passion for documentation: an interview with jia zhangke
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Passion for documentation: aninterview with Jia ZhangkeMartha P. Nochimson aa Cineaste , 5020 Tibbett Avenue, Riverdale, NY, 10471,USAAssociate EditorPublished online: 24 Nov 2009.
To cite this article: Martha P. Nochimson (2009) Passion for documentation: an interviewwith Jia Zhangke, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 7:4, 411-419, DOI:10.1080/17400300903306896
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Passion for documentation: an interview with Jia Zhangke
Martha P. Nochimson*
Associate Editor Cineaste, 5020 Tibbett Avenue, Riverdale, NY 10471, USA
The leading member of the sixth generation filmmakers in China, JiaZhangke, has turned his camera on ordinary life in Shanxi, the remoteprovince to which his family was forcibly removed during the CulturalRevolution, and produced films of breathtaking beauty committed to theimportance of individual needs and desires.
Keywords: Jia Zhangke; sixth generation; Cultural Revolution; TiananmenSquare
JIA ZHANGKE In-person interview 25 September 2008 at the Walter Reade
Theatre during the New York Film Festival 2008, with the aid of a translator.
Jia Zhangke is one of China’s sixth generation filmmakers. Born in 1970 in the
remote northern province of Shanxi, in the middle of the infamous Cultural
Revolution, Jia lived the uneventful life of a provincial child, accepting the
micro-management of Chinese lives by local Communist functionaries. He was
on track to become an unquestioning part of the system when the civil rights
protests in Tiananmen Square made him re-think everything he had been
taught. As an independent filmmaker, Zhangke has not been a doctrinaire
protester. Rather, he has sought to make films about the life he knew in Shanxi
province, which he never saw represented on movie screens. In these films, he
focuses, subtly but incisively, on the human consequences of a society that
does not honor individual desires and points of view. He began with
Pickpocket (1997), a film that contrasted with the studio-produced films
Chinese audiences were used to. He cast non-professional actors, shot on
location, and used available light to tell a non-documentary story about the
lives on the street of marginalized children. An innovative combination of
reality and fiction in Pickpocket has become one of his hallmarks as a director.
Jia’s films also do not conform to traditional narrative expectations. Instead of
using the A story/B story, main plot–subplot formula, Jia likes to juxtapose
the varying situations of numerous characters in a single social setting. Most
of Jia’s characters are poor, yet his films capture a naked beauty in people and
ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online
q 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17400300903306896
http://www.informaworld.com
*Email: [email protected]
New Review of Film and Television Studies
Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2009, 411–419
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things that is independent of the amenities of luxury and affluence with which
people rising to the top of the system in China are rewarded.
Jia has made seven feature films, including Platform (2000), his most
autobiographical film, which affectingly tells the stories – based on his own life
experiences – of confused young Chinese with few prospects, recording in
intimate and often surprising details lives that will almost certainly dwindle into
boredom and routine in adulthood. Platform won him awards at numerous
festivals including the Venice Film Festival, the Singapore International Film
Festival, and the Nantes Three Continents Festival. His 2004 film The World,
which traced the (fictional) lives of a group of young Chinese who work in the
Beijing World Park (a real theme park) was his first film to be made with
government support. The World won the award for best foreign film from the
Toronto Film Critics Association, and the Critics Award at the Sao Paulo
International Film Festival. Still Life (2006) a stunningly beautiful film based on
the flooding of a 2000-year-old city in Shaanxi province, which is close to Shanxi
but should not be mistaken for it, uses a real government project to trace the
impact on fictional characters of the kinds of official policies based on abstract
public calculations that fail to take into consideration the needs, desires,
memories, and traditions of the individuals involved. Among other recognitions
for excellence, Still Life won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the
award for Best Director at Hong Kong’s Asian Film Awards.
Recently, the balance between documentary and fiction in Jia’s work has
shifted noticeably toward the documentary. His film Useless (2007) contains
some fictional characters but is essentially about the manufacture of clothing in
China. 24 City (2008) is based on over a hundred interviews of men and women
who worked in factory 420. A few of them actually told their own stories in the
movie, though there were also professional actors who play characters that were
composites of many of the people Jia met during the research phase of pre-
production on the film.
