Jia Zhangke

on
on
Jia Zhangke
sinotheory  ​A series edited by Carlos Rojas and Eileen Cheng-­yin Chow
 on

Jia Zhangke
Jia Zhangke
michael berry
afterword by dai jinhua

duke university press ​Durham and London ​2022

on
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Title: Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke/ Michael Berry ; afterword
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Cover art: Photo by Wang Jing, courtesy of Xstream Pictures.

This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to

tome (­Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—­a collaboration
of the Association of American Universities, the Association of
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the generous support of Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Raus-
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for Naima,
wishing her a life filled with ­music, dance, and beautiful images
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Series Editor’s Preface ​carlos rojas ix

Acknowl­edgments xiii

Introduction From Fenyang to the World 1

One A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man 19
Two The Hometown Trilogy 46
Three Documenting Destruction and Building Worlds 87
Four Film as Social Justice 113
Five Return to Jianghu 133
Six Toward an Accented Cinema 157
Coda To the Sea 182

Afterword ​dai jinhua 193

Notes 197
Jia Zhangke Filmography 205
Bibliography 207
Index 211
This page intentionally left blank
Series Editor’s Preface

carlos rojas

when jia zhangke, in one of his conversations with Michael Berry that
compose this volume, remarks that “good films come in all shapes and sizes,
but bad films all have a common feature,” he is inverting the princi­ple
famously articulated in the first line of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “All
happy families are alike; each unhappy f­amily is unhappy in its own way.”
The irony in Tolstoy’s original formulation, of course, is that even as Anna
Karenina focuses on several radically unhappy families, the novel itself has
come to be regarded as an apogee of nineteenth-­century literary realism.
Even so, Tolstoy’s work si­mul­ta­neously heralded a wave of modernist devel-
opments in Euro-­American lit­er­a­ture and the arts, which in turn helped to
reconfigure the standards for what might be considered an exemplary (or
“happy”) work of art. In con­temporary China, meanwhile, Jia Zhangke has
played a similarly decisive role in helping to expand assumptions of what
constitutes a “good” film in the first place.
Almost precisely a c­ entury ­after the 1877 publication of Anna Karenina,
the 1978 debut of post-­Mao China’s reform and opening-up campaign marked
the beginning of a far-­reaching reassessment of the standards of realism and
of aesthetic value that had characterized cultural production ­under Mao.
For the first quarter of a ­century following the establishment of the ­People’s
Republic of China in 1949, t­ here was an expectation that cultural production
would conform to the strictures of socialist realism, wherein art was viewed
 primarily as a vehicle for disseminating Communist values. The result was
a relative homogeneity of cultural production that was disrupted during the
post-1978 Reform Era, when a relaxation of China’s censorship apparatus,
an influx of Eu­ro­pean and American cultural works, and a rapidly growing
economy helped facilitate the emergence of a more openly experimental,
and even iconoclastic, art scene.
­These developments had a particularly notable impact on domestic film
production. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), China’s flagship film
school, the Beijing Film Acad­emy, was shuttered, and it was not ­until 1978
that a new cohort of aspiring filmmakers (who came to be known as the
Fifth Generation) was able to enroll in the recently reopened acad­emy. A ­ fter
graduating in 1982, members of this cohort, which included figures such
as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, and Tian Zhuangzhuang, began producing
films that diverged dramatically from the aesthetic and technical standards
of ­earlier Maoist-­era works, and in turn provided a new set of standards for
what might be considered a “good” film.
Meanwhile, Jia Zhangke, who was born in 1970, describes how in 1991 he
fi­nally had a chance to watch Chen Kaige’s classic Yellow Earth (1984), which
he says changed his life and helped inspire him to become a filmmaker in
his own right. In 1993, accordingly, Jia enrolled in the Beijing Film Acad­emy,
and ­after graduation he came to be recognized as one of the leading repre-
sentatives of a rather eclectic group of young filmmakers sometimes referred
to as the Sixth Generation. Unlike the Fifth Generation, this ­later cohort pro-
duced films that ­were often set in the con­temporary post-­Mao period, and
they tended to ­favor an aesthetic that took inspiration from documentary
cinema verité. To this end, t­ hese younger filmmakers often pursued a com-
paratively unpolished feel that not only sought to make a virtue of necessity
(many of t­hese early Sixth Generation films w ­ ere produced on a low bud­
get and without official permission) but also attempted to generate a more
realistic sensibility.
Jia Zhangke’s second feature-­length film, Platform (2000), for instance, is
set in Jia’s hometown of Fenyang, in Shanxi Province, and explores how the
cultural transformations that characterized the Reform Era gradually im-
pacted not only China’s urban areas but even relatively isolated communities
like his hometown. Produced on a low bud­get with nonprofessional actors,
the film spans the “long de­cade” of the 1980s, from 1978 to 1990, focusing on
x youngsters in a small song-­and-­dance troupe that shifts from performing
canonical revolutionary works to more pop works inspired by international
figures like the con­temporary Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun) and

series editor ’ s preface

the 1984 American break-­dancing film Breakin’. The result is a moving ex-
ploration of not only the historical conditions u­ nder which Jia himself came
of age but also some of the tectonic shifts in China’s cultural and aesthetic
orientation during this same period.
Three years ­after Jia Zhangke released Platform, China’s Film Bureau or­
ga­nized a symposium at the Beijing Film Acad­emy for filmmakers who, like
Jia, ­were producing works without previously obtaining approval through
official channels. Jia recalls that more than fifty “under­ground” directors
showed up at the meeting, and that it was as a result of this event that he de­
cided to submit his recently completed screenplay for official approval. The
result was The World (2004), which was Jia’s first film to be officially approved
for domestic screening, though it still retained many of the documentary-­
style qualities that had distinguished Platform and his other under­ground
productions.
Meanwhile, even as Jia’s subsequent body of feature films, documentaries,
and shorts has continued to extend his cinematic vision in new directions,
his oeuvre continues to be driven by a concern that has ­shaped it from the
beginning—­namely, an attempt to reexamine and expand conventional as-
sumptions about what constitutes a “good” film.

xi

series editor ’ s preface

This page intentionally left blank
Acknowl­edgments

­ here are many ­people I need to thank for helping to make this book
t
a real­ity. I would like to begin by extending my sincere appreciation to Jia
Zhangke for his friendship, generosity, and artistic spirit. He has given us
some of the most remarkable Chinese-­language films ever produced, and
I am deeply moved by his willingness to share his thoughts and reflections
on ­those films. Thanks to Jia Zhangke’s staff, especially the team that ac-
companied him to Los Angeles in 2018, Casper Leung and Yang Xiuzhi.
When I learned that Jia Zhangke’s artist-­in-­residence program in Los Angeles
conflicted with my jury duties for the Golden Horse Film Festival, it took
some acrobatic feats of scheduling to arrange two separate trips to Taipei,
sandwiched between a week of Jia Zhangke screenings in LA. Thanks to Ang
Lee, Wen Tien-­hsiang, and Mr. Luo Hai for accommodating my complicated
schedule. Special thanks to my ucla team of collaborators, Susan Jain, Paul
Malcolm, and Cheng-­Sim Lim. It was truly a plea­sure to work with all of
them on this unforgettable program. I especially appreciate Cheng-­Sim and
Berenice Reynaud, who traveled to Beijing to personally invite Jia to Los
Angeles for our ucla program. Thanks to Jonathan Karp, Charlie Coker,
and Li Huang from the Asia Society Southern California and Susan Oxtoby
from Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (bampfa) for invit-
ing me to host further dialogues with Jia on Ash Is Purest White and Swim-
ming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue. Many campus partners helped sponsor
 Jia Zhangke’s visit, thereby also making this book pos­si­ble; they include the
China Onscreen Biennial, the ucla Confucius Institute, the Department of
Asian Languages and Cultures, the Department of Film and Media Studies,
and the Division of the Humanities. Appreciation is also due to the staff
at the Hammer Theater and the Bridges Theater, where the dialogues w ­ ere
held. My deep appreciation to Eugene Suen, who provided interpretation for
the majority of the screenings. I am grateful to my doctoral students, espe-
cially Lin Du and Yiyang Hou, who helped with Chinese transcription of a
portion of the dialogues, and to all of the students, colleagues, and audience
members who attended the vari­ous events and screenings, especially t­ hose
whose questions made it into the book. Thanks to the legendary Peter Sell­
ars (who attended e­ very screening and dialogue!), Robert Rosen, Barbara
Robinson, David Schaberg, Stanley Rosen, and Janet Yang for their support
of this proj­ect. For more than twenty years, Professor Dai Jinhua has been
one of my academic role models, and I am honored and humbled that she
agreed to write an afterword for this book. It was a plea­sure to be able to
work with my old friends and Sinotheory series editors Carlos Rojas and
Eileen Cheng-­yin Chow on this proj­ect; they offered unwavering support
from the first moment I reached out to them to pitch the idea. I have also
been a beneficiary of the support and editorial wisdom of Elizabeth Ault,
Liz Smith, Susan Ecklund, and Aimee C. Harrison at Duke University Press,
who saw the book through the publication pro­cess. I want to also express
my gratitude to Jason McGrath and an anonymous external reviewer, who
offered valuable suggestions on two early versions of the manuscript. Fi­nally,
thanks to my f­ amily—my wife, Suk-­Young Kim, and our ­children, Miles Berry
and Naima Berry. Like many of the protagonists of Jia’s films, Naima loves
­music, dance, and fashion, and it is to her that I dedicate this book.

xiv

Acknowl­e dgments
Introduction
From Fenyang to
the World

when we look back on the cinema of the ­People’s Republic of China

(PRC) from 1949 to the pre­sent, one can divide this period of film history
into three phases: the socialist period, the Chinese New Wave, and the era
of commercial cinema. From the early 1950s through the late 1970s, virtually
all of PRC film history was dominated by government-­sponsored propa-
ganda films. This was socialist realist cinema that projected what an ideal
world should look like—­a world filled with utopian socialist visions, Maoist
thought, images of patriotism and martyrdom, and clearly delineated lines
between “heroes” and “villains.” During this period, the war film—­often
depicting the Korean War, the War of Re­sis­tance against Japan, and the
Chinese Civil War—­and ­later the eight model opera films from the Cultural
Revolution would dominate the Chinese screen.
With the reform policies initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, a new cul-
tural space opened up in China, and the 1980s saw the beginning of what
would be called the “Culture Fever.” Suddenly a vibrant combination of influ-
ences began to flood into China from the outside: rock and roll, the En­glish
pop duo Wham!, Western classical ­music, Nietz­sche, Schopenhauer, magic
 realism, Milan Kundera, Umberto Eco. ­These examples of Eu­ro­pean culture
combined with a rediscovery of traditional Chinese religion, thought, and
cultural practices—­Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, tai chi, qigong—to cre-
ate a cultural re­nais­sance in China. One by one, all the vari­ous arts saw radi-
cal movements that revolutionized the Chinese cultural landscape—­the Stars
(Xingxing huahui) collective in art; the Misty Poetry (Menglong shi) move-
ment and the ­Today (Jintian) group that opened up a new space for cultural
and poetic discourse; the Scar (Shanghen) movement that presented trau-
matic remembrances of the Cultural Revolution through poetry, oil painting,
lit­er­a­ture, and film; and the early origins of con­temporary Chinese rock and
pop ­music from artists like Cui Jian.
Eventually, this “Culture Fever” would give rise to China’s first New Wave
cinematic movement—­the Fifth Generation. Dominated by a core group of
filmmakers who graduated from the Beijing Film Acad­emy in 1982, the
Fifth Generation was fueled equally by the experience of growing up dur-
ing the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution and reaching early adulthood
during the vibrant early days of the Reform Era. They would go on to make
films that challenged the very definition of Chinese cinema. Films like Chen
Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984) represented a new page in Chinese
cinema history. While the film presented peasants and soldiers—­familiar
subjects in socialist Chinese cinema—­the method of repre­sen­ta­tion was
completely dif­fer­ent from anything that had appeared previously on the Chi-
nese screen. Instead of black-­and-­white heroes and villains, Yellow Earth
featured morally ambiguous characters, a probing and brooding existential
tone, an open-­ended conclusion, and a bold new visual language that em-
ployed unorthodox horizon lines and extensive use of montage, meta­phor,
and symbolism. Starting around 1983, the Chinese New Wave would mark
the beginning of the second major phase in PRC cinema history as One
and Eight (Yige he bage, 1983), Yellow Earth, and other early films of the Fifth
Generation began to establish a new aesthetic and narrative language for
Chinese film. And while many Fifth Generation filmmakers would eventu-
ally turn ­toward more commercial cinematic pursuits, the experimental edge
of their early work would be picked up and continued by the Sixth Generation
in the early 1990s.
As the Sixth Generation evolved and the movement they represented
began to develop a collective voice, fundamental differences between this
2 group and its pre­de­ces­sors emerged. Early representative filmmakers of the
Sixth Generation like Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan eschewed epic
narratives in ­favor of depictions of the everyday, heroes w ­ ere replaced by

Introduction
characters from the margins of society, aestheticized mise-­en-­scène was aban-
doned in ­favor of a gritty documentary-­esque style, and adaptations of
con­temporary literary classics ­were tossed aside in order to adapt original,
autobiographical, and real-­life stories set mostly in con­temporary urban
China. Th ­ ese differences aside, on some level, both the Fifth and the Sixth
Generation can be seen as distinct phases of a second stage in Chinese film
history that was very much dominated by aesthetics and princi­ples of
New Wave art cinema.
Born in 1970, Jia Zhangke was several years younger than filmmakers like
Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan, but he would eventually come to be re-
garded as the leading voice of the Sixth Generation. Jia grew up in Fenyang,
a town in Shanxi Province. He would spend his first years during the latter
phases of the Cultural Revolution, through which he was exposed to the
socialist realist cinema of that era. But by the time Jia was six years old, the
cultural thaw had begun, and a much broader tapestry of cultural influences
would slowly become available throughout Jia’s adolescence. He fell in love
with the voice of Taiwanese songstress Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun) through
shortwave radio broadcasts and imitated moves from the US break-­dancing
movie Breakin’ (1984). He would study painting in the county seat of Tai-
yuan and eventually had his own artistic epiphany a­ fter attending a screen-
ing of Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth. Jia would ­later recall the dramatic impact
this film had on him: “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. . . . ​Before [that], virtually all of the other
Chinese films I had seen w ­ ere basically state-­sponsored works laden with
propaganda, all made in a very conservative mold. So my cinematic imagi-
nation was always very l­ imited; I never realized ­there ­were other possibilities
for film. But all of that changed a­ fter watching Yellow Earth. Suddenly I
was struck with a new paradigm for cinematic expression” (chapter 1). That
fateful experience led Jia down a path to become a filmmaker. He went on
to study film at the Beijing Film Acad­emy, where he was active in several
student film groups and began to make a series of short films. It was through
that series of early short films—­One Day in Beijing, Du Du, and Xiao Shan
­Going Home—­that Jia started to develop his signature cinematic style.
Xiao Shan G­ oing Home traces a few days in the life of a mi­grant worker
in Beijing. As the Chinese New Year draws near, Xiao Shan (Wang Hong-
wei), an out-­of-­work restaurant cook, decides to return home to visit his 3

­family for the holiday. The entire fifty-­eight-­minute film traces Xiao Shan’s
journey—­not as he returns home but as he traverses Beijing calling on a

From Fenyang to the World

 variety of characters, including a university student, a ticket scalper, and
a prostitute, in hopes of finding someone willing to accompany him back
to his hometown. The “­Going Home” in the film’s En­glish title hints at an
action eternally suspended; Xiao Shan never actually makes it to his desti-
nation, and “home” proves to be an ever-­elusive site just out of grasp. This
detail would prove to be a power­ful meta­phor for what was to come in Jia
Zhangke’s cinematic oeuvre, a world in which characters face an environ-
ment pregnant with possibilities that never come to fruition. Xiao Shan
­Going Home was actually a student film shot during Jia’s days at the Beijing
Film Acad­emy; it would help establish his stylistic direction and attention
to the everyday. Xiao Shan ­Going Home was also the first film to star Wang
Hongwei, who would become one of Jia’s most frequent collaborators. When
Jia brought Xiao Shan G ­ oing Home to Hong Kong in 1997 for the Hong Kong
In­de­pen­dent Short Film and Video Awards, it also set in motion the forma-
tion of his early core creative team—­cinematographer Nelson Yu Lik-­Wai
(Yu Liwei) and producers Chow Keung (Zhou Qiang) and Lee Kit-­Ming
(Li Jieming). With the help of this team and its production com­pany Hu
Tong Productions, Jia would make a series of films that would rewrite the
rules for Chinese in­de­pen­dent cinema. Together they would go on to cre-
ate some of Jia’s most impor­tant films—­Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Plea-
sures, Still Life, and 24 City. Over the course of making ­these films—­and all
of his subsequent work—­Jia would continually navigate the space between
China’s socialist past and its new identity as a global superpower. While the
vast majority of China’s filmmakers have w ­ holeheartedly embraced the latter
identity—­making big-­budget, blockbuster-­style films that seem to comple-
ment China’s po­liti­cal and economic rise—­Jia has remained fairly consistent
in making smaller-­scale, art house–­style films that ask difficult questions
about one’s place in society, alienation, technology, exploitation, the envi-
ronment, and the disorientation one f­ aces when living through moments of
radical social change.
Jia’s first major cinematic statement was a series of films that would come
to be referred to as the “Hometown Trilogy” (Guxiang sanbuqu). Xiao Wu,
Platform, and Unknown Pleasures constituted a remarkable group of films
that broke new ground in terms of their sophisticated use of film language,
documentary film–­style aesthetics, realist tone, employment of nonprofes-
sional actors, and complex, layered story lines. Each of the three films was
4 shot in a dif­fer­ent format (16mm, 35mm, and digital) and spanned a dif­
fer­ent time period (1996, the 1980s, and 2002, respectively), yet collectively
they created one of the most consistent and power­ful cinematic statements

Introduction
to come out of the con­temporary Chinese film scene. All three eschewed
portrayals of both the “backward” countryside and the “modern” big city
usually seen in Chinese cinema in ­favor of “small-­town,” everyday China.
The trilogy also focused not on traditional “heroes” but on everyday mar-
ginalized protagonists (dancers, pickpockets, and delinquents) in an attempt
to reveal the texture of Chinese real­ity.
Highlighting a few days in the life of a small-­time pickpocket in Fenyang,
Xiao Wu revealed the breakdown of interpersonal relationships in Xiao Wu’s
world. The film utilized a documentary-­like approach, yet woven into the
handheld camerawork and gritty style was a carefully designed structure
that traced the tragic destruction of Xiao Wu’s relationships with his former
best friend, a would-be girlfriend, and his soon-to-be-estranged parents. Play-
ing out against Xiao Wu’s story is the larger story of mass-­scale de­mo­li­tion
and forced relocation being carried out in his (and the director’s) hometown
of Fenyang. More ambitious, Platform unfolds in more epic time, spanning
the entire de­cade of the 1980s, from the early days of the Reform Era in the
late 1970s up ­until the time of the Tian­anmen crackdown in 1989. Playing out
against this canvas of massive social change is a more quotidian story of
a group of young dreamers who are members of a song-­and-­dance troupe
who attempt to navigate the changing world around them. Unknown Plea-
sures continued Jia’s exploration and updated his take on China’s transfor-
mation to 2002, portraying two lost teen­agers whose coming-­of-­age story is
plagued by a series of misfortunes and missteps. Shot entirely in digital, the
film was also an impor­tant early example of digital filmmaking in China.
Platform and Unknown Pleasures ­were also notable for introducing Zhao
Tao. Trained in classical Chinese dance and a gradu­ate of the Beijing Dance
Acad­emy, Zhao Tao would succeed Wang Hongwei as Jia’s most impor­tant
on-­screen collaborator, starring in almost all of his subsequent dramatic fea-
tures and eventually becoming his wife.
While Jia’s Hometown Trilogy established the filmmaker internationally,
in China his films ­were ­limited to small screenings in film clubs, universities,
and in­de­pen­dent film festivals and w ­ ere available as under­ground dvds. It
was not ­until the release of The World (2004) that Jia Zhangke’s films ­were
commercially screened in China. The World also marked a turning point
in Jia’s film aesthetic. Its protagonists find themselves in Beijing working at
World Park, a theme park modeled a­ fter Disney’s Epcot Center where all
the ­great tourist sites of the world are collected in miniature. ­There, mi­grant 5

workers from Fenyang and beyond can have lunch atop the Eiffel Tower,
stroll over London Bridge, and gaze at the World Trade Center towers, which,

From Fenyang to the World

 as one character observes, h ­ ere are still standing. The cast features Zhao Tao
as Tao, a dancer/performer who strug­gles with her relationship with her
boyfriend Taisheng (Cheng Taishen), a security guard at the park. At the
heart of the film is the deep disconnect between the glossy and glamorous
global tourist destination sites, which are “fake,” and the isolated, exploited
lives of the workers and performers who inhabit the park, which are all
too “real.” Through this radical juxtaposition of opulent spaces and disen-
franchised workers, The World unveils its scathing critique of globalism, its
meditation on the place of the simulacrum in postmodern society, and a
desperate vision of alienation in postsocialist China.
The film highlighted the director’s trademark techniques and themes, but
this time Jia surprised viewers with a thumping electronic ­music soundtrack
by Lim Qiong, dreamlike Flash animation vignettes, and touches of what
could almost be described as magic realism. In Still Life (2006), Jia again
tested the bound­aries between fiction film and documentary, while si­mul­ta­
neously pushing his magic realist tendency even further with painted Peking
Opera actors, tightrope walkers, and spaceships all intermittently appearing
among the ruins of a soon-­to-­be-­submerged city. The film seemed to take
Jia’s politics of de­mo­li­tion and destruction, first introduced in Xiao Wu, to
their ultimate destination, with an entire city slated to be “relocated” in an-
ticipation of the rising level of the Yangtze River due to the Three Gorges
Dam proj­ect. Still Life would go on to win Jia widespread critical acclaim, in-
cluding a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. As film scholar Dai Jinhua
has pointed out, the film was also crucial for its inversion of long-­ingrained
cinematic themes:

The visual space of Still Life has become a “site” in the narrow sense, a
temporal appearance of a spatial form. Clearly, within the range of
Chinese art cinema, or rather in the tradition of post-­Mao film, Still Life
is the first to accomplish the inversion of cultural and visual themes of
fifth-­generation Chinese cinema (or rather fifth-­generation style film).
No longer is space given priority over time, and no longer is the time of
pro­gress, reform, and life swallowed by Chinese historical and geo­graph­
i­cal space. Rather, it is temporality, that is to say development or pro­
gress, that sweeps away historical and natu­ral spaces like a hurricane and
rewrites them, as if once again corroborating a compressed experience of
time: con­temporary China experienced four hundred years of Eu­ro­pean
6
cap­i­tal­ist history, from the Enlightenment to the critique of modernity in
the thirty years leading up to the turn of this ­century.1

Introduction
Besides its impor­tant intervention into temporality, Still Life also continued
the director’s complex investigation into the relationship between documen-
tary film and narrative film storytelling. In Still Life, this was demonstrated
not only through the use of real locations and nonprofessional actors but
also through the film’s connection with a companion documentary film, Dong,
part of which focused on painter Liu Xiaodong’s portraits of workers and
residents in the same city.
Continuing to alternate between feature films and documentaries, Jia
made two more feature-­length documentary films, Useless in 2007 and I Wish
I Knew, which was produced in cooperation with the 2010 Shanghai Expo.
His film 24 City (2008) again played with the line between documentary and
fictional filmmaking, casting professional actors like Joan Chen and Zhao
Tao alongside retired factory workers, who ­were the real-­life interview sub-
jects whose stories inspired the film. Jia’s 24 City was a nostalgic look back at
the factory system of socialist China and the fate of the workers whose lives
­were once entirely bound by the structure of the factory work unit. Like Still
Life, which depicted the literal drowning of the entire city of Fengjie, 24 City
is a portrait of disappearance. As Corey Kai Nelson Schultz observes: “The
film creates ‘portraits in per­for­mance’ and ‘memories in per­for­mance’ which
use history, memory, and emotion to construct a felt history of the worker
class on the eve of its extinction. This creates a structure of feeling that
ultimately commemorates and elegizes this group’s irrevocable decline and
disappearance in the Reform era, and mourns the class by placing it in the
past.”2 In 2013, Jia Zhangke released what was perhaps his most controversial
film, testing his sometimes-­tenuous relationship with China’s film censors.
Inspired by a series of real-­life news reports, A Touch of Sin documented a
group of loosely intertwined stories about individuals frustrated, abused,
exploited, or other­wise disenfranchised by society. In each of the stories,
individuals pushed to the limit explode—or implode—­triggering a series of
violent acts that captured the disenchantment and frustrations lurking just
beneath the surface of economic prosperity.
Mountains May Depart saw Jia return again to his hometown of Fenyang,
but rather than a nostalgic vision of the past, Jia presented—­for the first
time in his body of work—­a vision of the ­future. Like Platform fifteen years
­earlier, Mountains May Depart provided a sweeping narrative perspective
from which to meditate on loss and change. Th ­ ese would also be some of the
themes that Jia would pick up again in 2018 with Ash Is Purest White, which 7

followed two self-­styled gangsters as they navigate prison, illness, aging, and
the loss of central values like brotherhood and loyalty in f­avor of a social

From Fenyang to the World

 economy that runs on money. Literally called “Sons and D ­ aughters of Jianghu”
in Chinese, Ash Is Purest White directly references jianghu, a concept that
has been impor­tant throughout Jia’s body of work. The term traditionally
refers to the realm outside mainstream society where heroes and villains
operate according to their own codes of righ­teousness and loyalty, which has
been the setting for countless stories from The ­Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan)
to the modern martial arts novels of Jin Yong. But jianghu can also point
to a form of social bonding centered around notions of brotherhood and
often displayed in modern martial arts and gangster films. While inspired
by the 1980s gangster films of John Woo, Jia’s reinterpretation of the jianghu
genre is devoid of mtv-­style editing, two-­handed gun ­battles, white doves,
and other melodramatic flourishes; instead, Ash Is Purest White offers what
can almost be thought of as a deconstruction of the gangster genre. Chases
and gunfights are replaced by searching and waiting; slow-­motion action
set pieces are replaced by slow cinema aesthetics; the male-­centered bond-
ing and misogynist undercurrent of many jianghu films are displaced by a
strong central female character; and, by the time the surveillance cameras go
up at the end of the film, we know that, u ­ nder the watchful eye of the state,
­there is no longer space for this jianghu to survive.
From the martial arts extravaganzas Hero (Yingxiong, 2002), House of
Flying Daggers (Shimian maifu, 2004), and The Promise (Wuji, 2005), to aes-
theticized visions of urban consumption in Tiny Times (Xiao shidai, 2013), to
escapist fantasy films like Monster Hunt (Zhuoyao ji, 2015) and The Mermaid
(Meirenyu, 2016) or even nationalist-­fueled action cinema like Wolf Warrior II
(Zhanlang II, 2017), Chinese cinema t­ oday has largely turned its back on the
more experimental roots of the Fifth Generation and the Sixth Generation
in the 1980s and 1990s. T ­ oday the Chinese film industry finds itself deeply
entrenched in a third phase that is utterly dominated by the juggernaut of
commercial cinema. But while the industry bulldozes forward into com-
mercial cinematic forms and genres, Jia and his collaborators have homed in
on that space between socialism and capitalism, destruction and revitaliza-
tion. This liminal space is inhabited by marginal characters—­dancers and
drifters, prostitutes and pickpockets. Feeling a disconnect between the pro-
tagonists depicted in most Chinese-­language films, Jia set out to create a
world populated by figures he could relate to. As Jia explains: “I increasingly
feel that the single most difficult ­thing in film is to create a new image of
8 what a protagonist should be. That is where the absolute heart of cinematic
innovation lies. You need to create a new type of person and capture that new
character on film” (chapter 2).

