerged after the country’s reform and opening up. From 1949 to the beginning of the 1980s, Chinese cinematographic production served almost exclusively as a vehicle for the regime’s political messages, that is, it was a propaganda cinema engaged in the creation of a consensus. The pinnacle of this regime of imposed agreements came with the model-operas, filmed during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) under strict rules of representation imposed by Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four, directed at every aspect of the mise-en-scène in order to make them work in favour of the political message. If the fifth generation takes the first step towards a cinema of rupture, the sixth generation of the 1990s, emerging from the trauma of 1989, set out to rediscover reality through the creation of a dissensus, which interferes in the hierarchy of discourses and genres and builds a new sense of reality (Rancière 2004). In the specific case of Jia’s cinema, this means both a concern with contemporary reality and a reconnection with the past, previously suppressed by a regime committed to ignoring the history of China before 1949, mainly during the traumatic years of the Cultural Revolution. Therefore, the rediscovery of Chinese artistic and philosophical traditions related to painting, architecture and opera, as well as the use of pop music from Taiwan and Hong Kong, becomes a powerful weapon in the creation of heterogeneity in Jia Zhangke’s cinema. His latest film, Ash Is Purest White, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 and released to great acclaim in China months later, continues on this tradition while sedimenting another one of Jia’s authorial gestures, that of revisiting his own work in a form of self-referential intertextuality reminiscent of Tsai Ming-liang. The film, as A Touch of Sin and Mountains May Depart before it, openly recuperates and references previous characters, clothes, motifs, locations and themes, chiefly from Unknown Pleasures (including images shot in the early 2000s in Datong) and Still Life, and makes them more palatable to a wider audience through the occasional use of genre

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conventions. If such conventions risk pushing Jia’s cinema closer and closer to a form of consensus remains to be seen. More likely, though, his films will continue to challenge such binarisms by never failing to embrace the complexity of twenty-first-century China; and, in an analogous movement, they will continue to enhance our understanding of what world cinema is.

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App e ndi x I

Filmography Filmography Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 One Day in Beijing (有 有一天, 在北京 You yi tian, zai Beijing, 1994) [allegedly lost] Directed by Jia Zhangke Cinematography Jia Zhangke, Zhu Jiong; Producer Wang Hongwei. China; Beta Max; 15 minutes.

Xiao Shan Going Home (小 小山回家, Xiao Shan hui jia, 1995) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Hu Xin; Editing Jia Zhangke; Cast Wang Hongwei (Xiao Shan), Yao Sheng, Zhu Liqin, Dong Shuzhe, Zhao Xiaomin, Jia Zhangke. China; Beta-Cam; 59 minutes.

Du Du (嘟 嘟嘟, 1996) [allegedly lost] Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Liang Meng; Producer Wang Hongwei; Cast Lin Xiaoling. China; Vhs-C; 50 minutes.

Xiao Wu (小 小武, 1997) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Lin Xiaoling; Art Direction Liang Jingdong; Sound Lin Xiaoling; Sound Mixer Zhang Yang;

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Producer Jia Zhangke, Wang Hanbin, Li Kitming; Cast Wang Hongwei (Xiao Wu), Hao Hongjian (Mei Mei), Zhuo Bai Tao, An Qunyan, Liang Yonghao. China, Hong Kong; 16 mm; 108 minutes.

Platform (站 站台 Zhantai, 2000) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Kong Jinglei; Sound Zhang Yang; Music Yoshihiro Hanno; Art Direction Qiu Sheng; Producer Shozo Ichiyama, Li Kitming; Cast Wang Hongwei (Cui Mingliang), Zhao Tao (Yin Ruijuan), Liang Jingdong (Zhang Jun), Yang Tianyi (Zhong Ping), Wang Bo (Yao Eryong), Han Sanming (Sanming). China, Hong Kong, Japan, France; 35 mm; 154 minutes and 193 minutes.

The Condition of Dogs (狗 狗的状况 Goude zhuangkuang, 2001) Directed by Jia Zhangke China; dv; 6 minutes.

In Public (公 公共场所 Gong gong chang suo, 2001) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai, Jia Zhangke; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Cha Seoung-Jae. China, South Korea; dv; 30 minutes.

Unknown Pleasures (任 任逍遙 Ren xiao yao, 2002) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Chow Keung; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Shozo Ichiyama, Li Kitming; Cast Zhao Wei Wei (Bin Bin), Wu Qiong (Xiao Ji), Zhao Tao (Qiao Qiao), Li Zhubin (Qiao San), Wang Hongwei (Xiao Wu), Zhou Qingfeng (Yuan Yuan), Bai Ru (Bin Bin’s mother), Liu Xi’an (Xiao Ji’s father), Jia Zhangke (opera-singing man in street). China, Japan, France, South Korea; digi beta; 113 minutes.

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The World (世 世界 Shijie, 2004) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Kong Jinglei; Music Lim Giong; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Shozo Ichiyama, Chow Keung, Takio Yoshida; Cast Zhao Tao (Tao), Chen Taisheng (Taisheng), Jing Jue (Wei), Jiang Zhongwei (Niu), Wang Yiqun (Qun), Wang Hongwei (Sanlai), Ji Shuai (Erxiao), Xiang Wan (Youyou), Alla Shcherbakova (Anna), Han Sanming (Sanming). China, Japan, France; hdcm; 133 minutes and 108 minutes.

Dong (东 东, 2006) Directed by Jia Zhangke Cinematography Yu Likwai, Jia Zhangke, Chow ChiSang, Tian Li; Editing Kong Jinglei; Music Lim Giong; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Chow Keung; Co-Producer Dan Bo; Cast Liu Xiaodong. China; hdv; 66 minutes.

Still Life (三 三峡好人 Sanxia haoren, 2006) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Kong Jinglei; Music Lim Giong; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Zhu Jiong, Wang Tianyun, Xu Pengle; Cast Han Sanming (Han Sanming), Zhao Tao (Shen Hong), Li Zhubing (Guo Bin), Wang Hongwei (Wang Dongming), Ma Lizhen (Missy Ma), Zhou Lin (Brother Mark), Luo Mingwang (Brother Ma). China, Hong Kong; hdv; 108 minutes.

Useless (无 无用 Wu yong, 2007) Directed by Jia Zhangke Cinematography Yu Likwai, Jia Zhangke; Editing Jia Zhangke; Music Lim Giong; Sound Zhang Yang, Renaud Michel; Producer Youyishanren (Stanley Wong aka anothermountainman), Yu Likwai, Zhao Tao; Cast Ma Ke. China, Hong Kong; hdcm; 80 minutes.

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Our Ten Years (我 我们的十年 Women de shi nian, 2007) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Lu Sheng; Music Lim Giong; Producer Chow Keung; Cast Zhao Tao, Tian Yuan, Liang Jingdong. China; hdv; 9 minutes.

24 City (二 二十四城记 Er shi si cheng ji, 2008) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke, Zhai Yongming; Cinematography Yu Likwai, Wang Yu; Music Yoshihiro Hanno, Lim Giong; Sound Zhang Yang; Editing Kong Jinglei, Lin Xudong; Producer Shozo Ichiyama, Jia Zhangke, Wang Hong; Cast Joan Chen (Gu Minhua/Xiao Hua), Lü Liping (Hao Dali), Chen Jianbin, Zhao Tao (Su Na). China, Japan; hdcm; 112 minutes.

Cry Me a River (河 河上的爱情 Heshang de aiqing, 2008) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Wang Yu; Sound Zhang Yang; Cast Wang Hongwei, Zhao Tao, Hao lei, Guo Xiaodong. China, Spain, France; hdcm; 20 minutes.

Black Breakfast (黑 黑色早餐 Heise zaocan, 2008) [Segment in the portmanteau film Stories on Human Rights] Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Zhao Jing; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Zhang Dong, Eva Lam; Cast Zhao Tao. Switzerland; hdcm; 5 minutes.

Remembrance (十 十年 Shinian, 2009) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Music Lim Giong; Producer Eva Lam, Ou Ning, Zhang Dong; Executive Producer Jia Zhangke, Shao Zhong; Cast Zhao Tao, Yu Entai. China; hdcm; 12 minutes.

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I Wish I Knew (海 海上传奇 Hai shang chuan qi, 2010) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Sound Zhang Yang; Editing Jia Zhangke; Producer Wang Tianyun, Yu Likwai, Meg Jin, Lin Ye, Xiong Yong; Cast Zhao Tao, Lim Giong; Interviewer Lin Xudong; Interviewees Chen Danqing, Yang Xiaofo, Zhang Yuansun, Du Mei-ru, Wang Peimin, Wang Toon, Chang Lingyun, Lee Chia-tung, Chang Hsin-i, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zhu Qiansheng, Huang Baomei, Wei Ran, Wei Wei, Barbara Fei, Rebecca Pan, Yang Huaiding, Han Han. China; Digital red one; 138 minutes.

Cao Fei and Pan Shiyi (曹 曹非 and 潘石屹 2011) [Two segments in the portmanteau film 语路 Yulu (China; 4 minutes and 3 minutes)] Directed by Jia Zhangke, Chen Tao, Chen Zhiheng, Song Fang, Tan Chui Mui, Wang Zizhao, Wei Tie Cinematography Yu Likwai; Music Lim Giong; Sound Zhang Yang; Editing Tan Chui Mui, Bu Yang, Bu Pengzheng, Shun Zi, Shen Ao, Wang Jing, Xie Qi, Zhou Jingjing; Producer Jia Zhangke. China; Digital red one, 5d mark ii; 88 minutes.

Alone Together (2012) [Segment in the portmanteau film 3.11 Sense of Home] Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Sound Li Danfeng; Executive Producer Naomi Kawase; Cast Zhao Tao, Liang Jindong. Japan, China; 5d mark ii; 3 minutes.

Untitled segment (2013) in the portmanteau film Venice 70: Future Reloaded (Italy; 2 minutes) A Touch of Sin (天 天注定 Tian zhuding, 2013) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Matthieu Laclau, Lin Xudong; Music Lim Giong; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Shozo

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Ichiyama; Cast Jiang Wu (Dahai), Wang Baoqiang (Zhou San), Zhao Tao (Xiao Yu), Luo Lanshan (Xiao Hui), Zhang Jia-yi (Zhang Youliang), Vivien Li, Wang Hongwei, Han Sanming. China, Japan; Digital alexa, arriraw; 128 minutes.

Smog Journeys (人 人在霾途 Ren zai maitu, 2015) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Matthieu Laclau; Music Lim Giong; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Jia Zhangke; Cast Liang Jingdong, Liu Lu, Liu Qiang, Zhao Tao. China; arriraw; 7 minutes.

Mountains May Depart (山 山河故人 Shanhe guren, 2015) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Matthieu Laclau; Music Yoshihiro Hanno; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Ren Zhonglun, Jia Zhangke, Nathanaël Karmitz, Liu Shiyu, Shozo Ichiyama; Cast Zhao Tao (Tao), Zhang Yi (Zhang Jinshen), Liang Jingdong (Liangzi), Dong Zijian (Dollar), Sylvia Chang (Mia), Rong Zishan, Liang Yonghao, Liu Lu, Yuan Wenqian, Han Sanming. China, France, Japan; Digital alexa, Arriraw, Codex; 131 minutes and 126 minutes.

The Hedonists (营 营生 Ying shen, 2016) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke, Zhao Tao; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Matthieu Laclau, Weisong Guo; Sound Zhang Yang; Producer Liu Jingya; Cast Han Sanming, Jia Zhangke, Liang Jindong, Wenqian Yuan. China; arriraw, dji 4k; 25 minutes.

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Revive (逢 逢春 Feng chun, 2017) [Segment in the portmanteau film Where Has Time Gone?] Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing Matthieu Laclau; Music Lim Giong; Sound Zhang Yang; Cast Zhao Tao, Liang Jindong. China; arriraw; 18 minutes.

Ash Is Purest White (江 江湖儿女 Jianghu ernü, 2018) Directed by Jia Zhangke Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Eric Gautier; Editing Matthieu Laclau, Lin Xudong; Sound Zhang Yang; Music Lim Giong; Producer Shozo Ichiyama; Cast Zhao Tao (Qiao), Liao Fan (Bin), Xu Zheng, Casper Liang, Feng Xiaogang, Diao Yinan, Zhang Yibai, Ding Jiali, Zhang Yi, Dong Zijian. China, France, Japan; 35 mm, arriraw, hdcam, hdv, Digital Redcode raw; 141 minutes.