The fifth generation of filmmakers, which includes Zhang Yimou and Chen
Kaige, are well known in the USA and Europe. Sixth generation filmmakers are
only beginning to make their reputations outside of China. In the following
interview, Jia opens a window into his thinking and his aesthetics in a way that
introduces us vividly to the most recent wave of Chinese cinema.
Q.: Considering Useless and your new film, 24 City (2008), it looks like you are
turning toward documentary. Do you intend to make only documentaries for the
time being? Why?
Jia: My change of focus and shift reflects the reality of China right now. There
have been changes in China in the past one or two years that have come so swiftly
that if I don’t film as fast as I can I will never be able to catch up. I feel the need to
use documentary to record the changes we are experiencing right now. I need to
shoot the changes, edit, put my films together right now; time is of the essence.
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With the directness of documentary I can catch up with the changes we are
experiencing as they happen. The other thing is my sense that memories of
China’s mid-twentieth-century history are disappearing; I must use documentary
to tell my stories and prevent not only the disappearance of memories but also the
disappearance of the architecture, the buildings, the disappearance of the whole
generation of people after 1949. This is the generation that is going to pass away
very soon. So this gives me a sense of urgency to really document this generation,
these buildings, this time. And I do think they offer very real testimonies about
what we are going through right now and what we have been and where we’re
going to go from here. But I have been feeling this for some time. I do believe that
even in Still Life (2006) that element of documentary is there. But what is funny is
that even as I shift to documentary I become more aware of the importance of
fiction. A very complex contradiction I’m experiencing right now.
The old man at the beginning of the film [24 City] who lost his ability to hear
is a worker who actually came with the factory [that is being destroyed in 24 City
to make way for luxury apartment houses] from Shenyang to Chengdu. This was
in 1948, and he was part of the first group of workers, and you can see that he’s
withering away. And it really touched me to see that he had a hard time speaking.
Because no one actually talked to him for a long, long time. And to me that
somehow heightened the sense of urgency. I really need to do this now because if
I don’t do this, he’s going to pass away very soon and then we’ll have nothing that
we can actually record of this history. To me when you look back over the
Cultural Revolution 1966–76 which determined the fate of the whole nation, you
don’t get to see a lot of unmediated images. Most of the images you get to see are
official images and they are highly controlled and only particular people can have
the access to them. The Cultural Revolution produced a 10-year blight. I really
fear if I don’t do something right now to document the change right now in China
we’re going to have something similar, 10 years of Chinese history that just
disappear from the face of the earth in terms of individual, not official
governmental histories. This is what is driving me at this time.
Q.: Why you? Why is it your mission and not someone else’s?
Jia: The government is covering the developments I am filming, there are film
productions on these subjects from the Chinese Film Group of Shanghai Film
Group, but they are not like this. Because most of them grow out of a tradition of
government propaganda. The government is making films shaped by official
policies and so forth. It would be impossible for the government to record the
experiences I am recording just because a lot of the memories I am committing to
film are actually the unhappy reactions of a lot of common people about recent
governmental policies, and I think an official film team cannot make films
criticizing official policies. These films are for propaganda purposes andwould not
be a feasible channel for popular discontent. Other directors I think are making
films similar to mine but there are not enough of them and they aren’t necessarily
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of high quality. They aren’t getting to the scenes of change fast enough. There is
this director I really love – Wang Bing. He’s also making documentary films and
trying to record this part of the history.When I first started as a filmmaker, I thought
cinemawas away to create dreams; it was only after a while that I began to become
aware of the urgency of capturing changing reality and disappearing histories.
Little by little I began to see that I was being called on by what I was witnessing to
record the memories that might be disappearing as we speak.
Q.: In an interview that’s on the DVD of Platform (2000), you say that the 1980s
was the time when the greatest changes took place in China. Not the Cultural
Revolution of 1966–76?