Introduction
 Over the course of his films to date, Jia has indeed created some of the
most recognizable characters in the history of Chinese cinema—­Xiao Wu,
the naive pickpocket who stubbornly lives by his own code of ethics even as
he is swallowed up by a still larger world of swindlers and thieves; Cui Ming­
liang, whose youthful fire and idealism of the early 1980s gradually die off
as he s­ ettles into ­middle age; Han Sanming, who silently searches the ruins
of a doomed city in search of his long-­lost wife; or Shen Tao, who strug­gles
to navigate the complex web of relationships with the men in her life and
­later her son. Jia’s creation of t­hese and other characters—­often ­those left
­behind amid China’s economic revolution—­can be seen as an active stance
in his cinematic proj­ect to refocus the story of China’s transformation.
The protagonists highlighted in Jia’s films function as a revisionist inter-
vention into both socialist soldier heroes like Dong Cunrui and Lei Feng,
whose image dominated the cinematic imagination during the period when
Jia was still a small child, and lead-­actor tropes from both Hollywood and
mainstream Chinese commercial cinema. Instead, Jia’s characters reflect
a sense of rootlessness, displacement, and wandering; they strug­gle to find
their place in society; relationships are riddled with miscommunication,
lies, and disappointment; and textbook cinematic devices often used to
provide characters with “closure,” “happy endings,” and “resolution” are al-
most always withheld. This intervention, which has played out across his
films over twenty-­five years, has had a pervasive impact on the collective
imagination of what on-­screen repre­sen­ta­tion looks like in Chinese cinema.
­These are voices from the subaltern that Jia’s films have rendered vis­i­ble,
identifiable, and ­human.3 Part of the director’s insistence on highlighting
perspectives that had been rendered invisible over the course of much of
China’s cinematic history comes from Jia’s self-­identification as a “folk direc-
tor,” a “grassroots director,” or, as Li Yang and ­others have described him,
a “mi­grant filmmaker.”4 At the same time, Jia Zhangke himself has spoken
eloquently about how refocusing our attention on a dif­fer­ent set of protago-
nists on-­screen can almost be thought of as an intervention that attempts to
retrain audience conceptions about the very notion of “marginality”: “I d ­ on’t
agree with the claim that our films are about ‘marginal’ figures in society. . . . ​
I feel ­these issues actually concern the majority of Chinese. ­These characters,
therefore, are ordinary, not ‘marginal.’ The notion of marginality refers to
something alienated from the center and the mainstream. Out of the city,
however, what is the mainstream of Chinese society? How does the Chinese 9

majority live? If you think my characters are ‘marginal,’ then the majority of
the Chinese could also be labeled ‘marginal.’ ”5

From Fenyang to the World

 This refocusing can be seen not only through the types of characters
Jia features but also through the environment in which he positions them.
For de­cades, the vast majority of Chinese-­language films—­and films about
China produced in the West, for that ­matter—­were set in one of two locales,
the countryside or the city. Over time, a visual shorthand came to be pro-
jected on ­these locations as they took on often overly simplistic symbolic
meanings—­the city as stand-in for modernity, alienation, and westernization
while the countryside represented tradition, community, and cultural roots.
But in a bold move, Jia drew his viewers’ attention to the often-­neglected
provincial towns and smaller-­scale cities off the beaten path of development.
Jia began with his hometown of Fenyang in Shanxi Province, the setting
for Xiao Wu, Platform, and ­later Mountains ­Will Depart. This attention to
liminal spaces can be seen not only in the macro-­locations of his films
­(Fenyang, Datong, Fengjie, ­etc.), but also on a micro-­level in the ­actual
spaces where he shoots, with locations such as street-­side noodle stalls,
bus station waiting rooms, and illegal gambling h ­ ouses also highlighting
a sense of “in between.” Liminality is further displayed, enhanced even,
not only through the locations but through their very disappearance, which
plays out in the camera’s repeated interest in documenting destruction, de­
mo­li­tion, and construction.
Throughout Jia’s films one can find backdrops of buildings being torn
down, sweeping expanses of rubble and waste. Th ­ ese images further isolate
the already marginalized characters, destabilizing them and alienating them
from their surroundings. Th­ ese power­ful images of desolation and destruction
can even be seen as refracted allegorical portraits of Jia’s protagonists, who
themselves navigate the same treacherous transformation as their environ-
ment. Along the way, careful viewers can see the signposts of the abandoned
socialist utopia—­faded po­liti­cal slogans hiding in the backdrop in Platform,
ruins of old Soviet-­style apartment buildings in Unknown Pleasures, or the
factory that takes center stage to make room for a modern real estate enter-
prise in 24 City. Eventually, Jia’s cinematic portrayal of Fenyang would take
on a looming presence in his body of work, like Joyce’s Dublin, Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha County, or Mo Yan’s Northeast Gaomi County. The liminal
space of Fenyang would l­ ater be expanded to other locales—­such as Datong
in Unknown Pleasures, Chengdu in 24 City, or Dongguan in Touch of Sin.
But nowhere provided a more ideal canvas for Jia’s meditation on transfor-
10 mation than the drowning city of Fengjie in Still Life, Dong, and Ash Is Purest
White. Cecilia Mello has observed that Jia is conscious “of how a disappear-
ing space implies the loss of memory. From this, he derives an urgency to

Introduction
film t­ hese spaces and t­ hese memories, felt to be always on the cusp of disap-
pearance. At the same time, he cultivates a seemingly contradictory slow-
ness 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.’ ”6
Equally remarkable as the characters and places he depicts in his body
of work is the cinematic form he appropriates; content to ­settle into the un-
comfortable space between, allowing his camera to linger on the unsettling
space of transition itself. This in-­between space speaks to a longing nostalgia
­toward the socialist world being abandoned while projecting an uneasiness
about the uncertain ­future rapidly rising up to take its place. While Chen
Kaige, the director of Yellow Earth, the very film that first inspired Jia’s cine-
matic epiphany, has long eschewed the experimental filmmaking of his early
days in f­ avor of more mainstream commercial fare, Jia Zhangke has contin-
ued to take up the mantle of Chinese art cinema. ­Going against the current
of the mainstream, Jia continues to make films that ask difficult questions
and push the bound­aries of cinematic form: one can see subtle intertex-
tual bleeds between his own films, which function like a nuanced cinematic
conversation: hints of the martial arts film genre in Touch of Sin, echoes of
science fiction in Still Life, shadows of the 1980s Hong Kong gangster film in
Ash Is Purest White, and a probing interrogation between the bound­aries of
narrative film and documentary. He experiments with dif­fer­ent mediums—
16mm, 35mm, digital—­and dif­fer­ent genres, and over time has created a cin-
ematic vocabulary that is all his own.
In dissecting the philosophical under­pinnings of the director’s formal
approach to filmmaking, film scholar Qi Wang has offered the following
insight:

Jia Zhangke exercises what I call “subjective metanarrative vision” and

creates conscious subject positions for the spectator to encounter cin-
ematic repre­sen­ta­tions of past and pre­sent. The encounter is an episte-
mological experience of the “superficial” nature of time and space: traces
left on the surface of a wall as an embodiment of the past and debris as a
spatial index of the memory of space, for instance. In the face of the richly
suggestive surface of the pre­sent pregnant with the past, Jia’s camera re-
mains non-­intruding yet attentive, anonymous yet conscious, placing the
spectator in a sensitive position, from where cinematic interventions and
11
the real historical world informing them are seen and experienced si­mul­
ta­neously as a ­whole.7

From Fenyang to the World

 Wang’s description allows us to appreciate a key facet of Jia Zhangke’s
film style, which is at once seemingly detached and observational yet some-
how “conscious.” And it is through this visual consciousness that viewers
are invited to experience the subjects as being thoroughly rooted in time,
even as Jia repeatedly reminds us of how history, and time itself for that
­matter, is continually being broken down and stripped away. While many of
the other early Sixth Generation filmmakers became known for their “on-­
the-­spot realism,” Jia went further than anyone e­ lse in rooting his camera’s
documentary-­like captures of the ­here and now inside a larger meditation
on the passage of time.
Another facet that sets Jia apart from his contemporaries is the way he has
self-­consciously positioned himself as one of con­temporary China’s leading
public intellectuals. Jia’s documentary films have garnered almost as much
critical acclaim as his feature films. He is a popu­lar public speaker who ap-
pears frequently on Chinese talk shows and lecture tours. In addition, he is
a prolific essay writer and has published more than half a dozen companion
books related to his films, such as a collection of interviews with workers
released in conjunction with 24 City, vari­ous screenplays, and the highly
­acclaimed two-­volume collection Jia Xiang (the first volume is available in
­ nder the title Jia Zhangke Speaks Out). Jia has run his own produc-
En­glish u
tion com­pany, Xstream Pictures, since 2006 and serves as a prolific producer,
fostering the work of several other up-­and-­coming directors like Han Jie,
Diao Yinan, and the poet Han Dong. Jia appears in Hitchcock-­esque cameos
in nearly all of his feature films and has also appeared in cameo roles in films
by Han Han and other directors.
However, since 2012, Jia’s film activities have taken on a markedly en-
trepreneurial flavor. In 2012, he became the second-­largest investor in Turn
East Media (Yihui chuanmei), a com­pany involved in developing tele­vi­sion,
film, and variety shows. In 2015, Jia formed Fa­bula Entertainment (Shang-
hai nuanliu wenhua chuanmei) with Cao Guoxiong, Wang Hong, and Wu
Xiaobo, a com­pany aimed at “film-­related lifestyle building.” And in 2016
Jia registered three new companies in his hometown of Fenyang: Fenyang
Jia Zhangke Arts Center, Fenyang Zhongzi Film Exhibition, and Shanxi
Mountains May Department Food and Beverage. The following year, he
founded the Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film
Festival, which in just a few short years has developed into one of the most
12 dynamic and influential in­de­pen­dent film festivals in China. Two de­cades
­after Fenyang first appeared on-­screen in Xiao Wu, Jia Zhangke seemed
determined to reinvent his hometown as a major hub for cinema and the

Introduction
arts via theater construction, cafés, an arts center, and his own film festival.
Perhaps one of the most notable shifts in Jia’s public persona came in 2018
when the onetime under­ground director was elected a deputy of the Na-
tional ­People’s Congress, the highest organ of state power in China. All of
this points to Jia’s enormous impact on the con­temporary Chinese cultural
scene and his transformation into a cultural critic, a producer, a film mogul,
and ultimately even a politician. However, it seems uncanny that a direc-
tor whose films once championed the underdog and leveled unflinching
criticism at the mechanisms of power that create alienation and oppression
now finds himself situated at the very center of t­hose corporate and state
centers of power. At the same time, within Jia’s body of work we witness a
telling synthesis of the three phases of Chinese film history mentioned at
the beginning of this introduction: socialist cinema, art ­house film, and
commercial cinema. Throughout Jia’s body of work, we have seen a keen
engagement with the fate of socialist China’s legacy, and experimental or
New Wave cinema has always been the primary language through which Jia
has expressed his attachments, concern, and often suspicions about China’s
socialist legacy in the Reform Era. However, his more recent commercial
and entrepreneurial activities are telling indicators that even someone once
described as a “mi­grant director” and as “A Director for the ­People from
China’s Lower Class” cannot escape the uncompromising commercial na-
ture of Chinese film culture t­oday. It also begs the question as to w ­ hether
Jia’s commercial activities are used to fund his art ­house films or that in-
stead his cultural activities are used to leverage bigger business moves.
However, as Dai Jinhua reminds us in her afterword to this book, a big part
of Jia Zhangke’s contribution has been breaking down binaries, and not
falling into them.
All the while, Jia Zhangke’s voyage from Fenyang to the world needs to
be considered not only within the context of con­temporary Chinese film
history but also through the director’s engagements with global art cinema.
As scholars like Jason McGrath and Li Yang have observed, Jia’s style of aes-
thetic realism can be seen as a marriage between the dual influences of post-
socialist realism in Chinese fiction and documentary films from the 1990s
and the tradition of international art ­house cinema.8 Stressing the “synergy”
between ­these two forces, Li Yang argues that “it was Jia’s ingenious blend-
ing of gritty realism and formalism to address con­temporary social issues
in unmistakable aestheticism, that ultimately produced his success and the 13

lasting power of the new realist style.”9 But Jia Zhangke’s interface with the
international art h­ ouse film movement went far beyond its influence on him

From Fenyang to the World

 as a young director. Perhaps more than any other con­temporary Chinese
filmmaker, Jia Zhangke not only has been embraced by the global network
of elite film festivals, from Venice to Cannes and from New York to Tokyo,
but has become a central figure in that world. Jia has been awarded presti-
gious prizes such as the Golden Lion at Venice for Still Life, and five of his
films have been screened in competition at Cannes. Whereas Yellow Earth
may have been the film that ignited his early interest in cinema, he would go
on to study the works of Ozu, Hou, Antonioni, and Bresson. More commer-
cially minded directors like Martin Scorsese and John Woo would also leave
their mark on Jia’s aesthetic. Jia came to perfect a style and cinematic diction
that firmly positioned him alongside the auteur masters of the global art
­house tradition. In fact, Jia further enmeshed himself in this world through
active collaborations with figures like Eric Gautier (cinematographer for
filmmakers like Agnes Varda, Olivier Assayas, and Hirokazu Koreeda); Mat-
thieu Laclau (French film editor who has worked with Jia since 2013); Lim
Qiong (Taiwanese composer and frequent collaborator with Hou Hsiao-­
hisen); and Shozo Ichiyama (Japa­nese producer who has also worked ex-
tensively with Hou). Jia has even had the global art ­house camera turned
on him when he became the subject of a documentary by Walter Salles, the
Brazilian director of films such as The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Dark Water
(2005), and On the Road (2012). The resulting film, Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from
Fenyang (2016), was screened at Berlin and helped to further establish Jia as
part of the canon of global art ­house cinema.
To understand Jia’s po­liti­cal positioning, body of work, and aesthetic
signature, it is essential to position him within the dual environments of
the local Chinese film industry and international art h ­ ouse cinema. Between
­these two poles, Jia’s body of work takes on conflicting meanings and alter-
native arcs of reception and dissemination. The tensions between t­ hese two
worlds can be seen through his first three films—­Xiao Wu, Platform, and
Unknown Pleasures—­which ­were embraced by the international art ­house
community while being commercially restricted in China. They can also be
seen through the complex lines Jia walks when he accepts Chinese proj­ects
like the documentary I Wish I Knew (2010), which was commissioned by the
Shanghai World Expo, or corporate proj­ects like directing a 2019 iPhone X
commercial or opening the 2020 Prada Mode show in Shanghai. Perhaps
the example that best crystallizes ­these tensions is A Touch of Sin (2013),
14 which was recognized by Cannes and even selected by the New York Times
as one of the best twenty-­five films of the twenty-­first ­century even though,
as of 2021, the film had yet to be commercially distributed in China. ­Another

Introduction
example of t­hese tensions was revealed in October 2020 when Jia suddenly
announced that he and his team ­were stepping away from the Pingyao Crouch-
ing Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival, which had just com-
pleted its fourth run. While no clear explanation was given for why he felt
the festival needed to be “unburdened from the shadow of Jia Zhangke,”10
lurking b ­ ehind the announcement ­were certainly deeper tensions between
state-­sponsored film festival models in China and a po­liti­cally unfettered
vision of what a true in­de­pen­dent film festival can be. This results in two Jia
Zhangkes or, at the very least, two dif­fer­ent bodies of work and artistic per-
sonas between China and the West. While a film like A Touch of Sin may be
absent from Chinese theaters, Jia’s shorts and numerous producing activities
have left a power­ful mark on the industry in China, all of which is largely
invisible to Western viewers. At the same time, Jia’s previously discussed
persona as a public intellectual, cultural entrepreneur, and po­liti­cal player is
also largely left out of his presence in the West, where he is still received pri-
marily as an auteur of pure cinema. But one of the reasons Jia Zhangke has
managed to flourish as a filmmaker, even ­under the crushing tide of com-
mercial cinema in mainland China over the past two de­cades, is ­because he
has been able to so successfully navigate t­ hese two poles, from the Chinese
film market to the global art h ­ ouse, standing up for an uncompromising ar-
tistic vision while traversing the complexities of censorship and shareholders,
from Fenyang to the world.

while this book proj­e ct came together fairly quickly, with the majority
of conversations recorded over the span of one week in 2019, in some sense
it took much longer ­because the book includes interview content recorded
as early as 2002 and as recently as 2021. Jia Zhangke began making films just
a few years ­after my first trip to China, and his work has been a core part
of my academic life for the past twenty years. I started taking note of Jia’s
films in the late 1990s, when I was a PhD student at Columbia University.
I first watched Xiao Wu and Platform on poor-­quality vcds and l­ater in
their proper format at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Th
­ ose films had a
tremendous impact on me during ­those years, partly for their sophisticated
use of film language, their power­ful images, and the humanistic portrayal
of characters but also ­because the world they portrayed was so close to my
personal memories from my time as a foreign student in China during the
early and mid-1990s. While I had seen dozens of Chinese films from that 15

period, none of them captured the sights and sounds, spaces and ­faces of
1990s China like Xiao Wu and Platform.

From Fenyang to the World

 I had the opportunity to fi­nally meet Jia Zhangke in 2002 when he trav-
eled to New York with his producer Chow Keung for the New York Film Fes-
tival, where Unknown Pleasures was screening. I served as Jia’s interpreter,
­handling all of the postscreening q&as, vari­ous press interviews, and even
an unforgettable private meeting with Martin Scorsese. I also managed to
squeeze in my own two-­and-­a-­half-­hour interview with Jia, which was pub-
lished in Film Comment and l­ater reprinted in my first book, Speaking in
Images: Interviews with Con­temporary Chinese Filmmakers. Gradually, Jia’s
films became an increasingly impor­tant part of my teaching and research; I
would use his films in my classes and even taught a gradu­ate seminar on his
entire body of work. In 2009, I published the first English-­language mono-
graph on Jia: Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy: Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown
Pleasures, which was included in the British Film Institute’s Con­temporary
Classics series. Five years l­ater, Jia wrote a preface to my full-­length inter-
view book with Hou Hsiao-­hsien, Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-­hsien’s Memo-
ries of Shadows and Light. Thus, much of my work has somehow been linked
to Jia Zhangke.
In 2017, my colleagues Susan Jain from the ucla Confucius Institute, Paul
Malcom from the ucla Film and Tele­vi­sion Archive, and curator Cheng-­
Sim Lim ­were beginning to plan for the 2018 China Onscreen Biennial. I
suggested inviting Jia Zhangke, but the idea was not to simply screen his new
film Ash Is Purest White, but to create an artist-­in-­residence program around
which we could program a series of screenings, dialogues, and a master class
with ucla film students. The other motivation b ­ ehind this program was
this book—to produce a rec­ord of discussions with Jia on cinema that would
take place during his visit.
During the Jia Zhangke retrospective at ucla, we screened eight of Jia’s
films over the course of five nights: Xiao Shan G ­ oing Home, Xiao Wu, Plat-
form, The World, Still Life, the short film Revive, A Touch of Sin, and Ash Is
Purest White. Besides the first night, each of the subsequent four screenings
was followed by a 90-­to-120-­minute dialogue. Jia also participated in a two-­
hour master class, which was conducted as part of our r­ unning conversation
but was more focused on issues of professionalization and film technique.
In February 2019, on the eve of the official US commercial release of Ash Is
Purest White, Jia and I ­were able to rec­ord two additional conversations at
the uc Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) on Feb-
16 ruary 10 and at the Asia Society Southern California on February 12. Then
on June 3, 2021, Jia Zhangke and I engaged in an online dialogue to discuss his
documentary film Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020). ­These more

Introduction
than thirteen hours of conversations, combined with some material from
our 2002 interview, form the basis of this book.
Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke is divided into six chapters, which in large part
chronologically follow the director’s body of work. Chapter 1, “A Portrait of
an Artist as a Young Man,” focuses on Jia’s formative years, his comments on
film m­ usic, his student films, and reflections on some of his primary col-
laborators, such as cinematographer Yu Lik-­Wai. The second chapter, “The
Hometown Trilogy,” centers on Jia’s first three feature films: Xiao Wu, Plat-
form, and Unknown Pleasures. The third chapter, “Documenting Destruction
and Building Worlds,” is devoted to The World and Still Life, two films that
are generally regarded as impor­tant works in the transition of Jia’s style and
engagement with the Chinese market. Chapter 4, “Film as Social Justice,”
explores 24 City and the controversial A Touch of Sin. Chapter 5, “Return
to Jianghu,” primarily engages with Ash Is Purest While, with some discus-
sion of Mountains May Depart. Chapter 6, “­Toward an Accented Cinema,”
is drawn largely from Jia Zhangke’s master class with ucla film students.
This chapter begins with Jia’s reflections on his time as a film student at the
Beijing Film Acad­emy and a detailed account of his own student film Xiao
Shan G ­ oing Home before moving on to discuss the aesthetic princi­ples of
designing an opening shot (by way of Still Life as an example) and concludes
with his advice to young filmmakers. The book concludes with a coda, “To
the Sea,” which uses Jia’s documentary film Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns
Blue to reflect on the relationship between lit­er­a­ture and film in modern
China, Jia’s approach to documentary filmmaking, and film structure.
The fact that most of the dialogue included ­here originally took place
in a public forum inevitably had an impact on the content of this book. In
a private interview setting, one has more freedom to explore highly spe-
cialized topics, pursue points that would other­wise be brushed aside, and
gradually ease into sensitive topics. In public dialogues, the presence of the
audience immediately alters the nature of the conversation; the audience
brings a certain energy to the forum, while at the same time, one becomes
more sensitive to the constraints of time, audience engagement, and techni-
cal m
­ atters of interpretation. I also realized that the public forum tended to
bring out Jia Zhangke’s witty side, whereas he was much more serious and
reflective during our private interviews. Most of the dialogue was tied to
film screenings, which also had a direct impact on the content: for instance,
films not screened at ucla during Jia’s visit—­such as Unknown Pleasures 17

and Mountains May Depart—­are discussed in far less detail than films in the
series. And while we did discuss his views on documentary filmmaking via

From Fenyang to the World

 Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, ­there is relatively l­imited extended
analy­sis or discussion of his main documentary films, Dong, Useless, and I
Wish I Knew. Instead, most of the dialogue is focused on his feature films,
with special emphasis on his major works. Over the course of this extended
dialogue, certain themes are revisited and expanded on with new details and
nuances: the art of working with actors, intertextuality between his films, the
shifting meaning of m ­ usic in film, and the importance of vari­ous sites—­like
his hometown of Fenyang—in his work. Limitations aside, this book con-
tains the single most extensive collection of interviews with Jia on his life,
major works, and views on cinematic art.

18

Introduction
 childhood in fenyang
popu­l ar ­m usic
student films
film collaborators

1 A Portrait
of an Artist as
a Young Man

1.1 Jia Zhangke shooting one of his student films

 Naturally t­ here are some directors who
neglect real­ity in their work, but my
aesthetic taste and goals ­don’t allow me to
do that—­I can never escape real­ity.

Your first three films are often referred to as the “Hometown Trilogy,” and
your own hometown of Fenyang in Shanxi Province is also the primary
setting of Xiao Wu and Platform. In your ­later films, such as Mountains
May Depart, Fenyang also repeatedly reappears. Why ­don’t we begin with
the concept of guxiang, or “hometown”? Could you describe your child­
hood experience growing up in Fenyang? And what has the concept of
“hometown” meant for you over the course of your ­career?

My hometown of Fenyang in Shanxi is a provincial town and it has indeed

been very impor­tant to me. The ­thing about ­these provincial towns is that
they are quite unique in terms of how they have been viewed from an ad-
ministrative perspective; they are essentially a bridge between the country-
side and the cities. If we take the example of Shanxi Province, the largest
city is Taiyuan, which is also the provincial capital. As the provincial capital,
­there are naturally a large number of cinemas, theaters, dance halls, tele­vi­
sion stations, and film studios; t­here are an incredible number of cultural
organ­izations that are concentrated in that single city. In the countryside
­there is basically just land—­the only ­thing they have t­here is agriculture.
But in ­these provincial towns you could find all kinds of cultural ele­ments
as well as an abundance of material goods like tele­vi­sion sets and washing
machines, which all make their way to the countryside via t­ hese provincial
towns. At the same time, it is also through t­ hese same provincial towns that
agricultural products make their way into the cities. So growing up in a pro-
20 vincial town provided me with a unique perspective through which I was
exposed to all of the information that came from the big cities, while also
having a deep understanding of the countryside.

chapter one
 Take me, for example. My f­ ather’s f­ amily has always lived in one of t­ hese
provincial towns, so all my dad’s relatives live in Taiyuan. My m ­ other, on the
other hand, grew up in the countryside, and all of my aunts and ­uncles on
my ­mother’s side still live in the country, where they are basically peasants.
So whenever I had summer vacation as a child, I would spend half my sum-
mer in Taiyuan with my aunt’s ­family, where we would play tennis and go
to the movies, and the other half of my summer in the countryside with an
aunt on my mom’s side of f­ amily, where I’d spend all my time herding sheep
with my cousins. So growing up in a provincial town like Fenyang gave me
a ­really unique perspective from which I could understand both rural and
urban culture; I have always deeply trea­sured that perspective.
My hometown, Fenyang, has a long and rich history. Fenyang’s place in
history during the late Qing and early Republican era is especially in­ter­est­ing
­because during that time some of the earliest educational and medical insti-
tutions in Shanxi Province ­were established ­there. Fenyang ­Middle School
was built in 1905, and the local hospital was built in 1907. Although Fenyang
was a leader in ­these areas, it was actually a very small town. On bicycle, you
can traverse the entire town in just ten minutes, and once you reach the city
limits, you are basically surrounded by fields and the countryside.
Back when I was growing up, ­people ­were quite poor, and nobody ever
went on trips out of town. Of course, part of the reason was that during the
Cultural Revolution and its immediate aftermath, ­people still did not have
the freedom to travel where they wanted. I remember my f­ather g­ oing on
a trip to Shanghai around that time; his work unit had sent him to pur-
chase a set of musical instruments for their per­for­mance troupe. At the time,
you needed an official introduction letter to go to Shanghai, other­wise you
­wouldn’t even be allowed to purchase a train ticket or book a ­hotel. That
meant that from a very young age I always had the impression that Fenyang
was a particularly isolated place.
When I think back about that time period now, it almost feels like I spent
my childhood in ancient China! That is b ­ ecause all of the h
­ ouses and build-
ings t­here dated back to the Ming and Qing dynasties. ­People rarely left
Fenyang during their lives. This sense of isolation and a closed-­off feeling
impacted me in many ways during my childhood. It led me to entertain all
kinds of fantasies about the outside world. In Platform ­there are some scenes
where the characters are listening to the radio and hear about a cold front
coming in from Ulan Bator; that is actually drawn from my own childhood 21

memories. When I was a kid, ­there was ­really nowhere for us to go. If I had
to imagine the most distant place in the entire world, it was Ulan Bator! And

A Portrait of an Artist
 that was ­because whenever the northwestern winds picked up, we would get
a cold front in from Ulan Bator! [laughs] ­After I shot Xiao Wu, I actually had
plans to visit Mongolia and see Ulan Bator for myself, but I had to cancel
the trip due to a visa issue. But somehow, in my imagination, Ulan Bator has
also stood for a very distant place.1
Growing up in such an isolated place meant that when the Reform Era
kicked in during the early 1980s and all kinds of new ­things began to enter
into our lives, the utter shock we felt was even more power­ful. Whenever I
talk about my hometown, I always feel the need to link it up with this period
of extreme change. When it comes to this era of radical transformation, I
need to start with the changes taking place on a material level, but besides
­those external changes, ­there ­were also radical changes taking place on a
spiritual level. The Reform Era began back when I was seven or eight years
old and had just started elementary school. ­Things ­were just on the verge of
changing, but when I think back to that time, what left the deepest impres-
sion on me was the sensation of feeling hungry all the time. I definitely lived
with the sensation of hunger during that time. That was b ­ ecause food staples
­were still being distributed centrally according to how many p ­ eople ­were in
your ­family. We ­were a ­family of four, so the two adults would be allocated
a certain amount of rice and flour, and my s­ ister and I would be allocated
a smaller amount—­every­thing was distributed according to ­these quota al-
lowances. One of the primary staples at that time was cornmeal, which we
would prepare as steamed buns referred to as wotou. We would eat wotou
for breakfast, but by noon I would already feel hungry. That’s ­because wotou
has very poor caloric value; it gets quickly absorbed into the body and you
are left hungry. This feeling of lingering hunger stayed with me throughout
my entire childhood. So one of the first ­things I remember about the Re-
form Era during the early 1980s was how quickly that sensation of hunger
dis­appeared.
Shortly ­after that all of ­those material objects that had always seemed
like distant fantasies—­things like tele­vi­sion sets and washing machines—­
suddenly began to appear in our lives. This shift in the material nature of our
lives was extremely exciting. How can I describe this sense of excitement? I
remember the shock when I first learned what a washing machine was. Back
when I was in school—­that must have been around 1983 or 1984—my school
showed us a documentary called New Face of the Nation (Zuguo xinmao),
22 which introduced new products and architecture from that era. That episode
was about a factory in Shanghai that had just begun to produce washing
machines. At the time, what I saw on-­screen all felt so distant, but a year or

chapter one
 1.2 ​Jia Zhangke
as an infant

1.3 ​Jia Zhangke as a young boy

 two ­later my f­amily bought a washing machine! In an instant, what I saw
on-­screen had become a real­ity. The pace of that material change and devel-
opment was extremely rapid. This form of transformation was so power­ful.
Besides that, society began to remake itself in leaps and bounds; suddenly
­there ­were all kinds of new pop ­music from Hong Kong and Taiwan that came
in as well.