The Bucket (一个桶 一个桶 Yi ge tong, 2019) Directed by Jia Zhangke; Co-director Yao Qi Screenplay Jia Zhangke; Cinematography Yu Likwai; Editing San Pao Su; Sound Zhi Yang Gao; Music Varqa Buehrer; Producer Chen Xie; Cast Xuan Li (Son), Zhen Jiang (Mother). China; hevc, h.264; 6 minutes.

Expanded Filmography La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (France; 1895) Louis Lumière Demolition of a wall (Démolition d’un mur; France; 1895) Louis Lumière The Lumière Brothers’ films are the source of myriad tropes that the cinema has been revisiting over the decades. One such trope is the image of workers leaving a factory, integral to 24 City’s observation and analysis of the changing

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industrial landscape in China in the twenty-first century (see Chapter  7). Other tropes that appear in the Lumière Brothers’ films are the observation from an aerial point of view, seen, for instance, in their filming from inside the Eiffel Tower lift in Paris (Panorama pendant l’ascension de la Tour Eiffel, 1898, Louis Lumière), a gesture echoed by Jia Zhangke in The World; and the tracking shot that unveils a site (Panorama du Grand Canal vu d’un Bateau, 1896, Alexandre Promio for the Lumière Brothers). Experimenting with cinema’s ability of reversing and restoring time and an interest in the trope of ruins informs Demolition of a Wall, with resonances through the history of the medium and quite central to Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (see Chapter 5).

Conquering the Jun Mountain (定 定军山 Ding Junshan; China; 1905) Ren Jingfeng The first film allegedly made in China in 1905, Conquering the Jun Mountain (定军山 Ding Junshan, Ren Jingfeng) brought to the screen a performance by the then most famous Peking opera star, Tan Xinpei, sponsored by the Empress Dowager Cixi herself. He plays the role of General Huang Zhong from the opera based on the cycles 70 and 71 of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (see Chapter 6).

Man with a Movie Camera (Человек с кино-аппаратом Chelovek s kino-apparatom; Soviet Union; 1929) Dziga Vertov In Vertov’s film symphony Man with a Movie Camera the city awakens and comes to life with the passage of a train, observed by the camera situated on the railway tracks. This speaks of cinema’s affinity with the train, explored by Jia Zhangke in Platform (see Chapter 4).

Shanghai Express (USA; 1932) Josef von Sternberg ‘It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily’, says Marlene Dietrich’s character in Sternberg’s pre-code film, in an indication of the city’s reputation in the 1930s as a den of decadence, where gambling, narcotics and prostitution were widespread mainly due to Western presence (see Chapter 9).

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The Big Road (大 大路 Dalu; China; 1934) Sun Yu Set during the second Sino-Japanese war, the film shows a group of workers building a road as part of the Chinese war effort. A 1930s classic (see Chapter 2).

Sisters of the Gion (Gion no shimai; Japan; 1936) Kenji Mizoguchi The Japanese master Mizoguchi’s unique ‘scroll-shot’ is an instance of indirect intermedialilty between the cinema and the emakimono, and came to define his cinematic style. Scroll-shots open Sisters of the Gion and were increasingly employed by Mizoguchi in his late 1930s films (see Chapter 5).

Street Angel (马 马路天使 Malu tianshi; China; 1937) Yuan Muzhi Yuan Muzhi’s masterpiece is one of Jia Zhangke’s favourite films. It combines urban realism and melodrama, with a focus on the downtrodden of Shanghai interlaced with comedic tones and musical numbers by Zhou Xuan, who would become one of the most popular singer/actresses of the 1930s/1940s.

Spare Time (UK; 1939) Humphrey Jennings It is noticeable how Jennings’s wartime documentaries were concerned not just with the home front effort but also with how the population in Britain relaxed during leisure hours. Spare Time actually predates the war and focuses on how workers from three different industries (steel, cotton and coal) spent their free time (see below and Chapter 7).

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Zangiku monogatari; Japan; 1939) Kenji Mizoguchi This is one of Mizoguchi’s masterpieces, where he makes ample use of the scroll-shot already employed, but to a lesser degree, in Sisters of the Gion (see above and Chapter 5).

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Listen to Britain (UK; 1942) Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister Jennings’s masterpiece Listen to Britain (1942) offers a somewhat contradictory response to the war effort by going around the country to show common people living their lives in farms, factories, offices, coal mines, railroads, schools, hospitals and even in a ballroom dance (see Chapter 7).

Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette; Italy; 1948) Vittorio De Sica De Sica’s neorealist classic is one of Jia Zhangke’s favourite films and this also attests to his Bazinian/realist credentials (see Chapters 1 and 2).

Germany, Year Zero (Germania anno zero; Italy; 1948) Roberto Rossellini The third film in Rossellini’s neorealist trilogy, Germany, Year Zero was shot on location in the ruins of Berlin and makes ample use of derelict buildings and open spaces.

Spring in a Small Town (小 小城之春 Xiaocheng zhi chun; China; 1948) Fei Mu Largely seen as one of the best films in Chinese film history, Fei Mu’s classic remained forgotten for many decades before being rediscovered by fifthgeneration film-makers in the 1980s. Jia Zhangke revisited it in Cry Me a River (see Chapter 8) and alludes to it in Platform (see Chapter 3). See also Chapter 2 for an analysis of the trope of ruins in the film.

Awaara (India; 1951) Raj Kapoor Kapoor’s highly popular film, allegedly Mao Zedong’s favourite, is quoted by Jia Zhangke in Platform (see Chapter 4).

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Appendix I

Every Day except Christmas (UK; 1957) Lindsay Anderson A landmark documentary of the Free Cinema movement, shot in the Covent Garden Market in London. The film celebrates the manual labourer who works long hours through the night, and ends in a series of moving portraits that finds an echo in Jia’s cinema.

Huang Baomei (黄 黄宝妹; China; 1958) Xie Jin A sort of docudrama focusing on factory model worker Huang Baomei, directed by Xie Jin, one of China’s most important film-makers. Huang is interviewed by Jia Zhangke in I Wish I Knew (see Chapter 9).

Pickpocket (France; 1959) Robert Bresson Bresson is one of Jia Zhangke’s main cinematic references. It is not by chance that he elects a pickpocket as the main character in his first feature film Xiao Wu (see Chapter 2).

To Liberate Shanghai (战 战上海 Zhan Shanghai, 1959) Wang Bing This propaganda film is paralleled with Wang Toon’s Red Persimmon in I Wish I Knew, providing a commentary on the 1949 events from two different points of view (see Chapter 9).

The Little Soldier (Le Petit soldat, 1960–63) Jean-Luc Godard Bazin’s foundational question ‘what is cinema’ is famously answered by Godard in The Little Soldier as ‘truth twenty-four times per second’. Laura Mulvey complements Godard’s retort with her suggestion that cinema is ‘death twentyfour times per second’. See Chapter 7 for a discussion of realism, motion and stillness in the cinema, and its relationship with photography.

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The Night (La Notte; Italy; 1961) Michelangelo Antonioni Antonioni is, alongside Bresson and Hou Hsiao-hsien, one of the main cinematic references for Jia Zhangke. Jeanne Moreau’s perambulations in Milan in The Night made an impression in the young film-maker in the 1990s (see Chapter 2).

Wild Boar Forest (野 野猪林 Ye zhu lin; China; 1962) Chen Huaiai and Cui Wei An adaptation of the opera Wild Boar Forest made in mainland China, telling the story of how Lin Chong became an outlaw.

The Story of Su San (玉 玉堂春 Yu Tang Chun; Hong Kong; 1964) King Hu This is King Hu’s first film made in Hong Kong for the Shaw Brothers. It is an adaptation of the opera The Story of Su San, adapted from a chapter of the Ming Dynasty collection of vernacular stories by Feng Menglong entitled Stories to Caution the World (警世通言 Jingshi Tongyan, 1624) (see Chapter 6).

Red Desert (Il deserto rosso; Italy; 1964) Michelangelo Antonioni Antonioni’s shots of the Italian industrial landscape in Red Desert reverberate in Useless (see Chapter 1), as well as in A Touch of Sin.

Black God, White Devil (Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol; Brazil; 1964) Glauber Rocha Brazil’s most important film-maker follows the opening credits of his 1964 masterpiece with a tilt down that connects the cosmic and the telluric. Chen Kaige tilts up from earth to heaven in the beginning of Yellow Earth, a movement that suggests the same passage and interconnection (see Chapter 5).

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Two Stage Sisters (舞 舞台姐妹 Wutai jiemei; China; 1964) Xie Jin The woman in white in I Wish I Knew sees Xie Jin’s film in a cinema in Shanghai. The scene is reminiscent of My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1962), where Nana (Anna Karina) is seen watching Dreyer’s The Passion of Jean of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 1928) in a cinema in Paris. Shangguan Yunzhu plays an ageing opera star in Two Stage Sisters and her son Wei Ran is interviewed in I Wish I Knew (see Chapter 9).

A Touch of Zen (俠 俠女 Xiá Nǚ; Hong Kong, Taiwan; 1971) King Hu King Hu’s classic is openly referenced by Jia Zhangke in A Touch of Sin (see Chapter 6). It remains one of the greatest wuxia films of all times.

Chung Kuo, Cina (Italy; 1972) Michelangelo Antonioni Jia Zhangke interviews Zhu Qiansheng in I Wish I  Knew. He was one of the Shanghai crew members for Antonioni’s film (see Chapter  9), and later suffered persecution from the Gang of Four. The film triggers an important debate about the act of looking/staring from/through and towards the film camera (see Chapter 7).

The Little Flower (小 小花 Xiao Hua; China; 1979) Zheng Zhang and Huang Jianzhong A highly popular melodrama about an orphan girl, played by Joan Chen in her second film role (see Chapter 7).

When the Leaves Turn Red (等 等到满山红叶时 Deng dao man shan hong ye shi; China; 1980) Tang Huada and Yu Benzheng A love story set in the Three Gorges, this film is referenced by the faint melody of its main theme which plays over the break-up scene in Still Life (see Chapter 5).

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251

The Bund (上 上海滩 Shanghai Tang; Hong Kong: 1980) Chiu Chun-keung et al Starring Chow Yun-fat, this TV series was a great success when first broadcast by TVB in Hong Kong in 1980. It is set in the 1920s in Shanghai and has been dubbed as The Godfather of the East. Its theme song is featured in Still Life (see Chapter 5).

The Shaolin Temple (少 少林寺 Shaolin Si; China and Hong Kong; 1982) Chang Hsin Yen One of the first co-productions between China and Hong Kong, the film was a huge commercial success and one of Jia Zhangke’s favourites in the early 1980s.

The Boys from Fengkuei (風 風櫃來的人 Fenggui lai de ren; Taiwan; 1983) Hou Hsiao-hsien This is one of Jia Zhangke’s favourite films, notable for its focus on the everyday through an observational realism (see Chapter 2). The film features a shot of the cityscape framed by a building under construction that is referenced by Jia Zhangke in Still Life (see Chapter 5). The film is also referenced in the Chinese version of The World (see Chapter 2).

Yellow Earth (黄 黄土地 Huang tudi; China; 1984) Chen Kaige Jia Zhangke claims to have decided to become a film-maker after seeing Yellow Earth, the fifth-generation classic by Chen Kaige. The film is analysed in Chapter 5.

Breakin’ (USA; 1984) Joel Silberg A comedy-drama about breakdancing that much impressed a young Jia Zhangke in Fenyang in the 1980s (see Chapter 4).

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A Better Tomorrow (英 英雄本色 Yingxiong bense; Hong Kong; 1986) John Woo John Woo transposed the wuxia universe of jianghu to 1980s Hong Kong in his highly influential action films. Jia Zhangke has been a fan of John Woo from the outset, referencing his films The Killer and A Better Tomorrow over and over again (see, e.g., Chapters 2 and 5).

Dust in the Wind (恋 恋恋风尘 Lian lian feng chen; Taiwan; 1986) Hou Hsiao-hsien Hou Hsiao-hsien is interviewed in I Wish I Knew inside the train that opens his film Dust in the Wind (see Chapter 9).