Jia: The 10 years of Cultural Revolution saw extreme dictatorship and invasion of
individual liberties, a disastrous period of Chinese history. The 1980s were a time
when we tried to correct those mistakes. It was a time when China began to move
forward to modernity, to become a modern society in both a material and a
spiritual sense, and as a political/economic system. These were very dramatic
changes. We had a minor setback in 1989 but I don’t think that we actually
stopped the transformation. The spirit is still there; that’s why I mentioned the
1980s as the period of greatest transformation.
Q.: In that same interview, you spoke of how Platform is about time and how it
wears people down. You said that people are at their most energetic, creative, and
excited about life when they are in their teens and early 20s. And then they get
stuck in the routine of everyday life. After youth it’s not fun to live anymore, for
example, at the end of Platform, the contrast between the excited baby and a
young guy asleep. The baby marks the beginning of life as a vital creature, but it
is prematurely terminated in young adulthood. The young guy is no longer fully
engaged. Do you still feel that way?
Jia: In general, in China, this is still the case. Although the transformation we are
experiencing is so swift, our concern for the individual is not keeping up with
other modern changes. And I think that the problem of the individual is a huge
part of the question: What is Modernity? What is modern? Shanghai and
Guangzhou are modern cities in materialistic terms, in terms of technology. But
at the same time, with respect to the core ideal of individualism or the individual
idea or sense of self, I think we are still not quite there yet in terms of becoming a
fully modern society. The idea of individual freedom, the freedom to choose, the
ideology of individualism hasn’t caught up with improvements we are
experiencing in material technology. The whole process of going to school,
going to work, getting married, these are just ways for us to become part of a
system. And you’re losing yourself by putting yourself into this system. And I
think if you take these ideas apart you can see that a lot of families in China don’t
love each other but they will stay together for the sake of staying together, for
stability, for the ideal of the collective; you need to maintain that the collective is
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greater than individual happiness. When you’re young, that’s the time you can
still rebel and think that you can do anything that you want. When you start
getting old and become a part of the system, you lose yourself as you go. You
have a lot of obligations and responsibilities, and you are more intertwined with
this ideal collective. That’s why I think that everything might go downhill in
adulthood. I think that I might become part of the system as well, but at least
I want to make films to think about it and to challenge that.
Q.: So for you the essence of modernity is individualism not technology?
Jia: They go hand in hand. One will be your left arm and one will be your right
arm in order for you to be balanced. And I think China is changing from the
socialist system to what we are experiencing now. In the past, the socialist system
didn’t respect individual freedoms; the individual was just a rivet for this huge
machine which is the society, and the [Communist] party, or the country, and the
metaphor they used to give us is that the person or the individual is just one little
tiny part of this huge machine. You have to keep running so you don’t have the
sense of who you are as an individual. First of all you belong to a work unit; after
that you are part of a family, and then maybe you can think about ‘I’ and the sense
of being an individual. Now as we in China move forward toward being modern,
we can start to respect individual freedom and along with that will come freedom
of the press, and freedom to travel. I think it’s important to have that in order to
move forward.
I don’t think this is a unique experience in China. I think that all through Asia
you can see the influence of the Chinese tradition of Confucius to curb yourself
and take care of the collective; think about the big picture somehow, sacrifice
yourself for the better world or society. For us to become modern, the first thing
we have to do is to think about the individual. And as a director I want to use film
as a language to convey that. As you can see from the beginning of the film
24 City, I start with a meeting and that’s a collective, and go from that as my
beginning and then I go to the individual story. Going from the collective to the
idea of self. And how everyone has his own stories to tell and his own memories
and it’s worth recording. And that’s how I see how the movies start and move into
the individual interviews. Self is important, being an individual is important, and
the difficulty I had when I began conducting the interviews is a lot of people
asked, ‘Why are you interviewing me?’ After I let them know my motive and my
intention is to record individual lives, they opened themselves up.
Q.: What do you think about the role that you have seen ndividualism play in
America and in Europe?