Speaking of pop m ­ usic, virtually all of your films highlight the place of
­music in everyday p ­ eoples’ lives, often representing a variety of themes.
Sometimes ­music can portray the passage of time or becomes a means
of unspoken communication between characters, while at other times it
serves as a kind of cultural signifier. ­Whether it be karaoke, opera, Can­
topop, rock and roll, a subtle melody hummed by a character, or even an
electronic melody played by a cigarette lighter, ­music seems to be ever pre­
sent in your body of work, and although your employment is often quite
subtle, it brings an enormous power to your film narratives.

I have always loved ­music. Even when I was in college I once wrote a thesis
essay on the relationship between film narrative and ­music. I feel that ­there
are all kinds of structural aspects to ­music that can be incorporated into a
narrative. So even then I was already playing around with t­hese rather ab-
stract thoughts about the relationship between ­music and film. In the years
preceding the shooting of Xiao Wu, karaoke became extremely popu­lar in
China. I went with a bunch of friends to a karaoke club in my hometown
where we saw a guy all alone who kept singing the same songs over and over
again. His voice was ­really terrible; at first I found him annoying, but as time
went by I suddenly found myself quite moved by his singing. That experi-
ence ­really made me look at popu­lar culture in a new light. In such a cold and
difficult environment [popu­lar culture] provides a place to come home to, it
serves as a means of providing self-­comfort. So it was r­ eally that experience
that led to all of ­those karaoke scenes in Xiao Wu.
Another ­factor stems from the fact that I was born in 1970, so I was in
my formative years in the early eighties when popu­lar ­music began to take
root in China. I grew up with pop ­music. Popu­lar ­music ­really played an
enormous role in the lives of p ­ eople of my generation as we matured and
came of age. At first it was all popu­lar ­music from Hong Kong and Taiwan,
24 and only ­later did Western ­music start coming into China. One of the rea-
sons [popu­lar m ­ usic] was so impor­tant was b ­ ecause, previous to this, China
­really d
­ idn’t have any popu­lar culture to speak of. The closest ­thing we had

chapter one
­ ere revolutionary model operas and ­things made in that mold. I still re-
w
member so clearly the first time I heard the ­music of Teresa Teng.2 The
experience was exactly as it was portrayed in Platform, where the characters
listened to illegal shortwave radio broadcasts from Taiwan. At the time, I
was quite young and c­ ouldn’t ­really say what it was about her voice, but it
was so moving—­I was utterly hypnotized. ­There was a special time ­every day
when they would play her songs, and I would always tune in.
­Later, when I went to college and reflected back on this time, I realized that
her ­music represented a massive change in our cultural landscape. When I
search my earliest memories from childhood, I realize that back then China
­really d­ idn’t have such a ­thing as so-­called pop culture, nor did we have pop
­music. All our radios ever broadcast w ­ ere revolutionary songs. If I recite the
names of some of t­hose songs, you w ­ ill understand just how unique that
period was. When I was a child we used to always sing “We Are the Succes-
sors of Communism” (“­Women shi gongchanzhuyi de jiebanren”), or in the
eighties we sang “We Are the New Generation of the Eighties” (“­Women shi
bashi niandai de xin yidai”) and “We the Workers Have the Power” (“Zamen
gongren you Liliang”), all of which highlighted “we”—­the collective. But it was
around 1978 or 1979 that cassette tapes from abroad began to get smuggled
into China, and suddenly artists like Teresa Teng and Chang Ti came into
our field of vision.3 When Teresa Teng’s ­music first made its way to our pro-
vincial town, the first song we heard w ­ asn’t “My Sweetie” (“Tian mimi”) or
“The Moon Represents My Heart” (“Yueliang daibiao wo de xin”), but “Wine
with Coffee” (“Meijiu jia kafei”), which featured a line that went “Wine with
coffee, I want a glass!” [laughs] When you think about it, wine and coffee
are both cap­i­tal­ist luxuries, and then you add in the “I” and it becomes a
song completely about individualism! When you put songs like that side by
side against “We Are the Successors of Communism,” you get such a radical
juxtaposition. But it was precisely this type of new ­music that attracted the
younger generation.
All t­ hose kids a ­little older than me would walk down the street carry­ing
a tape recorder that would be blasting ­these pop songs. I remember ­those
older kids walking around with their boom boxes being the epitome of cool
during that time; they ­were so fash­ion­able. You can even see a few scenes
that portray that in Platform. But Teresa Teng’s songs ­were always about
“me”—­the individual. Songs like “I Love You” (“Wo ai ni”) and “The Moon
Represents My Heart” w ­ ere something completely new. So p ­ eople of my 25

generation ­were suddenly infected with this very personal individual world.
Before that every­thing was collective, we lived in a collective dormitory, our

A Portrait of an Artist
 parents worked as part of a collective, and our schools ­were structured in
the same manner. In our educational system, the individual belonged to the
nation, and we ­were all part of the collective. But in the 1980s every­thing
changed, and it all started with popu­lar ­music.
This is especially evident in Platform, where I tried to consciously inject
all the ­music that moved me over the years into the film. So ­there is a histo-
ricity immediately built into the narrative through the ­music. ­There are also
several specific songs that ­really represent what the Chinese ­people ­were
­going through during a given historical frame, For instance, in 1980 with the
beginning of the Open Door Policy, when the government was trying to let
­people know how optimistic the ­future awaiting them was, ­there appeared
an incredibly popu­lar song entitled “Young Friends Come Together” (“Nian-
qing de pengyou lai xianghui”). The key line in the song is “In twenty years
we ­will realize the Four Modernizations. We w ­ ill come together then and
the world ­will be a beautiful place.” This song represented a kind of promise
from the country to its p ­ eople that the ­future w
­ ill be brighter and tomorrow
­will be a better day. During the early days of the Open Door Policy, practi-
cally ­every young person in China was singing that song. They ­were filled
with excitement and hope. By 1988 or so we start getting songs like “Go
with Your Feelings” (“Gen zhe ganjue zou”), which came during the initial
thawing-­out period [­after the Cultural Revolution], when we saw the begin-
ning of ­free thought and expression.4 And then ­later came Cui Jian’s anthem,
“I Have Nothing to My Name” (“Yiwu suoyou”).5 Each of ­these songs ­really
represents a snapshot of the social real­ity of the time. So for a director of my
generation, I ­really cannot escape the influence of popu­lar ­music; it is every-
where. ­There is a historical reason why t­ hese songs move us.

Besides m
­ usic, popu­lar culture in general seems to have an incredible power
in your films, but it is a power that is alternately both liberating and
oppressive.

It is only natu­ral for ­there to be a kind of oppressive component at work.

When ­there is all of a sudden a voice that is telling ­people to start paying
attention to their personal desires, ­there is bound to be this kind of phe-
nomenon. Take loneliness, for example. I have no doubt that in the sixties
and seventies the Chinese ­people ­were often very lonely, but at the time they
26 ­didn’t know what loneliness meant. P ­ eople then also had feelings of lone-
liness and desperation, but they would never feel that ­those ­were natu­ral
­human emotions. Only once our minds ­were liberated and we started pay-

chapter one
ing attention to ourselves as individuals and began to read Freud, Nietz­sche,
Schopenhauer, and other forms of Western thought and philosophy did we
begin to understand ourselves, and with that came a kind of loneliness and
desperation. But this is all actually a very natu­ral phenomenon.

What other forms of popu­lar culture had a major impact on you in the
1980s during the early days of the Reform Era?

The most impor­tant aspect of the 1980s was the awakening of a new form of
self-­consciousness. If you look at Platform, when the film begins, the young
­people in the song-­and-­dance troupe are performing a bunch of propa-
ganda programs, but they have no personal attachment to any of that m ­ usic.
Gradually, however, they begin to perform more pop ­music and rock and
roll. They begin as part of a collective, but over time this breaks down and
they end up as a touring song-­and-­dance group. The 1980s brought with it an
awakening—­a re­nais­sance, if you w­ ill—of individual consciousness. At the
same time, families started to purchase tele­vi­sion sets, and with that came
tv dramas from Amer­i­ca, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. At the time, t­ here
­were two American tele­vi­sion miniseries that w ­ ere particularly popu­lar,
Garrison’s Gorillas and Man from Atlantis. Another popu­lar one was the
6

Hong Kong series Huo Yuanjia.

Besides t­hese examples of mass culture, this was also the period of
time when books by authors like Nietz­sche, Sartre, and even Freud began

27

1.4 ​Jia Zhangke (right) with childhood friends on the set of Xiao Wu

A Portrait of an Artist
 to appear in bookstores. Who would believe it, but even in a provincial town
like Fenyang, reading works by ­these masters of Western philosophy became
all the rage! My friends and I would get together and discuss ­things like
the subconscious! [laughs] At the time, my favorite was Freud; that’s b ­ ecause
you could read his work as a kind of pornography! [laughs] It ­wasn’t long
before video rooms came to town—­they ­were small, privately run places
where you could watch all kinds of films and videos—­I spent virtually of my
time from ­middle school through high school hanging out in t­hese video
rooms. Most of the video rooms ­were just equipped with a single tele­vi­
sion and a single vhs player, and we would mostly watch films from Taiwan
and Hong Kong. It was during that time that I first became exposed to the
films of King Hu, Chang Cheh, and John Woo, along with an assortment of
wuxia martial arts films, action films, gangster films, and other genre films.
At the time, the most popu­lar type of films among the young p ­ eople who
frequented ­those video rooms w ­ ere sex education documentaries. And just
like in Platform, we would often end up getting ripped off; sometimes we
would buy a ticket only to discover they ­were showing a cartoon! [laughs]
It was a few years ­later, in 1987, that an American film entitled Breakin’
made it to China, and virtually every­one my age fell in love with that film.7
I personally watched it over and over again! Why did I watch it so many
times? ­Because I was into break dancing! I wanted to learn all the moves in
the film. But a­ fter I had seen it seven times, it s­ topped playing in Fenyang,
so my friends and I had to rely on our memory to copy all ­those dance
moves. Since I was one of the better dancers in my hometown, [laughs] I
received an invitation one summer to tour with a dance troupe that was one
person short. I had a lot of homework that summer, but I r­ eally wanted to
go—­I wanted to get out of Fenyang and see the world. So I told my parents
that I was g­ oing to go with a classmate of mine on a two-­week study trip to
improve my En­glish! [laughs] When they heard that, my parents encour-
aged me to go. So I went with that song-­and-­dance troupe from Fenyang
across the Yellow River and stayed with them all the way up u ­ ntil they al-
most reached Inner Mongolia. That was my first time away from home, the
first time I had left Fenyang, and the first time I had made money on my
own—­I earned money through dancing! [laughs]
That was an age when I would secretly read Freud and discuss sex. I could
write a dozen love poems in a single after­noon, I would practice my break
28 dancing, and I would read novels. That was an age when our thoughts and
bodies ­were all liberated. E ­ very day t­here w
­ ere new philosophical and lit-
erary books to read. And t­here w ­ ere so many t­hings we could discuss—it

chapter one
­ asn’t just intellectuals that ­were discussing ­these ­things—­even peasants
w
­were discussing ­these sophisticated topics. Take, for instance, the novella Life
(Rensheng).8 Another example was a film that starred Zhang Yimou, Old Well
(Lao jing, 1987).9 ­These ­were being discussed by every­one. But then it all
­stopped in 1989, and suddenly that era was over.
It was as if we w
­ ere on a train that had suddenly s­ topped moving. One of
the very first Chinese rock songs of that era that I heard was called “Platform”
(“Zhantai”). The song made me think of the first time I ever saw my s­ ister
perform in public; she played violin in a per­for­mance of “Train to Shaoshan”
(“Huoche xiang zhe Shaoshan kai”). The per­for­mance began with a violin
solo, and without realizing it, I somehow unconsciously ended up linking
­those two pieces of ­music together. I felt like I should write a screenplay.

You have discussed your childhood as a form of jianghu, hanging out with
gangster types and hoodlums, listening to rock and roll, break dancing, et
cetera. How much impact do you think t­ hose formative experiences had
­ ecause many of your films, from Xiao Wu to
on your l­ ater films? I ask this b
Touch of Sin, all the way up to Ash Is Purest White, all emphasize a certain
jianghu sensibility.

If you want to talk about jianghu, I spent my entire childhood in a kind of

jianghu. By the time I started to mature a bit, the Cultural Revolution was
over, and ­there ­were a lot of young ­people who ended up disenfranchised—­
they ­were unemployed, some had graduated and ended up back home,
­others had returned a­ fter having spent years in the countryside during
the Cultural Revolution. Somehow my group of friends and I—we ­were all
around seven or eight years old—­ended up hanging around with that group
of teen­agers and young adults. We constituted our own kind of jianghu. Our
most frequent activity was fighting. [laughs] ­There was no real reason for
­these fights, and one wrong stare could set off a war between two p ­ eople. It
­didn’t take much for a s­ imple fight between two p ­ eople to develop into an
all-­out ­battle between two factions from dif­fer­ent sides of the street. All of
­these kids w­ ere just filled with raw energy and seemed to be looking for any
opportunity to release their frustrations.
At the time, t­ here ­were a lot of kids who d
­ idn’t get past third grade of ele-
mentary school. That is b ­ ecause by the time they got to third grade, they had
covered basic math, and their parents thought that was enough for them; for 29

them, being able to count money was good enough to get a job. That meant
­there ­were a lot of kids who just dropped out, but they w ­ ere still too young

A Portrait of an Artist
 to get a real job, so they just ended up as part of this jianghu. Back then I had
quite a few friends who ­were part of this jianghu. Elementary school was
five years, and a lot of ­people thought that was enough to learn basic literacy
skills, so they just dropped out. By the time I got to m ­ iddle school, t­here
would always be a dozen or so kids hanging out around the school gate—­
they ­were all my buddies, but none of them went to school. That was a kind
of jianghu. In the first segment of A Touch of Sin, Dahai picks up a hunting
­rifle and sets out to exact revenge. Back when I was in elementary school,
the mom of one of my classmates came a­ fter me with a hunting r­ ifle! At
the time, she scared me half to death! [laughs] But I had a lot of experiences
like that as a child. That is the kind of environment that I grew up in, and it
had a rather power­ful impact on my ­later work as a filmmaker. I always felt
as if I was a part of that group. But growing up in that environment I always
craved in­de­pen­dence, I longed for the day when I would no longer be reliant
on my parents, and I felt the need for adventure. The entire pro­cess is a long
story, but to put it simply, I felt that in­de­pen­dence, adventure, understand-
ing Chinese society, and understanding ­people w ­ ere what constituted my
individual jianghu.
As a kid I was already a master negotiator. Whenever anybody got into
a fight, I was always the one to smooth ­things over. I’ve always been good
at helping to make peace ­because I have a knack for clearly communicating
who’s right and who’s wrong and how to resolve conflicts. I somehow always
ended up being the peacemaker. In some way, I feel that cinema has helped
­people like me who grew up in this jianghu. My love for film and lit­er­a­ture
seemed to bring out my good side. Whenever I would write a poem or l­ater
when I started making movies, it was as if art helped me discover this other
kindhearted side of my personality.

You became heavi­ly interested in the arts as a youth, spending a lot of time
painting, drawing, writing poetry, and reading. How impor­tant was that
early artistic stage on your ­later work in film?

Being born in 1970, much of my formative years w ­ ere spent during the 1980s.
While I still have some very early memories from the Cultural Revolution
period, the majority of my childhood memories ­really begin only ­after the
Reform Era of the late 1970s. Before that time, ­there ­wasn’t a lot ­going on in
30 terms of Chinese culture; ­there was ­really no entertainment to speak of, nor
­were ­there many books available for us to read. Actually, we had some books
at home, but they ­were all the same old stuff—­The Selected Works of Mao Ze-

chapter one
dong, The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, and po­liti­cal books like that.
As for nonpo­liti­cal books, we had at the most two books, The W ­ ater Margin
and Dream of the Red Chamber, but that was it! [laughs] We ­didn’t even have
a collection of Tang poetry b ­ ecause all of t­hose types of books had been
destroyed during the “Destroy the Four Olds” campaign. But in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, copies of books by Nietz­sche, Freud, and all kinds of other
Western literary and philosophical works started to appear in our small-­town
bookstore. For me it all started with reading. Actually, it is kind of hard to
express just what the act of reading meant to a kid like me during that era; all
I knew was that I loved reading. At the time, a friend of mine gave me a copy
of one of Freud’s books and told me: “This book is all about sex!” [laughs] So
I read it like it was some kind of pornographic lit­er­a­ture! [laughs] Of course,
­there was no real erotic content in the book; it was instead a book that was
primarily about the subconscious and our internal world, which immediately
led me to a new place of self-­discovery and self-­understanding.
But I spent even more time reading con­temporary Chinese literary works,
and ­there was one book that had a particularly power­ful impact on me—­
Lu Yao’s novella Life. The book was about a talented young man from the
countryside who moved to a provincial city, where he became a reporter.
However, he ­didn’t have the required hukou, or residence permit, to work in
the city, and ­after someone reported on him, he ended up getting sent back
to the countryside. Before this time, I had never r­ eally given much thought
to China’s hukou system. Although I was living in a provincial city, I some-
how qualified as a city resident, but for most citizens in China at that time,
the only way to become a city resident was through the high school entrance
examination system. It was only a­ fter I read Lu Yao’s Life that I was suddenly
struck by just how unfair the ­whole system was. Why is someone’s lot in life
predetermined simply by the fact that they ­were born in the countryside?
And why is every­one ­else somehow not a peasant, just ­because of where they
­were born? So, reading started me on an early path t­ oward self-­discovery and
reflection about the society I live in.
It was in that context that I began to fall in love with lit­er­a­ture and try my
own hand at writing. In the beginning I wrote poetry, which was inspired
by all the Misty Poets I read at the time.10 ­Those types of poems w ­ ere fairly easy
for me to imitate; all you had to do was jot down some strange, enigmatic
phrases and you had a poem! [laughs] Speaking of the Misty Poets, ­there
was one poem in par­tic­u­lar that r­eally had a tremendous impact on me; 31

that was the poem “The Answer” (“Huida”) by Bei Dao.11 The poem had a
line, “I ­don’t believe . . . ,” which kept repeating. That was the coolest poem

A Portrait of an Artist
 in the world for me at the time! I absolutely loved that line “I ­don’t believe”
­because our educational system at the time kept emphasizing “You have to be-
lieve every­thing!” But Bei Dao’s poem represented the spirit of questioning; it
taught us to challenge. At the very least, the words “I d ­ on’t believe” filled me
with a kind of excitement! I ended up trying my luck at poetry, and l­ ater I wrote
fiction.
On the one side, t­ here was lit­er­a­ture, but on the other side t­ here was life
experience. I lived in a small provincial city, so I could get my hands on
­things like Misty Poetry and other literary works—­all of t­ hose literary jour-
nals made their way to Fenyang—­but on the other hand, I also got firsthand
experience about what life in rural China was like. I saw the impact ­those
dramatic changes had on the lives and fates of everyday p ­ eople. Our h ­ ouse
was in a mining area where life was hard, and I often had the opportunity
to witness firsthand just how fragile life ­really is. ­After seeing that, I felt an
even greater desire to find an outlet to express myself; I needed to find a way
to write about my experience and feelings. But I never thought about mak-
ing films—­that was a dream that felt too distant, but lit­er­a­ture was always
something much closer to our everyday lives.

When did you first become interested in film?

I first became interested in film in 1991. I was already twenty-­one years old
at the time. ­After high school I failed to get into college ­because I was never
much of a good student. My parents, however, ­didn’t give up on their hope
that I could still someday pursue a college education. So they proposed the

1.5 ​Jia Zhangke during his

Beijing Film Acad­emy days

32

chapter one
option of attending an art institute b ­ ecause most art colleges have relatively
lax requirements when it comes to subjects like math and physics. In my
hometown of Fenyang t­ here are a lot of p ­ eople who studied art as a way of
improving their social situation. So I went to the provincial seat of Taiyuan
and took a preparatory art class at Shanxi University. One day during that
year at Shanxi University I went to a movie theater next to our art studio
where we did our painting. The theater was called the Highway Movie The-
ater (Gonglu dianyingyuan), b ­ ecause it was run by the Department of Roads
and Highways—it was actually their social club. They used to screen a lot of
old films, and the tickets ­were dirt cheap, just a few cents to get in.

­Were t­ hese Chinese or foreign films?

They ­were all domestic films. On that after­noon in question I went in and
they happened to be showing Yellow Earth.12 Yellow Earth was actually made
in the mid-1980s, 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, a­ fter
watching Yellow Earth, that I de­cided I wanted to become a director and my
passion for film was born.
Actually, before I became taken with film, I had long been interested in
art and lit­er­a­ture. I have actually written several works of poetry and fiction.

Did you publish any of your early literary work?

Yes, in some Shanxi-­based literary magazines. But ­going back to my inter-

est in film, it all started with that after­noon in Taiyuan when I saw Yellow
Earth. Before I saw Yellow Earth, virtually all of the other Chinese films I
had seen w ­ ere basically state-­sponsored works laden with propaganda, all
made in a very conservative mold. So my cinematic imagination was always
very ­limited; I never realized ­there ­were other possibilities for film. But all of
that changed ­after watching Yellow Earth. Suddenly I was struck with a new
paradigm for cinematic expression.

And soon ­after you applied to the Beijing Film Acad­emy?

Not right away, I ­didn’t get into the Beijing Film Acad­emy ­until 1993 and 33

majored in “film lit­er­a­ture” (dianying wenxue), which was basically a film

theory major.

A Portrait of an Artist
 The Beijing Film Acad­emy has an almost legendary place in the history of
Chinese cinema and has produced many of China’s top filmmakers. What
­were ­those four years like, and how did what you learned ­there shape your
­later directorial vision?

As it happened, my time at the Beijing Film Acad­emy coincided with what

was the single most prosperous time in the c­ areers of many Fifth Generation
directors. Just before I was accepted, Zhang Yimou had completed work on
The Story of Qiuju (Qiuhu da guansi, 1992) and was close to finishing up his
production on To Live (Huozhe, 1994). In addition, 1993 was the year that
Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji, 1993) met with g­ reat in-
ternational success.13 This brought a breath of fresh air into the film acad­emy
and gave the students a burst of real confidence.
But as for what the acad­emy actually provided for us . . . ​well, most of the
professors ­there are still extremely conservative. For me the most impor­
tant ­thing I got out of the acad­emy was that for the first time I was actually
able to watch true films—­and a lot of them. Th ­ ere has always been a lot
of censorship and control regarding films in China. For instance, even as
late as 1993 let’s say you wanted to watch some popu­lar American films like
The Godfather (1972) or Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). U ­ nless you ­were
a film director or a film student, you had absolutely no access to t­ hose types
of films. So the greatest t­hing about film school for me was being able to
fi­nally see a­ ctual prints of all ­those films that up ­until that point I had only
read about in books. At the film acad­emy we had two movie nights a week.
­Every Tuesday was Chinese movie night, and ­every Wednesday was foreign
movie night. So during t­ hose four years I r­ eally felt as if I had entered into a
world of cinema.
I am also very thankful that the Beijing Film Acad­emy maintains a
library of film books from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Film theory in the PRC
is primarily based on all the classic Western theorists like Bazin and Eisen-
stein; then ­there are more con­temporary theories like feminism, new his-
toricism, and semiotics that we learn l­ater. But ­there are very few available
books that contain biographical writings on film directors or even primary
sources featuring interviews with filmmakers. So when I went to the Hong
Kong–­Taiwan Film Library I was fi­nally able to read books like Scorsese on
Scorsese, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema,
34 and volumes of collected interviews with Hou Hsiao-­hsien and other direc-
tors. At the time, none of ­these works had been published in China, and that
library was the only place you could get your hands on them.

chapter one
 My interest was in directing; the only reason I majored in film theory was
­because ­there ­were a lot fewer applicants to that department. I figured that
I would get my foot in the door first and worry about the rest once I was in.
At the time the Beijing Film Acad­emy was extremely hot, and entry was very
competitive. But what r­ eally opened my eyes at the acad­emy ­were ­those film
screenings and books.
The acad­emy, however, was also supportive when it came to helping stu-
dents branch out in other directions. Gradually I started to gravitate ­toward
directing, and around 1995 my classmates and I established an experimental
film group. As part of this proj­ect I managed to raise some money on my
own to shoot a short. It was a ten-­minute documentary entitled One Day in
Beijing. We shot it in Tian­anmen Square, and it was a work of documentary
portraiture. ­After that we shot two subsequent dramatic shorts, Xiao Shan
­Going Home and Du Du. Xiao Shan ­Going Home won an award at the Hong
Kong In­de­pen­dent Film Festival, and it was during that trip to Hong Kong
that I met producers Chow Keung and Li Kit-­ming and cinematographer Yu
Lik-­Wai, who would ­later become the core of my creative team. Together, we
de­cided to make films.

For the past de­cade, you have been a g­ reat supporter of young Chinese
filmmakers, even serving as a producer for filmmakers like Han Jie. Back
when you w­ ere just starting out in the industry, what teachers or filmmak­
ers provided you with support and encouragement?

I thought I was still a young filmmaker! [laughs] When I entered the Beijing
Film Acad­emy in 1993, t­ here w­ ere not a lot of resources for film students in
China. If I h
­ adn’t been admitted to the Beijing Film Acad­emy, t­ here is no way
I would have been able to see all of t­ hose classic films. But once admitted, I
was immediately exposed to the classic films of directors like Akira Kurosawa,
Yasujiro Ozu, and Jean Renoir. We had access to all of ­those impor­tant mas-
terpieces of world cinema. The education model used at Beijing Film Acad­
emy was very close to the Soviet model; it was basically the same system em-
ployed by the former Soviet Union. But when I enrolled, t­ hings had started
to change, and many of the younger teachers had experience studying in the
United States, France, and Japan, and this introduced some new teaching
methods. Take, for instance, our screenwriting classes, where some of the
teachers employed the Soviet style while o­ thers preferred the Hollywood style. 35

Each style had its benefits, but my generation was unique in that we could
have the freedom to select which style we preferred. The Soviet method

A Portrait of an Artist
 required all screenplays to achieve a very high level in terms of their inherent
literary quality. You needed to produce a literary screenplay of publishable
quality—it should be able to be read as a literary work in­de­pen­dent of any
film. When it came to details like word choice and descriptive passages, it
needed to be a true work of art. But all of our teachers who had studied in
the United States would say: “Film scripts are meant to be shot! Just focus
on the dialogue and make sure the setting is expressed clearly and you’ll be
fine!” The script is just a working tool. Th
­ ese represent two very dif­fer­ent
methods of thinking about and approaching filmmaking. But I always had
a preference for the Soviet method, partly b ­ ecause I ­didn’t have confidence
that any of my screenplays would ever be made into movies, so at the least I
wanted something that was highly readable.

And what was the most influential part of being in school for you?

The most influential ele­ments of that atmosphere w ­ ere ­those new ideas that
my teachers shared with us. They all directly translated t­ hose ideas and ex-
plained them to us ­because at the time ­there still no real teaching materials
available, but they still did their best to introduce us to theories like post-
modernism, structuralism, neo-­historicism, and all the other “isms” that
­were in vogue at the time! [laughs] Most of the time we thought that t­ hese
ideas had a real freshness to them, even though ­those methods of thought
and understanding the world had not yet been widely disseminated in Chi-
nese research communities. But for a filmmaker, the most impor­tant t­ hing
remains the method through which you see the world, and ­those theories
provided a ­whole palette of ways in which to grasp and understand dif­fer­ent
methods of viewing the world. This leads to a certain openness and toler-
ance, and for many filmmakers it brought a new modern perspective to their
way of thinking.
On one occasion, I had a teacher who gave me a homework assignment.
He said: “Jia Zhangke, next week I want you to give us a mini-­lecture on
structuralism. I ­haven’t had time to prep my lecture, so I want you to prepare
something and teach structuralism to the class!” [laughs] I ended up spend-
ing an entire week in the library trying to figure out what the hell structural-
ism was! [laughs] I’m sure that what I ended up talking about was just what
I ­imagined structuralism to be ­after a week of torturing myself over this!
36 [laughs] As I reflect on all of this, I find that ­those years as a film major ­were
very impor­tant to my development, but even more impor­tant is being able

chapter one
to have an open mind when it comes to dif­fer­ent methods of understanding
the world.
One person who had a particularly strong impact on me was my Chinese
film history professor Zhong Dafeng. He had spent time in the United States
and was a specialist in the theatrical tradition in Chinese film history. He
felt that Chinese cinema had been deeply influenced by drama and vari­ous
theatrical traditions, ­going all the way back to the very first Chinese film
Dingjun Shan, which was adapted from a Peking opera.14 Over time, this
tradition had gradually contributed to the formation of a unique perspective
of film in China. Even t­ oday when we shoot film, we usually say in Chinese
“pai xi,” or “shooting a drama”; when audiences go to the movies, they say they
are ­going to “kan xi,” or “see a play.” When they watch documentary films,
they never look at them as cinema; it is as if only fiction, drama, and work
with more dramatic qualities can qualify as cinema. Professor Zhong’s re-
search was ­really eye-­opening to me. It made me realize that sometimes Chi-
nese culture can lead audiences to form certain fixed ideas when it comes
to cinematic form. What is cinema? For most mainstream audiences, the
preference is clearly highly dramatic fictional films. When facing this type of
an audience, what should our approach be? What is cinema? I too have been
heavi­ly influenced by this tradition, so early on my screenplays ­were also
filled with g­ reat spectacles and fantasies, just like all t­ hose other mainstream
films you see in the multiplexes! [laughs]

­ ose first three efforts, One Day in Beijing (1994), Xiao Shan ­Going Home
Th
(1995), and Du Du (1996), are largely unavailable. Could you talk a bit about
­these early student works and what they meant to your early trajectory as
an aspiring filmmaker?