Old Well (老 老井 Lao Jing; China; 1987) Wu Tianming Produced by Xian Film Studios and starring Zhang Yimou, this film belongs to the period of renewal in Chinese cinema in the 1980s and had an impact on the young Jia Zhangke (see Chapter 2).

River Elegy (河 河殇 Heshang; China; 1988) Wang Luxiang A six-part television documentary that caused a stir in the country when broadcast on CCTV in 1988 (see Chapter 3).

A City of Sadness (悲 悲情城市 Beiqing chengshi; Taiwan; 1989) Hou Hsiao-hsien Hou’s masterpiece employs intermediality as a vehicle of historicity (see Chapter 2).

The Killer (喋 喋血雙雄 Diexue Shuangxiong; Hong Kong; 1989) John Woo Jia’s obsession with The Killer and its theme song pervades his career and reaches a pinnacle in his most recent Ash Is Purest White. (see above and Chapters 2 and 5).

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Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (流 流浪北京 Liulang Beijing; China; 1990) Wu Wenguang This is China’s first independent documentary, made by pioneer Wu Wenguang. Its ‘precarious’ style is indicative of what the early sixth-generation films would look like in the 1990s.

Days of Being Wild (阿 阿飛正傳 Afei zhengzhuan; Hong Kong; 1990) Wong Kar-wai The Shanghai–Hong Kong connection in Days of Being Wild is highlighted by Jia Zhangke in his interview with Rebecca Pan in I Wish I  Knew (see Chapter 9).

Mama (妈 妈妈 Mama; China; 1990) Zhang Yuan One of the first films of the sixth generation, Zhang Yuan’s debut combines social realism and film noir overtones in an original way. Years later, Lou Ye and Wang Xiaoshuai would venture into similar territories (see Suzhou River and So Close to Paradise).

Yearnings (渴 渴望 Kewang; China; 1990) Lu Xiaowei This was the first soap opera to achieve huge success in China. It is said that the sales of TV sets went up when it was first broadcast, and that the streets would be empty of people who would stay home to watch the story of two families in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.

The Story of Qiu Ju (秋 秋菊打官司 Qiu Ju da guansi, 1992) Zhang Yimou This film is by fifth-generation master Zhang Yimou and stars his muse Gong Li. It reveals an oblique kinship with the nascent urban realism of the sixth generation (see Chapter 2).

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Appendix I

Beijing Bastards (北 北京杂种 Beijing zazhong; China; 1993) Zhang Yuan Zhang Yuan’s second film is a landmark in Chinese film history. It combines fiction and documentary and includes musical sequences by Cui Jian, capturing the spirit of Beijing in the years following the Tiananmen massacre. Liu Xiaodong (the subject of Jia Zhangke’s documentary Dong) is the film’s art director. (see above and Chapter 2).

The Days (冬 冬春的日子 Dong chun de rizi; China; 1993) Wang Xiaoshuai Another of the founding films of the sixth generation, Wang Xiaoshuai’s debut feature has Liu Xiaodong (see above) playing the part of a struggling artist alongside Yu Hong.

Green Snake (青 青蛇 Ching se; Hong Kong; 1993) Tsui Hark The folk tale Madame White Snake as seen from the point of view of the Green Snake in Tsui Hark’s Hong Kong fantasy film. This is watched by the character Xiao Yu inside the sauna in A Touch of Sin (see Chapter 5).

Pulp Fiction (USA; 1994) Quentin Tarantino Unknown Pleasures establishes a crucial intertextual dialogue with Pulp Fiction, one of the defining films of the 1990s and a watershed of an exaggerated mode of reflexivity, hypermediacy and irony that characterized that decade’s cinematographic output (see Chapter 4).

Ulysses’ Gaze (Το βλέμμα του Οδυσσέα To vlemma tou Odyssea; Greece, France, Italy, Germany, UK, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina; 1995) Theo Angelopoulos The demise of the Soviet bloc in the Balkans and the ensuing Bosnian war provide the backdrop to Angelopoulos’s film. The most memorable sequence

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is the long take of a disassembled oversized statue of Lenin being transported in a barge down the Danube in Romania (see Chapter 7).

Red Persimmon (红 红柿子 Hong shizi; Taiwan; 1997) Wang Toon Wang Toon was born in Shanghai but moved to Taiwan with his family when still a child in 1949, before the Communist Revolution. His autobiographical film motivates his interview in I Wish I Knew, shot inside a classroom theatre in Taipei National University of the Arts, Taiwan, where he now heads the Film Department. Red Persimmon is paralleled with Wang Bing’s To Liberate Shanghai in Jia’s film (see above and Chapter 9).

Flowers of Shanghai (上 上海花 Shanghai hua; Taiwan, Japan; 1998) Hou Hsiao-hsien Brothel life in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century as recreated by Hou Hsiao-hsien (see Chapter 9).

Not One Less (一 一个都不能少 Yi ge dou bu neng shao, 1999) Zhang Yimou Another of Zhang Yimou’s realist films, Not One Less reveals an oblique kinship to the sixth-generation style (see Chapter 2).

Suzhou River (苏 苏州河 Suzhou he; Germany, China, France; 2000) Lou Ye Lou Ye combines urban realism and film noir overtones in his Suzhou River, a film honoured by Jia Zhangke in I Wish I Knew (see Chapter 9).

Made in China (Belgium; 2005) Julien Selleron The first feature documentary about Jia Zhangke made by a foreign film-maker, Selleron’s film contains precious moments of Jia Zhangke with his father and mother in Fenyang.

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Appendix I

Before the Flood (淹 淹没 Yan Mo; China; 2005) Li Yifan and Yan Yu A documentary about the evictions going on in Fengjie during the building of the Three Gorges Dam. Shot over the course of two years, it was a source of inspiration for Jia’s Still Life (see Chapter 5).

Summer Palace (颐 颐和园 Yihe yuan; China, France; 2006) Lou Ye Lou Ye, one of sixth generation’s most controversial film-makers, revisits the Tiananmen events of 1989 in this melodrama staring Guo Xiaodong and Hao Lei. The couple was cast by Jia Zhangke in Cry Me a River as a homage to Lou Ye’s film, banned in China (see Chapter 8).

Xiao Jia going home (Xiao Jia rentre à la maison; France; 2007) Damien Ounouri The second feature documentary about Jia Zhangke by a foreign film-maker, Ounouri’s film offers a contemplative gaze over Jia’s work and his relationship with the landscape.

Last Train Home (归 归途列车 Guitu lieche; China, Canada, UK; 2009) Fan Lixin Mass migration, broken families and generational conflicts converge in Fan Lixin’s impressive documentary Last Train Home, attesting to the centrality of the New Year holiday in China and to the country’s shifting social tapestry since the 1980s.

Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from Fenyang (Jia Zhang-ke, un gars de Fenyang; France, Brazil; 2014) Walter Salles This is the third feature documentary about Jia Zhangke, shot by leading world cinema film-maker Walter Salles. This is an affectionate portrait that highlights Jia’s connection with his hometown, his roots in Shanxi and the role of his father in his upbringing. It also obliquely and unintentionally speaks of Salles’s own work, where a literal or figurative search for the father figure is recurrent (see, e.g., Central Station, 1998). Shot in 2013, the film captures Jia’s memories and his unfulfilled struggle to release A Touch of Sin in cinemas in China.

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App e ndix II

Songography Jia Zhangke’s cinema enjoys a profound relationship with pop songs, as analysed in Chapter 4. In this songography, I provide a list of the main songs divided by film title and in chronological order. I  have included the songs’ composers and main interpreters to the best of my knowledge, and this usually corresponds with the version heard in the films. Sometimes, a song does not feature in its recorded version but is sung by a character, as briefly noted.

Xiao Shan Going Home (1995) ●

●

●

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Yesterday Once More – [Richard Carpenter and John Bettis] The Carpenters, 1973 Runaway Train – [David Pirner] Soul Asylum, 1993 Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm – [Brad Roberts] Crash Test Dummies, 1993 Cang ying 苍蝇 – [Zhang Chu 张楚] Zhang Chu 张楚, 1994

Xiao Wu (1997) ●

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Qianzui yisheng 淺醉一生 (My Drunken Life) – [lyrics by Tang Shuchen 唐書琛, music by Lowell Lo 盧冠廷] Sally Yeh 葉蒨文, 1989 Xin yu 心雨 (Raining Heart) – [Liu Zhenmei 刘振美 and Ma Zhaojun 马兆骏] Yang Yuying 杨钰莹 and Mao Ning 毛宁, 1993 (sung by Xiao Wu and Mei Mei) Ai jiang shan geng ai mei ren 爱江山更爱美人 (The Bold and the Beautiful) – [Xiao Chong 小虫] Lily Lee 李丽芬, 1994 Tian kong 天空 (Sky) – [lyrics by Huang Guilan 黄桂兰, music by Yang Minghuang 杨明煌] Wang Fei 王菲, 1994 (sung by Mei Mei)

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258 ●

Appendix II

Ba wang bie ji 霸王别姬 (Farewell My Concubine) – [lyrics by Chen Tao 陈涛, music by Feng Xiaoquan 冯晓泉] Tu Honggang 屠洪刚, 1996

Platform (2000) ●

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●

●

●

●

●

●

Zanmen gongren you liliang 咱们工人有力量 (We Workers Have Power) – [Ma Ke 马可] 1948 Meijiu jia kafei 美酒加咖啡 (Good Liquor and Coffee) – [lyrics by Lin Kwang-kuen 林煌坤, music by Gu Yue 古月] Teresa Teng 邓丽君, 1972 Chen ji si han 成吉思汗 (Genghis Khan) – [Ralph Siegel for Dschinghis Khan] George Lam 林子祥, 1979 Shiyi ge 十一哥 – Zhang Di 张帝, 1980s Wode zhong guo xin 我的中国心 (My Chinese Heart) – [lyrics by James Wong 黄霑, music by Wang Fuling 王福龄] Cheung Ming Men 张明敏, 1983 Shifou 是否 (Is It True?) – [Luo Dayou 罗大佑] Julie Su (Su Rui) 苏芮, 1983 Zhantai 站台 (Platform) – [lyrics by Huang Pusheng 黄蒲生, music by Liu Ke 刘克] Liu Hong 刘鸿, 1987 Lu deng xia de guniang 路灯下的小姑娘 (Girl under the Street Lamp/ Brother Louie) – [Dieter Bohlen for Modern Talking] Deng Jieyi 邓洁仪, 1987

Unknown Pleasures (2002) ●

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Menggu ren 蒙古人 (Mongolian) – Tenggeer 腾格尔, 1986 Chiluoluo 赤裸裸（My Love is Stark Naked) – Zheng Jun 郑钧, 1994 (disco version) Renxiaoyao 任逍遥 (I Am Free) – [Xiao Chong 小虫] Richie Ren 任贤齐, 1998 Jia xiang 家乡(Hometown) – Han Hong 韩红, 1998 Nüren shi laohu 女人是老虎 (Women as Tigers) – [lyrics by Shi Shunyi 石顺义, music by Zhang Qianyi 张千一] Li Na 李娜, 2000 (sung by female singer in nightclub)

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Appendix II

259

The World (2004) ●

Wulanbatuo de ye 乌兰巴托的夜 (Ulan Bator Night) – [lyrics by P. Sanduyjav, music by G. Purrevdorj and Ineemseglel band in 1985] Zhao Tao, 2003