Jia: A fundamental principle of Europe and America is that they respect
individual freedom, and manifest that through institutional regulations and laws,
and I do think that this is something that China can learn from. Whenever
Europeans and Americans talk about the system, you talk about what it will mean
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for the individual. For China, such a way of thinking would be a break from the
past. I think we are still under the dictatorship of the collective and we’re
supposed to sacrifice ourselves. We’re encouraged to sacrifice ourselves as
people are forced to under Fascism. But having said that, I do think that even with
individualism you have problems. I recently heard that the French government is
thinking about emulating the Chinese system because of the efficiency they’ve
observed. They are amazed by the way the Chinese government can produce.
France is thinking of actually putting in certain regulations that will result in a
transformation that will move them closer to China. To me, this runs counter to
the European ideals of individualism, freedom, and individual principles. Yes, of
course we are efficient in China. There’s no doubt. We have the power to
mobilize a huge part of the public to do major tasks. The power to mobilize the
mass is incredible. But the price is high. What the West is not seeing is the stories
behind these mobilizations and the sometimes tragic consequences for the
individual under totalitarianism. And I don’t think that this is something that
should be emulated.
Q.: I understand and I agree with you. But would you be surprised to hear that I
think Americans are too selfish? We’re selfish and we’re greedy [Jia Zhangke
laughs]. Have you noticed that? [Jia Zhangke says in English, ‘I’ve heard of it’.]
It’s almost as if the extremes of individualism and totalitarianism meet.
Jia: That’s why I think it’s especially important to have culture and art to be the
third party monitor. Art acts as a kind of regulator. So that no matter what kind of
government you live under at least you get to voice your opinion. Difficult as it is
to release my movies in China because of restrictions and censorship, I do believe
that it’s my obligation to keep on producing films and making films. Because I do
think that that is one way to make sure that we are not losing our mind and losing
our control and making wrong choices and becoming unreasonable and
nonsensical in the direction we’re taking.
Q.: What made it possible for YOU to stand back from the machine of
government and see things differently?
Jia: What happened in 1989, the Tian’anmen incident, has very strongly impacted
how I see things. At the time I was 19 years old and I was in the system. I went to
the school they arranged for me to go to, I went to work at the place I was
supposed to go to work for, and Tian’anmen made me really understand what it
means to be out of the system and to have the freedom to express my independent
ideas and independent perspectives. And also the other thing that helped me to
have a unique perspective is that I came from a very, very remote part of the
country. That gave me a perspective to see things from the ground up rather than
seeing things through the propaganda top down way of seeing things. When
I went to the movies, I never saw stories that had anything to do with the lives
around me in my rural part of China. And I thought there was a need for those
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lives to be seen and stories to be told through the medium of film. Taking this on
this quest as a film director is definitely brave, but I think I have a great group of
people helping me with my mission, starting from 1997 [when he released his
first film Pickpocket] until now.
Q.: I’d like to talk to you about the end of The World. The last scene makes me
think about your statement that in China youth is the highest point of life and the
rest is, well, static, like death. Tao and Taisheng, the main couple, appear to have
been killed by gas fumes. But over a black screen, we hear their voices.
Taisheng: Are we dead?Tao: No, this is just the beginning.
Some critics have assumed that they are dead and that the dialogue is paranormal.
Are you referring to an afterlife? Or are they alive and do the last lines refer to a
new possibility in your films that life is not over after youth?
Jia: The last one is the closest answer. I am trying to convey that what has been
killed is the routine life that people get trapped in. It’s all about possibilities and
options. For a person really to be reborn or to have a different life he or she must
forsake the mindlessness of the routine life. So, to me it’s all about breaking the
routines and having more and better options. The characters can ask themselves
why do we have to live in this city and dance in the park. Is there any other way
that we can do this? Here, I mean to show that, yes, you can really change your life
by offering yourself more options. The possibilities are endless and I think that’s
what you live for.
Q.: So routine and a sense of helplessness are what Tao and Taisheng are freed
from by the accident with the gas heater at the end of The World?