One Day in Beijing was my first effort as a director, and I also served as cin-
ematographer on the shoot. It was shot on Betacam, and it was ­really the first
time that I looked at the world through a lens. The excitement I felt during
that shoot is so difficult to express in words. 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 naive film. But even though it is
a short and immature work, standing t­here in the street during the shoot
got me to start asking myself about the ­people I was filming and how to ap- 37

proach ­these subjects. The film is basically a short documentary portrait of

A Portrait of an Artist
 tourists in Tian­anmen Square, but what left me with the deepest impression
­were ­those p ­ eople from the countryside who I seemed to naturally gravitate
to during the shooting. Naturally, t­ here are all kinds of p ­ eople in the square,
maintenance ­people who work ­there, Beijing locals taking their kids out for
a stroll, p ­ eople flying kites, but for some reason I was naturally attracted to
­those p ­ eople from the countryside. On an emotional level, ­there was just
something that drew me to them.
­After One Day in Beijing, I wanted to make a film built around the story of
some of ­these provincial workers who come to Beijing for work. So I wrote a
screenplay entitled Xiao Shan ­Going Home. Xiao Shan is the name of a pro-
vincial worker from Henan, and the story takes place just before the Spring
Festival when the protagonist wants to go home to visit his ­family for the New
Year, which is a custom in China. But Xiao Shan d ­ oesn’t want to go alone so he
starts looking around Beijing for someone from his hometown to accompany
him on his trip. Among ­these ­people from his hometown are construction
workers, scalpers, prostitutes, and university students—­but no one is willing
to go with him. Fi­nally, he puts up an announcement on the street, and the
film ends with him at a street-­side barber stall having his long hair cut off.
It is a fifty-­eight-­minute work that is quite linear; the basic narrative motive
follows his search for ­people from his hometown as a means of expressing
some of the fundamental issues faced by many of the provincial workers
who find their way into the big cities in China. Th ­ ese issues include illegal
workers, the harsh realities faced by construction workers, and prostitutes
who live between the lines of morality and self-­respect. This was without
question my most impor­tant work prior to the making of my full-­length
features. It established my direction. For instance, the kind of characters that
I care about in my work and my stylistic approach are both already becom-
ing clear in Xiao Shan ­Going Home. Naturally, it is also an immature and
unpolished film, but it nevertheless remains very impor­tant to me and truly
marks the beginning of my work as a filmmaker.
From a production perspective, I also learned so much with Xiao Shan
­Going Home. I learned how to get funding, how to put together a camera
crew, how to edit and mix, and how to publicize and promote the finished
work. ­After Xiao Shan was finished, we took the film to several universities
around Beijing, including Beijing University, the Central Drama Acad­emy,
­People’s University, and the Central Acad­emy of Arts, to screen the film and
38 interact with student audiences. Looking back on Xiao Shan ­after having com-
pleted Xiao Wu and Platform, I realized that with Xiao Shan I had already
gone through the entire filmmaking pro­cess. Although it is crude work, with

chapter one
it I completed a full education in how to produce a film, from shooting to
editing to promotion. In the end, we sent the film out for competition in the
Hong Kong In­de­pen­dent Film Festival, and it took home an award, which
was a huge encouragement for a student filmmaker like myself and proved
to be a big confidence booster. That trip to Hong Kong also led me to my
core creative team.
So ­today when young aspiring filmmakers ask for advice, I always tell
them that no ­matter what, they must persevere and get through their stu-
dent film and see it through to the end. Even if halfway through the shoot
they are already convinced that it is garbage, they still need to finish it, edit
it, and show it to p ­ eople. Filmmaking is a field that relies heavi­ly on experi-
ence. And the only way to acquire a complete experience as a filmmaker is
to go through the entire pro­cess yourself. So although my first major work,
Xiao Wu, was not made ­until 1997 and ­didn’t start getting international no-
tice ­until the following year when it was distributed in France and gradually
several other Eu­ro­pean countries, I had already been through the entire pro­
cess before—­just on a smaller scale. ­Later, when I began to attend interna-
tional film festivals and see all kinds of films, I could approach every­thing
with a very composed attitude ­because through my shorts I had already es-
tablished my own direction as a filmmaker. One prob­lem facing Chinese
artists is that ­after living in a relatively closed society, once they leave China
and are exposed to the diversity of the artistic scene abroad, they end up
losing their cultural self-­confidence or sacrificing their artistic values. But I
feel that through my early shorts I had already established an inner artistic
world—­something that is essential for any artist.
­After Xiao Shan, I made a third short entitled Du Du about a college
student who, on the verge of graduation, is faced with an array of poten-
tially life-­changing choices. Th ­ ese decisions involve her c­ areer, her f­amily,
and pressure to get married. This film represented a new kind of cinematic
experiment for me b ­ ecause we worked without a script and with only one
actress. It was very spontaneous, and we would only work out the plan for
each day of shooting the night before. It was an incredibly spontaneous film,
which helped develop my skills on set. I am not terribly proud of Du Du and
rarely show it to anyone, but from the perspective of my growth as a film-
maker, it ­really did the most to hone my directorial instincts while shooting.
I would suddenly realize what kind of actor I needed or what kind of a­ ngle I
needed for a par­tic­u­lar shot. The ­whole ­thing was completed with us figur- 39

ing out what we needed as we went, including the narrative continuity and
even the very structure of the film.

A Portrait of an Artist
 The shooting schedule for Du Du was very strange. We only shot two days
a week.

That was b
­ ecause you w
­ ere still in school and had to rely on the Beijing
Film Acad­emy’s equipment?

Right, we ­didn’t have money to rent our own equipment, and the school
camera could only be taken out on the weekends. We’d borrow the camera
on Friday night, shooting on Saturday and Sunday so we could get it back
before Monday. It took six shooting days spread out over four weekends to
fi­nally complete the film.

Let’s talk about some of your collaborators. Some filmmakers put together
a new crew for each proj­ect, yet you have been working with a stable group
of collaborators for many years; this group includes editor Kong Jinlei,
sound designer Zhang Yang, and cinematographer Yu Lik-­Wai. What is it
that having a stable core group of collaborators brings to your artistic pro­
cess? How impor­tant are they to your method of filmmaking? And what
does each one bring to the ­table?

Generally speaking, it comes down to the fact that we all share the same
goals and values. We have very similar sensibilities when it comes to our
views on filmmaking. Although I am a gradu­ate of the Beijing Film Acad­
emy and have a lot of classmates I went to school with ­there, our perspec-
tives on and understanding of film are not necessarily compatible. One t­ hing
that is quite unique about my approach is the drive to capture p ­ eople in their
natu­ral state when shooting, and I have always had a distaste for overly dra-
matized shooting styles and overly theatrical methods. Whenever I’m shoot-
ing, I am always trying to capture a natu­ral sense of time, a natu­ral sense of
space, and the way t­ hings are in their natu­ral state. But this is a perspective
that not all filmmakers can subscribe to. Back when Xiao Wu and Platform
­were released, ­there was even a film critic who came out and accused my
films of not even qualifying as film! He felt that film w­ asn’t supposed to look
like that! [laughs] So it is impor­tant that I find collaborators who share the
same view of cinema as I do.
Yu Lik-­Wai, Zhang Yang, and Kong Jinlei each admire ­these types of films,
40 and our overall views on cinema are quite similar. I was struck by how simi-
lar my views on sound mixing w ­ ere with Zhang Yang when I first started
working with him. Part of the reason he was able to appreciate my views on

chapter one
sound had to do with the fact that Zhang Yang is also a rock musician, so
he appreciates noise and discordant sounds like me. If I ­were to work with a
dif­fer­ent sound designer, he w­ ouldn’t necessarily be able to accept my vision
of what film sound should be. Zhang Yang recorded the sound for Xiao Wu,
and we had a wonderful working relationship back then. I kept wanting to
add more and more street noise and pop ­music into the mix ­because that
would reveal a more accurate and realistic soundscape of what small towns
in northern China are ­really like. ­Those towns are so noisy. They are filled
with all kinds of sounds: ­people talking, cars, motorcycles, and all kinds of
other noise ele­ments from the environment. So when working on sound de-
sign, Zhang Yang and I both like to add more sounds to the mix. Our views
on sound also impact the quality of the sounds we rec­ord and the use of pop
­music. When we utilize pop ­music, we never run the ­music clean through
our computer, nor do we use any special effects to alter it. Instead, we insist
on using ­actual radios and cassette players that are historically accurate to
the environment and period; then we play the m ­ usic through ­those play-
ers and rec­ord it on site. So any ­music you hear in the film is being played
through a tape player or cd player that is on set during the shoot. This is
an extremely unusual vision of film sound that not a lot of ­people use. For
instance, many of Zhang Yang’s classmates would be utterly disgusted by our
approach to sound recording. According to them, our approach to sound is
“too dirty.” A lot of sound designers insist on a clean soundtrack; they want
to preserve the quality and clarity of ­every sound, which should be clear and
distinctive. But both Zhang Yang and I are looking for something very dif­
fer­ent when it comes to sound design, and it is precisely b ­ ecause we share
similar aesthetic tastes that our collaboration has lasted all t­ hese years.

Another core member of your creative team is Yu Lik-­Wai.15 A brilliant

cinematographer and a director in his own right, Yu has a unique style
that juxtaposes jarring handheld work reminiscent of Christopher Doyle
with steady long takes in the spirit of Hou Hsiao-­hsien’s works. Could you
talk about your working relationship with Yu?

My working relationship with Yu Lik-­Wai began in Hong Kong at the Hong

King In­de­pen­dent Film Festival when I saw a documentary he directed en-
titled Neon Goddesses (Meili de hunpo, 1996). I r­ eally admired his cinematic
approach and felt that it was extremely close to what I was ­going for in my 41

own work. I ­really fell in love with his cinematography. Since we d­ idn’t r­ eally
know each other, we d ­ idn’t have much to say at first, but as soon as we

A Portrait of an Artist
 discovered that we ­were both fans of Robert Bresson, we started to hit it
off.16 I never ­imagined that Bresson was also one of Yu’s favorite filmmakers,
so immediately t­here was this instant connection. We got on so well that
we started collaborating almost immediately. One critic in China described
our collaborative relationship as perfect partners in crime. [laughs] One of
the main qualities that sets our collaborative relationship apart is that ­we’re
not just business partners but very close friends. We see each other almost
­every day, and usually before my next screenplay is even written he already
knows exactly what it is about ­because I’m constantly sharing my ideas with
him. So on set t­ here ­isn’t much need for communication ­because he already
knows what I’m ­after.

So in some way Yu Lik-­Wai is your most impor­tant collaborator.

Without question. A good director ­really needs a very strong cinematogra-

pher by his side to support him. His vocabulary of visuals is what supports
my aesthetic vision. I have seen a lot of films made by my fellow filmmak-
ers, and I always feel it is such a shame to see films by directors with vision
who lack the visual support they need. Naturally, ­there is a lot of room for
aesthetic critique of the Fifth Generation directors, but one reason for their
overall success is that they all have an incredibly strong visual support team;
­people like Gu Changwei and Zhang Yimou have such a strong aesthetic
sense. In my graduating class at the Beijing Film Acad­emy, we had a lot of
cinematography majors, but ­there r­ eally ­wasn’t anyone that I felt was speak-
ing the same aesthetic language as me. But as soon as I saw Yu Lik-­Wai’s
Neon Goddesses, I instantly realized that he was someone I should collabo-
rate with. What’s funny is that a­ fter seeing my film, he also wanted to work
with me. So it was very in­ter­est­ing the way every­thing came about, as if it was
all meant to be.

What is it about your collaboration with Yu Lik-­Wai that has allowed you
to attain such a deep chemistry?

I think that the fundamental foundation lies with the fact that our views on
cinema are quite close to one another; moreover, even more impor­tant, we
have the same taste in film. We are both tuned in to the same channel. It
42 is absolutely essential for a director to work with a cinematographer who is
on the same page. ­After all, every­one has a dif­fer­ent understanding when it
comes to the aesthetics of visuality. To give you an example, t­ here are a lot of

chapter one
1.6 ​Yu Lik-­Wai (right) with Jia Zhangke (center)

­ eople who love photos and images of the beach during sunset; they think
p
they are so beautiful. But I have always despised ­those images! They are so
difficult for me to look at! I could never work with a cinematographer who
shot ­those kinds of aestheticized images! Instead, I need to find a cinema-
tographer who despises shots of sunset beaches as much as I do! [laughs] So
in Yu Lik-­Wai I fi­nally found a cinematographer who hated beautiful sunsets
as much as me. [laughs]
Mutual understanding is also essential for us. When we ­were shooting
Platform, I told Yu Lik-­Wai that I wanted to add a green tint. Yu Lik-­Wai
asked me, why green? Why not blue or yellow? At the time, I d ­ idn’t have
an answer for him, I just felt that it should be green. Then one day when we
­were setting up one of the shooting locations, I told the art designer to paint
one of the walls green ­because when I was a kid all the walls like that ­were
green. Yu Lik-­Wai overheard me and suddenly understood why I wanted
green. Back then I was a l­ittle kid and was not very tall, so when I looked
up all I saw w
­ ere ­these green walls! [laughs] Taking that information, Yu
Lik-­Wai was able to create the gorgeous green tints that you see in Platform.
[laughs] 43

From the perspective of collaboration, my relationship with Yu Lik-­Wai

is indeed quite unique. I ­don’t have any special preproduction routine; the

A Portrait of an Artist
 main ­thing I do during that period is location scouting. I usually go together
with Yu Lik-­Wai to scout the locations and decide on ­angles, colors, and
lighting. We usually s­ ettle on ­these t­ hings during location scouting so by the
time we are actually shooting ­there ­isn’t too much we need to discuss.
Sometimes when on set ­there are times when I suddenly find myself at a
complete loss as to what to shoot. That is b ­ ecause I d
­ on’t story­board. I just
bring my literary-­style script to the location, but then we sometimes need to
take an hour or two to set up all the camera a­ ngles. Usually the other crew
members have no idea what we are d ­ oing when this happens. But l­ater I
discovered that Yu Lik-­Wai has a method to deal with this—he just starts
tinkering with the vari­ous props on set. That way the rest of the crew mem-
bers ­will think we are ­doing something impor­tant! [laughs] In actuality, he
is the only person on set who understands that I still ­haven’t de­cided how to
shoot that par­tic­u­lar scene!
For instance, when we w ­ ere shooting A Touch of Sin, we spent most of
our time together discussing how to link the film style up with the tradition
of wuxia films. At the time, we de­cided on using wide-­screen ­because all of
the old Shaw ­Brothers wuxia films ­were shot in wide-­screen. So that is what
we did. The way we arranged items in the foreground was also indebted to
the style of ­those early Shaw B ­ rothers films.
I have a short film entitled Revive (Fengchun), in which we added some
special effects to the overall look during postproduction, and that was en-
tirely Yu Lik-­Wai’s idea. When the film begins, audiences often think they
are watching a classical Chinese costume drama, and it is only ­later that
they discover they are actually watching a con­temporary story. Yu Lik-­Wai
asked me, “Do you want to make the characters appear even more like they
­were from a classical drama?” So he experimented with the images to make
the characters’ ­faces appear longer, just like t­hose palace girls in old Chi-
nese court paintings. What he did was ­really amazing, and their ­faces indeed
­were stretched, but in a subtle way that most audiences w ­ ouldn’t even notice.
But it indeed helped to enhance the classical effect of the film.
One time I went to a dance per­for­mance with Zhao Tao; the per­for­mance
featured a ­woman dancing on the shoulders of her male dance partner. The
show was a big hit in China, and every­one loved this part of the show. But
when Zhao Tao saw it, she said it was terrible! She explained that dance was
not a contest to show off difficult tricks; a­ fter all, how are you supposed to
44 express emotion when you are ­doing fancy tricks? This per­for­mance was
more like an acrobatic performance—­every­one in the audience was on the
edge of their seats, afraid that the w
­ oman might fall off her partner’s shoul-

chapter one
ders. How can you call that a good dance per­for­mance? I’m telling you this
story ­because it serves as a meta­phor for cinematography. A good cinema-
tographer should express his emotions through his images; it ­shouldn’t be
about accomplishing some sort of technical feat. When it comes down to it,
what we want to see most in any film is how ­people live their lives; we want
to explore their inner emotional lives, and technique should always be in the
ser­vice of revealing ­those core truths.

­ fter working with Yu Lik-­Wai for so many years, his style seems to con­
A
stantly transform as you explore dif­fer­ent visual strategies for each of your
films.

My relationship with Yu Lik-­Wai is indeed quite special. One of the most

unusual t­hings about our relationship is that from Xiao Wu all the way up
­until Ash Is Purest White, Yu Lik-­Wai participated in the preproduction pro­
cess of all t­hese films. Ash was actually shot by Eric Gautier, but that was
only ­because Yu Lik-­Wai’s schedule was busy, but he was ­there from the
inception of the film. So he is in many ways my most impor­tant collaborator.
I never discuss my stories with Kong Jinlei or Zhang Yang; they are always
so busy, and I ­don’t want to bother them. Naturally, Yu Lik-­Wai is also very
busy, but we have already settled into a habit of collaboration. Even before
I have a screenplay, I always share my stories with him as they are evolving.
While I am writing I call him almost ­every day to update him on what I
wrote that day. Sometimes when I get tired of writing and need a break, we
meet up for dinner and we talk about the screenplay and where the story is
­going. When we talk we never get into the details of cinematography, but he
serves as a sounding board for me. He is always willing to share his thoughts
on my proj­ects. On a spiritual level, Yu Lik-­Wai is my most impor­tant in-
terlocutor. So on some level he has participated in the production of almost
all my films, he is like a producer. That is not to say that he carries out the
traditional role of a film producer by locking up funding or booking shoot-
ing locations, but he provides me with all kinds of input. For instance, for
Ash Is Purest White, it was actually Yu Lik-­Wai who recommended I use Eric
Gautier.17 ­Because Ash required a broad palette of dif­fer­ent shooting styles
and equipment, he felt that Eric’s style would be better suited to this film.

45

A Portrait of an Artist
 xiao wu (1997)
working with actors
platform (2000)
unknown pleasures (2002)

2 The Home­
town Trilogy
2.1 ​Jia Zhangke on the set of Platform
I increasingly feel that the single most
difficult t­ hing in film is to create a new
image of what a protagonist should be.
That is where the absolute heart of
cinematic innovation lies. You need to
create a new type of person, and capture
that new character on film.

Let’s talk about your first full-­length feature film, Xiao Wu. What made
you decide to focus on a pickpocket? Did you know ­people like Xiao Wu
when you w ­ ere growing up in Fenyang?

Before getting to work on Xiao Wu, I had originally wanted to do a short

about a man and a ­woman and their first night together. I wanted to make a
short film that featured one location (a bedroom), one time (a single night),
and just two characters. We w ­ ere getting ready to shoot, and my cinematog-
rapher Yu Lik-­Wai came in from Hong Kong. Spring Festival was just around
the corner, and it had been a full year since I had been home, so I went back
to Fenyang. When I arrived, I was suddenly struck by how dramatically the
city had changed in just one year. The rate of Fenyang’s modernization and
economic growth, not to mention the impact the forces of commodifica-
tion had on ­people ­there, ­were all unbelievable. Shanxi is already a relatively
backwater province in China, and Fenyang, being on the bank of the Yellow
River and close to Shaanxi, makes it a rather remote place even in Shanxi, so
the fact that ­these changes ­were reaching even Fenyang and in such a vis­i­ble
way had an incredible impact on me. The changes stunned me, especially
when I discovered that so many old friends of mine ­were no longer even 47

speaking to one another. I also had several friends who a­ fter getting married
­were starting to have prob­lems with their parents and barely spoke to them.

The Home­t own Trilogy

 Then ­there ­were friends who had just gotten married and w ­ ere now already
divorced. I just felt that ­people ­were changing so quickly, every­thing was a
blur. All in the course of a year, it seemed as if all of ­those interpersonal rela-
tionships and friendships I had ­were completely transformed.
Then ­there was the sudden appearance of countless karaoke clubs and
karaoke girls, who ­were basically prostitutes; all of this became so common-
place. ­There was an ancient road near the neighborhood where I grew up,
and that entire road was to be ripped up, just like the scene portrayed in
Xiao Wu. All of this radical change playing out right ­there before my eyes
left me with a pressing urge to shoot it and capture it before it was gone.
China’s hinterland was in a state of massive transformation—­not on the eve
of ­great change or just ­after a ­great change—it was all happening right ­there
before my eyes. I knew it might not last long, perhaps one year, maybe two,
but it was a time of im­mense pain. So amid this excitement I de­cided to
make a movie about an ordinary Chinese man living in this environment of
upheaval and massive social change.
Another reason for why I de­cided to make Xiao Wu is that in 1997 I
was getting ready to gradu­ate from the Beijing Film Acad­emy, and a­ fter
four years of watching Chinese films, I still ­hadn’t seen a single Chinese film
that had anything to do with the Chinese real­ity that I knew. ­After the Fifth
Generation’s initial success, their artistic works started to undergo a lot of
changes. One of ­these big changes came with Chen Kaige, who once said, “I
increasingly feel that film should be used as a vehicle to convey legendary
stories.” I, however, could not disagree more. Sure film can describe legend,
but where is it written that film ­can’t depict other ­things as well? Unfortu-
nately, most of the Fifth Generation directors all followed this trajectory.
Moreover, it became increasingly common to see Fifth Generation directors
imitating each other. For instance, Huang Jianxin, who I am very fond of,
made a film called The Wooden Man’s Bride (Wukui, 1994); He Ping also did
a film in this style called Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker (Pao da shuang
deng, 1994). ­These kinds of imaginary repre­sen­ta­tions of traditional Chinese
society became increasingly common [­after the success of similar period
pieces by directors like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou]. But t­ here was a very
clear disconnect between ­these films and the current Chinese real­ity that we
are living in. Th
­ ere is something about this phenomenon that left me feeling
very unsatisfied, and it was partially out of this frustration that I de­cided to
48 make films. I told my collaborators at the time that I wanted to express “the
­here and the now” (dangxia xing) in my films, and that has been the aim of
our films ever since. Although Xiao Wu was made in 1997, ­today China still

chapter two
f­ aces many of the same prob­lems and exists in a state of agony, brought on
by its current state of massive change and transformation. For an artist this
can be a double-­edged sword b ­ ecause, on the one hand, living in this envi-
ronment of constant change can generate a lot of creative inspiration, espe-
cially with the camera; however, the other side of the coin is the multitude of
prob­lems brought on by this change and all the hardships the p ­ eople must
go through in this pro­cess.

On the surface, Xiao Wu adopts a realist documentary style, yet the film
actually had a very complete structure. So on the one hand ­there is a natu­
ral shooting style, yet hidden beneath that is a tight three-­act structure
centering on the protagonist’s relationships with his friend, lover, and ­family.
How did you develop the structure of this film, and how did the screenplay
take shape?

When it comes to the structure of Xiao Wu, what r­ eally drove me to make
this film was seeing just how profoundly the changes playing out in society
had impacted ­people’s interpersonal relationships. But just what do ­these
“relationships” entail? Th ­ ere are relationships with friends, ­family, and ro-
mantic relationships. Coincidentally, just as I was getting ready to start work-
ing on the screenplay for Xiao Wu, I read an old article from the time of the
Cultural Revolution. The article’s structure was something like “Ding Ling’s
friend, Chen Huangmei’s nephew, so-­and-­so’s ­uncle.” It was basically a per-
sonal attack on an individual, but the article began by laying out the network
of personal relationships surrounding him. [laughs] This is very much in
line with Chinese ­people’s worldview. Since I wanted to tell a story about
changing times, I de­cided to use interpersonal relationships as my entry point.
So the structure begins with practical, real-­world relationships and develops
from ­there.
The original title for Xiao Wu was actually Hu Meimei’s Sugardaddy, Jin
Xiaoyong’s Buddy, Liang Changyou’s Son: Xiao Wu. [laughs] I ­really loved that
title. But a­ fter we shot the film, my producer forced me to drop every­thing
that came before Xiao Wu! laughs] Other­wise, it may have been one of the
longest titles in film history! So in the end we just went with Xiao Wu. Even
up u­ ntil ­today, I still like to s­ ettle on a Chinese title early on in the screen-
writing pro­cess; without that it is hard for me to ­really capture the spirit and
emotion of what I want to convey through the film. I normally d ­ on’t s­ ettle on 49

an En­glish title u ­ ntil ­after the film is complete, but I always have a Chinese
title early on.

The Home­t own Trilogy

 2.2 ​Wang Hongwei (left), Zuo Baitao (center), and Jia Zhangke (right) on the set of Xiao Wu

­There is one funny anecdote regarding Xiao Wu’s Hong Kong distribution:
The local distributor t­ here wanted to change the name to The Thief and the
Beauty (Shentou qiaojiaren) [laughs], but I ­wouldn’t agree. In my mind that
was an oversimplification—­after all, if all you have is a thief and a beauty,
what about Xiao Wu’s parents? [laughs] And what about his good buddy? So
we just stuck with Xiao Wu. [laughs]

Although you grew up in Fenyang, and shooting ­there must have been a
homecoming of sorts, was ­there also a kind of alienation ­after having been
away during this time of rapid change?

Right, the transformation of Fenyang is ­really incredible. So whenever I go

50 back, part of me feels like a stranger. For instance, the means by which young
­people ­today communicate with each other and get along is ­really completely

chapter two
dif­fer­ent from what it had been. This ­really showed me how to capture the
transformation of my surroundings with a kind of sensitivity, which should
always be the responsibility of a director. Naturally, ­there are some direc-
tors who neglect real­ity in their work, but my aesthetic taste and goals d ­ on’t
allow me to do that—­I can never escape real­ity. So in Unknown Pleasures, I
made a film about a younger generation with dif­fer­ent values and character-
istics than my generation. Growing up, I always played with at least three or
four other kids, often all the kids on the block played together—­the power of
the collective was extremely strong, and culturally speaking, we always had
a lot of confidence. But the younger generation are faced with a new kind of
cultural oppression. This is in part due to the lifestyles they hear and learn
about through the media—­especially the internet and cable television—­
which exists on a completely dif­fer­ent plane from their everyday real­ity. It is
this radical contrast between the real­ity of their environment and the picture
of the world they get through the media that creates an enormous pressure
in their lives.
We completed Xiao Wu in just twenty-­one shooting days, and a big part
of my goal was to capture transforming relationships. Chinese ­people live in
a world where they are dependent on interpersonal relationships. W ­ hether
they be ­family relationships, friendships, or husband-­wife relations, we are
always living in the context and confines of a relationship. And describ-
ing the structure of t­ hese relationships was r­ eally what I wanted to express
through Xiao Wu. So the first section of the film is about the relationship
between two friends. Amid this relationship ­there is a fundamental change
brought on by broken promises and the loss of trust that the friendship was
once based on. The second section of the film is about love and Xiao Wu’s
relationship with Mei Mei. In the past, the Chinese view of love was always
an eternal one, from now u ­ ntil forever; the relationship between Xiao Wu
and Mei Mei, however, is only about the moment, the now. Fate is destined
to tear them apart. The final section is about f­ amily and the relationship with
one’s parents, another source of many prob­lems. Of all the radical changes
confronting the Chinese ­people in recent years, I feel the most fundamental
and devastating change is in the realm of interpersonal relationships.

In one sense, it is as if all the characters are wearing a mask, pretending to

be someone they are not. Xiao Yong, once a thief, is now a model entre­
preneur, Mei Mei calls herself a karaoke girl while she works as a prostitute 51

and her parents think she is studying acting in Beijing . . .