Still Life (2006) ●

●

●

●

●

●

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Shanghai Tang 上海滩 – [Cantonese lyrics by James Wong 黄沾, music by Joseph Koo 顾嘉辉] Frances Yip 叶丽仪, 1980 Man shan hongye shi caixia 满山红叶似彩霞 (Red leaves in the mountains like rosy clouds) – [lyrics by Gao Xing 高型 and Luo Zhiming 罗志明, composed by Xiang Yi 向异] Zhu Fengbo 朱逢博,from the film When the Leaves Turn Red 等到满山红叶时 Deng dao man shan hong ye shi (Tang Huada and Yu Benzheng), 1980 Jiugan tang maiwu 酒干倘卖无 （Any Old Wine Bottles for Sale） – [lyrics by Luo Dayou 罗大佑 and Hou Dejian 侯德健, music by Hou Dejian 侯德健] Theme song from Taiwanese film Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing 搭錯車, performed by Julie Su (Su Rui 苏芮), 1983 (sung by bald singer in nightclub) Hao ren yi sheng pin an 好人一生平安 (Bless the Good People) – [lyrics by Yiming 易茗, music by Leilei 雷蕾] Theme from the soap opera Kewang 渴望, performed by Li Na 李娜, 1990 (Sanming’s ringtone) Liang zhi hudie 兩只蝴蝶 (Two Scalewings) – [Niu Chaoyang 牛朝阳] Pang Long 庞龙, 2004 Laoshu ai dami 老鼠愛大米 (Mouse Loves Rice) – [Yang Chengang 杨臣刚] Xiang Xiang 香香, 2004 (sung by young boy) Chaoshi de xin 潮濕的心 (A Moist Heart) – [lyrics by Li Guangping 李广平, music by Lan Zhai 兰斋] Gan Ping 甘萍, 2004

Useless (2007) ●

●

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Qingren 情人 (Lover) – [Cantonese lyrics by Liu Zhuhui 刘卓辉, music by Wong Ka Kui 黄家驹] Beyond, 1993 Ai de laogong 爱的劳工 (Labor of Love) – Zuo Xiao Zuzhou 左小祖咒, 2001

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260

Appendix II

24 City (2008) ●

●

●

●

Gechang zuguo 歌唱祖国 (Ode to the Motherland) – written and composed by Wang Xin 王莘, 1951 (sung by factory workers) Arigatou Anata – [lyrics by Kazuya Senke, music by Shunichi Tokura] Yamaguchi Momoe, theme song from Japanese TV series Red Suspicion (Akai giwaku 赤い疑惑, in Chinese 血疑), 1975 Qianzui yisheng 淺醉一生 (My Drunken Life) – [lyrics by Tang Shuchen 唐書琛, music by Lowell Lo 盧冠廷] Sally Yeh 葉蒨文, 1989 Waimian de shijie 外面的世界 (The World Outside) – Chyi Chin   齐秦, 1990

Cry Me a River (2008) ●

Lian qu 1990 戀曲 1990 (Love Song 1990) – Lo Ta-yu 罗大佑, 1988

I Wish I Knew (2010) ●

●

●

I Wish I Knew – [lyrics by Mack Gordon, music by Harry Warren] Dick Haymes, 1945, from the film Diamond Horseshoe (George Seaton, 1945, USA), performed by Dick Haymes and Betty Grable Langzi xinsheng 浪子心声 (Prodigal Voice) – [lyrics by Sam Hui 许冠杰 and Li Peter 黎彼得, music by Sam Hui 许冠杰] Sam Hui 许冠杰, 1976 Yu Ye Hua 雨夜花 (Rainy Night Flower) – [lyrics by Zhou Tianwang 周添旺, music by Deng Yuxian 邓雨贤] Teresa Teng 邓丽君, 1980

Mountains May Depart (2015) ●

●

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Zhen Zhong 珍重 (Treasure) – [lyrics by Pan Weiyuan 潘伟源, music by Wang Wenqing 王文清] Sally Yeh 葉蒨文, 1990 Go West – [Victor Willis, Henri Belolo and Jacques Morali for The Village People, 1977] The Pet Shop Boys, 1993

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Appendix II

261

Ash is Purest White (2018) ●

●

●

●

●

●

●

●

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Y.M.C.A. – [written by Henri Belolo, Jacques Morali and Victor Willis] Village People, 1978 Shanghai Tang 上海滩 – [Cantonese lyrics by James Wong 黄沾， music by Joseph Koo 顾嘉辉] Frances Yip 叶丽仪, 1980 Cha Cha Cha – [written by Fabrizio Baldoni, Franco Reitano, Mino Reitano, Bruno Rossellini and Graziella Boldo] Finzy Kontini, 1985 Qianzui yisheng 淺醉一生 (My Drunken Life) – [lyrics by Tang Shuchen 唐書琛, music by Lowell Lo 盧冠廷] Sally Yeh 葉蒨文, 1989 Xiaosa zou yihui 潇洒走一回 – [lyrics by Chen Lerong 陈乐融 and Wang Huiling 王慧玲，music by Chen Dali 陈大力 and Chen Xiunan 陈秀 男] Sally Yeh 葉蒨文, 1991 You duoshao ai keyi chong lai 有多少爱可以重来 – [lyrics by He Houhua 何厚华，music by Huang Zhuoying 黄卓颖] Huang Zhuoying 1994 (sung by performer in Fengjie) Yongyuan shi pengyou 永远是朋友 – [lyrics by Ren Weixing 任卫新, music by Liu Qing 刘青] Zhuo Yiting 卓依婷, 1996 Jianghu Ernü 江湖儿女 – [lyrics by Chen Xi 陳曦, music by Tong Dongdong 董冬冬] Tan Weiwei, 2018

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Notes Foreword 1 This scene unfolds in Walter Salles’s film Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from Fenyang (2014), shot in Fenyang, Pingyao and Beijing in 2013. (C.M.)

1  Introduction: Jia Zhangke, realism, impurity and memory 1 In his many interviews in the past 15 years, Jia Zhangke frequently mentioned film projects that never came to fruition. In fact, his work method involves the concomitant preparation of three of four films, finally going ahead with that which seems more mature at the time. Recent projects completed or announced include a short for the BRICS portmanteau film Where Has the Time Gone? (时间去哪儿了, 2017); the feature film Ash Is Purest White (江湖儿女 Jiang Hu Er Nü), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018; and a future ‘Journey to the West’ (the West being of course India) for the production of an adaptation of the story of the Monkey King. 2 Recent productions include Life after Life (枝繁叶茂 Zhi fan ye mao, 2016) by Hanyi Zhang, K (2015) by Darhad Erdenibulag and Emyr ap Richard, and Forgetting to Know You (忘了去懂你 Wangle qu dong ni, 2014) by Quan Ling. 3 Jia Zhangke appeared in Karmic Mahjong (血战到底 Xue zhan dao di, 2006) by Wang Guangli and The Continent (后会无期 Hou hui wu qi, 2014) by Han Han. 4 The ‘Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival’ (PYIFF平遥国际电影展) was initiated in 2017 by Jia Zhangke and Marco Müller. 5 These are his first production company XStream Pictures (西河星汇影业), founded in 2003 alongside Yu Lik-wai and Chow Keung, with offices in Beijing and Hong Kong, and where Jia is the main shareholder; Yihui Media (意汇传媒), a second film production company launched in 2012; Fabula Entertainment (暖流电影公司), launched in 2016; and the digital video platform Jia Screen (柯首映), launched in 2016 and showcasing over 100 curated art-house short films from China and abroad (but only available in China for streaming). 6 In 2016, Jia Zhangke opened a restaurant called ‘Mountains May Depart/山河故人Shanhe guren’ in his hometown Fenyang in Shanxi province.

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Notes

His cultural centre, also in Fenyang, has opened in 2018. In this he follows on the footsteps of Hou Hsiao-hsien, who owns an art-house cinema in Taipei (Spot Film House), and of Tsai Ming-liang, who until recently owned a café in the city and who still sells his own brand of coffee ‘Tsai Lee Lu’ (named after him and the two other owners, his main actors Lee Kang-sheng and Lu Yi-ching). 7 Jia played the role of tourism ambassador for his hometown province of Shanxi. See http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-03/15/c_137040967.htm [Accessed July 2018]. 8 See, for instance, the October 2013 issue of 旅伴 (Fellow Traveller), a national publication distributed on all CRH trains throughout China, and the January 2016 issue of Nihao, China Southern Airlines’ in-flight magazine. 9 人生在線: 贾樟柯 (2000), special for LeTV Beijing; Made in China (2005) by Julien Selleron; Xiao Jia Going Home (Xiao Jia hui jia, 2007) by Damien Ounouri; and Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from Fenyang (Jia Zhangke, um homem de Fenyang, 2014) by Walter Salles. 10 For more on Bazin in China, please see Cécile Lagesse’s “Bazin and the Politics of Realism in Mainland China” (2010). 11 Cécile Lagesse makes this point while observing that it has also inevitably transformed Jia’s cinema aesthetically, as well as the relationship between the film-maker and his object (2008: 79). Yet even the occasional inclusion of surreal or animated digital effects in his films, most notably in Still Life, rather than attempting against realism end up reinforcing it, precisely because of their conspicuity (Lagesse 2008: 80). 12 Jia made two films while studying at the BFA, which he claims to have lost after repeated house moves. 13 I will not be discussing Ash Is Purest White in the book. 14 This appeared on 20 March 1996 in the newspaper Xiju Dianying Bao (戏剧电影报 – Drama and Film Paper). 15 Jia openly discusses piracy in the four documentaries made about him as well as in his writings. This has also been a recurrent topic of conversation in his interviews in the past twenty years. See, for instance, his essay ‘The Three Revolutions of the Digital’ (Jia 2004). 16 It should also be noted that the influence of Cultural Studies in film theory has led to a distrust in the notions of purity and essence, replaced by hybridity and by the current preference for the prefixes ‘trans’, ‘multi’ and ‘inter’, used to redefine critical notions in the singular such as ‘national’ and ‘cultural’ (Nagib 2014a; Shohat and Stam 1994). 17 Pethő sees in the cinema of Godard and Varda ideal examples for a reassessment of how intermediality often combines hypermediacy with effects of immediacy,

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Notes

18

19 20

21

22

265

for they often relied on a sense of realism through a preference for natural lighting, real locations and a focus on the everyday which counterbalanced the impression of a heavily ‘textual’ environment (2010). The poem 清平乐 qing ping le by 周密 Zhou Mi is transcribed below: 诗情画意 只在阑干外雨露天低生爽气一片吴山越水宫烟醉柳春晴海风洗月秋明唤取 九霞飞佩, 夜凉跨鹤吹笙 Information on Ma Ke’s company is available at https://www.linkedin.com/ company/exception-de-mixmined [Accessed June 2017]. See, for instance, the documentaries Remote Mountains (1995) by Hu Jie, Mine no. 8 (2003) by Xiao Peng, Coal Money (2009) by Wang Bing and Behemoth (2015) by Zhao Liang; the photographic series of coal mine workers by Song Chao, himself an ex-miner, and Geng Yunsheng’s photograph ‘Miners at Wusheng Mountain’ (2003), analysed by Jerome Silbergeld (2012: 411–12). The film, which has not been approved for release in China while being acclaimed abroad, stared Wang Baoqiang in the role of a migrant worker. Wang would later appear in Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin. In the original ‘妹妹啊把我这快乐的外衣披上吧; 妹妹啊把我这疯狂的外衣披 上吧’, 那感觉如何?’

2  The walls of China: Between ephemerality and permanence 1 Information on Jia Zhangke’s biography was mainly collected from the documentary Jia Zhang-ke, A Man from Fenyang by Walter Salles, from the lengthy interview with Jia published in the book O mundo de Jia Zhangke, from extra filmic and transcribed material from Salles’s documentary, as well as from two masterclasses offered in Sao Paulo in August and October 2014. 2 大字报 dazibao are big-character posters, usually wall-mounted, which employ big Chinese characters for communication, protest and political propaganda. They were very frequent during the Cultural Revolution. 3 The BFA was founded in May 1950, shortly after the revolution. Like most educational institutes in China it was shut down during the Cultural Revolution, reopening its doors in the late 1970s. 4 Xiao Shan features The Carpenters’ ‘Yesterday Once More’, Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’, Crash Test Dummies’ ‘Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm’ and the recurrent first chords of the song ‘Cang Ying’ (苍蝇) by Chinese singer/ songwriter Zhang Chu (张楚).

