Growing up listening to music that praises proletarian heroes, workers and farmers, Jia Zhangke (賈樟柯) was shocked when he first heard Teresa Teng (鄧麗君) singing on pirate radio about love, fine wine and everything that centered on the individual instead of the community. Years later, as a high school student and aspiring poet, he spent much of his free time at a video hall where customers would pay to see movies smuggled in from Hong Kong or Taiwan. Since the operation was free from state censorship, audiences were able to see anything from erotic films to If I Were for Real (假如我是真的), Wang Tung‘s (王童) 1981 movie about the cruelty of the Cultural Revolution.
“The arrival of pop culture brought an earth-shaking change … revealing the experiences of ordinary people in everyday situations, while claiming the right to express oneself and to entertain,” Jia said.
Today, Jia is internationally renowned for films that critically explore China’s society. The director was in Taipei earlier this month to attend the opening of a mini retrospective that is currently screening five of his works. Amid the media hubbub over whether or not his latest film, A Touch of Sin (天注定), has been banned by the Chinese authorities because it touches on politically sensitive topics, Jia delighted local fans and cinephiles with a talk on his filmmaking career.
Photo courtesy of Joint Entertainment
“I was born in 1970 in Fenyang, Shanxi,” the director said by way of introduction to a packed audience.
It’s a simple utterance that contains the key to understanding Jia’s cinematic world and his inspiration.
THE PERSONAL AND THE COLLECTIVE
Born six years prior to the end of the Cultural Revolution, Jia says that an indelible part of his childhood memory was constant hunger. But that all changed in 1978, when economic reforms were launched. Food became sufficient; motorcycles began to appear, and with limited choices of entertainment, young people — from seven-year-old elementary schoolers to young adults — hung out on street corners, got into fights and listened to pop songs on pirate radio in which “the bourgeois celebrated their life.” At video halls, movies by directors such as John Woo (吳宇森), Tsui Hark (徐克), King Hu (胡金銓) and Chang Cheh (張徹) fed hungry young minds like Jia’s.
“I lived through that particular moment in history, at the transition from the Cultural Revolution to China’s economic reform. It generated tremendous changes which continue to reverberate today. It provides an important context to my films. I have always been and still am interested in China’s rapid change and how it affects individuals,” he said.
The teenage Jia yearned to break away from his stifling, poverty-stricken life in Fenyang. He formed a poetry club in high school and, at one point, learned breakdancing. When an opportunity to tour with a performance group as a break dancer presented itself, the wannabe adventurer jumped at it.
“I imagined a completely new world. We travelled hundreds of kilometers, passing the Yellow River and all the way to Inner Mongolia. Then I realized [that the poverty] was the same everywhere,” Jia recalls.
CINEMATIC ENLIGHTENMENT
However, it was Chen Kaige’s (陳凱歌) Yellow Earth (黃土地) that prompted Jia to study film.
“I saw my hometown depicted in a film for the very first time: deep poverty, silent people and the vast land that stretches as far as the eye can see. It was at that moment that I decided to become a film director,” Jia says.
Jia was admitted to the Beijing Film Academy (北京電影學院), where another personal epiphany occurred when he came across Hou Hsiao-hsien’s (侯孝賢) The Boys from Fengkuei (風櫃來的人). Jia said that Hou’s film is about personal experiences and memory, notions that are largely foreign to a generation raised on a diet of propaganda sprinkled generously with heroic figures and hollow rhetoric.
“I didn’t know that one could make a film about a bunch of itinerant youths and make it so beautifully,” the filmmaker said.
The first script Jia wrote was Platform (站台), which was made into a film in 2000. The story is based on his experiences traveling with a performance troupe. It is also a young writer’s elegy for the death of idealism that characterized much debate in the mid to late-1980s, brought to an end by the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
“In the 80s, a hip thing to do was to read Nietzsche, misty poems (朦朧詩), to talk about the future of the country. A hooligan on the street would tell you that he read Freud,” Jia said. “Then the 90s came. No more poetry and reading. We all wanted to make money; people stopped caring about things other than themselves.”
The 1990s witnessed China’s often brutal shift to state-sanctioned capitalism and the breakneck progress at the price of human suffering.
CAPTURING UPHEAVAL
In 1997, Jia returned to Fenyang with cinematographer and long-term collaborator Yu Lik-wai (余力為) to make Xiao Wu (小武). With a 16mm camera and a cast of nonprofessional actors, the director soberly examined the massive changes free market forces were exerting on a farming community. Old streets and ancient buildings that had existed since the Ming Dynasty were torn down and karaoke parlors selling sex replaced a food market. In the film, the titular character Xiao Wu is a pickpocket utterly out of tune with his times, doomed to decline and fall while others clamor to embrace the benefits brought by economic reforms.
Jia views China’s rapid transformation as a kind of violence, and the speed and enormity of the changes have reached a point of being “surreal.” Still Life (三峽好人), for example, paints a haunting portrait of life on the eve of the demise of the 2,000 year-old town of Fengjie to make way for the Three Gorges Dam.
Though some of Jia’s works might seem like material for social cinema, the director’s focus is always on the individual, characters who are rooted in everyday life and their historical moment. His aesthetic penchant for using nonprofessional actors who speak using a region’s local dialect adds a quality of documentary realism.
In his latest film, A Touch of Sin, however, unsettling emotions under the surface of daily life give way to violent eruptions as real-life tabloid news provides substance to the four loosely connected stories about ordinary people pushed over the edge. Jia says the change in tone echoes China’s increasing number of violent crimes, and also reflects how perceptions of the world are strongly colored by social media like Weibo (微博): fragmented, disparate and fraught with anxiety.
However, A Touch of Sin, what many critics have called the director’s most viewer-friendly work to date, might not reach its intended audience. Even though it passed China’s censors and won best screenplay at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the effort to have a theatrical release in China has been “frustrating.” Jia says negotiations with the related authorities will continue, but stresses that censorship is most harmful to the artistic community.
“It sets many off-limit areas in the creative process, but no one tells you where and what they are. The worst result consequently happens, that is, the self-censorship,” he says.
In Taiwan, the film didn’t get approval for release under a quota system which allows 10 movies from China to be shown each year in theaters. It was later packaged as part of the retrospective currently taking place at Eslite Art House (誠品電影院) and Spot Huashan Cinema (光點華山電影館).
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