The Home­t own Trilogy

 2.3 ​Wang Hongwei (left) and
Zuo Baitao (right) on the set
of Xiao Wu

Right, that’s something I wanted to express. In China t­ here are two kinds of
­people, ­those who can adapt to the changes around them, like Xiao Yong,
Xiao Wu’s childhood friend. In the film he takes part in all kinds of illegal
activities, like importing contraband cigarettes, but he describes himself as
“working in the trade industry.” He uses wordplay to completely alleviate
any moral burden or responsibility. Or, for example, when he opens up a
dance hall, which is actually a place for prostitution, he says, “I’m in the
entertainment industry.” He has the power to cover up his be­hav­ior with
52 language. He knows how to adapt to his environment, unlike Xiao Wu, who
is helpless in this regard. Take, for example, his profession; for Xiao Wu a
thief is a thief. ­There is nothing he can say or do to change his inferior moral

chapter two
 2.4 ​
Xiao Wu French film
poster

position. This is further augmented by his idealized view of friendship and

interpersonal relationships.

Platform has been considered by numerous critics to be a key work of in­

de­pen­dent Chinese cinema. Could you talk about how the film came into
being? You began work on the screenplay even before you conceived of
Xiao Wu?

That’s right, Platform was the first full-­length screenplay that I wrote. It was
already completed long before I began shooting Xiao Wu. Back when I was
still shooting short films, I kept thinking about what kind of film I should
make as my first full-­length feature film if I w ­ ere to ever get the opportu- 53

nity. The first ­thing that came into my mind was Platform—­a film about the
1980s and pop culture. For most Chinese—­myself included—­the 1980s was

The Home­t own Trilogy

 an unforgettable de­cade. Just from the perspective of material culture, the
transformation was utterly soul-­stirring. I remember back when I was seven
or eight years old, my older ­brother told me: “If I could buy a motorcycle,
I’d be the happiest person in the world!” At the time, only police officers and
mailmen had motorcycles, but for every­one ­else, owning a motorcycle was
a luxury no one could even dream of. For my b ­ rother the very thought of
one day having his own motorcycle was the pinnacle of happiness. But just
three or four years a­ fter making his wish, the streets of China ­were utterly
filled with motorcycles! By the same token, when we w ­ ere kids you could
only find tele­vi­sion sets in large public facilities like the conference room at
the police station or the local u ­ nion’s meeting room, and ­there would always
be several hundred p ­ eople crammed into t­hose places to watch the tele­vi­
sion. But just a year or two ­later practically every­one was buying their own
tele­vi­sions sets!
The other big transformation taking place during this time was on a spiri-
tual level. Previous to the Reform Era, ­there w ­ ere very few books we could
get our hands on, ­there ­were no ave­nues through which we could access
outside cultural influences. But as the cultural thaw began, we suddenly had
access to foreign lit­er­a­ture, and by 1983 or 1984 the rate of that thaw seemed
to increase. Even in a remote place like my hometown of Fenyang, you could
buy books by Freud and Nietz­sche at the local book vendor on the street.
And even though none of us ­really understood what we ­were reading, we
still devoured ­those books with ­great relish! [laughs] The change was so
rapid, and throughout the entire de­cade of the 1980s, China was in a phase
marked by idealism and excitement. Deep down we ­were all filled with hope
and optimism for the f­ uture. We started to win all kinds of freedoms that we
never had before, but then in 1989 came the setback. . . .
It was only a­ fter 1989 that p ­ eople began to attain true in­de­pen­dence in
terms of their lifestyles. If I look at myself as an example, I was not part of
a so-­called work unit, and ­didn’t have a traditional job. Suddenly a lot of
in­de­pen­dent intellectuals and artists began to appear, and, gradually, more
aspects of the economy started to privatize. Many of us w ­ ere determined to
seek out an in­de­pen­dent life for ourselves and break away from the system
of state-­controlled work units. This is also the period when in­de­pen­dent or
under­ground cinema began to arise: in 1989, Zhang Yuan started making
films. ­These are all some of the ­things that the 1980s culture gave us. When-
54 ever I look back and reflect on the 1980s, I always get particularly excited,
and that is where the idea to make a movie about the 1980s first emerged.
But ­there was always the question of how to find the right a­ ngle to approach

chapter two
that de­cade. It was only ­later that I realized I could use a song-­and-­dance
troupe to reflect on the changes taking place during that era. ­These wengong-
tuan, or song-­and-­dance troupes, ­were the lowest on the rung of so-­called
cultural workers, and I thought that through their transformation we could
gain a perspective on the changes taking place throughout the country at
that time.

­Were you a member of a song-­and-­dance troupe?

Not an a­ ctual member, but I participated in a lot of per­for­mances. In high

school we saw an American movie called Breakin’. I must have watched that
movie ten, twenty times, and learned all the moves from that movie. I became
a break-­dancer. It was right about this time that song-­and-­dance troupes
­were cut off from state financing and had to tour poor provincial areas to
sustain themselves eco­nom­ically. Since I could break-dance, they often took
me on tour during my summer vacations, adding a break-dance showcase to
the per­for­mance. In addition to my experience, my older s­ ister was also a
violinist with a song-­and-­dance troupe in the early eighties. It was a combi-
nation of t­ hese two experiences that inspired the film.
Once the script was written, I started negotiations with my Hong Kong
producers about a full-­length feature film. At the time, however, the avail-
able funding was extremely l­imited, and I felt that Platform would require
a larger investment to accurately re-­create the historical background and
cover the expenses of all the travel (since the film is about a touring troupe).
All they initially offered us was just over 200,000 rmb, and t­ here was no way
to shoot Platform on that small amount, so we went ahead and shot Xiao Wu
first. ­After the success of Xiao Wu, funding came easier; suddenly ­there w
­ ere
many international producers interested in working with us. In the end, we
de­cided to collaborate with Shozo Ichiyama from Japan. A main ­factor in
my decision to work with Shozo was the fact that he had produced Hou
Hsiao-­hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye (Nanguo zaijian, nanguo, 1996) and
Flowers of Shanghai (Haishanghua, 1998). Hou Hsiao-­hsien is a director I
have greatly admired for many years, so I felt that based on Shozo’s relation-
ship with Hou, we should be able to understand each other artistically. He
came on to produce Platform, and he indeed turned out to be a wonderful
producer.
55

Is it a fair assessment to say that Platform is the most personal of your

works? Or even autobiographical?

The Home­t own Trilogy

 I would agree with that. Naturally, t­ here are a lot of differences between the
characters depicted and myself; they are actually about ten years older than
me. But several scenes in Platform are derived from t­ hings I saw growing up,
and the latter half of the film was influenced heavi­ly by my own experiences.

How did you discover your lead actor, Wang Hongwei? What is it about
his per­for­mance and acting style that attracted you initially to him and led
you to continually recast him?

Wang Hongwei was a classmate of mine in college. We ­were both film theory
majors. When I made Xiao Shan ­Going Home, he played the role of Xiao
Shan. I r­ eally admire his work. One t­ hing that initially attracted me to him
was the plainness of his appearance; his face looks just like countless other
Chinese ­people.

And Xiao Shan ­Going Home was his first film as an actor?

Yes, that was his first film.1 What r­ eally attracted me to him as an actor is his
sensitivity and self-­respect.

Wang was the lead actor in Xiao Shan G ­ oing Home, Xiao Wu, and Plat-
form; he also appears in cameo roles in several of your l­ ater films, includ­
ing Unknown Pleasures, The World, Still Life, and A Touch of Sin. Since he
is not a professional actor, can you talk about just what it is that draws you
to his per­for­mance style and makes you keep g­ oing back to collaborate
with him?

Actually, back when I first cast Wang Hongwei, I was at a stage where I was
quite rebellious and was consciously trying to resist the images I was seeing
on-­screen, which I had a g­ reat distaste for. Back then, all of the lead roles in
film w­ ere portrayed by handsome young men and beautiful young w ­ omen,
but I wanted to try to pre­sent a more moving and realistic image for my
lead characters. That’s not to say I have a distaste for handsome and beauti-
ful actors! [laughs] The real issue is that t­hese professional actors have all
been trained; when they speak, t­ here is a certain standard inflection to the
way they deliver their lines. You could line up ten actors for a role, and they
56 ­will all read their lines exactly the same—­speaking beautiful, pitch-­perfect
Mandarin Chinese and delivering their lines with the same air of artificial
theatricality. When your average person speaks, their manner of speech is

chapter two
2.5 ​Wang Hongwei in Xiao Wu

usually quite natu­ral, but as soon as ­those actors open their mouths, ­there is
a theatrical tone; it just immediately reads as fake. I d­ on’t want t­ hose types
of ­people in my films. So t­ hose actors may have training and be very good-­
looking, but they are completely removed from ­those ­people I see around
me in my everyday life. I started to ask myself, why c­ an’t the characters in my
films resemble ­those p ­ eople in my everyday life? I wanted to create a new
image, an image built on authenticity, which up ­until that point I had never
seen on the big screen. So I started to search for ­those individuals that drew
me in, and they ­were precisely the kind of ­people that you rarely see in film.
They are instead ­people imbued with real life. And that is what led me to
Wang Hongwei.
Xiao Shan ­Going Home was the first time I worked with Wang Hongwei;
at the time, we ­were both enrolled in acting class at the Beijing Film Acad­
emy. Our instructor thought that Wang Hongwei and I ­were such abysmal
actors that when we did our acting workshop exercise we w ­ ere both assigned 57

to portray corpses! [laughs] But when I would see Wang Hongwei hanging
out around the dormitory, I was also mesmerized by his expressive body

The Home­t own Trilogy

 language. Sometimes he would shake his sleeves and just that action was
enough for me to know exactly what he was thinking. At other times he
might be angry, anxious, or looking down on someone, but he was always
able to express ­those emotions with a r­ eally creative and rich set of physical
gestures. ­There was so much depth in his movements that I felt like he could
have the potential to be an amazing actor.
In short, that was an era in which the image of the rebel was extremely
popu­lar on the silver screen. But a­ fter twenty years of filmmaking experi-
ence, I increasingly feel that the single most difficult ­thing in film is to create
a new image of what a protagonist should be. That is where the absolute
heart of cinematic innovation lies. You need to create a new type of person
and capture that new character on film.
Another impor­tant facet of my working relationship with Wang Hongwei
is that he has an innate ability to understand what I am trying to achieve—­
much more than any other actor. He always gets what I’m trying to do in my
films.

What is in­ter­est­ing is that although your first films end with the shock­
ingly power­ful credit “This film was made with nonprofessional ac­
tors,” by the time we get to Unknown Pleasures, Wang Hongwei in the
role of Xiao Wu is a kind of cultural icon, which you playfully reference.

Right, he has changed and on one level is already a cultural symbol of sorts,
which we see ­toward the end when he tries to purchase bootleg copies of
Xiao Wu and Platform.

All of your films employ large numbers of nonprofessional actors. What

are some of the pros and cons of using nonprofessional actors?

During the early phase of my ­career, I used exclusively nonprofessional ac-

tors in my films, starting with my early shorts. This r­ eally has to do with my
aesthetic taste and my desire to make films about p ­ eople in a very natu­ral
and realistic state. Professional actors have all under­gone extended speech
training and long periods of study on how to act with their bodies. So it is
very difficult to adapt their methods of movement and speech into the kind
of documentary-­esque type of narrative film I am making. An actor trained
58 in body movement is bound to stick out when walking down the streets of
a place like Fenyang; it is extremely difficult to get them to fit in with their

chapter two
 2.6 ​
Xiao Wu
Japa­nese film
poster

surrounding environment. So the benefit of using nonprofessional actors is

that their speech and movements are extremely natu­ral.
The other reason is that nonprofessional actors can ­really understand
what I am trying to express with the script. Since they grew up in a very sim-
ilar atmosphere, they can believe in the script; they believe in the characters
and their universe. For instance, the actors we used in Xiao Wu and Platform
grew up in that very environment. We would shoot scenes on streets that 59

they had been walking back and forth on for twenty or thirty years, so they

The Home­t own Trilogy

 all had a natu­ral confidence and “at home” feeling that professional actors
­can’t compare with.
Nonprofessional actors also provide me with a lot of inspiration, espe-
cially in the linguistic realm. In my scripts, dialogue is basically just a rough
blueprint with ample room for development. I always leave it up to the in-
dividual actors to choose their own words to interpret what is on the page.
Let me give you an example. Th ­ ere is a scene in Platform where Zhao Tao
is ­doing a scene with Zhong Ping where they are both smoking. So before
we began to shoot, I explained the scene to her and told her, “You just came
in from the street to tell her that Zhang Jun has gone to Guangzhou.” So
she walked in and said, “Hey, ­they’re parading some criminals down the
street!” As soon as I heard this, I was so moved. Back in the early eighties
it used to be quite common to see sentenced criminals paraded down the
streets of Fenyang for public exhibition. Her creativity in throwing in this
line was something completely inspired by her experience of growing up in
the streets of Fenyang. ­These moments of spontaneous creativity added so
much to the film, ­really making it come alive. If I had used a professional
actor, on the other hand, they prob­ably would never have added anything
like that b­ ecause they have no idea what went on in the streets of Fenyang
during that era. It is details like this that ­really added so much subtle color
to Platform.

And the challenges?

Well, at the same time ­there are also a lot of complications involved with
nonprofessional actors due to their unfamiliarity with the art. It takes a lot
of work to help them build up confidence in the characters they are playing.
For example, if I ask a nonprofessional actress to play a ­woman ­going for an
abortion, she ­will often have an internal re­sis­tance to playing such a role. Or
if I want her to perform a certain dance, she ­will ask why. All of this requires
extra effort on the part of the director. The link between the director and
nonprofessional actors is very vulnerable and demands a lot of time and
attention. Unlike professional actors who basically have a professional work-
ing relationship with the director, nonprofessionals require you to build up
friendship and trust. If the actor loses their trust in the director, t­ here is basi-
cally no hope of inducing a genuine per­for­mance. The ­whole pro­cess takes
60 a lot of time. Another f­actor that comes into play h ­ ere is the spontaneous
style with which I make films, which tends to influence the rhythm of the
work. Often an actor w ­ ill deliver lines spontaneously during shooting, and

chapter two
although the words are incredible, it sometimes gets too long, making the
scene go over and influencing the rhythm of the film. Gradually, however,
I am figuring out ways to deal with ­these types of prob­lems. A ­ fter all, that’s
what film is about—­it’s all based on experience.
But the biggest challenge is simply the amount of time you have to invest
in nonprofessional actors; ­after all, ­there are several ­factors you have to take
into consideration when working with them. The first issue has to do with
the type of language I employ when writing screenplays. When I write I
almost always use my local dialect for the dialogue—­this is true even for my
most recent film, Ash Is Purest White. That is ­because it is impossible for me
to imagine my characters without knowing where they are from. So when-
ever I write, I need to first s­ ettle on where exactly my characters are from to
establish their background. China is, ­after all, a massive country: So where
in China are they from? In what city do they live? Where did they grow up?
Since I am from Fenyang in Shanxi Province, the characters in my head
are almost always from Fenyang and they speak Shanxi dialect. Once you
start using Shanxi dialect, the language itself has its own unique methods
of expression and emotional texture. E ­ very region is unique when it comes
to this. If you compare p ­ eople from Shanxi, Shanghai, Beijing, or Guang-
zhou, you ­will quickly discover that every­one has their own unique qualities.
And since their dialects are dif­fer­ent, the vocabulary they use is dif­fer­ent, as
are their ways of expressing and understanding emotion. So when I begin
to imagine a new character and how he expresses himself, I need to know
where he is from. That means that I almost always create characters from
Shanxi, which also means that when I cast actors for t­ hese roles I try to find
actors who can speak this dialect. So if an actor from Shanxi is performing
in one of my films, they are speaking their native tongue—­this is the language
they have been speaking since childhood, which makes the per­for­mance
more natu­ral. That’s why I used nonprofessional actors almost exclusively
for my first few films. ­After all, ­there ­aren’t many professionally trained ac-
tors from Fenyang—­there ­aren’t even that many from Shanxi! [laughs] It can
be ­really hard to cast t­hese films. Take Zhao Tao, for example. She is from
Shanxi but ­isn’t actually a native of Fenyang; she is from the provincial capi-
tal of Taiyuan. But the dialect ­there is quite similar to Fenyang dialect, so it
­isn’t too hard to adapt.

Given your extensive experience working with nonprofessionals, what are 61

some of the tactics you use to get them to feel comfortable in front of the
camera?

The Home­t own Trilogy

 The single most impor­tant quality to have when working with nonprofes-
sional actors is patience b ­ ecause shooting a film is a totally new experience
for them. You need to take time to allow the actors to familiarize themselves
with the set and the general shooting environment. And another challenge
is teaching them to put their guard down and let themselves go. Not every­
one is able to feel comfortable and relaxed in front of the camera and truly
let their vulnerable side be seen. Professional actors are trained in how to
do this, but nonprofessionals rely on the director to help them adapt to this
new environment.
Early on, my crew was usually quite small. At the early phase of my c­ areer,
I needed only around thirty ­people to shoot a film, since I had a fairly nimble
crew. One method I often would use was to have the nonprofessional actors
spend all their time with us starting about three weeks before shooting.
We would go to karaoke together, play mah-­jongg, sing songs, go out to eat,
and basically spend all our waking hours together. This ­isn’t just so the actors
become familiar with me; it is also so they can get comfortable with the
cameramen, the soundman, and every­one ­else in the crew. I want them all
to be like old friends who r­ eally understand each other by the time we start
shooting; that way, the actors feel like they are part of the crew.
Besides that, another ­factor is the importance of rehearsal for nonprofes-
sional actors. I ­don’t rehearse ­every scene ­because I still ­really love the freshness
and spontaneity when actors are performing. ­There is a direct and sponta-
neous emotional release that occurs when acting a scene that ­hasn’t been
overrehearsed. But for nonprofessionals, ­there are always certain scenes that
require a run-­through. That’s ­because even rehearsal is something quite for-
eign for a nonprofessional actor. However, through the pro­cess of rehearsal,
nonprofessional actors can become acquainted and comfortable with this
­thing called acting. If you d ­ on’t rehearse with them and just throw them in
front of a camera, they find themselves suddenly faced with two forms of
pressure: the stress of per­for­mance and the stress of the camera. However,
if you rehearse with them and allow them time to get comfortable with the
cameramen and the rest of the crew, you can significantly reduce t­ hese two
stress ­factors. I usually like to select a few of the more difficult scenes for
them to rehearse. For instance, the scene in Xiao Wu where Wang Hongwei
visits Jin Xiaoyong to ask why he w ­ asn’t invited to his wedding and ends
with Wang Hongwei stealing Jin’s lighter. That is prob­ably the single most
62 impor­tant scene for ­those two characters, so I began with that scene and
we spent a lot of time rehearsing. As we ran through the scene, I would ex-
plain the screenplay and discuss the actors’ understanding of their respective

chapter two
characters; this of course touches on their overall understanding of plot that
I discussed ­earlier. ­These are some of the basic methods I use when trying
to resolve the challenges faced when working with nonprofessional actors.
Another issue when working with nonprofessional actors is the need to
­really understand them: their conception of self-­respect, their personality,
the level of sensitivity. Sometimes all it takes is a deeper understanding of an
actor in order for me to create a method through which he or she can ­really
break through and assume the role.

While your first few films all employed a cast of nonprofessional actors,
you ­later began to branch out and work with more and more professional
actors: in 24 City you worked with Joan Chen, Lü Liping, and Chen Jian­
bin; then you went on to work with more Chinese celebrity actors in Touch
of Sin, such as Wang Baoqiang and Jiang Wu. Th ­ ese collaborations repre­
sent a very dif­fer­ent approach than what you ­were used to early in your
­career, but what new challenges did working with celebrity actors pre­sent?
And in what ways was the collaborative pro­cess more comfortable?

The most comfortable ­thing was not having to do all of that prep work on
the front end. Instead, the real work came down to acclimating to ­these dif­
fer­ent actors. I needed to find a way to let ­these dif­fer­ent actors understand
what I was trying to do through my films and allow them to get used to my
approach to filmmaking.
For my three most recent films—­Touch of Sin, Mountains May Depart,
and Ash Is Purest White—­I employed quite a few professional actors. Touch
of Sin featured Jiang Wu and Wang Baoqiang; Mountains May Depart fea-
tured Dong Zijian and Sylvia Chang; Ash Is Purest White costarred Liao
Fan; and of course all of ­these films featured my wife! [laughs] This shift is
partially due to the fact that, ever since Touch of Sin, my views about cinema
began to undergo some changes and I started to play with genre cinema in a
much more overt manner. From the portrayal of characters at the screenplay
stage to the final character designs, Touch of Sin was heavi­ly influenced by
the wuxia genre, especially the classic novel The W ­ ater Margin. All of the
characters in the film are like the protagonists from that classic novel, and
you can even detect traces of Wu Song, Lin Chong, and Lu Zhishen in the
story.
When you appropriate a set genre, you end up needing to increase the 63

dramatic ele­ments in the film. This is an area where the specialized training
of professional actors comes in handy, allowing them to capture ­these more

The Home­t own Trilogy

 challenging characters with greater ease. Another f­actor for working with
more professional actors has to do with a change that began to take place
among actors in the industry. In the 1990s, when I first began making movies,
­there ­were not a lot of films shot in the realist mode. Since most films w ­ ere
more dramatic, actors held on to a view of per­for­mance that made it difficult
for them to accept a director who asked them to go for a more realist tone
that was closer to everyday life. Since ­there ­were so few films being made in
that realist manner, most actors faced real challenges when it came to nailing
a per­for­mance that was both naturalistic and realistic in tone. Their perspec-
tive on what per­for­mance entails was simply too far off. This required me to
waste a lot of time explaining ­things to actors and carry­ing out all kinds of
experiments before we could begin shooting. Nonprofessional actors, on the
other hand, ­didn’t have any of that baggage and could deliver per­for­mances
that I wanted much easier. But ­after twenty years, ­there is now a crop of ac-
tors who can take on dramatic roles while also being able to deliver very
natu­ral, true-­to-­life per­for­mances. This new breed of professional actors are
fully able to appreciate films that accentuate a style that shuns any hint of an
actor’s “performing.” ­There has indeed been a shift in per­for­mance styles.
So now when I work with celebrity actors like Liao Fan and request they go
for a more natu­ral acting style, they are only all too happy to accommodate.
They now also have a deep understanding of what kind of per­for­mance style
I am looking for as a director. In some sense, this is just like how we h ­ andle
technical aspects of film like lighting. Of course, we need to have lighting for
our films, but I always stress a lighting style that falls on the side of natu­ral
lighting. Since ­these films are genre films, ­there are naturally some essential
dramatic ele­ments, but for the per­for­mance approach I always stress a more
natu­ral style.

Could you describe the screenwriting pro­cess for Platform? How was
the story first designed, and how did you figure out the structure for the
film?

Platform is actually the first full-­length screenplay I ever wrote; I wrote it

during my sophomore year at the Beijing Film Acad­emy right ­after I had
completed shooting Xiao Shan ­Going Home. However, when I was eventually
able to raise close to 300,000 rmb in funding to shoot a feature film, I was
64 concerned it ­wouldn’t be enough for Platform. Since the screenplay was so
long, the story spanned such a long time period—­from the 1970s to the late
1980s—­and ­because the troupe tours around dif­fer­ent provinces, it required

chapter two
 2.7 ​Jia Zhangke (left), Wang
Hongwei (center), and Zhao Tao
(right) on the set of Platform

shooting at numerous locations: t­ hese w ­ ere the ­factors that led me to shoot
Xiao Wu first. But Platform ­will always be my first screenplay.
So, what led me to write this screenplay? I left my hometown in Shanxi
to study at the Beijing Film Acad­emy in 1995, and it was actually only a­ fter
arriving in Beijing that I started to gradually begin to understand my home-
town. Before that time, I had basically spent my entire life in Shanxi. It is
like the old saying, “It is only when you leave your hometown b ­ ehind that
you can truly know that place called home.” That’s ­because it is only ­after
you have this spatial distance—­only ­after I arrived in Beijing—­that I began
to have all kinds of memories about home that came back to me. Once I
was in Beijing, I began to experience a new set of emotions regarding my
hometown.
Another reason I wanted to make Platform has to do with that era—­the
entire film is basically an ode to the eighties decade—­the entirety of Chinese
society was experiencing the single most explosive era of social change and
individual liberation of the modern era. That was the age when p ­ eople w
­ ere
all longing to get out and see the outside world, and when that era came to
an end in 1989, all kinds of ­things ended with that. I have always felt that
the period during which I wrote the screenplay was at a par­tic­u­lar moment
when the Chinese reform period was at its most stagnant; it had basically
come to a complete halt. The social atmosphere at the time grew very heavy
and grim, and even ­people like me who ­were only twenty-­five or twenty-­six
years old keenly felt that the 1980s ­were gone and this was truly the end of
an era. This led me to also have a dif­fer­ent understanding of my hometown 65

and also created a deep nostalgia for that lost atmosphere of the 1980s. This
is the backdrop against which I began writing the screenplay for Platform.

The Home­t own Trilogy

 When it came down to shooting the screenplay for Platform, ­there was
actually an intense pro­cess of subversion where I had to turn a lot of ele­
ments upside down. At first the screenplay was extremely long, with so
many characters undergoing all kinds of changes in their lives that I wanted
to portray. I de­cided to shoot the film in a way that traced their movements,
starting from an extremely isolated environment and eventually moving from
the collective to the individual, and then from the individual back to a ­family
structure. In the end, my protagonist gets married, ­settles down, and returns
to a highly structured life within the confines of a social system. That’s the
story I wanted to tell, and that was the basic narrative structure.

Once it came to the production phase, in what ways did you have to adjust
the original screenplay?

In the original screenplay, ­every detail in the characters’ lives was clearly
delineated: you could easily trace out all of the c­ auses and effects in their
lives. For instance, the reason that Zhao Tao’s character made all of t­ hose
vari­ous decisions in the film w­ ere all spelled out in black and white: the rea-
son she d ­ idn’t go on the road with the song-­and-­dance troupe was b ­ ecause
she got a better job with the local tax bureau. The original screenplay even
had a segment where her ­family tried introducing her to all kinds of pro-
spective suitors ­after she left the troupe, but she ­didn’t like any of them.
By the time Cui Mingliang returned to Fenyang from his years of touring,
Zhao Tao was beginning to get a bit old to be a single w ­ oman, which is
why she married him. In the early version of the screenplay ­these ­were all
details that ­were clearly spelled out. But ­after one week of shooting I de­
cided to throw out that version of the screenplay ­because I realized it had
some prob­lems.
So what led me to halt shooting a­ fter only one week? The main reason
was that I realized how much I hated that omniscient perspective where
the camera seems to know every­thing. In our real everyday lives we often
understand ­people through scattered fragments. Take the example of my
neighbor. They have a d ­ aughter who usually goes to school e­ very morning at a
set time, but then I started to occasionally see her during the day shopping
with her ­mother—­immediately I knew that she ­wasn’t in school anymore.
She only made it halfway through high school before deciding to drop out.
66 I ­don’t know why—­I ­don’t think any of the other neighbors knew why ­either.
Sometime ­later I discovered that she must have gotten a job at the post office
­because I would see her wearing a postal uniform. Before long I started to

chapter two
see her with a young man in the morning who would walk her to work—­I
knew that she must have a boyfriend. Then one day I heard the sound of
firecrackers and knew that she must have gotten married. Normally, t­hese
are the kinds of fragmented details that everyday life gives us. So how come
when we make films we suddenly have an omniscient perspective? At the
very least, I knew that at least for this film I did not want to have an all-­
seeing eye that would capture every­thing my characters w ­ ere ­doing. I instead
wanted to bring the narrative perspective back to what my understanding of
­these characters would be in real life, but in order to achieve that, I needed to
severely limit my perspective. I consciously wanted to shoot a film without
that omniscient point of view. So as we shot Platform I kept revising the
screenplay to adjust it to this new perspective and ended up making some
very dramatic changes.

You have a quite a few shots where the camera gradually pans across an
environment, and as the camera moves, so too the characters reposition
themselves, creating a radically dif­fer­ent mise-­en-­scène within a single shot.
In other cases, you have a fixed camera but the characters are constantly
moving, also changing the mise-­en-­scène in in­ter­est­ing ways. One such
example of the latter approach occurred in Platform when Wang Hong­
wei’s and Zhao Tao’s characters are atop the city wall discussing their rela­
tionship. How much of shots like that is planned out in advance, and how
much is improvised on set?