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Notes

5 Following these decisive encounters in Hong Kong, Jia made another film in Beijing entitled Du Du, about a female college student who is faced with life’s uncertainties on the cusp of graduation. This film was largely improvised and represented ‘a new kind of cinematic experiment’ for Jia (M. Berry 2005: 189). It is also, alas, allegedly lost. 6 Zhang Zhen contests this and proposes that ‘the appearance in the late 1990s of Jia Zhangke and his film’s Xiao Shan Going Home (1995), Xiao Wu (1997), and Platform (2000) inaugurated a different phase in the independent movement that effectively ended the era of the Sixth Generation’ (2007a: 15). 7 Nowadays known as the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of the People’s Republic of China (SAPPRFT). 8 This essay opens the three books containing the screenplays and other writings about his Hometown Trilogy (see Jia and Zhao 2010a, b and c). It was later translated into Portuguese for the book O mundo de Jia Zhangke (Frodon and Salles 2014). 9 ‘Piranha Ox’ (‘Boi de Piranha’) is a Brazilian expression that refers to sacrificing an older or diseased cow by offering it to the piranhas in order to cross a river with a herd of cattle. 10 说唱 shuochang is a genre of popular entertaining consisting mainly of talking and singing. 11 This is not entirely clear from the film but made explicit in the original script (see Jia and Zhao 2010a: 66 and 92). 12 A similar gesture can be observed in Neighbouring Sounds (O som ao redor, Kléber Mendonça Filho, 2012), a film that also sees and hears a present charged with the past, weaving a sophisticated superimposition of temporalities that gives rise to a similar ‘geological’ investigation into the politics of time and space. The film takes place in and around one street in Recife, the capital of the state of Pernambuco in the northeast of Brazil, located in a middle-class area of the city close to the sea. On this street lives the head of a family, property mogul Francisco, descendant of seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave owners. In one particular scene, his nephew João, who sometimes works for his uncle as an estate agent, takes his girlfriend Sofia back to the house where she lived as a child, soon to be demolished to make room for yet another of his uncle’s high rises. Once inside the house, Sofia moves around different rooms, as if inhabiting Quintilian’s architecture of memories. She finally reaches her old bedroom and looks up to find the same glow-in-the-dark stars she had glued to the ceiling so many years before. Here, the architectural, spatial and present nature of memories once again comes to the fore, and the film pauses to allow this to happen. Finally, Sofia, repeating the same gesture as the two friends in Xiao Wu, asks

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267

João to lift her up so she can touch the stars, reaching up to her memory, stuck to the ceiling of the house. 13 Joss paper or ghost money is usually burned in Chinese funerals as well as in other Asian country’s funerals. This tradition is meant to ensure that the spirit of the loved one has plenty of good things in the afterlife. 1 4 This analysis could also extend to include Mountains May Depart and the message Tao sends to her son Dollar in the second part of the film, informing him of the death of his grandfather. Not finding a wall that can hold it, it simply migrates from her phone to the filmic screen, and later disappears.

3  Pingyao’s city walls: On-location filming and the weight of history 1 Please see UNESCO’s website on Pingyao for detailed justification about the city’s inscription as a World Heritage Site: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/812 [Accessed July 2018]. 2 Yoshihiro Hanno composed the soundtrack for Platform which ended up not being used but for this single, poignant leitmotif of four bars, punctuating some of the most significant moments of the film. 3 Yuan (2014) tells the story of this reconstruction and its abandonment after Geng Yanbo, Datong’s mayor behind the initiative, left the city for Taiyuan, the capital of the province. See also the 2015 documentary The Chinese Mayor (Datong) by Zhou Hao, which follows Geng Yanbo’s megalomaniac project for two years, observing closely the relocation of almost half a million people along the way. 4 The purple mist or cloud (紫气 ziqi) is considered an auspicious omen in Chinese astrology. 5 In the original: Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d’un mortel); 6 Jia comments on this family habit in the documentary Made in China (2005).

4  Pop music’s sonic memories 1 In 2014, Han Han wrote and directed his first film The Continent (后会无期 Hou hui wu qi) a road trip comedy featuring a cameo by Jia Zhangke. 2 Han Han’s blog is available at http://blog.sina.com.cn/twocold [Accessed February 2017].

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Notes

3 Vancl’s publicity video is available at http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=HDhdos2pA8w [Accessed February 2017]. 4 As already mentioned in Chapter 1, information on Jia Zhangke’s biography was mainly collected from the documentary Jia Zhang-ke, A Man from Fenyang by Walter Salles, from the lengthy interview with Jia published in the book O mundo de Jia Zhangke, from extra-filmic and transcribed material from Salles’s documentary, as well as from two masterclasses offered in Sao Paulo in August and October 2014. I would include here the documentary Made in China (2005) by Julien Selleron. 5 The book had interviews with directors seen as representatives of the new wave of realist cinema in China, including Zhang Ming, Zhang Yuan, Lou Ye, Wang Xiaoshuai and Jia Zhangke. Yingjin Zhang analyses the claim of the book as well as of the eponymous documentary by Solveig Klassen and Katharina SchneidereRoss, featuring interviews with these and other film-makers in China (see Zhang 2010: 104–5). 6 Of course, subjectivity will also be sought after by the Young Turks once they turn to making their own films, their auterism springing from the phenomenologyinfluenced existentialist humanism of post-war France. However, that was not the real novelty of their politics. 7 The same pun is employed by Godard in his Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1988–98). 8 Victor Fan offers a very insightful contribution to the notion of the auteur in relation to Jia Zhangke and Chinese independent cinema from the 1990s onwards in ‘Revisiting Jia Zhangke: Individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy in contemporary Chinese independent cinema’ (2016). 9 In Platform, Cui Mingliang and friends go into a video shop and are seen watching a sex education animated video. This scene derives from Jia Zhangke’s memory of going to a video shop in Fenyang with his friends hoping to see a pornographic film. The boss said to them ‘I have a surprise for you’, and gave them a family planning propaganda video instead (see Frodon and Salles 2014: 92). 10 Yu Lik-wai follows the same habit by calling his 1999 film 天上人间 Tianshan renjian as Love Will Tear Us Apart after the Joy Division song, and his 2003 film 明日天涯 Mingri tianya as All Tomorrow’s Parties after the Velvet Underground song. 11 In Ash Is Purest White, Sally Yeh’s song for The Killer becomes the central tune, appearing in the credits sequence and on other occasions throughout the film. 12 Interestingly, the Chinese soap opera 一年又一年 (yi nian you yi nian), from 1998, features a similar scene in which one character arrives home in Beijing coming from the south, sporting new fashionable clothes and listening to a cassette recorder. 13 In Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Dust in the Wind (戀戀風塵 Lian lian fengchen, 1986), similar drunken behaviour of stacking bricks in front of a door can be observed towards the end of the film.

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14 Both Teresa Teng and Deng Xiaoping have the same Chinese surname, Deng 邓. The transliteration of Teresa Teng’s surname, however, did not follow the pinyin system in use in mainland China, thus the distinction between Teng and Deng in the Romanized surnames. The literal translation of the saying would be ‘During the day we listen to old Deng, during the night we listen to little Deng.’ 15 Today, China has one of the longest railway networks in the world, second only to the United States and followed by India, and it has the longest high-speed rail network in the world. Rail transport has become the most important mode of long-distance transportation in the country and has significantly affected its way of life. 16 I would like to thank Lúcia Nagib for first calling my attention to this significant convergence. 17 Datong was initially called Pingcheng, which became the capital of Northern Wei Dynasty from 398 AD until 494 AD. It was renamed Datong in 1048 AD and became the Western Capital of the non-Han Liao and Jin Dynasties. 18 Remarkably, certain occurrences and gestures that will later reappear in other films can be observed for the first time in Unknown Pleasures. These include Zhao Tao’s or Sanming’s habit of covering themselves with a veil, a coat or a mac as protection from the sun or the rain, seen here for the first time with Qiao Qiao and repeated in The World, Still Life, Our Ten Years (我们的十年, Women de shi nian, 2007), Black Breakfast, Remembrance (十年 Shinian, 2009), A Touch of Sin and Smog Journeys (2015), and the gesture of slapping or pushing someone repeatedly as seen with Qiao Qiao and Xiao Ji in this film, later reappearing in one of A Touch of Sin’s most poignant sequences.

5  Landscape painting, Chinese philosophy and the aesthetic innovation of Still Life 1 There have been a few studies of the relationship between Jia Zhangke’s cinema and scroll painting. Donald (2014) includes in her analysis of 24 City a parallel with the famous Song Dynasty ‘Along the River During the Qingming Festival’ scroll painting by Zhang Zeduan, which received a 3D animated, viewerinteractive digital version for the Shanghai World Expo 2010. Wang (2014), in her turn, studies the issues of multiple perspective and a migrating gaze in Still Life by also taking into consideration the Qingming Festival scroll. 2 The cinema of the fifth generation in China, for instance, seemed to cast a look towards the past, with an emphasis on intermediality, in order to bypass censorship and provide a comment on the country’s political situation.

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3 It should be remarked that the Japanese scroll painting differs from the Chinese landscape tradition. Broadly speaking, the main difference lies in the fact that Japanese scroll developed the narrative potential of painting while the Chinese scroll tended to remain pictorial. So the Japanese e-makimono is distinctively a narrative picture scroll, while the landscape scroll in China does not usually contain a narrative element. 4 This camera movement brings to mind the beginning of Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, 1964), set in the Brazilian backlands in the 1960s, and where the camera tilts down rather than up, yet making a similar association between the cosmic and the telluric.

6 Opera, wuxia and China’s imagined civilization 1 The World has two versions, as will be discussed in Chapter 7. Both Still Life and 24 City had scenes cut out in the Chinese version, the first relating to prostitution and the second showing a choir singing ‘The Internationale’ while a factory building is imploded. The DVD copies of both Still Life and 24 City released in Mainland China also come in their ‘censored’ form. 2 Jia Zhangke’s and his company Xstream Pictures’ statement on the reasons for withdrawing from the festival can be read here: http://dgeneratefilms.com/ critical-essays/statement-by-jia-zhangke-on-his-withdrawal-from-melbourneinternational-film-festival [Accessed February 2017]. 3 The tiger reappears in Mountains May Depart, this time a real one pacing inside a cage and exchanging looks with Liangzi (Liang Jingdong), who stares at it in what could be seen as a mixture of compassion and identification. Here, it does not roar like the imaginary tiger in A Touch of Sin. 4 It is true that the accuracy of this information (regarding the first film made in China) has been disputed in recent scholarship (see, for instance, Huang De Quan 2012 and Rojas 2013), but for the purpose of this argument it still matters that the real or invented film, which only survived in a still photograph of Tan Xinpei, is concerned with an operatic performance. 5 Performances are also a constant in Jia Zhangke’s filmography, and this relates to his experience growing up in Fenyang and attending the frequent rallies with performances organized locally. It is possible to trace the evolution of performances from Xiao Wu to The World, starting with the brief insertion of a theatrical performance in the first film, moving on to propaganda and later rock and pop performances in Platform, to a publicity performance in Unknown Pleasures and finally to the World Park shows resembling haute couture fashion shows in Milan and Paris as seen in The World (see Jia quoted in Burdeau and Tessé 2005: 33).

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6 In one scene near the start of the film, Qiao Qiao moves around the balcony corridors until she finds her boyfriend in one of the private booths talking to an opera actor in full attire. He compares him to a Tang dynasty queen in order to make Qiao Qiao jealous. Towards the end of the film, she is seen again in one of these booths, wearing a blue wig and watching the opera performance through a window in mise en abîme. Xiao Ji’s dad walks in and asks if he can sit with her, to which she replies ‘You cannot afford me.’ He then takes out the one-dollar bill that had come inside the Mongolian King Liquor bottle and places it over the table.

7  Painterly still lifes and photographic poses 1 Source: The Economist (2014a, 2014b). 2 Jia’s cousin Han Sanming, for instance, has a distinctively slow manner of talking, reacting, walking and moving that contributes to the slowing down of the narrative. A prolific parallel could be drawn between Sanming and Xiao Kang, Tsai Ming-liang’s alter ego and the epitome of ‘slow acting’ in cinema. 3 24 City was first conceived as a fiction film, but the idea was later abandoned and replaced with the hybrid documentary format. The book accompanying it is entitled A Collective Memory of Chinese Working Class (中国工人访谈录: 二十四城记). It contains the script for the four fictional interviews and the transcription of eight real ones, as well as an introductory essay by the film-maker, some photographs and reproductions, a section on keywords, timeline and map, and a brief word from musician Lim Giong. 4 The name of the company comes from Runzhi 润之, Mao Zedong’s second unofficial childhood name, meaning ‘dewy orchard’. 5 There is another ‘24 City’ complex built by CR Land in the city of Chongqing, also in a land that was previously occupied by a large factory. See http://www. crland.com.hk/cpyfw/zzcp/csgs/ [Accessed July 2018]. 6 I have on other occasions drawn out the resemblances between 24 City and the films Jogo de Cena by Eduardo Coutinho (2008) and The Arbor by Clio Barnard (2010). The three films employ similar filmic and dramatic techniques as a way of highlighting the fluid nature of memory and the relationship between the real and the intermedial in contemporary documentary. 7 The poems quoted in the film are: ‘Glass Factory’ by Ouyang Jianghe, ‘The Coming of Wisdom with Time’ and ‘Spilt Milk’ by W. B. Yeats, an extract from ‘A Dream of Red Mansions’ by Cao Xueqin (Daiyu burying the flowers 黛玉葬花, Chapter 23–4), and ‘Innate Character’ by Wan Xia.