Jia: Yes. Here’s what I’m thinking of in that ending. At the time of 2003, the
height of the SARS incident which served a metaphorical purpose to step on the
brakes to stop the routines and the momentum that we were caught up in. It gave
us a time to reflect on what we’ve been doing, the velocity of our lives and where it
was taking us, and really make us stop and think and really examine what’s
happening in the past. And to tell the truth before the SARS when I was walking
on the street in the city I wasn’t aware of sights around me.
Q.: Why did you choose to use both animation and live action in The World?
Jia: What I’m trying to show using animations and real images is that young
people who are living in China today are caught between the real and simulated
images. Take a look at the theme park. You have the images of the white house,
waterfalls, the Eiffel Tower that stand for reality and on top of that you have this
digital reality that the younger generation is living as if it were the real thing. So,
I’m using the animation and actual images to somehow convey what the reality is
like for young people in China.
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Q.: The art of your cinema is just as interesting as your themes. For one thing, you
often point the camera away from the action and let us hear the characters from
off-screen, as during the scene in Platform when the train comes by and the
camera is focused on the trestle. We hear the voice of the main characters
watching the train pass from somewhere outside the frame. Why did you make
this choice?
Jia: So instead of facing the story or the subject or the characters face to face, by
using these off-camera techniques I can actually increase the audience’s freedom
to imagine. So that their imagination can run wild, and I think it’s important in
terms of the inter-active dynamics between the audience and the film. I want to use
these techniques so I can give license to the audience to start participating in the
interpretation process rather than be passive viewers of the films.
Q.: That’s also a very modern way of doing things; that’s about the individual [Jia
laughs]. What connection do you see between yourself and the other filmmakers
of the sixth generation?
Jia: We all studied or started making films around the time of 1989. Other things
that we share in common is that we mostly focus on the reality of China. It’s the
big theme of our films. And we tell our stories through our own individual,
personal perspective. We are all outside the system, and we are good friends and
we have a lot of interaction. In 2003 the sixth generation filmmakers as a
collective, there are about 40 of us, communicated with the film bureaus trying to
see whether there is room to loosen up the regulations. Right now the rules are
bipolar; the film is either acceptable or not to be shown. There is only yes and no.
So for us it’s really about whether China can adopt a ratings system that would
give us more flexibility. Films would be rated in terms of how old you are; we
really want to get it so that there are decisions made about what kind of audience
and what kind of age can see what kind of film, rather than just yes and no.
Q.: That said, what do you owe to previous Chinese filmmakers, particularly of
the fifth generation?
Jia: They definitely had a huge impact on my generation. The fifth generation
filmmakers came out of the Cultural Revolution and they were the first to
examine that period of history in China on screen. A lot of them took a very
experimental approach to filmmaking; they were creative, and sometimes
subversive. They were important to me because living in a rural area of China, we
were able to see films; they were more accessible than other forms of culture for
us. Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou had a huge effect on me personally. I’m quite
disappointed with the new movies they have made.
Q.: Like Hero (Dir. Zhang Yimou, 2002)?
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Jia: Yes, Hero. They’ve gone back to doing their ‘ancient times’ period pieces.
Q.: What did you think of the show Zhang Yimou put on at the Olympics?
Jia: I didn’t see the closing ceremonies but I did watch the opening ceremonies.
I think it was unfortunate that the focus was mostly on the past. The present and
the future part is what’s missing. Individual expression is what’s missing. It’s all
about regulated, synchronized machinery. And that really reflects the problem not
the possibilities of Chinese culture.
Q.: I hear from what you are saying that you are speaking mostly to your own
people as a filmmaker. But is that true? Perhaps you’re speaking to everyone. Do
you think that although your stories are about China, they are at the same time
about the universal condition of all people?
Jia: Of course I would be honored if my films can be received by people of
different cultures from different nations because it is important for people no
matter what culture you belong to or where you live to take a look at other
people’s experience and then start to re-think a lot of things and gain inspiration
and somehow re-examine their own life no matter where you are. And I hope I can
accomplish that.
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