In order to answer this question, let me begin by explaining a bit about my

working method: I always start with a literary screenplay. That’s ­because
when I was studying at the Beijing Film Acad­emy our curriculum was heavi­ly
influenced by Soviet film training methods, and Soviet screenplays are quite
literary—­they require screenplays that can stand on their own as pieces of
lit­er­a­ture. So my screenplays have a lot of rich descriptive language. Even
­today I still prefer to write screenplays in this style ­because it provides a
method by which I can clearly convey the type of story and overall tone I am
trying to achieve to all of my collaborators. This is also the screenplay I use
on set during shooting—­I usually d ­ on’t prepare a separate shooting script
with all of the shot breakdowns. So when it comes to the a­ ctual shot break-
down and camera setup, we usually work all of that out when we actually
start shooting. 67

Let’s talk about the scene you mentioned in Platform where Zhao Tao
and Cui Mingliang are atop the city wall, but as they move about, the wall

The Home­t own Trilogy

 periodically obscures them in the shot. As I was rehearsing that scene on
set, I discovered that this perspective would be a perfect complement to the
subtle and awkward nature of their relationship—he was constantly walking
in and out of her life, close one minute and distant the next. So that led me to
utilize that approach for the scene. Just a few subtle movements on the part
of the actors, and they would suddenly be out of the shot and then back in.
And it matched the story perfectly b ­ ecause at that point in the narrative the
nature of their romantic relationship was quite ambiguous; it was precisely
the point where ­things ­were teetering on a brink.
The scene also marks the only time in the film that Wang Hongwei asks
Zhao Tao about the nature of their relationship. We de­cided to shoot the
scene on top of the city wall, and I kept feeling that using words alone to
express their feelings ­wouldn’t carry the weightiness that I was ­going for. So
I started thinking about the possibility of playing with the a­ ngle to visually
accent the characters’ feelings. Suddenly I discovered that corner with that
hidden a­ ngle. Basically, Wang’s pacing in and out of frame represents his
inability to completely enter her world and the fact that they seem destined
to keep g­ oing back and forth, unable to r­ eally be together. We actually shot
that scene in several ways, but none of them seemed to click. Fi­nally, I had
every­one take a break while I tried to work out a way to ­handle the scene,
and that’s when I thought of using that cornered a­ ngle, and it seemed to
­really bring the scene together.
When it comes to true-­to-­life documentary-­style shooting methods, ­there
is often a sense of dislocation between the subject and the camera. What do
I mean by this dislocation? If you are in a real-­life location and trying to
rec­ord the surroundings—­and not just re-­create a realistic environment—­
whenever your attention moves from one spot to another, the characters
never wait for the camera to follow them. They never cooperate with you.
They always end up walking away or eventually start d ­ oing something ­else.
But I have always felt that this is precisely one of the most beautiful t­ hings
about the truth of documentary-­style films. This is the beauty of truth, the
beauty of real­ity. In traditional narrative films, the camera always follows
the actors and they have a close relationship. In narrative films, your cam-
era might pan away from an actor, but when it returns, the actor has actu-
ally been waiting all along for the camera to return so he can resume his
per­for­mance. But in my method of making narrative films, I ­really hope to
68 occasionally employ methods and a­ ngles that are more common in docu-
mentary films and convey a deeper sense of real­ity. My camera may pan
away from an actor, but when it eventually returns, ­there is no one waiting

chapter two
for the camera. They may have already walked out of frame, or gone on to do
something ­else. This is one of the subtle t­ hings that I have taken away from
documentary filmmaking and attempted to apply to my feature narrative
films. Of course, it is not something I can employ all the time, but when you
occasionally sneak this technique in, it can bring a subtle change in texture
to certain scenes.
­People often talk about the fact that my feature films have a documentary-­
esque sensibility, but as far as I’m concerned, what they are more concerned
with is the notion of real­ity in and of itself, ­because what is “true” ­will always
be relative. So for me the most impor­tant ­thing about film is its sense of
truth, its sense of authenticity. Deep down I have always felt that since the
invention of this medium we call film, the most beautiful aspect of this art
form is the way in which it can pre­sent the world with a sense of authenticity:
the way we eat, the way we walk, the sky, nature, our cities. The most power­
ful medium when it comes to reproducing the authenticity of the real world
is film. And this is what I take to be the most enticing aspect of cinema.
Given ­these feelings, when I make films I am always striving to create this
sense of real­ity. I would never dare to say that my films are “real”—­after all,
that is a dif­fer­ent category, it is also a dif­fer­ent concept—­but “realism” is an
aesthetic concept, and I always strive for a kind of beauty in my films and
that is the beauty of realism.
Back in 2013, when I was shooting A Touch of Sin, t­ here was a scene fea-
turing Wang Baoqiang buying a train ticket at a crowded train station dur-
ing the Spring Festival holiday. The station was packed with p ­ eople buying
tickets, and when we w ­ ere shooting we needed to control the location. The
greatest challenge was how to ensure that the thousand extras we had t­ here
for the shoot revealed an order that was natu­ral and true to life. We needed
a kind of natu­ral logic to arrange such a large-­scale location; it is not enough
to just take this crowd of p ­ eople and stick them into that location. We needed
to boil it down to the everyday real-­life world and have a logical reason for
why each person was t­ here; what are they d ­ oing ­there at the station? So you
have to figure out who is buying tickets, who is just standing around, who is
shopping at some of the stores in the station. All of this needs to be designed.
Over the course of the past few years my films have moved closer to genre
cinema: A Touch of Sin was designed according to the structure of martial
arts films; Ash Is Purest White borrows ele­ments from gangster films. But
even as I move closer to genre films, I still strive to make films in which the 69

characters, natu­ral environment, and the overall tone and mood are all true
to life and realistic. This is extremely impor­tant for me.

The Home­t own Trilogy

 2.8 ​Yu Lik-­Wai (left) and
Jia Zhangke (right) on
the set of Platform

­ arlier we talked about some of the subtle changes in your shots, such
E
as camera movement, but in Platform you are also documenting a much
bolder form of historical change. The film explores the transformation of
an entire era, social movement, and the passage of time. Given the l­ imited
bud­get you had to work with, what techniques did you use to convey the
passage of time? Can you talk about how you used subtle changes in cos­
tume, props, hairstyle, art design, and character design to convey the pas­
sage of time?

70 Platform spans an entire de­cade from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, and
conveying that radical change was indeed challenging—­a de­cade is simply
too long! When you are dealing with such a long time span, ­there are a lot of

chapter two
ele­ments that end up getting mixed together: some ­things change, ­others re-
main the same, and then t­ here are some ele­ments that superficially look the
same but are actually completely dif­fer­ent. Given this situation, one of the
first ­things you have to do is deal with the issue of making a judgment call
on how to deal with ­these issues. Let’s start with the issue of costume design.
The first proposal my costume designer gave me planned to use exclusively
Mao-­style tunic jackets for the late 1970s and then switch to light jackets in
the early 1980s, then gradually we would switch t­ hose out for Western-­style
suit jackets. By the time we got to the late 1980s, the plan was to transition
to cream-­color windbreakers, which ­were very popu­lar then. The benefit of
that costume design plan was that each time period was very clearly delin-
eated. Just one look and you knew exactly what year you ­were in. However,
when I scrutinized the overall proposal, ­there was something that ­didn’t
sit right with me. Th ­ ere ­were certainly clear fashion trends in China d ­ uring
that time; ­people did indeed suddenly start wearing dif­fer­ent types of cloth-
ing that came into fashion, but that w ­ asn’t exactly how t­ hings played out in
real life during that time. For instance, in the early 1980s ­there ­were a lot of
­people who started wearing Western-­style jackets, but it was just one seg-
ment of the population—­definitely not every­one. What was ­really ­going on
was that while some p ­ eople ­were wearing Western jackets, o ­ thers ­were wear-
ing suit jackets, and then ­there w ­ ere still a lot of ­people wearing their old
Mao-­style tunic jackets. I felt mixing it up like that would be a much more
convincing approach. ­After all, what we w ­ ere ­going for was historical accu-
racy, but not some kind of historical time stamp. If you just want to produce
something that ­will immediately read as the product of a certain era, well,
that is easy to do. What we ­were attempting to do with this more hybrid
approach was much more difficult. L ­ ater my costume designer and I fig-
ured out a method to achieve what we ­were g­ oing for: we went back to my
old school and looked up the old class graduation photos from the 1980s.
Once we looked at that de­cade of class photos side by side, we quickly real-
ized that the fashions ­were indeed quite uneven and mixed. Once we saw
that, we began to utilize this hybrid approach for the costume designs in
Platform.
Then ­there ­were some very minor details that I was also insistent upon
paying attention to. For instance, t­here is one scene in Platform that takes
place in the late 1970s where a group of girls are rehearsing for a per­for­
mance, and at one point, they kick their legs up, exposing their socks. They 71

­were wearing synthetic fiber socks. When I saw that, I immediately knew
that t­ hose types of socks d
­ idn’t come into fashion u ­ ntil the 1980s. In the 1970s

The Home­t own Trilogy

 every­one was still wearing coarse wool socks—­there is no way that anyone
would be wearing ­those synthetic fiber socks in the 1970s! If we wanted
to switch out the socks for fifty or sixty actors, it would have been a major
proj­ect—we simply ­didn’t have the appropriate socks on hand and ­were not
prepared. But in the end, I de­cided we had to make the switch. So we shut
down production and went on to shoot some other sequences before com-
ing back to reshoot that dance rehearsal scene. I felt that since I noticed
the socks ­were inaccurate and felt they d ­ idn’t look right, I knew we had to
change it. My cinematographer argued that it was the kind of detail that no
one would ever even notice on-­screen! Who would even be able to tell the
difference between synthetic fiber socks and wool socks!? [laughs] But, as
a director, I felt that once I noticed something was wrong, how could I still
include that in my film? How could I knowingly include something that is
historically inaccurate? If I had cut corners like that, I prob­ably would never
be able to look at that film again! So it is a good ­thing I insisted on changing
the socks ­because now I can at least watch the film without feeling too em-
barrassed! [laughs] So a lot of what I do is tied to the accumulation of ­these
types of fine details.
If you w­ ere to ask me about how we w ­ ere able to shoot Platform on such
a tight bud­get, I think the best example I can give you has to do with cos-
tumes. When we ­were looking for costumes for Zhao Tao’s character, we
tried out all kinds of outfits, but none of them ­were quite right. ­Later I found
some of my older ­sister’s old clothes from that era, and when Zhao Tao put
them on they ­really felt just right. My ­sister is six years older than me, and
the characters in the film are all basically from her generation. The open-
ing of Platform takes place around the time I was seven or eight years old,
which was in 1978 or 1979; so the film is ­really the story of my older ­sister’s
generation. So we dug all of my ­sister’s old clothes out of the closet and had
them washed and disinfected, and that is what Zhao Tao wore in the film.
In the closing credits we even list the two “clothes washers,” who ­were ­really
amazing! They collected all of ­these old clothes, washed them, and prepared
them for the actors so they would all feel comfortable. So this was one way
in which we truly captured the pulse of the era in an accurate way but also
saved a lot of money!
Another reason we needed to save money was ­because the vast majority
of our bud­get was devoted to production costs. When we w ­ ere shooting
72 Platform, we had fourteen-­hour workdays. A lot of ­people commented on
our low production costs; actually the production costs for my films are ex-
tremely high ­because we invested our youth in ­those films! By the time we

chapter two
 2.9 ​Zhao Tao (left) and Yang
Lina (right) on the set of
Platform

got to the last week of shooting, we had burned through our entire bud­get
and ­were almost broke. We had no choice but to quickly wrap up the shoot.
By the end, my producer was buying me cans of Red Bull just to get through
each day. They kept my body ­going forward, but my mind started to slow
down! [laughs] But I indeed invested my youth in that film.

Critics of traditional Chinese lit­er­a­ture sometimes use the dynamic be­

tween jing (stillness) and dong (movement) to describe a certain literary
technique in classical Chinese poetry. On some level, I feel that Platform
also engages with a similar dialogue between stillness and movement. In
Platform “stillness” is epitomized by Fenyang, the city wall, tradition, and 73

daily life; “movement” can be seen through ­those external ele­ments that
pre­sent the world outside such as Guangzhou, Wenzhou, the Reform Era,

The Home­t own Trilogy

 and the troupe’s life on the road. What are your thoughts on the film’s re­
lationship with stillness and movement?

Well, the film is a story about movement. ­After the first third of the film, the
protagonists are basically on the road as touring performers. So it is the story
of them leaving ­behind an isolated place and traveling from one place to an-
other. But in the end, Cui Mingliang returns home to the order of everyday
life. ­Toward the end of the 1980s ­there was a period of time when every­thing
seemed to stop and ­there was a genuine feeling of stillness. Then by 1995
or 1996, society started to come back to life again. A ­ fter 1989 t­here was a
dark period where ­things ­were quite oppressive, but then by the mid-1990s
­there was the so-­called Second Wave of the Reform Era. This second-­wave
of reforms ­were directed primarily at the economic realm, while culture and
intellectual trends just continued along the same lines as in the 1980s. But
the economic changes w ­ ere quite dramatic. All of Platform is revealing the
transition from a closed society to when ­things started to move and eventu-
ally leap forward, but in the end, every­thing goes back to everyday f­ amily
life where it began—­that’s the cycle of change I wanted to express. Accord-
ing to the Chinese perspective, the concept of f­amily represents a kind of
stillness. So in the end, Cui Mingliang returns to the structure of a ­family
system. For me it is this system that is most impor­tant: when the film be-
gins he is part of an official song-­and-­dance troupe, which is also a type of
system or organ­ization. He and the other protagonists are all part of that
system. ­After all of his travels and touring around the country, he returns
home, gets married, becomes a f­ ather, and is now part of the f­ amily system.
I wanted to use this as a foil to set against all ­those years of restless travel.
As far as I am concerned, this journey that they are on is a journey in search
of freedom.

Each installment of your Hometown Trilogy is quite dif­fer­ent stylistically,

but they are also very dif­f er­ent in terms of the technical approach you took
on each film. Xiao Wu was shot on 16mm, Platform was shot on 35mm,
and Unknown Pleasures was shot on digital. How does shooting in dif­fer­
ent formats and using dif­fer­ent technology impact the style and content
of your work?

74 The transition from 16mm to 35mm was due to clear technical consider-
ations. For Xiao Wu I was hoping to r­ eally capture that “on-­the-­scene” aes-
thetic and rec­ord what was happening in the “­here and now.” At the time, I

chapter two
r­ eally wanted to use handheld cameras, and 16mm handheld cameras w ­ ere
lighter, smaller, and more con­ve­nient to shoot with. This allowed me to get
closer to my protagonists and navigate around the real-­life environments of
my characters. So when we shot Xiao Wu we ­didn’t use any dolly tracks or
any other special equipment. Instead, we just put the camera on our shoul-
ders or on a tripod, and 16mm was enough for us to capture that documen-
tary aesthetic.
For Platform we de­cided to use 35mm ­because we ­were facing an era that
had passed us by, and I wanted to create a greater sense of distance between
the camera and the characters. Moreover, I wanted to keep the number of
shots down and instead focus on fixed camera ­angles, long takes, and long
shots as the overriding look of the film. With that aesthetic in mind, I knew
that 16mm ­wouldn’t deliver the kind of quality image that 35mm could. And
that is why I switched to 35mm for Platform.
By the time I got to Unknown Pleasures, I de­cided to switch to digital.
From an aesthetic perspective, I ­didn’t give this switch too much consider-
ation at first. I just thought it was a new film medium to explore and it was
quite con­ve­nient. It was just as con­ve­nient as 16mm, and it had fairly low
requirements in terms of lighting. That meant that we could shoot in low
lighting situations without many special light sources. It was that ­simple,
and that’s how I came to first experiment with digital film. But as I was shoot-
ing I quickly realized that the format had a big impact on my methods and
approaches.

Did the amount of footage you shot greatly increase when you started shoot­
ing in digital?

It increased quite a bit. I also did a lot more experiments with dif­fer­ent char-
acters and locations. To give you an example, back when I shot on location
in Xiao Wu, I had two basic approaches: ­either prepare the scene with actors
in advance or just go in quickly and do one or two takes before packing up
and moving on. However, a­ fter the transition to digital, I could shoot in the
same location for several days, allowing the environment to gradually grow
accustomed to our presence. In the past I needed to rely on a style of guerrilla
filmmaking where I would try to get some footage in the can before p ­ eople
even had a chance to register what we ­were ­doing. With digital I could set up
in a train station or pool hall and just stay t­ here a few days. In the beginning 75

the presence of our camera would create a disturbance in the environment,

but a­ fter two or three days, you become part of the environment and ­people

The Home­t own Trilogy

 stop paying any special attention to you. So ­after shooting in digital I started
to utilize this method.
At the time, the deepest impression that digital left on me was that when
shooting in public spaces it somehow allowed me to get a kind of abstract
feeling. Why do I say that? Once every­one is completely comfortable with
your presence, the environment around you begins to reveal its natu­ral tex-
ture and sensibilities to you. But somehow through that pro­cess you are left
with an abstract feeling. In films like Xiao Wu we would barge in, shoot
shoot shoot, and every­one on camera was touched with a kind of excitement
and energy. The camera would change the feeling of the space and alter the
mood in the room.
Unknown Pleasures also featured a richer color palette than my e­ arlier
films ­because adjusting color in postproduction is much more con­ve­nient
when working with digital. Back then we would still have to transfer the
digital back to celluloid a­ fter we had adjusted the color. Then, once trans-
ferred to celluloid, we would have one last shot at adjusting the color a final
time before locking the picture. So for Unknown Pleasures we adjusted the
colors in digital; then, a­ fter transferring to film, we did some further manip-
ulation to the colors during the development pro­cess. For this second color
adjustment, we used a special technique called “portrait method” (liuying
fa), which allowed us to add a coldness to the colors we w ­ ere adding. This is
something that you can only do with digital, and we r­ eally tried to accentu-
ate that. For the entire postproduction period, we w ­ ere continually search-
ing for the right texture and color. We wanted to find a visual style that was
unique to digital film and not use digital to re-­create the style of celluloid
film. They are, ­after all, two completely dif­fer­ent mediums that ­really c­ an’t
be compared. From that point on, my cinematographer Yu Lik-­Wai would
spend most of his time experimenting with dif­fer­ent possibilities for digital
cinema.

In 2002, when you first shot Unknown Pleasures, digital cinema was still
in its infancy. A lot of directors ­were just beginning to experiment with
digital as a less expensive alternative to celluloid. But, at the time, t­here
­were still a lot of questions about the feasibility of a true digital revolu­
tion due to the technical and aesthetic limitations of the medium as well
as the complications associated with transferring work shot in digital to
76 traditional film stock. At the time of its release, however, critics called Un-
known Pleasures the most successful film ever shot with dv technology.

chapter two
Actually, I feel that ­there are a lot of prob­lems with Unknown Pleasures. One
issue was that in the pro­cess of resolving some of the prob­lems associated
with shooting in digital, we sacrificed a lot. For instance, we cut back heavi­ly
on exterior shots due to the poor quality of filming in the sunlight. Another
prob­lem was with the dif­fer­ent camera lengths, some of which w ­ ere too long
for me to utilize—so ­there are some restrictions when working with digital.
But working in digital was ­really a new experience; I found that t­here was
much less pressure on the shoot. It was a very relaxed atmosphere. We had
the freedom to experiment with many dif­fer­ent ­things.
For instance, the second-­to-­last scene in Unknown Pleasures when the
character Xiao Ji is riding his motorcycle down the highway—­that w ­ hole
scene is purely the result of digital. In the scene Xiao Ji’s bike starts to stall,
and suddenly it begins to thunder and rain—­the ­whole scene came together
beautifully; it was as if the environment was complementing his internal feel-
ings. Actually that scene had already been finished, and we ­were packing up
for the day when the sky suddenly grew dark and it looked like it was g­ oing
to pour. Now, if I had been making a traditional film, I would have just told
every­one to pack it up and go home for the day; ­after all, we already had a
good take. But since we ­were shooting in digital, ­there was no pressure, we
­were completely ­free, so I suggested one more take. That final take [with the
rain] was the one we used in the film.
Digital film also seems to bring a certain degree of abstractness when
shooting in public spaces. This required some readjustment on my side b ­ ecause
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. E ­ very space has a kind of abstract order. Tra-
ditional film works to break up this order, making ­people appear active and
excited, but digital interacts with its subjects in a very quiet way, enabling me
to capture a cold, distant, almost abstract quality. This is something I realized
a few days ­after shooting and adjusted to fit the story. Actually, it worked quite
well for a film about lost youth like this.

Let’s talk a moment about the place of destruction and ruins in your
Hometown Trilogy. ­Toward the end of Xiao Wu an entire block is being
torn down, but by the time we get to Unknown Pleasures, it appears an
entire city is in a state of utter ruin. Can you talk a bit about the politics of
destruction in your work, from the destruction of youth or the destruc­ 77

tion of locales?

The Home­t own Trilogy

 2.10 ​
Unknown Pleasures
French film poster

­ ere are definitely some connections between Xiao Wu and Unknown Plea-
Th
sures; not only is ­there the cameo reappearance of the character Xiao Wu,
but ­there is also the echoing of the motif of destruction. The entire city ex-
ists in a state of desolation. All of t­ hose old industrial factories have s­ topped
production, leaving a cold, abandoned feeling that permeates the city. Da-
tong left me with all kinds of feelings of desperation and devastation. In one
sense, it is truly a city in ruins, and the p­ eople who inhabit it very much live
in a spiritual world that reflects their environment.
78

One very in­ter­est­ing difference between Fifth Generation filmmakers and

the younger generation of filmmakers like yourself lies in the realm of

chapter two
adaptation and source material. Virtually all the major cinematic works of
Fifth Generation and older-­generation filmmakers are adapted from liter­
ary sources, while the Sixth Generation, or Urban Generation, as they are
sometimes called, have often opted for a more spontaneous approach and
have preferred original screenplays over adaptations.

This is indeed a major change. One reason for this change is that Fifth Genera-
tion directors seem to need to extract their material from historical and liter-
ary texts in order to carry out their cinematic creativity. Younger-­generation
filmmakers seem to pay more re­spect to their own life experience. They are
willing to directly express their lives through film. Naturally, Fifth Genera-
tion filmmakers express their life experience through their work as well, but
it is not as direct. They create a space between themselves and the cinematic
text, and this space often comes through the intervention of adaptation. My
big turning point in this re­spect came when I saw Hou Hsiao-­hsien’s Boys
from Fengkui (Fenggui laide ren, 1983), which ­really taught me to trust my
own experience. At the same time, I’m not at all against adapting a novel or
literary work for film. I plan to write my own screenplays for my next two
features or so, but in the f­ uture I would r­ eally love to adapt a novel. Actually,
[right ­after making Unknown Pleasures] I was considering adapting a French
novel called La condition humaine (The ­Human Condition) by French author
André Malraux.2 It is a story about Shanghai in the 1920s, and if we ever do
it, we would prob­ably shoot in Southeast Asia.

One of the themes in your work is the repetition of actions. Examples of this
include the continuous opening and closing of the switchblade in Platform,
the repeated slapping of Xiao Ji, and the pushing game between Qiao San
and Qiao Qiao in Unknown Pleasures. What is the function of t­ hese repeti­
tive games in the narrative fabric of your films?

They represent a kind of mechanistic lifestyle. For instance, the pushing game
between Qiao San and Qiao Qiao—­actually their relationship is nothing but a
cycle of mutual provocation. They are blind in their relationship, neither knows
what love is—­all that they have left is this rote and mechanical method of
antagonizing one another as a futile attempt to change their situation. Or
in the karaoke bar where they are beating Xiao Ji and continually repeating
that same line, in that scene the two of them are using their stubborn stances 79

to express the pain they have inside. At least, that’s what was g­ oing through
my mind while shooting ­those scenes.

The Home­t own Trilogy

 I was wondering if you would mind playing a ­little game. I would like to
describe a handful of key scenes from each of your three features and have
you tell me what was g­ oing through your mind from a filmmaker’s per­
spective as you w
­ ere filming each respective scene.
Starting with the opening scene of Xiao Wu, our first visual introduc­
tion to the protagonist, the first t­hing we see is a close-up of Xiao Wu’s
hands lighting a cigarette before he boards the bus. The scene culminates
with the climactic juxtaposition of Xiao Wu picking the pocket of the pas­
senger next to him and the mini-­portrait of Chairman Mao hanging from
the rearview mirror of the bus.

Well, the second half of that scene is a standard montage. Basically, I wanted
to describe a new phenomenon playing itself out u ­ nder the gaze of [a sym-
bol of] traditional hegemony. I de­cided to open the film with a shot of his
hands ­because he is a pickpocket; as a thief, his hands are the tools of his
trade. The package of matches in his hand actually has Shanxi written on it.
I de­cided to add this prop to provide a spatial reference point to the viewers,
which is very impor­tant. The w ­ hole issue of locale was extremely close to
me when I made the film, and I wanted to highlight the fact that this was a
story about Shanxi. It was r­ eally a rarity for a camera crew to come to a place
like Shanxi and face the real­ity ­there, so I wanted to make this clear from the
beginning—so the hands for the thief and the matches for Shanxi.

­ ere is a scene in Xiao Wu where the protagonist’s childhood friend Xiao­

Th
yong touches a brick wall. Just a few scenes l­ater, Xiao Wu caresses the
same wall. What is the symbolism ­here?

You might not notice it, but t­ here are height marks carved and scraped into
the wall. ­Those scrapes are actually markers that come from a popu­lar cus-
tom in northern China where ­children the same age who are good friends
mea­sure their height by marking a wall. So t­ hose marks are a rec­ord of their
childhood, a rec­ord of them growing up. The wall, in this sense, is a symbol
of their friendship and their past.

Another moving scene in Xiao Wu is when he visits Mei Mei when she is
sick. Mei Mei sings a popu­lar song by Faye Wang (Wang Fei/Wang Jing­
80 wen), but when she asks Xiao Wu to sing a number, all he can do is flick
open his singing cigarette lighter, which plays a mechanical version of
“Für Elise.”

chapter two
In my mind Xiao Wu is the kind of character who is not good at expressing
his thoughts and feelings. But in that situation he needs to find some way
to express his feelings for this girl. I kept trying to figure out a way for him to
express his feelings when I suddenly thought of the cigarette lighter. So he
responds to her with ­music as a means of expressing his feelings for her.

What about the conclusion of Xiao Wu where we see Xiao Wu squatting

like a dog, handcuffed to a pole on the street, surrounded by a crowd of
onlookers? It is a scene of incredible power, and I was curious, what led you
to end your film with such a sudden, and in some sense brutal, conclusion?

In the original script the ending was supposed to be of the old police officer
leading Xiao Wu through the street, eventually disappearing into a crowd.
But as I was shooting, I was never r­ eally completely satisfied with this origi-
nal ending. It is a safe ending, but also a rather mediocre one. During the
twenty days of the shoot, I was constantly trying to come up with a better
ending. Suddenly, one day when we w ­ ere shooting a crowd started to gather
around to watch us filming, and I was struck with a kind of inspiration. I
de­cided to shoot a crowd scene of ­people staring at him. 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 t­ here is a shift in perspective. As
soon as I thought of it, I felt a kind of excitement. Naturally, I also thought of
Lu Xun’s conception of the crowd.3

In Platform ­there is a short but endearing scene where three p­ eople pile
on to a single bicycle and one of the passengers extends his arms as if he
can fly.

Fleeting happiness.

­ ere is a very charming scene in Xiao Wu where a beeper is being passed

Th
around to the dif­fer­ent members of the protagonist’s ­family, eliciting radi­
cally dif­fer­ent expressions from each person.

Right, for them, the beeper is a strange, unknown device. And when t­hese
new ­things enter ­people’s lives for the first time, they are beside themselves
as to how to deal with them. During that era, the Chinese p ­ eople had to 81

continually deal with the introduction of new t­ hings, and we ­really had no
idea what they ­were. It is a kind of cultural blindness.

The Home­t own Trilogy

 2.11 ​
Platform
film still

It is difficult to find a scene of such understated melancholy and cinematic

power as the climactic scene in Platform where Wang Hongwei dozes off
in a chair on a lazy after­noon as his wife takes care of their baby. It is a
scene that has been described by Kent Jones of the Film Society of Lincoln
Center as “one of the finest moments in modern movies.”4 Can you talk
about that scene?

82 I wanted to arrange an ending where they return to a state very close to that
of most other Chinese. They w
­ ere once rebellious, they once pursued their

chapter two
ideals and dreams, but in the end they return to the pace of everyday life—­
which is where most young ­people eventually end up. They return to the
trappings of the everyday.
The challenge came with how to go about expressing the state of the every-
day. And then I suddenly thought of an after­noon nap. I c­ an’t speak for life
in southern China, but in my hometown ­after starting their ­careers and get-
ting married, most p ­ eople end up living a very repetitive life where they do
the same t­ hings ­every day and the possibilities for variations are extremely
­limited. A lot of men living this type of life spend all their time at their work
unit and come home for after­noon naps. And I de­cided to use this to con-
clude the film.

The scene conveys such a lonely existence, and does so with such incred­
ible power.