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8 In The World photography also indicates an absence in the scene where Qun shows Chen a photograph of her husband, who has left China and lives in France. 9 I would like to thank Marco Giannotti for kindly calling my attention to this aspect of still-life painting. 10 In Italian: ‘La Cina apre le sue porte, ma è ancora un mondo in gran parte sconosicutto. Abiamo pottuto getare qui poco pìu che un sguardo. C’è un detto dell’antica Cina: “Poi disegnare la pelle di una tigre, non le sue ossa. Poi disegnare il viso di un uomo, ma non il suo cuore” ’. 11 Original proverb: ‘In drawing the tiger, in you paint his skin, but it is hard to depict his bones. In acquaintance with a man, you may know his face, but you cannot know his heart.’

8  Garden heterotopias and the memory of space 1 Another park, located in Shenzhen and called ‘Window of the World’ (Shi Jie Zhi Chuang), was also used as location in the filming of The World. The monorail seen in the film is in fact a feature of the Shenzhen Park and not of the Beijing one. 2 The correct website is www.beijingworldpark.com.cn and not www.worldpark.com. 3 In the Chinese version of the film, Anna’s passport apprehension by her Russian ‘agent’ is not shown, and neither is the scene in which she sits on a plane to Ulan Bator. 4 Victor Hugo never saw the actual palace, but the incursion by troops of his country into China and the subsequent destruction of the garden impelled him to write a letter of protest. 5 It is worth pointing out that in Western art history, the obsession with originality is relatively recent, dating to the Romantic period. 6 Jia Zhangke later directed a video of Zhao Tao’s version of ‘Ulan Bator Night’, with scenes from The World intersected with Zhao Tao riding a white horse.

9  I Wish I Knew’s cinephilic journeys (an afterword on intertextuality) 1 For detailed information on each of the interviewees, please refer to http:// filmpressplus.com/wp-content/uploads/dl_docs/I_WISH_I_KNEWNotesTextOnly.pdf [Accessed June 2017]. 2 My translation. 3 See the conference’s website http://film.sapientia.ro/en/conferences/the-real-andthe-intermedial [Accessed July 2018].

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Xavier, Ismail (2009). ‘Character Construction in Brazilian Documentary Films: Modern Cinema, Classical Narrative and Micro-Realism’. In Lúcia Nagib and Cecília Mello (eds), Realism and the Audiovisual Media, pp. 210–23. Xiang, Alice (2013). ‘ “When Ordinary Seeing Fails”: Reclaiming the Art of Documentary in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1972 China Film Chung Kuo’. In Senses of Cinema 67 [Online]. Available at http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/ feature-articles/when-ordinary-seeing-fails-reclaiming-the-art-of-documentaryin-michelangelo-antonionis-1972-china-film-chung-kuo/ [Accessed February 2017]. Xiao, Jiwei (2011). ‘The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke’s Films’. Senses of Cinema [Online]. Available at http://sensesofcinema. com/2011/feature-articles/the-quest-for-memory-documentary-and-fiction-injia-zhangke%E2%80%99s-films/ [Accessed January 2017]. Xie, Fei (2016). ‘Half-Century as a Teacher of Film Directing’. In Maria Dora Mourão, Stanislav Semerdjiev, Cecília Mello and Alan Taylor (eds), The 21st Century Film, TV & Media School: Challenges, Clashes, Changes. Sofia: Cilect. Yan, Haiping (2014). ‘Amidst Landscapes of Mobility: The Embodied Turn in Contemporary Chinese Cinema’. In Lúcia Nagib and Anne Jerslev (eds), Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film. London: I.B. Tauris, pp. 203–24. Yang, Yuanying and Jia, Zhangke (2015). ‘拍电影最重要的是~发现~’/ ‘Discovery: The Core of Filmmaking: A Dialogue with Director Jia Zhangke’ in 当代电影 Contemporary Cinema 236, pp. 38–46. Yau, Esther C. M. (1991). ‘Yellow Earth: Western Analysis and a Non-Western Text’. In Chris Berry (ed.), Perspective on Chinese Cinema. London: British Film Institute. Yu, Chen (ed.) (2003). Yihe Yuan. Beijing: Morning Glory Publishers. Yuan, Ren (2014), ‘Back to the Future: The Fake Relics of the “Old” Chinese City of Datong’. The Guardian, 15 October 2014. Available at https://www.theguardian. com/cities/2014/oct/15/datong-china-old-city-back-to-the-future-fake-relics [Accessed February 2017]. Yuan Ming Yuan Park (Yuan Ming Yuan) [Online]. Available at http://www. yuanmingyuanpark.com/ [Accessed November 2010]. Zhang, Hongbing (2009). ‘Ruins and Grassroots: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontents in the Age of Globalization’. In Sheldon H. Lu and Jiayan Mi (eds), Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

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Zhang, Xudong (2010). ‘Politics of Vanishing: The Films of Jia Zhangke’. New Left Review 63, 71–88. Zhang, Yingjin (2004). Chinese National Cinema. New York: Routledge. Zhang, Yingjin (2010). Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in A Globalizing China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Zhang, Yingjin (ed.) (2012). A Companion to Chinese Cinema. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Zhang, Yunpeng (2017). ‘“It Felt Like You Were at War”: State of Exception and Wounded Life in the Shanghai Expo-Induced Domicide’. In Katherine Brickell, Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia and Alexander Vasudevan (eds), Geographies of Forced Eviction: Dispossession, Violence, Resistance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Zhang, Zhen (2007a). ‘Introduction: Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of “Transformation”’. In Zhang Zhen (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Zhang, Zhen (ed.) (2007b). The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Zhong, Dafeng (1986). ‘‘Yingxi’ lilun lishi suoyuan’ ” 影戏理论历史所愿” (Tracing the history of the ‘shadow theatre’). Dangdai dianying 3, 75–80. Zhong, Dafeng (1994). ‘Zhongguo dianying de lishi jiqi genyuan: Zailun ‘yingxi’’ “中国电影的历史及其根源: 再论 ‘影戏’ ” (History and origins of Chinese cinema: another history of the ‘shadow theatre’). Dianying yishu 1, 29–35; 2: 9–14. Zich, Arthur (1997). ‘China’s Three Gorges: Before the Flood’. National Geographic 192:3, 2–33. Žižek, Slavoj (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso.

Book 1.indb 291

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Book 1.indb 292

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Index Ai de laogong /Labor of Love (2001) 24 Ai jiang shan geng ai mei ren 89 Akomfrah, John 176 alcoholism 36 Ali Baba 95 alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt) 162, 163 Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema (1993) 171 All-Union State Institute of Cinematography 33 Alone Together (2012) 242 The Analysis of Mind 45 Anderson, Lindsay 20 Andrew, Dudley 3, 4, 16 Angelopoulos, Theo 190 Ang Lee 183 animation 11 anti-illusionism 43 anti-illusionist credentials 163 anti-systemic impulse 92 anti-utilitarian stance 77 Antonioni, Michelangelo 8–9, 200, 228 Any Old Wine Bottles for Sale (Jiugan tang maiwu) 109 archaeological approach 16 architecture, Chinese garden 203–6 Aristotelian dramatic theatre 164 Art Deco buildings 226 artistic documentary 228 Ash Is Purest White (Jiang hu er nü, 2018) 6, 244 Atlas of Emotion (book) 201 Aumont, Jacques 121 Austin, Thomas 181 auteur 84, 85, 91 authorship 84–90 avant la lettre 128, 202 Avercamp, Hendrick 88 Awaara (1951) 39, 87, 247

Book 1.indb 293

Bacon, Francis 122 Bai Di (White Emperor City) 117, 141–2 Baijiu 110 Ballad of a Soldier (Ballada o soldate, 1959) 33 Baudelaire, Charles 75 Bazin, André 3, 10, 12, 157, 235 aesthetic realism 4 construct 11 film-maker 3 indexical signs 48 ontology of the photographic image 4 Bazinian impulse 43 Bazinian realism 11 Bazin’s impurity 9 Before the Flood (Yan Mo, 2005) 51, 255 Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong, 1993) 35, 253 Beijing Film Academy (BFA) 3, 29 Beijing World Park 207–9 Benjamin, Walter 122 Berry, Chris 32, 88, 134, 169, 188 Berry, Michael 34, 38, 42, 61, 66, 73 Better Tomorrow (Ying xiong ben se, 1986) 88, 109, 141, 251 BFA See Beijing Film Academy (BFA) Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) 33, 39, 247 The Big Road (Dalu, Sun Yu, 1934) 53, 245 Black Breakfast (Heise zaocan, 2008) 192, 241 Black God, White Devil (Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, 1964) 249 Blind Shaft (Mangjing, 2003) 21 Blogs de Chine 81 Bloody Saturday (photograph) 53 The Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng, 1992) 183 Bonitzer, Pascal 122 Bordwell, David 123 Bosker, Bianca 216 Boss Wang 75

21-Oct-21 19:39:46

294

Index

The Boys from Fengkuei (Fenggui lai de ren, 1983) 33, 49, 54, 250 Breakdance Electronic Band 60 Breakin’ (1984) 83, 251 Brecht, Bertolt 162 Brechtian proposition 146 Brechtian reflexivity 43 Bresson, Robert 3, 8–9, 33, 39 Bruno, Giuliana 22, 46, 57, 101, 122, 123, 124, 127, 175, 201, 202 Bumming in Beijing (Liulang Beijing, 1990) 36, 252 The Bund (1980) 111, 250 Burch, Noël 128 Busan International Film Festival 168 Butterfly Dream 107 Cahiers du Cinéma 7, 10, 84 Cai Zong-qi 119 Candy (tang) 113 Cannes Film Festival 146 Cao Fei and Pan Shiyi (2011) 242 cartographic perspective 16 cassette recorder 94 Cécile Lagesse 103 century of humiliation 69 Chae Youn-Jeong 127 chai (demolition) 8, 25, 38, 44 chained-sequence plays 15 Chairman Mao 60 Chang’an School of painting 134 Chang Cheh 83 Cheng, François 130, 132 Chen Jianbin 183 Chen Kaige 15, 26, 31, 32, 35, 91, 129 Chen Taisheng (Chen Taisheng) 48 China into Film 15 China Resources Land 180 Chinese civilization 170, 173 Chinese Communist Party 169 Chinese ‘floating generation’ 7 Chinese garden 203–6 Chinese New Realism 119 Chow Keung (Zhou Qiang) 8, 35, 60 Chung Kuo, Cina (1972) 199–200, 228, 229 Cigarettes (yan) 113, 114 cinema, painting, space 120–4 cinema of attractions 161 cinema of discovery 3

Book 1.indb 294

cinema’s impurities 12, 13, 14 cinematic geography 4–9 cinematic modernity 52 cinematic realism 36, 175 cinematographic realism 2, 4 Citizen Kane’s (1941) 22 24 City (Ershisi cheng ji, 2008) 6, 26, 88, 146, 178–200, 241, 260 A City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi, 1989) 191, 252 City Walls 25, 47 classical film theory 11 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 10 A Collective Memory of Chinese Working Class 184 commodity fetishism 140 communism 133 Communist Party of China 69 Communist Revolution (1949) 169 Comolli, Jean-Louis 122 conceptual hybridization 145 The Condition of Dogs (Goude zhuangkuang, 2001) 234, 239 Confucian conservatism 70 Confucianism 118 Confucian Philosophy 113, 132 Confucius 131 Conquering the Jun Mountain (Ding Junshan) 156 contemporary China 5 contemporary cinema 4 Contemporary Cinema (magazine) 3 A Conversation with God 176 Costa, Pedro 4 The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli 1957) 33 Crary, Jonathan 123 creative destruction 54 creative geography 123 Cry Me a River (Heshang de aiqing, 2008) 6, 89, 158, 218–23, 227, 241, 260 Cui Mingliang 64–6, 78, 87, 93, 97, 102 Cultural Revolution (1966–76) 5, 6, 18, 30, 32, 43, 57, 70, 84, 157, 170, 179 Cultural Revolution Model Operas 157 Culture & Idées 81 Da Hai 67 Dai Qing 115

21-Oct-21 19:39:46

Index Daoism 118 Daoist Philosophy 130 The Days (Dong chun de rizi, 1993) 35, 253 Days of Being Wild (Afei zhengzhuan) 229, 252 dazibaos 30 de Certeau, Michel 201 découpage 127 Deer Park (Lù Zhài) (poem) 132 Deleuze, Gilles 122, 123, 176 Democracy Wall 56 democratization 11 Deng Xiaoping 5, 61, 68, 96, 179 Deng Yujiao Incident 150 De Sica, Vittorio 3, 33, 39 Desser, David 124 Dietrich, Marlene 226 digital memories on the green wall 55 digital technology in film production 4 Digitopia 176 dikengyao (Sunken Yaodong) 47 dissensus 236 Doane, Mary Ann 190 documentary films 176 documentary practice 181 Donald, Stephanie 172 Dong (2006) 6, 27, 120, 196, 240 Dowager Cixi 156 drugs and violence 36 Du Du (1996) 238 Du Fu 117, 142 Dust in the Wind (Lian lian feng chen, 1986) 251 Ehrlich, Linda C. 124 Eighth Route Army 32 Eisenstein, S. M. 10, 33, 123, 162, 163, 201, 202, 278). e-makimono 128, 129 empty space (liu bai) 125, 129, 130, 131 Every Day except Christmas 20 Exception 18 Factory 111 179 Factory 420 179, 186 fallacy of duality 13 Falun Gong 87 Fan Lixin 38 Farewell My Concubine (Ba wang bie ji) 89 Farquhar, Mary Ann 134, 169

Book 1.indb 295

295

faux raccord 153 Fei, Barbara 228 Fei Mu 53, 64, 227 Fei Xiaotong 23 Fenyang 29 Fenyang County Rural Cultural Work Team, 60 Fenyang Jiajiazhuang Jiajie 78 fifth generation of Chinese cinema 31, 32 The Films in My Life 84–5 Five-Pagoda Temple 71 flânerie 201 floating generation 48 Flowers of Shanghai (Shanghai hua, 1998) 229, 254 Foucault, Michel 215, 216 Four Modernizations 61 Foxconn suicides 149 França, Andréa 171 François Cheng 118 Freud, Sigmund 46 gaige kaifang 5 Gan Ping 109 Gao Qiu 159 garden heterotopias 201–3 Chinese garden 203–6 Cry Me a River 218–23 The World 206–17 Gate, Kuimen 137 Generation Y 82 Genghis Khan 94, 95–6 Geng Yanbo 71 Germany Year Zero (Germania Anno Zero, 1947) 51, 247 Gesamtkunstwerk 112 globalization 59, 92 Godard, Jean-Luc 121, 192 gongyuan 207 The Good People of Setzuan 111 Great Wall 68–9 Green Snake 153, 253 Guangxi Studios 31 guanxi 114 Guattari, Félix 122 Guest House of the Great Tang People (Tang ren ge kezhan) 114 Gunning, Tom 161 Guomian Cotton Factory 228

21-Oct-21 19:39:46

296

Index

Guo Xi 118, 126 Gu Qing 133 guyao (Hoop Yaodong) 47 Hainan Island incident 87 half-green wall and a deathbed note 48–50 Hamilton, Arthur 89 Han Dynasty (221 BC–220 AD) 116, 203, 215 Hanging Monastery 104 Han Han 81, 82 Han Sanming 8, 51 Hark, Tsui 153 Haussmann, Georges 75 Haymes, Dick 89 HD camera 103 Heath, Stephen 122 The Hedonists (Ying shen, 2016) 6, 59, 72, 78, 243 Hessler, Peter 68, 75 heterotopia 215 Higgins, Dick 10 Highway Movie Theatre (Gonglu Dianyingyuan) 31 Hill, John 36 historicity 68–72 hometown 38 Hometown Trilogy 37, 38 homeward-bound migrant workers 38 hong bao 140 Hongwu Emperor 62 horror vacui 124 Hou Hsiao-hsien 8–9, 33, 49, 54, 60, 125, 191, 229 Hou Lijun 181 Huang Baomei (1958) 228, 229, 247 Huang Jianxin 32 Hu Dahai 146, 160 Hugo, Victor 214 Hukou 66 Hukou Falls (Hukou Pubu) 137 Hu Wenhai 149 hybrid artistic genre 11 hybridity of film and audiovisual media 11 hydroelectric power plant 175 hypermediacy 12, 13, 83, 84–90, 86, 112 I Ching – The Book of Changes (Yijing) 129 I follow my own way (wo xin wo lu) 81

Book 1.indb 296

imagined civilization 169 immediacy 12, 13 Impressionist Movement 121 impure cinema 13, 157 In a Split Moment (poem) 229–30 Independent Cinema (Duli dianying zuo) 33 independent film-maker 36 indexicality 4 Indexical memories on brick wall 55 indexical trace 47, 48 In Public (Gong gong chang suo, 2001) 4, 6, 176, 239 intangible wall (Still Life) 56 interbreeding of cinema and architecture 59 interdisciplinary approach 17 intermedial impulse 84 intermediality 9, 10 intermedial pauses 178, 187, 191, 197, 198 Internet 149 intertextuality 227 Italian neorealism 176 I Wish I Knew (Hai shang chuan qi, 2010) 6–7, 27, 81, 87, 89, 153, 195, 225–37, 242, 260 Jacques, Martin 171 Japanese art 128 Japanese scroll painting 128 Jean Ma 190 Jennings, Humphrey 177 Jeonju International Film Festival 176 jet lags 16 Jet Li 83 jianghu 112, 160 Jiang Qing 157 Jiang Wu 67 Jia Zhangke architecture, relationship with 59–79 childhood experiences and memories 29–30 cinematic geography 4–9 cinematic geology 9–17 cinematic style 175 documentaries 2 early life 1 garden heterotopias 201–23 garments and memory 17–27

21-Oct-21 19:39:46

Index hypermediacy 112 opera 145–73 photography in films 192 polycentric cinema 2 polymathic nature 1 publicity campaigns 2 restaurant and cultural centre 1 See also Specific movies Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from Fenyang (Jia Zhang-ke, um homem de Fenyang, 2014) 37, 147, 256 jingju yangbanxi 157 Jin Xiaoyong (Hao Hongjian) 40 Joan Chen 183, 185 Johnnie Walker 2, 148 Johnny Chen 106 Johnson, Ian 69 Journey to Italy (Viaggio in Italia, 1953) 43 Journey to the West 106 Julie Su (Su Rui) 96 Kabuki theatre 163 kaoyayao (Cliff side Yaodong) 47 Kapoor, Raj 39, 87 Kenji Mizoguchi 125, 128 Khan, Kublai 68 Kiarostami, Abbas 130 Kikunosuke Onoue 128 The Killer (Diexue Shuangxiong, 1989) 88, 89, 111, 252 King George III 63 King Hu 83 King Xuan of Zhou 62 Kiralyfalvi, Bela 164 KTV room 107 Kuimen Gate (Kuimen) 116 Kuomintang 169 Lacan 122 Lacanian spectatorial model 202 La Chinoise (1967) 121 Lam, George 94, 95 landscape, humanism and question of scale 131–40 landscape paintings 113–16 cinema, painting, space 120–4 landscape, humanism and question of scale 131–40 miniature to earthly moonscape 140–3

Book 1.indb 297

297

mountains and water 116–20 Shanshuihua and Still Life 124–31 landscape poetry 14, 119 Lanfang, Mei 163 La Nouvelle vague: 25 ans après (1983) 85 La Règle du jeu 85 La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (France; 1895) 245–6 Last Train Home (Guitu lieche, 2009) 38, 255 La Traviata 85 leaning pagoda and imperial village 72–9 Le Cygne/The Swan 75 Lefebvre, Henri 124 Legend of the White Snake (Bai she chuan) 153 Le Monde 81, 82 “Let us love our China, let us restore our Great Wall” 68 Liang Jingdong 64, 78 Liang Shanbo yu Zhu Yingtai 107 Liang zhi hudie 107 Li Bai 117 Li Kaixian 158 Li Kit-ming (Li Jieming) 35, 60 Li Liang 115–16 Lim Giong 8, 129 Lin Chong 159 Lin Chong Escapes at Night (Lin Chong ye ben) 158, 159 Linda Chiu-Han Lai 39 ling she zhuan shi – clever snake reincarnation 153 lingua franca 156 Lin Xudong 8 Liquor (jiu) 113 Listen to Britain (1942) 177, 246 Little Flower (1979) 88, 89, 183, 250 Little Shanghai 40 The Little Soldier (Le Petit soldat, 1960) 192, 248 Liu Fa 216 Liu Huifang (Zhang Kaili) 87 Liu Yiqing 204 Li Yang 21 L’oeil interminable: cinéma et peinture 121 Loess Plateau (huangtu gaoyuan) 47 London, Julie 89 Long Promenade (chang lang) 209

21-Oct-21 19:39:46

298

Index

loudspeaker 94 Lou Ye 36, 227 Lu, Sheldon H. 38 Lü Liping 185 Lumière, Louis 244 Lumière Brothers 190 lü -shi 133 Lust/Caution 183 Lu Xun 42 Lynch’s, David 183 Lyotard, Jean-François 76 Made in China (2005) 255 Ma Ke 17, 19, 22, 225 Mama (Mama, 1990) 35, 252 Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, 1929) 100, 192, 245 Mao Jacket 18 Mao Zedong 41, 68, 101, 115, 169, 170 Marco Polo 183 Marxist theory of commodity fetishism 140 Massey, Doreen 124 maternal intimacy 135 McCartney, Lord 63 McGrath, Jason 36, 206 “Me” Culture 82, 84 Mei jiu jia kafei 96 Mei Lanfang 26, 146, 163 Mei Mei (Zuo Baitao) 40 memory 46, 47 metaphysical poetry 119 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 162 migrant-artisan 7 migrant worker 114 migrant-worker director (mingong daoyan) 7 migrant workers 8 Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) 62, 68, 160 Ming-liang, Tsai 4, 176, 236 miniature to earthly moonscape 140–3 minjian de jiyi 92 Mixmind 17 Mizoguchi system 128 mnemonic walls, amnesiac walls 56–7 mobility and immobility 213 model operas 88, 157 modernization of cinematic language 36 Moist Heart (Chaoshi de xin) 109 The Mongol 105

Book 1.indb 298

montage of attractions 162 Moscow Proletkult 162 ‘mother river’ (muqin he) 70, 77 mountains and water 116–20 Mountains May Depart (Shan he gu ren, 2015) 6, 7, 25, 34, 59, 67, 72–9, 89, 102, 114, 140, 193, 233, 234, 243, 260 Mouse Loves Rice (Laoshu ai dami) 109 movement-image 176 multi-ethnic country 69 Mulvey, Laura 43, 130, 196, 197 My Border Town, My Country (Wo de biancheng, wo de guo) 38 My Camera Doesn’t Lie (Book) 84 Mystic Writing Pad 46 Nagib, Lúcia 2, 11, 77, 164 Nagisa Oshima 163 narratives 154 national allegories and invented traditions 167–73 National People’s Congress 2 nation-ness 110 neologism ‘intermedia’ 10 Neon Goddesses (Meilide hunhun) 35 Nichols, Bill 176 The Night (La notte, 1961) 76, 248 Night Train 153 Northern Song (960–1127) 118 Not One Less (Yi ge dou bu neng shao, 1999) 37, 254 nouveau riche 147 nouvelle vague 32 Nüren shi laohu – Women Are Tigers 105–6 objective reality 4 Old Well (Lao Jing, 1987) 31, 251 one-child policy 82 One Day in Beijing (You yitian, zai Beijing, 1994) 33, 238 on-location filming 59 historicity 68–72 leaning pagoda and imperial village 72–9 Pingyao’s city walls 60–8 opera 145–8 cinema of attractions 161–7 Jia Zhangke’s operatic modes 157–61