It is a lonely existence. No longer is t­ here any possibility for miracles to hap-

pen. ­There is no hope for change. And then ­there is that late after­noon sun,
shining down as he naps, which also adds another layer to the scene.

83

2.12 ​Zhao Tao (left) and Wu Qiong (right) in Unknown Pleasures

The Home­t own Trilogy

 Let’s talk about Xiao Ji’s motorcycle in Unknown Pleasures. Did you in­
tend for the cycle’s continual breakdowns to serve as a meta­phor for the
youth in the film who are young and full of energy but are always “break­
ing down” and apparently ­going nowhere?

In the original screenplay ­there is nothing wrong with the motorcycle, so

that scene was something that came out spontaneously during shooting.
Suddenly the motorcycle ­wouldn’t go up the hill and began to stall. I should
have yelled cut right ­there, but I discovered that the actor’s expression at that
moment was so close to what the character was ­going through. He looked
so anxious, he wanted to make it up the hill, he wanted to get through his
youth, and to get the scene right. He kept trying, and I kept shooting. Only
­after this scene did I get the idea of revisiting the stalled-­out motorcycle
again at the end of the film. So in the penultimate scene we de­cided that we
would have him run out of gas, but then it rained and the scene was brought
to a ­whole other level.

You discussed your preference for literary screenplays over more technical
screenplays. But during the screenwriting pro­cess are you already conceiv­
ing shots and imagining the look of the film? Or do you design the visual
tone of your films l­ ater?

I often have some ideas about the imagery I want to use. When I was in
college t­here was a ­really in­ter­est­ing situation where half of the teachers
­were gradu­ates of the Moscow Film Acad­emy. That is ­because the entire film
education system in China was imported from the Soviet Union during the
1950s and 1960s, so many of our professors came out of that tradition. But by
the time I went to the Beijing Film Acad­emy ­there was a new generation of
professors who had studied in Amer­i­ca, Japan, and France, so when it came
to screenwriting t­ here ­were two distinct approaches we w­ ere exposed to: the
Soviet style and the American style. The two methods ­were completely dif­
fer­ent. The Soviet approach required a very literary style similar to a novel
but did not have any practical requirements when it came to actually shoot-
ing. [laughs] Instead, the main goal was to write something of publishable
quality that was highly readable. That was my earliest training, and even
­today I still write screenplays according to this method. Part of that is tied
84 to the fact that I have always been drawn to the pro­cess of description. I love
the pro­cess of describing colors, environments, smells—­the latter of which
you can of course never depict on film! But for me, that pro­cess is extremely

chapter two
impor­tant ­because it helps me understand the kind of mood I want to create
for the film. The more detailed my descriptions, the clearer I am about what
I want to shoot. By the time I am done with the screenplay and start to di-
rect the film, I have a very good understanding of what kind of atmosphere
I want to create for the picture. So as I am writing I am already very clear
about what kind of image I want to capture. Another essential part of this
is that the screenplay provides a blueprint for the crew to understand the
style and mood of the film. So I have always stood by this practice of writing
detailed literary screenplays for all my films, and it is a pro­cess I ­really enjoy.
When it comes to shooting, I am very much reliant on the pro­cess of
location scouting. When I do location scouting, I usually visit each location
three times. The first time I go alone; usually I have two to three options
to select from for each location. For instance, if I want to shoot a scene in
a karaoke bar, I w­ ill select a few locations and get a clear understanding of
each one. As I’m visiting ­these locations I am usually si­mul­ta­neously g­ oing
back to the screenplay and making all kinds of adjustments and revisions
to account for the logistics of the locations. That is my first round of location
scouting. For the second round, I bring along my cinematographer
Yu Lik-­Wai and we look at all the locations together. That is when we start

2.13 ​Jia
Zhangke on
location

85

The Home­t own Trilogy

 to have deeper conversations about shot breakdowns and camera ­angles; that
is when we play with dif­fer­ent options for the overall visual design. The third
visit includes the core creative team: sound designer, producer, production
man­ag­er, and even the lead actors. We go together and go through every­
thing as a team. I never draw story­boards or write shot-­by-­shot breakdowns,
but over the course of this third trip to visit the locations I always have a com-
plete shot-­by-­shot breakdown in my head. And by then the shot-­by-­shot
breakdown is not something abstract, it is grounded in specific locations:
I know exactly which ­house and which street each shot ­will take place in.

How big is the difference between your first draft screenplay and your final
film? Do you usually add new scenes during shooting?

More often than not, I cut scenes. Th

­ ere are never any major changes when it
comes to the overall structure of my films. In the case of Platform I ended up
shooting less and less as we went along; for Still Life I shot more and more!
­Every film pre­sents a set of unique circumstances to navigate.

In your entire body of work, which film diverged most greatly from the
original screenplay?

That would have to be Platform.

86

chapter two
 the world (2004)
still life (2006)

3 Documenting
Destruction and
Building Worlds

3.1 ​Jia Zhangke on location shooting The World

 But t­ here is one ele­ment that is of par­tic­
u­lar importance when you are writing a
story, and that ­thing is emotion. Once you
are moved by something, your imagination
becomes extraordinarily rich, and all kinds
of details start to come to you. ­Every
one of us has the power of observation,
­every one of us has an extraordinary
capacity to remember details, but often
when we ­can’t remember ­those details, it
is simply ­because ­there is nothing about
them that moved us—­there is no emotional
connection.

When you first came on the scene all the films in your Hometown Trilogy
­were considered “under­ground films.” Your 2004 film The World was your
first film to be commercially distributed in China. What w­ ere the consider­
ations that led you to transition from a so-­called under­ground filmmaker
to someone who could operate above ground? What ­were your concerns?
Was ­there a fear that through this pro­cess you would lose some of your
freedom and autonomy?

I began shooting my first film, Xiao Wu, on April 10, 1997—at the time I ­hadn’t
even graduated yet and was still a student at the Beijing Film Acad­emy. At
88 the time, I just thought I was shooting another student film and ­didn’t give
the pro­cess that much thought. Jumping ahead to February 1998, Xiao Wu
was selected for competition at the Berlin Film Festival, and before I even

chapter three
realized what was g­ oing on, the film started to get picked up for distribution
in several countries, including France and ­Korea, and it started to make an
impact. ­Things continued like that for a while ­until one day some ­people
from the Film Bureau came to have a chat with me. It was only when they
told me, “You have ­violated the rules,” that I realized I had indeed not followed
proper protocol when submitting the film! [laughs] Somehow, without even
realizing how it ­really happened, from that point forward I was labeled a so-­
called under­ground director! [laughs]
­Later, when I was preparing to shoot Platform, I ­really hoped the film
would be able to be commercially distributed in China. It was r­ eally impor­
tant for my film to be seen by Chinese audiences, so I was very careful to go
through all the proper channels to apply for shooting approval. However,
­because of my previous rec­ord with Xiao Wu, they did not approve the film.
I de­cided to go ahead with the film anyway, and ­later I also made Unknown
Pleasures.
During that period the film censors and I d ­ idn’t have a ­great desire to
reach out to each other. [laughs] I actually ­didn’t even know how to get in
touch with them; ­there w ­ ere no open channels. Fast-­forward to 2003, I had
just completed the screenplay for The World when the dean from the Beijing
Film Acad­emy called to inform me that the Film Bureau was planning a
symposium with under­ground film directors. He asked me to attend, so I
went. When I arrived, I discovered fifty directors sitting ­there! I had no idea
China had so many under­ground film directors! [laughs]
That meeting turned out to be quite famous, and a lot of books on in­de­
pen­dent Chinese cinema make reference to that symposium. The gist of the
meeting was that the Film Bureau expressed its hope that, moving forward,
under­ground directors would all go through the proper channels to apply
for the required permits and permissions when making films. They also said
that the nature of Chinese cinema was changing, and they expressed their
hope that every­one’s film could be commercially exhibited in China. Since I
had just completed my screenplay for The World, I submitted it to a state-­run
film studio, Shanghai Film Group. The head of the studio (Ren Zhonglun)
was a former film critic who used to be the editor of the Wenhui Film Times.
He r­ eally liked my screenplay, but before we moved the proj­ect forward
I asked him, “Can I expect any interference from you?” He responded by
saying, “I ­will never interfere in your work. I hope that the Shanghai Film
Group can make a Jia Zhangke film—­what I d ­ on’t want is Jia Zhangke to 89

make a Shanghai Film Group film!” I was quite happy with that arrangement
and went on to collaborate with them on The World.

Documenting Destruction
 ­ ere was something e­ lse that was very impor­tant about that symposium
Th
in that it represented a major shift in China’s film environment—­from that
point on, film was regarded as an industry in China. Before that time, film
was still considered a tool for propaganda. But from that moment the gov-
ernment shifted its perspective from regarding film as propaganda to film as
an industry. This was an extremely impor­tant change. It w ­ asn’t just me; from
that point on ­there ­were quite a few directors in China whose films ­were
suddenly allowed to be officially exhibited. Another t­ hing that came out of
that meeting was the decision that under­ground films shot previously would
not be granted any distribution access; they would just remain in limbo. A
lot of directors ­were very much against that decision, but I took a somewhat
indifferent attitude to it. A
­ fter all, so much of the film market at that time
was dominated by bootleg dvds so it ­didn’t ­really m ­ atter; if p
­ eople wanted
to see my films, they could still see them. [laughs]

Besides bearing the “Dragon Seal” of the Chinese Film Bureau, another
impor­tant ­thing about The World was the shift in your overall film style.
One rather dramatic change was the incorporation of Flash-­style anima­
tion sequences in the film. I remember how shocked I was the first time I
saw ­those sequences b­ ecause their tone was so radically dif­fer­ent from the
rest of the film, as well as your previous work. ­Later, however, I realized
that in some way t­hose sequences fit perfectly b ­ ecause they represented
the inner desires of the characters, a kind of artificial world, and the digi­
tal escapist world of the cell phone. Could you talk about t­ hose animated
sequences?

Actually, China has been in a state of constant transformation, so although

this story is inspired by p
­ eople’s lives playing out in the h
­ ere and now, the
film captures some of that change in the atmosphere of the now. The period
of time from the initial conception of The World up ­until the time shooting
began corresponded to the outbreak of sars in China. Before the outbreak,
China’s economy was developing at breakneck speed, and the economy was
expanding rapidly. Another t­ hing that was happening was that the internet
was becoming a regular part of young ­people’s lives in China. The internet at
that time was mostly centered on sending email and looking up news stories,
but by 2002 or 2003 a lot of internet forums started to appear, and young
90 ­people began to invest huge amounts of time on online virtual games. Sud-
denly young ­people found themselves living amid two worlds—­the virtual

chapter three
3.2 ​Zhao Tao in The World

world and the real world. This period represented the very beginning of that
dichotomy between the virtual world and the real world. Before that time
­there was ­really no such ­thing as a so-­called virtual world for most ­people; we
­were all living the real-­life, everyday world. But the rise of the internet added a
virtual or artificial world to our lives, and this was a shocking change for me.
Then you ­factor in the fact that this film takes place at World Park, which is
already a kind of artificial fantasy space. Within World Park you have min-
iatures of all the world’s famous tourist destinations: the Eiffel Tower, the
Arc de Triomphe, the White House, all open for visitors. The park’s slogan is
“See the world without ever leaving Beijing.” It is truly an entirely artificial
world. So when I was writing the screenplay I de­cided to combine the a­ ctual
atmosphere of World Park’s artificial world with the artificial world of the
internet and intertwine them. I felt that this combination did indeed capture
the new situation that many young ­people found themselves in, living amid 91

two dif­fer­ent worlds.

Documenting Destruction
 3.3 ​Zhao Tao in The World

And how did the screenplay come about?

The story ­behind The World was inspired by my ­future wife, Zhao Tao. Zhao
Tao is a dancer, and before she went to Beijing Dance Institute she had been
enrolled in a dance school back in Shanxi, Shanxi Provincial Arts College.
I once asked her why she came to Beijing to study at the Beijing Dance Insti-
tute, and she told me that ­after she graduated she had been assigned to work
at Win­dow of the World in Shenzhen, which was another version of World
Park. At first she was extremely happy t­ here. Shenzhen is a very liberal and
open place, and at the park you can basically see the world without ever
needing a passport—­you can go from Niagara Falls to the Arc de Triomphe
in a ­matter of minutes. But ­after just two or three months she started to feel
92 extremely frustrated and closed off. She would have to perform at dif­fer­ent
sites ­every hour or two, and for an entire year they just mechanically per-
formed the exact same dance routines. So the place that at first gave her the

chapter three
impression of being an extremely open, global, and international fantasy­
land turned out to be an extremely closed-­off and isolated corner. So, on the
one hand, the park is dazzling and beautiful, filled with all kinds of sights
and sounds and imbued with the feelings of freedom and openness, but for
­those p ­ eople who actually work ­there, it is still like some backward corner
cut off from the world. This relationship between “the world” and a “small
corner” ­really enticed me and put me on the path to write the screenplay.
I do have one anecdote about the screenplay: The World was the first screen-
play that I wrote on a computer. I had just bought a laptop and learned how
to write on a computer. Just as I was finishing the first draft, I had to take a
trip to Belgium. Although I had learned some of the basics about the com-
puter, I still ­hadn’t learned the importance of backing up my files or emailing
files to myself. In the end, I ended up losing my laptop in Belgium! I was so
depressed that I spent the ­whole day in bed at my h ­ otel! [laughs] I was so
upset! I had no idea how to go about rewriting this entire screenplay. It was
only ­after taking a break for a few months that I fi­nally rewrote it! [laughs] I
guess this is one lesson I learned from the virtual world! [laughs]

You mentioned the setting of the film, Beijing World Park, which is a site
imbued with all kinds of allegorical meaning. The film itself also seems to
engage with some of the major keywords pre­sent in Chinese society dur­
ing the early 2000s—­“globalization,” “mi­grant workers,” “consumerism,”
“shanzhai” (copycats), et cetera. How impor­tant ­were t­hese keywords as
you ­were conceiving the screenplay and making this film?

I live in Beijing, and a­ fter the successful application to host the 2008 Olym-
pics in 2001, the entire city became an overnight construction site, and t­ here
was a huge influx of mi­grant workers from outside the city. That was the
moment when many of us living in northern China began to ­really sense
this tide of h­ uman movement as all t­hese new mi­grants ­were flowing into
the city. At the time one of the most common expressions was “mi­grant
worker.” Owing to the lack of a local ­labor force in Beijing, large numbers
of ­people from rural areas began funneling into the city. The World ­really
began with the phenomena of populations of p ­ eople from remote regions
who began to move into the cities. Of course, this ­human flow can be seen
much ­earlier—it is even t­ here in Xiao Shan G ­ oing Home. Back when I shot
Xiao Shan G ­ oing Home, you c­ ouldn’t call it a “tide,” but by the time we get 93

to The World, urban populations began to rapidly expand, traffic worsened,

and every­thing began to change.

Documenting Destruction
 3.4 ​
The World Chinese
film poster

sars was also an impor­tant ­factor when I wrote the script ­because, amid
the sars crisis, Beijing basically turned into what felt like an abandoned city.
The first, second, and third rings w ­ ere basically empty—at the time I lived
along the third ring, and ­because ­there ­were no cars on the road, I would
walk in the ­middle of the street on ­those major traffic arteries and not see a
single car! One day when I was out for a walk during the sars period, I sud-
denly started paying attention to all of t­ hose advertisements that you drive
94 by ­every day but ­don’t ­really take notice of. I was especially shocked by t­ hose
real estate advertisements: they ­were all advertising new developments with
names like “Roman Gardens,” or “Vancouver Forest”! ­There was even one

chapter three
called “Venetian Waterside Village” [laughs], but the a­ ctual place prob­ably
only had a l­ittle stream r­ unning through it! Without exception, all of t­ hese
real estate advertisements that ­were selling homes and condos w ­ ere named
­after vari­ous international locations. Just like World Park, this was another
reflection that the age of consumerism had arrived and with it had come an
extremely complicated psychological state through which you could see the
decline of our own cultural self-­confidence. All of this pointed to a longing
for the outside world, but on the other side of that, t­ here was also something
very negative being reflected. Take, for instance, that place called “Roman
Gardens,” which w ­ asn’t far from where I lived: the place was constructed
right in the ­middle of a traditional neighborhood filled with courtyard-­style
­houses. My feelings about the ­whole ­thing ­were quite complex. I remem-
ber at one point writing down the following question: “Is globalism actu-
ally Americanization?” In the age of globalization, I became keenly aware
of this crisis regarding cultural self-­confidence. Somehow this had become
intertwined with the concept of consumerism. At the time, McDonald’s and

3.5 ​Jia Zhangke (left) and Yu Lik-­Wai (right) on location

Documenting Destruction
 Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants w ­ ere popping up everywhere, and then
one day I discovered that my niece’s cd shelf d ­ idn’t have a single a­ lbum by a
Chinese artist—­all of her cds ­were in En­glish.

The World and Still Life reveal two completely dif­fer­ent worlds. In The
World we have an artificial theme-­park version of globalism, but in Still
Life you peel away this gaudy facade, and what is left is an empty, haunted
world literally in ruins and on the verge of being submerged. Looking
at ­these two films side by side creates an incredibly power­ful juxtaposi­
tion. How do you reflect on this rather absurdist juxtaposition, from the
construction of a completely artificial “plastic global city” to the submer­
sion of an ancient Chinese historical city? At the time of making Still Life,
­were you in some way intentionally trying to display the underbelly of
The World?

At the time I was shooting Still Life I never r­ eally considered its relationship
with The World, but ­after hearing your comparison, it is indeed quite in­ter­
est­ing. [laughs] ­Because I am a native of Shanxi who has lived in Beijing for
many years, southwest China and the area around the Yangtze River have
always been quite unfamiliar territory for me. When they w ­ ere building the
Three Gorges Dam, ­there was a lot of attention focused on that, and many
of my fellow filmmakers went out t­ here to shoot documentaries and feature
films. Initially I ­didn’t intend to shoot anything related to the Three Gorges
Dam, even though I knew what was happening ­there was very impor­tant.
What drew me ­there was the painter Liu Xiaodong.1 Liu Xiaodong was plan-
ning on g­ oing to that region to paint a series of paintings. For a long time,
I had been wanting to shoot a documentary film about Liu Xiaodong, so
I followed him t­here as part of that documentary (Dong). Once I arrived
­there and saw the ruins, I was utterly shocked. The city I went to was called
Fengjie; it is an ancient city with more than three thousand years of history.
The famous Tang poet Li Bai has a well-­known line of poetry, “The cries
of the monkeys from both sides of the shore never cease, as my small boat
traverses ten thousand layers of mountains”—he wrote that line while in
Baidi Fortress, which is in Fengjie. When you visit such a famous place so
filled with history and to see it completely reduced to rubble, it is ­really an
indescribable feeling—­I was utterly stunned. The ­whole city was in ruins.
96 By the time I arrived, the de­mo­li­tion was already nearing its tail end. It was
only taking the de­mo­li­tion teams a week to bring down massive buildings,
and they did every­thing by hand; t­ here was no heavy machinery—­just men

chapter three
with sledgehammers. You might won­der why they ­didn’t just use heavy ma-
chinery or explosives. That’s ­because they wanted to recycle all of the bricks,
steel, and other materials. When I stood on the bank of the Yangtze River
and saw the remnants of what was left amid a landscape of ruin, my first im-
pression was that it looked like the aftermath of an alien invasion! [laughs]
It was completely surreal. As I spent more time t­ here I began to feel increas-
ingly drawn in by ­those workers laboring amid ­these ruins. They w ­ ere filled
with such an incredible drive and energy. I arrived ­there in summer, and the
workers’ skin was all sweaty and blackened from the relentless sun and
the soot. It was the juxtaposition of ­these dead ruins and the life force of
­those workers laboring amid the remains of the city that drew me in and made
me want to make a film about the Three Gorges. As I wrote the screenplay,
the story was completely related to my direct observations and emotional
response—­immediately I knew I wanted to make this film.
Once the government made the Three Gorges Dam proj­ect a priority
and de­cided to make Fengjie the site, individuals had no recourse or means
of resisting. One decision ended up bringing about massive change. More
than a million ­people would be relocated, and a city with more than three
thousand years of history would be erased, buried beneath the river. Still
Life reveals the helplessness of the individual when confronted with rapid
change; instead the individual simply gets pushed aside and swept away. It
was within that kind of environment that I stood amid the ruins reflecting
on what a person can do when faced with such monumental changes. What
can any single individual do? Perhaps we need to start by resolving our own
issues as individuals and make some difficult decisions. You may not have
any power over ­whether or not this city w­ ill be flooded, but perhaps you can
exert control over who you love. While this made me somewhat depressed,
it helped me understand just what it meant for someone to truly have a pas-
sion for life—it is not that they are able to resist the raging tide of their
times, but rather are able to grab hold of themselves as the floodwaters crash
down. From t­ here, two characters gradually emerged: one of them wants to
get divorced and the other is trying to save a failed marriage. Han Sanming
is a coal worker who was once illegally married, which eventually ended in
divorce. They are re­united ­after many years, and although they love one an-
other, they ­don’t have the power or ability to be together again. The other
character is a nurse played by Zhao Tao who wanted to terminate a marriage
that had long been devoid of any love. The question of w ­ hether or not she 97

is able to resolve this prob­lem and get out of her marriage hints at the basic
question of w­ hether or not we are able to take control over our own fate. In

Documenting Destruction
 China t­here is a lot of jargon about being “the masters of society” or “the
masters of our nation,” but often ­people ­aren’t even able to be the “masters of
their own lives.” For me the definition of modernism is the individual being
able to be his or her own master. That is how ­these two characters emerged
out of the backdrop of the massive transformation surrounding the Three
Gorges Dam proj­ect.
The greatest challenge I had to face when making this film was the fact
that time was r­ unning out—­the entire city was being ripped apart and about
to be submerged. If I had followed my normal timeline for making a film,
which would be to write a screenplay, lock up funding, and cast the film, I
would have been looking at eight months to a year, perhaps even longer. But
by then the entire city would be underwater! So the screenplay was written
­under a very special set of circumstances. I wrote the screenplay in five or
six days. During the day I was shooting the documentary film Dong, and at
night I would go back to my h­ otel with the assistant director and producer from
my documentary; each of them had a laptop, and I would act out scenes and
they would rec­ord every­thing. ­There was something audacious about what
we ­were ­doing—it was as if we w ­ ere taking on the gods! [laughs] From that
very first sequence on the boat I just acted the w ­ hole ­thing out. A
­ fter a few
days of that we had a screenplay, which we then ran through. I took that early
version of the screenplay, did some hasty revisions, and then called up Han
Sanming and Zhao Tao and asked them to come down to Fengjie and we
started shooting. It was literally that quick.

Since you w
­ ere essentially shooting amid the ruins of a city being disman­
tled, what kinds of technical challenges did that pre­sent to you in terms of
equipment, lighting, power sources, et cetera?

Since we w­ ere in Fengjie to shoot a documentary film, we only had one digital
camera, a Sony dsr-­pd150, which is a rather small model. That was it! Now
that we ­were ­going to shoot a feature-­length narrative film, we had no choice
but to just use that same camera since we d ­ idn’t have time to get funding or
have other equipment shipped in. If we had been shooting on celluloid or in
high definition, we would have required special lighting, an external power
source, and the ­whole ­thing would have gotten quite complicated. But given
the circumstances, we had to let all of that go and just get what we could get
98 on camera and worry about other details ­later. The good ­thing was that the
dv technology provided us with a lot of freedom. We could shoot around the
ruins with very low lighting and in other places like the workers’ dormitory

chapter three
and get r­eally close to the subjects we w ­ ere shooting, so our pared-­down
equipment actually gave us a lot of flexibility. I r­ eally feel that given the spe-
cifics of this story and the shooting situation, this is the kind of film that
could only have been shot in digital.
At one point while I was shooting the documentary Dong, I suddenly no-
ticed that one of the electrical wires had a short cir­cuit and a light was flash-
ing. I ­really regretted not getting a shot of that, and when we ­were shooting
Still Life I asked my cinematographer, “In this scene, can we make the light
bulb flash like ­there is a short cir­cuit in the wire?” He replied by saying:
“I’m not sure if we are able to do that.” So he handed the task off to our art
designer to find a way to create that effect. [laughs] My art designer came back
to me and explained: “We ­don’t have any of the safety mea­sures in place to
do that. I’m afraid that if we try someone might get electrocuted!” Fi­nally,
my cinematographer just said: “C’mon, w ­ e’re shooting in digital! Let’s just
fix it postproduction!” [laughs] In the end, we ­were able to create the exact
same effect using digital effects in post, and it was quite affordable. That’s the
benefit of shooting in digital!” [laughs]
As we w ­ ere shooting Still Life I r­ eally felt that Fengjie was a surreal place.
As I mentioned ­earlier, my first impression when I got ­there was that this
place had been invaded by an alien race—­and they did not have good inten-
tions! I would often have ­these kinds of thoughts as we ­were shooting. For
instance, ­there is a building in the film called Commemorative Tower of the
Immigrants—­I always felt like that ­whole building was ready to launch off
into the sky. It just ­didn’t belong t­ here. So l­ater in the film I de­cided to let it
fly off—­those effects also cost almost nothing to produce! [laughs]
The film is filled with all kinds of embellishments from the world of my
imagination, such as the tightrope walker and the flying saucer. As shooting
continued I gradually started to feel like I not only wanted to capture the sur-
realistic aspects of the Three Gorges region, I also wanted to capture t­ hose
surrealistic reflections coming out of my imagination about that place. My
rationale for placing t­hese surreal ele­ments into a film that was other­wise
rooted in realism was b ­ ecause the dramatic pace of China’s development
during that time often felt as if it was somehow not real—it all felt surreal.
Actually, what I most wanted to capture at the time was this surreal feeling
that ­people living in that environment must have been experiencing. A big
part of Still Life is about allowing myself to be ­free enough to follow my
instincts, and just ­because we ­were telling a story about the real world in 99

con­temporary China ­doesn’t mean we ­can’t employ surrealistic methods.

As long as you are f­ ree, you can employ what­ever techniques you like. And

Documenting Destruction
even when you do utilize ­these methods, lurking ­behind them ­there is still a
clear realist intention.

­ arlier we talked about your collaborative relationship with Wang Hongwei

E
in your first three films. But for the past twenty years your most consis­
tent collaborator has been your wife Zhao Tao. You first worked together
on Platform, and starting with The World, she seemed to take on a more
central role in your films. How did you first cast her, and how has your col­
laborative relationship changed over time?

This is quite the story. [laughs] We started worked together on Platform. At the
time, the screenplay for Platform called for a girl who had experience with a
per­for­mance troupe, knew how to dance, could speak Fenyang dialect, and
was around twenty years old. We started to search for actors in Fenyang but
­couldn’t find anyone suitable. We then expanded the search by opening it up
to anyone who could speak Shanxi dialect, but we still came up empty. ­Later
we broadened the search again with a call that stated any actors who could
speak Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan, or Mongolian would be considered. [laughs]
But even ­after that we still ­couldn’t find anyone!