21-Oct-21 19:39:46

Index national allegories and invented traditions 167–73 Weibo, webs and real 148–55 wuxia tradition 155–7 opera–cinema relationship 170 operatic modes 156 Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China 216 Orwell, George 21 Oshima, Nagisa 33 Osnos, Evan 37 Ounouri, Damien 255 Our Ten Years (Women de shi nian, 2007) 192, 241 Ozu, Yasujiro 33, 49 Pan, Rebecca 229 Pan Shiyi 148 Pather Panchali (1955) 100 Pearl River Delta 93 Peking Model Operas 157 Peking Opera (jingju) 155–7, 169, 245 People’ s Republic of China (PRC) 69, 86 Pethő Agnes 12, 13 Philana Woo 147 Pickpocket (1959) 39, 248 pillow shot 197–8 Pingyao 61–2 Pingyao’s city walls 60–8, 78, 165 piranha ox 40 Platform (Zhantai, 2000) 6, 25, 37, 59, 60, 61, 64, 85, 86, 87, 93, 98–9, 239, 258 Plato 46 poetic documentary 178 political intervention 143 politique 84 politique des auteurs 10, 85 polycentrism 2 pop music in film 90 portraiture 188 Portugal, Ricardo Primo 184 post-socialist cultural sensibility 32 post-war Italian neorealist practices 3 prostitution 36 proto-cinematic experience 203, 206 public humiliation 43 Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts 218 Pulp Fiction (1994) 105, 254

Book 1.indb 299

299

Qianlong 63, 209, 211, 214 Qiao Qiao 104, 105, 157 Qing dynasty (1644–1911) 27, 62, 63, 155, 203, 229 Qing ping le (Heng yu ting qiu yi) (poem) 14 Qingren/Lover 23 Qiu Ju 37 Quiet Night (Jing je/Jing ye si) (poem) 38 Qutang Gorge (Qutang xia) 116 Raining Heart (Xin yu) 89 Rancière, Jacques 176, 177 Ray, Satyajit 100 realism Bazinian aesthetic 4, 200 characteristics 3 cinematographic 2, 4 defined 4 dialectics 35–43 and impurity in cinema 12, 13, 16 realist cinema 9 realist film-making 3 realist innovations 36 Red Desert (Il deserto rosso, 1964) 18, 249 Red Persimmon (Hong shizi, 1997) 229, 229.54 remediation 13 Remembrance (Shinian, 2009) 6, 37, 59, 60, 64, 85, 93, 98–9, 239, 241 renaissance art 124 Ren Xiao Yao 88, 106 Revive (Feng chun, 2017) 244 Reygadas, Carlos 4 Richie Jen 89 Riegl, Alois 122 River Elegy (Heshang, 1988) 70, 251 The Road to Wigan Pier 21 Rocha, Glauber 249 Rolleiflex 192 Romance of the Three Kingdoms 156 Rosen, Philip 11, 12, 47, 50, 123 Rossellini, Roberto 51 ruins 51 Russell, Bertrand 45 Russian Revolution 33 Salles, Walter 2, 147 Santos, Milton 6

21-Oct-21 19:39:47

300

Index

Sato, Tadao 128 Schultz, Corey 186 Sci-Fi-allusive sounds 143 scroll-shot 128 scroll shot 198, 245 Second Opium War 214 Second World War 92 self-fulfilment 81 Selleron, Julien 255 sensuous mobilization 202 sex 36 Shaanxi province 31 Shandong Peninsula 63 Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC) 34, 203 Shanghai Express (1932) 245 Shanghai World Expo (2010) 225 Shanhe yigai, benxing nanyi 75 shanshui 137, 205 Shanshuihua 118, 198 and Still Life 116, 124–31 shanshui shi 119 Shanxi 114 Shanxi Opera Company 158 Shanxi province 3, 21 Shaolin Temple (Shao Lin Si, 1982) 83, 250 Shaviro, Steven 122 Shaw Brothers Studios 158 Sheldon Lu 96 Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) 51 Shenzhen Allstars 99 Shenzhen All-stars Rock 60 Shi Fou 97–8 Shishuo xinyu 204 Shohat, Ella 2 shot-countershot 15 Shozo Ichiyama 8, 60 shuoshu (oral narrative) 167 siheyuan 47 Silbergeld, Jerome 14, 15, 124 Sino-Japanese War 53 Sisters of Gion (Gion no shimai, 1936) 128, 245–6 site-seeing 123 sixth-generation mavericks 35 sixth generation of Chinese film-makers 1 Smog Journeys (Ren zai maitu, 2015) 243 social extension 3 socialist market economy 5 socialist–realist gaze 188

Book 1.indb 300

Sokurov, Alexander 4 Song Dynasty (960–1279) 14, 62–3, 126, 155, 232 souffles 130 Soviet Revolution 162 Spare Time (1939) 177, 246 spatial–temporal fabric 13 Special Economic Zones 93 Spilt Milk (poem) 38, 186 Spring Festival 37, 76 Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhichun) 53, 63–4, 227, 247 Spring Prospect (Chun wang, 757) 142 Stam, Robert 2 State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television (SARFT) 37, 146 Still Life (Sanxia haoren, 2006) 6, 7, 25, 26, 27, 44, 53–4, 86, 89, 113, 124–43, 146, 197, 240, 259 ‘Golden Lion’ for Best Film 51 The Story of Qiu Ju (Qiu Ju da guansi, 1992) 36–7, 253 The Story of Su San 165, 166, 248 The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) 128, 246 Street Angel (Malu tianshi, 1937) 33, 246 Subaru 81 2008 Summer Olympics 87 Summer Palace in Beijing 210, 211, 227, 255 Sun Yat-sen 68, 169 Sun Yat-sen-style jacket 18 sun zhongshan 18 Su San 165 Suzhou River (Suzhou he, 2000) 227, 255 synecdoche 205 Tableaux Parisiens 75 Taiyuan 30 Tang Dynasty (618–907) 14, 114, 116, 133, 216 Tan Xiao 184 Tan Xinpei 156 Tarr, Béla 4 Tea (cha) 113 temporal dislocation 191 Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun) 96 The Big Road (Dalu, 1934) 53, 246

21-Oct-21 19:39:47

Index Third front 179 A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 2 122 Three Gorges Hydroelectric Dam (Sanxia daba) 51, 115, 116, 136 Tiananmen Square Massacre 70 Tian kong 89 Tian Zhuangzhuang 32, 183 tian zhu ding 146 time-image 176 Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953) 49 To Liberate Shanghai (Zhan Shanghai, 1959) 229, 248 A Touch of Sin (Tian zhu ding, 2013) 7, 15, 24, 25, 26, 59, 67, 68, 85, 139, 145, 148–9, 154, 167, 168, 172, 180, 242 A Touch of Zen (Xia Nü, 1971) 155, 249 transparency and opacity 13 Trip to Jiangling (poem) 117 The True Story of Ah Q 41 Tsai Ming-liang 4, 176 Twin Peaks 183 Two Scalewings 107 Two Stage Sisters (1964) 229, 249 Ulan Bator Night 217 Ulysses Gaze (To vlemma tou Odyssea, 1995) 190, 254 uncanny historicity 71 UNESCO World Heritage Site 61 Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiao yao 2002) 4, 6, 7, 25, 37, 60, 83, 85, 86, 102, 103, 105, 140, 152, 157, 176, 239, 258 unofficial memories (minjian de jiyi) 92 Unthinking Eurocentrism (1994) 2 urbanization 175 Useless (Wuyong, 2007) 6, 17–22, 225, 240, 259 Van Sant, Gus 4 Venice Film Festival, 2013 228 verbal translation 191 Verfremdungseffekt 162, 163 Vertov, Dziga 100 video games 11 von Sternberg, Josef 226 Wang Baoqiang 146 Wang Bing 229

Book 1.indb 301

301

Wang Dongming 116 Wang Hongwei 7, 29, 60, 61 Wang Husheng 87 Wang Toon 229 Wang Wei 14, 118, 132 Wang Xiaoshuai 35, 36 Wang Xin 185 Water Margin (Shui hu zhuan) 158, 160, 168, 211 wax tablet 46, 48 Weerasethakul, Apichatpong 4 Weibo, webs and real 148–55 Wei Wei 228 Wenfeng Pagoda 73, 78 Wenzhou train collision (2011) 87 Western depravity 226 Western Zhou dynasty 62 When China Rules the World (2009) 171–2 When the Leaves Turn Red (1980) 250 Where Has the Time Gone (Shijian qu nar le, 2017) 6 Where’s the Future (Weilai zai nali) 189 White Emperor City (poem) 141–2 Wild Boar Forest (1962) 248 Williams, Raymond 3 Wing-Tsit Chan 118, 131 Wong, H. S. 53 Wong Kar-wai 229 Woo, John 88 Words of a Journey 148 Workers Leaving the Factory (La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895) 190 The World (Shijie, 2004) 6, 7, 25, 44, 48, 50, 146, 206–17, 240, 259 World Cinema 2 World Heritage Site 61 The World Outside (Waimian de shijie) 186 World Trade Organization 87 Wu Tianming 31 Wu Wenguang 36 wuxia cinema 83, 109, 116, 145–6, 155–7, 156 Wuyong 18 Xavier, Ismail 120, 171, 181 Xiang Xiang 109 Xiaohe 196 Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan) 146, 180

21-Oct-21 19:39:47

302

Index

Xiao Jiwei 91 Xiao Shan Going Home (Xiao Shan hui jia, 1995) 6, 34, 35, 85, 238, 257 Xiao Wu 29, 39–45, 47 Xiao Wu (feature film, 1997) 6, 8, 25, 29, 37, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 48, 50, 60, 83, 89, 152, 238–9, 257 Xiao Yong 47, 50 Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao) 146, 162, 166 Xie He 216 Xie Jin 228 xiju 155 Xilingxia 116 Xintianyou 135 xiqu 155 XStream Pictures 8, 17 Xuanzang 106 Xu Hua 118 Yan’an Literature and Art Forum 169 Yang Hui-zhen (Hsu Feng) 161 Yang Tianyi 64 Yangtze basin 116 Yangtze! Yangtze! 115 Yan Haiping 114 Yearnings (Ke Wang) 87, 110, 253 Yeh, Sally 89 Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984) 26, 31, 32, 35, 113, 133–7, 251 Yellow River 70, 77, 83 Yihe yuan 209 Yingjin Zhang 51 Yin Ruijuan 61, 64–6, 78, 97 Yin–Yang 125, 129 Yoshihiro Hanno 8 youfu tongxiang 45 younan tongdang 45 Young Turks 84

Book 1.indb 302

Youth Experimental Film Group 7 Youth Independent Film Group 33 youth subculture 36 Yuan Dynasty 14, 68 Yuan Ming Yuan 214 Yuan Muzhi 33 Yu Lik-wai 8, 35, 48, 60, 176, 227 Yulu Project 148 Yungang Grottoes 104 Yu Tang Chun 166 Zanmen gongren you liliang 98 Zhang Jun 94 Zhang Junzhao 32 Zhang Yang 8 Zhang Yanyuan 216 Zhang Yimou 15, 31–2, 37, 129, 133 Zhang Yingjin 213 Zhang Yuan 36 Zhang Zeduan 232 Zhang Zhen 5 Zhang Zhichen (Li Wei) 63–4 Zhao Tao (Zhao Tao) 7–8, 17, 48, 60, 162, 183, 185, 186, 217, 225 Zhao Wangyun 134 Zhejiang province 75 Zhong Ping (Yang Tianyi) 64, 94 zhongshan zhuang 18 Zhou Enlai 61 Zhou Kehua 150 Zhou Mi 14 Zhou San (Wang Baoqiang) 146 Zhou Shan 150 Zhou Yuwen (Wei Wei) 53, 63 Zhuangzi 107 Zhu Qiansheng 228 Zich, Arthur 115 Zuo Xiao Zuzhou 24

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