3.6 ​Zhao Tao in Still Life

chapter three
 Just as I was getting to the point of despair, a friend told me that t­here
was a university in Shanxi that had just established a dance department, so
I went ­there to check out the students. I had been focused on the students,
but suddenly Zhao Tao appeared—­she was actually their instructor and was
just starting class. She was criticizing one of the girls in class and told her: “If
you want to dance you need to imagine yourself to be mute—­whatever feel-
ings or emotions you have must be conveyed through your body language
in dance. You have to dance with emotion.” That was the moment I noticed
Zhao Tao. She had just graduated and was actually fairly close in age to the
students. I patiently waited for her to finish class and told her that I wanted
to collaborate with her on a movie. Starting from that first film together, Zhao
Tao gradually began to display a truly singular understanding of what was
required for her roles.
­Because Platform is set in the past, the costume designer had to artificially
age all of the clothes so they would look au­then­tic. But the first time Zhao
Tao went out to the costume truck to try out her outfit for the film, she im-
mediately told me: “Director, this i­ sn’t right!” I asked her: “What i­ sn’t right?”
She replied: “This ­isn’t what I would call ‘making the clothes look old,’ it’s
called ‘making the clothes look dirty!’ All of the clothes from that era are old,
but they should look clean, especially for a girl who is a dancer with a per­
for­mance troupe. ­There is no way she would ever wear clothing that dirty!
­Can’t you get the costume designer to make sure the clothes all look clean
and proper?” What she said made a lot of sense. At the time, we ­were quite
inexperienced and took a lot of shortcuts—in our eyes, making clothes dirty
was the only ­thing we thought of when we tried to make them look aged.
And once they ­were dirty, we ­didn’t understand how to properly clean them
in a manner that would be period accurate. But from a w ­ oman’s perspective,
Zhao Tao immediately knew that t­ here was a big difference between aged
clothes and dirty clothes—­she knew ­there was no way her character would
wear dirty clothes. Even if a dancer in a per­for­mance troupe in the 1970s
had only two dif­fer­ent outfits, she would still be sure to wash them e­ very day.
In the ensuing years over the course of our collaboration, Zhao Tao would
often provide this kind of advice that ­really represented a woman’s unique
perspective.
Another example is when we w ­ ere filming Still Life and she kept telling
the makeup artist to “add more sweat” b ­ ecause we ­were shooting in an ex-
tremely humid environment and she felt that she needed more perspiration 101

on her face to capture that sense of humidity. She has always paid a lot of
attention to the physicality of her roles and is one of the few actors I have

Documenting Destruction
 worked with who has this sensitivity about the physicality of per­for­mance.
She is able to capture t­ hings like the environment and weather through her
performance—­this is very impor­tant for her. She needed the way her body
appeared on-­screen to convincingly reveal the real­ity of the environment.
­These are some of the ele­ments that make Zhao Tao such a unique performer.
­There is a scene in The World in which Zhao Tao goes down to the base-
ment ­after getting in a fight with her boyfriend. My cinematographer and
I followed her down into the basement, but then we ­were suddenly dumb-
founded. That’s ­because it was a night scene, and you ­couldn’t tell the setting
was a basement, it just looked like some room at night. At first I wondered,
should we add an establishing shot to make it clear she walked down to the
basement? But I knew if I included that shot it w
­ ouldn’t represent the type of
cinematic language that I wanted to employ—my films never intentionally
go out of their way to emphasize a par­tic­u­lar space. My cinematographer
Yu Lik-­Wai was discussing what to do with Zhao Tao when she suddenly
said: “What if I take out my cell phone to make a call but c­ an’t get reception?
That way the audience ­will know I’m in a closed-­off space like a basement.”
I ­hadn’t even thought of such a way to approach this, and so that’s how she
ended up playing the scene.

The other lead actor in Still Life is Han Sanming. He first appeared in your
film Platform, and you have worked with him repeatedly over the years,
including the short film The Hedonists in 2010. He has a very dif­fer­ent
image than most “leading man” film stars like Andy Lau or Chen Dao­
ming. What is it that led you to establish such a close working relationship
with Han Sanming?

I actually r­ eally like Andy Lau and Chen Daoming [laughs], but neither of
them very much resembles a coal miner. [laughs] ­There are some roles that
even they ­aren’t qualified to portray.
Han Sanming is actually my cousin, and he was a coal miner for many
years, so when he plays a character like a coal miner, it is quite convincing.
He first appeared in Platform, and I ­later cast him in The World and Still Life.
In all my films he plays characters who rarely speak b ­ ecause in real life he is
indeed a man of few words. Although he rarely opens his mouth, he is able
to express all kinds of life experience through his body language. As far as I
102 am concerned, he has a true camera face ­because he is someone with stories
to tell. He is also someone with a very rich emotional reservoir to draw from,
which allows him to get into character extremely quickly and convey a real

chapter three
3.7 ​Han Sanming in Still Life

sincerity through his per­for­mances. Now he has become a professional actor

and has worked in a lot of other films, including comedies! [laughs] An-
other special quality about him is that he is an avid reader. He loves reading
screenplays and spends more time reading the screenplay than anyone ­else
in our entire crew—­whenever he has a ­free moment, he is always reading
the screenplay.

Speaking of Han Sanming, ­there have been a lot of questions about the
symbolic role he plays in your films. One viewer asked ­whether or not he
represents a kind of “Chinese hero” or “sage figure” in your work. Another
viewer felt that he was symbolic of the mi­grant workers who have been left
­behind and forgotten amid the wave of social change brought on by the
Reform Era.

For me, Han Sanming represents a large category of ­people. He’s not simply
a symbol of the mi­grant worker or honest, hardworking ­people. I always look
at him as someone who stands for ­those countless p­ eople in China who are 103

powerless. When I talk about power, what I am referring to is the power

­people have to tell their own stories.

Documenting Destruction
 So many of your films are portraits of ­those marginalized individuals
at the very bottom of the social ladder. What methods do you use to
understand their experience and capture the details and nuances of their
lives?

This is a difficult question to answer. ­People often say to me: “Your films are
filled with so many details about ­people’s lives. You must have particularly
strong powers of observation.” ­Others ask: “Do you carry a notebook around
with you to jot down all of ­these details?” But to be perfectly honest, I never
carry a notebook around with me, and I ­don’t believe I have any particularly
keen powers of observation. But ­there is one ele­ment that is of par­tic­u­lar im-
portance when you are writing a story, and that ­thing is emotion. Once you
are moved by something, your imagination becomes extraordinarily rich,
and all kinds of details start to come to you. ­Every one of us has the power
of observation, ­every one of us has an extraordinary capacity to remember
details, but often when we ­can’t remember ­those details, it is simply ­because
­there is nothing about them that moved us—­there is no emotional connec-
tion. I find that when I am writing a screenplay or am on set shooting, all it
takes is that emotional connection to turn on in order for all t­ hose details to
emerge on paper or in my mind. But as for how to imagine ­those details, that
is indeed a hard question to answer. All I can say is that it is related to your
emotional connection with the subject.
From my very early days making films, I have developed the habit of re-
cording vari­ous ­faces I encounter in my life that I think I may be able to
use in my ­later films. ­These ­people come from all walks of life. Ash Is Purest
White has more characters than any film I have ever shot. Th ­ ere are a lot of
movie stars, but t­ here are also a lot of p ­ eople I cast in the film that are simply
­people I encountered in my everyday life and felt like they had what it takes
to act. Often this is simply b ­ ecause they have a look that I find particularly
in­ter­est­ing; ­there is just something that I find enticing about their physical
presence. [laughs] So I often invite t­ hese kinds of p ­ eople to act in my films,
and they are usually amazing. I may not pay par­tic­u­lar attention to ­those ev-
eryday details of life, but I do keep my own l­ ittle collection of character por-
traits that I draw from. I never know which ­future film of mine they might
appear in, but t­ here is often something about them that tells me they could
be a good actor. For instance, that young guy in Still Life who imitates Chow
104 Yun-­fat is one such example. I randomly ran into him and felt like he would
be a ­really in­ter­est­ing character, so I ­later used him in Still Life.

chapter three
 3.8 ​
Still Life Chinese film
poster

How does your approach to filmmaking change when you are shooting
documentaries as opposed to feature narrative films? Is it the same cre­
ative spirit, or are ­there certain fundamental shifts in your shooting strate­
gies and approach?

­ ere are always some changes in approach b

Th ­ ecause ­these are indeed very
dif­fer­ent types of films. When I shoot documentary films, I feel as though I
include more formalistic ele­ments. If I think about why that is, I think it has
to do with the fact that through the format of documentary film I can cap-
ture I lot of t­hings from my imagination. But t­hese t­hings may have never
happened—at least not in front of your camera. But at the same time, each
and ­every frame you are shooting needs to be real. In situations like this, it is
extremely impor­tant for a film director to find a unique cinematic language 105

in order to express t­ hose t­ hings he knows through visual language. Stories

Documenting Destruction
 are always fictionalized; fiction is an extremely efficient form that is quite
close to real­ity. So, as a w
­ hole, ­humans have always gravitated ­toward using
fiction as a vehicle for expressing their emotions.
Documentary film—­especially during the pro­cess of shooting—­often im-
pacts one’s perspective and attitude in fundamental ways. Documentary film
is actually an interruption into daily life. Given t­ hese circumstances, I always
feel that I should use a more experimental or subjective method when trying
to reveal ­things that did not occur in front of the camera. Let me provide
you with an example: My earliest documentary film was In Public, and it was
shot in all kinds of public spaces; however, over the course of editing I dis-
covered a thread that could tie ­things together, which was ­those sequences
shot in spaces related to public transportation. Through images of p ­ eople in
motion and t­ hose ­people walking past one another in ­those public spaces I
was able to tie t­ hings together. Another impor­tant trait of that film was that
I edited out all the talking-­heads interview footage; I d ­ idn’t want to have any
of that footage of the subjects talking about themselves. Instead, I tried to
just capture the image of ­those ­people in ­those spaces together; no one in
the film directly addresses the audience, but their being, their state of mind,
and the real­ity of their world are e­ tched on their f­aces. In other words, I
screened out all the language in order to convey the real-­life appearance of
­these subjects: their exhaustion, their excitement, and all the other emotions
written on their ­faces are collected and expressed directly to the audience.
Through this method I was able to get at some layer of real­ity and approach
a notion of truth.

Your documentary films often have an innate connection to your narrative

films. You just mentioned In Public, which has a particularly strong con­
nection with Unknown Pleasures. A few years ­later you shot Dong, a docu­
mentary about artist Liu Xiaodong, alongside the feature film Still Life. In
some sense, t­hose two films can be looked at as a couplet, with many inter­
connecting ele­ments, settings, and characters. ­Later in your ­career, the line
between documentary and narrative films seemed to get even more hazy.
One case in point is the film 24 City, in which you intentionally play with
the interrelation between narrative film and documentary. Could you talk
about the connection between narrative and documentary film in your
body of work?
106

This ­really comes from the fact that I feel t­ here are inherent limitations when
it comes to both mediums. When I’m shooting a documentary film, I often

chapter three
feel like it is not able to express the true real­ity of the subjects’ lives as power-
fully as a fiction film. Then when I’m shooting a fiction film, I often feel like
I’m trying to imitate what I see in documentary films in terms of the overall
mood and the natu­ral state of the characters. That’s ­because I always feel like
fiction films ­don’t feel natu­ral enough; they never feel like what we see in
everyday life. In short, I always feel like t­ here are certain limitations to each
medium and each form. So I de­cided that I wanted to try to break through
that dichotomy and combine the two.
When I first started working on 24 City, the initial idea did not have any
components from narrative cinema. It started as a fairly traditional docu-
mentary film proj­ect: I had interviewed quite a few retired factory workers
to hear their stories. But then I ran into a situation ­after interviewing twenty
or thirty Shanghainese workers who had been transferred to Chengdu to
work in factories t­here. The Shanghainese originally d ­ idn’t want to leave
Shanghai, and when they arrived in Chengdu, they ended up forming their
own ­little community—­they would all hang out together, eating together,
singing together, and they spoke to one another in Shanghainese dialect. I
was very much interested in this group, but a­ fter shooting twenty or thirty
of them, I discovered ­there ­wasn’t a single one of them who had all the ele­
ments to become the main subject of a documentary film. Yet at the same
time, the group was ­really fascinating, and all of them had their own in­ter­
est­ing stories. Instead of focusing on one of them, I started to won­der if I
could extract some of the more in­ter­est­ing details from several of their lives
and create a composite character. I knew that if I could do that, I would be
able to create a ­really in­ter­est­ing character. That is when I fi­nally realized the
importance of fiction. What a real-­life individual ­faces in his or her ­actual
life is the everyday, but film is a concentrated art form, and the medium
requires you to provide multiple levels of information concentrated in one
or two characters. Not every­one’s lives are rich enough to provide that, so
that is where the pro­cess of fictionalization comes in: so I absorbed stories
from all of ­those workers and created a new fictional character. That charac-
ter can, in turn, represent the entire group. It was also at that moment that
I de­cided I needed to cast some professional actors for ­those roles. That’s
­because I wanted my audience to be able to clearly differentiate the real-­life
subjects and the fictionalized characters. So I invited several highly recog-
nizable actors like Joan Chen, Lü Liping, Chen Jianbin, and Zhao Tao so
that viewers would immediately know who the actors w ­ ere. ­There was a 107

need to differentiate them from the other real-­life workers who appear in
the film.

Documenting Destruction
 You worked for many years with the Japa­nese production com­pany Of­
fice Kitano. How did you establish a working relationship with Takeshi
Kitano, and how do they support your work?2

I have been working with Office Kitano for years, right up ­until Ash Is Purest
White. When Xiao Wu was first screened at the Berlin International Film
Festival, Takeshi Kitano had just established his production com­pany and
was looking to invest in young film directors from Asia. ­After he saw Xiao
Wu, he wanted to work with me. I also needed money, so that’s where our
collaboration began! [laughs]
But the producer overseeing day-­to-­day affairs was Shozo Ichiyama, who
had previously produced Hou Hsiao-­hsien’s Goodbye South, Goodbye and
Flowers of Shanghai.3 Shozo Ichiyama had previously served as an interna-
tional producer for Shochiku Com­pany ­Limited. When Shozu Ichiyama first
approached me in Berlin, I ­didn’t know much about him, but I certainly
knew who Takeshi Kitano was. I also ­really admired the films of Hou Hsiao-­
hsien, which made me feel like this was a com­pany I could trust. So that is
how it started.
The first film we worked on together was Platform. I remember the con-
tract we signed with Office Kitano stipulated that the ­running time be no
more than two hours, but in the end the screenplay had over one hundred
fifty scenes! ­After Shozu Ichiyama read the script he said: “According to this
screenplay, we are looking at film with a run time of at least three hours.
­There is no way this is ­going to be a two-­hour film.” When I heard that I
asked him: “So, do I need to write a new draft and cut some scenes out?” He
responded by saying something that I ­will never forget: “If you as the direc-
tor feel the film needs to be this length to tell your story, then you should
tell it that way.” ­After that we ended up working together all the way up u
­ ntil
now.
I also remember sending Office Kitano the screenplay for The World, and
­after they read it, they wrote to me explaining, “Our office has already car-
ried out deliberations concerning your proj­ect and we feel that this film w­ ill
result in a profit loss. [laughs] However, Takeshi Kitano’s new film Zatoichi
(2003) has been able to perform well at the box office, so we have de­cided to
go ahead and greenlight your film.” [laughs] I worked with Office Kitano all
the way up through Mountains May Depart, but when I was getting ready to
108 shoot Ash Is Purest White, Mr. Kitano resigned from the com­pany, so Office
Kitano did not end up producing Ash.

chapter three
3.9 ​Jia Zhangke (left) and Zhao Tao (right) on location filming Still Life

Speaking frankly, ­today in China t­ here are a lot of potential investors that
I could get money from; however, I have always felt it is more impor­tant to
find a producer who shares the same vision and ideals. It is never good to
irresponsibly spend other ­people’s money; instead, you need to establish a
collaborative relationship built on mutual trust.

You mentioned Hou Hsiao-­hsien’s collaborative relationship with Office Ki­

tano, but besides working with the same production com­pany, you have a lot
of other t­ hings in common with Hou. You have both worked with composer
Lim Qiong on several of your films, and you even featured Hou in your film
I Wish I Knew. Could you talk about Hou Hsiao-­hsien’s impact on your work?

I enrolled in the Beijing Film Acad­emy in 1993, and in the early 1990s Hou
had actually donated prints of his films to the acad­emy. So while I was in 109

school I had the opportunity to see most of his films, from The Sandwich

Documenting Destruction
 Man (Erzi de da wanou, 1983) all the way up through City of Sadness (Beiqing
chengshi, 1989). ­Because I was someone who had just begun to study film,
Hou Hsiao-­hsien had a very impor­tant impact on me. At the time, it w ­ asn’t
just Hou’s films that had an influence on me ­because alongside them I was
also reading Shen Congwen’s fiction and Eileen Chang’s novels, which had
all begun to come back into fashion. Reading ­those novels alongside Hou’s
films pointed me in a certain direction, which was a much more personal
artistic vision. Younger ­people might not quite understand what I mean by
this, but that is ­because back when my generation was coming of age, our
environment was dominated by revolutionary art and lit­er­a­ture. According
to the logic of revolutionary art and lit­er­a­ture, ­there is no place for individual
artists or authors; they ­don’t exist. Every­thing was instead about the collec-
tive. But a work of art’s most impor­tant quality is the stamp of the original
author, its signature. So for me the films of Hou Hsiao-­hsien and the fiction
of Shen Congwen and Eileen Chang—­artists working in dif­fer­ent mediums,
dif­fer­ent genres, and from dif­fer­ent eras, but they all came together, and dur-
ing the Chinese cultural scene of the early 1990s they represented the return
of the artist with an individual style and vision. For me they marked the
resurgence of individuality in artistic expression.

Chinese cinema has been dominated by commercial works for the past
fifteen years, yet you have remained a champion for in­de­pen­dent cinema.
You have worked hard to try to help establish art ­house cinemas, produce
up-­and-­coming directors, and even founded the Pingyao Crouching Tiger
Hidden Dragon International Film Festival. What is the situation for in­
de­pen­dent cinema in China t­oday? And where do you see in­de­pen­dent
film g­ oing in the next few years?

Let me start by talking about the establishment of art ­house movie chains in
China, which we have been deeply engaged in. It started in 2016 when my
com­pany (Xstream Pictures) partnered up with several o ­ thers to establish
the Consortium for Art­house Cinema Exhibition. The main sponsor is the
Chinese Film Archive, and other partners include my production com­pany,
Edko, and Wanda. As of 2018, we have set up five hundred screens in China
devoted to the exhibition of art h
­ ouse cinema. Besides Chinese in­de­pen­dent
­ ouse films, like the recent Manches-
films, we also exhibit international art h
110 ter by the Sea (2016).
One of the initiatives my own com­pany has been spearheading is the
Pingyao Film Palace, which is located in Shanxi Province. Pingyao is an old

chapter three
city with a 2,700-­year history; it is also a popu­lar tourist destination. Right
now in Pingyao we have a five-­screen fa­cil­i­ty, which is the Pingyao Film
Palace, where films are screened e­ very day. In my hometown of Fenyang
I also opened a small, three-­screen art ­house cinema, which is currently
undergoing renovations. Th ­ ere are also plans to open another small theater
in Xi’an next year. If that plan is successful, it ­will be our first art ­house cin-
ema in a major city. But the current state of Chinese cinema is hard to pre-
dict. [laughs] The Chinese film industry has indeed expanded in leaps and
bounds: t­ here is a large output of films being produced each year, and we are
now the second-­largest film market in the world. But while the industry is
developing very quickly, t­ here are signs of instability. For instance, t­ hese past
two months (October and November 2018) ­there has been a sharp decline at
the box office, so we need to wait and see.
Naturally, the large quantity of films being produced is worthy of special
attention; however, I personally believe ­there is room for improvement in
terms of the quality. A lot of ­people are deeply dissatisfied with the state of
the Chinese film industry t­ oday, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact
that ­there are too many films being produced. When you have a situation
like that, the market ends up getting inundated with a lot of poor-­quality
films. Th
­ ere are actually quite a few r­ eally solid films being produced each
year, including art films, in­de­pen­dent films, and vari­ous genre films. The
prob­lem is that when you throw them in with eight hundred other films, it is
hard for them to carve out a space for themselves, and every­one feels t­ here
is a huge gap in terms of the quality of Chinese films.
Good films come in all shapes and sizes, but bad films all have a common
feature. [laughs] That common feature is that they do not fulfill the basic
requirements of what a film should be. This is something that we need to be
wary of. One of the unhealthy perspectives floating around right now is that
we should all be making commercial films and turning a profit at the box
office is the bottom line. Within this context, ­things like film language and
the intrinsic requirements of what a film should be are often overlooked.
Though this may be the case, at least ­there are audiences ­going to the the-
aters to see films, and the box office numbers are good. However, the quality
of films is very similar to the quality of one’s health—­you take one look at
some of t­ hese films, and you can tell that the quality is lacking. Having your
film succeed in the market s­ houldn’t be an excuse to cut corners when it
comes to the basic quality of film production. On the other hand, no m ­ atter 111

what genre you are working in t­here are certain basic requirements that
all films should meet. This has resulted in a strange perspective in China

Documenting Destruction
 where a lot of ­people think that commercial films are not art, nor do they
require any artistic dimension. But I would argue that commercial film is
also an art! How can you say that commercial cinema ­isn’t art? That is such
a strange perspective for me to hear. As for where the f­ uture of Chinese cin-
ema should go, I feel that no m ­ atter what type of genre you are working in,
you can never forget that film is an art form and should follow the rules and
requirements of art.
In 2017 we held the inaugural Pingyao International Film Festival, and I
intentionally included a retrospective of the films of Jean-­Pierre Melville.4
One of the reasons I wanted to highlight his work is ­because a lot of his films
are typical detective thriller genre pictures, but when you watch them you
can see his profound interest in the ­human condition and his incredible cre-
ativity. His films are all very deep and probing, yet at the same time they are
very enjoyable. Through that retrospective, I wanted to emphasize the fact
that ­there is a huge space for creativity when it comes to genre films. Com-
mercial cinema needs creativity and innovation.
At the 2018 Pingyao International Film Festival the Korean director Lee
Chang-­dong held a master class. During his master class, he told the audi-
ence that he has been pondering the relationship between in­de­pen­dent film,
auteur cinema, and the audience for t­ hese past few years. He feels like t­ here
needs to be a realignment of ­these relationships in order to win back audi-
ences. This is pretty close to my own view regarding in­de­pen­dent cinema in
China. Th­ ere is no inherent distance between in­de­pen­dent cinema and audi-
ences; nor is ­there any inherent distance between original and experimental
cinema and audiences. Instead, film needs to continually revise its relation-
ship with its audience. A film without an audience is an incomplete film. In
short, my thoughts regarding the ­future of Chinese cinema are that we need
to restore what we are currently lacking. If our commercial films are lacking
art, then we need to pay more attention to the artistic side of our films; and
if our in­de­pen­dent films are lacking audiences, then we need to find a way
to win them back.

112

chapter three
 24 city (2008)
a touch of sin (2013)

4 Film as
Social Justice

4.1 ​Jia Zhangke on location

 Of course you should shoot the kind of
film you want to make, but sometimes
­there is a price to pay for that, especially
in China. But, to speak frankly, if you are
someone with a strong ­will, you can bear
it, you can make the sacrifice. ­Because
I guarantee you that ­there are a lot of
­people out t­ here making much bigger
sacrifices for all kinds of ­things ­every day.
­After all, compared to ­those ­people that
are unemployed, ­those ­people facing vari­
ous forms of injustice, ­those ­people who
have been falsely arrested, what is this
­thing called film anyway? We can make
that sacrifice; we can pay that price. Once
you have seen ­people who are facing true
suffering in this world and ­those facing
injustice, the strug­gles of making a film
­aren’t even worth mentioning.

Your films The World, Still Life, 24 City, and A Touch of Sin are all imbued
114 with a strong moral spirit that resists vari­ous forms of social injustice.
Back in the age of Mao Zedong so much of artistic production was dictated
along the ideological lines of Mao’s “Yan’an Talks on Art and Lit­er­a­ture.”

chapter four
From that point on, all film and lit­er­a­ture had a clear po­liti­cal responsibil­
ity to fulfill in society. That essentially reduced most artistic production
­under Mao to propaganda. Times have changed a lot since then, but in your
view, does film still have a social responsibility?

Let me respond to this question by starting with A Touch of Sin. Although

Touch of Sin has yet to be commercially released in China, a lot of Chinese
audiences have already seen the film through bootleg versions. [laughs] ­After
every­one had seen the bootleg editions, t­here was a period of time during
which every­one was criticizing the film. Some p ­ eople said the film was ad-
vocating vio­lence during a time when vio­lence in society was already so
rampant, while ­others thought the film was praising criminals. At the time,
I responded to ­these criticisms by explaining that we as ­humans have de-
veloped dif­fer­ent structures in society to deal with t­hese issues. Take, for
example, the courts of law, where they resolve ­legal issues, face social prob­
lems, and make judgments in accordance with the law; and then t­here are
the churches, which use religion to face ­these issues. Now why did we ­later
invent cinema? The cinema is a place where we go to understand all the dif­
fer­ent complexities of h ­ uman nature; it is t­ here where we can face the dark
side of ­human nature and the dark side of society. The cinema is one such
place. If we are unwilling to deal with ­these darker subjects such as vio­lence
in the cinema, then we truly have no hope of ever truly understanding
them.
Ever since 1949, Chinese cultural discourse has been dominated by revo-
lutionary art and lit­er­a­ture. Revolutionary art and lit­er­a­ture have an impor­tant
requirement, and that is for the arts to function in the ser­vice of politics. By
the 1980s, when the Reform Era hit, a lot of artists abandoned this politi-
cized view of art. For the younger generation, the in­de­pen­dent cinema of
the 1990s marked a return to the individual. At that point the individual’s
relationship with society took on a more normal tone. But amid this transi-
tion, some other voices also began to emerge; ­those voices advocated indi-
vidualism and avoided po­liti­cal or social engagement in art. Instead, they
advocated using art to explore topics like love and romance from an indi-
vidualistic perspective. But I ­didn’t agree with that line of thought. In China
­today, each and ­every individual is impacted by the social, economic, and
po­liti­cal changes taking place around us. Each individual’s life is constantly
being interrupted by vari­ous external ele­ments. When we observe ­people or 115

portray them in films, we should make sure every­thing we do is built on the

foundation of the individual’s relationship with society; we need to observe

Film as Social Justice

 ­ umans within their social environment. What I mean is that we should avoid
h
­going from one extreme to the other.

You mentioned the fact that A Touch of Sin was never commercially dis­
tributed in China. In real­ity, the story ­behind this film’s release was ex­
tremely complex and convoluted, filled with all kinds of setbacks. It was
initially approved for release; however, just before its release date, authori­
ties blocked it, which inspired all kinds of heated debate and discussion
online. Could you talk a bit about the backstory ­behind A Touch of Sin’s
release? As the film’s director, how did you deal with this kind of major
setback?

A Touch of Sin was completed during the spring of 2013, and we immediately
submitted it to be reviewed by the censors. ­After a period of waiting it was
approved, and we received the so-­called Dragon Seal from the China Film
Administration. As the film’s director, I was not pre­sent when the censors
­were reviewing the film, so I have no idea what issues came up during their
deliberations; however, I did hear that ­there ­were some heated debates about
some aspects of the film. In the end, however, several of the censors who
supported the film felt that b ­ ecause the four stories told w
­ ere all based on
real-­life incidents that had already been widely reported by the media in
China, they d ­ idn’t see any reason why the film could not be shown. So the
committee ultimately de­cided to approve the film, and it met their criteria
for exhibition.
The Cannes Film Festival took place just ­after A Touch of Sin had passed
the board of censors, so I brought the film to Cannes. It was just ­after that
that we settled on an October release date for the China market. I remember
returning from the New York Film Festival to Beijing in October just before
the release date when someone from the censorship department contacted
me and asked if I could temporarily delay the film’s release. When I asked
why, he replied by saying that violent events like the ones depicted in the film
­were still playing out in China, and they ­were concerned that the film might
inspire more ­people to take to vio­lence. Naturally, I tried to explain my po-
sition on the ­matter, but ­after a long period of time trying to sway them, I
ultimately failed. ­Later they explained to me that the film had indeed been
officially approved for release; it was not banned, they just wanted to tem-
116 porarily delay the release ­because now ­wasn’t an appropriate time. [laughs]
But, as ­things went on, ­there was ­really nothing I could do, and then, as we
­were still in negotiations about a new release date, bootleg editions of the

chapter four
film began to appear online. [laughs] I was r­ eally frustrated ­because ­these
are the types of films that already strug­gle at the box office when they are
theatrically released, but now that bootleg editions ­were already available
online, I knew that it would be even more difficult. It was r­ eally a bad situ-
ation, but my hands ­were tied. For me the most impor­tant ­thing was to just
move forward and focus on my next film. Even up u ­ ntil now, I still take some
time to check in with the censors e­ very three or four months to see if the film
can fi­nally be released.
But an even greater crisis for me was the economic side of this. Although
the film was not permitted to be screened in China, it was allowed exhibition
outside of China, so I was able to earn some money through international

4.2 ​
24 City film
poster

117

Film as Social Justice

 distribution. But that still ­wasn’t enough ­because this was a film with a very
large bud­get. We shot in four locations—­Shaanxi, Hubei, Chongqing, and
Guangdong—­and the shoot was quite long; it was actually like shooting four
separate films. What we made overseas d ­ idn’t even get close to allowing us
to recoup our losses. That film was primarily financed by a friend of mine.
[laughs] So ­after that debacle, I spent an entire year shooting commercials—­I
shot around two each month for a year—in order to pay my friend back for
his investment. [laughs] I was so desperate that I not only shot commercials
but even acted in a few! [laughs] I shot commercials for liquor, suits, cam-
eras, all kinds of ­things! The ­whole ­thing was ­really quite absurd! [laughs]

I’d like to bring your previous film 24 City back into the conversation.
Looking back at your early films—­Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures,
The World—­all of them ­were based on original stories. But starting with
24 City and A Touch of Sin you began to adapt the real-­life stories of sub­
jects. The film 24 City was adapted from the interviews with retired fac­
tory workers that you conducted, and A Touch of Sin was based on four
sensational news stories.1 Could you talk about the pro­cess of boiling down
such a massive amount of material, much of which is fairly loose in terms
of narrative, and structuring it into a complete screenplay?

When I made 24 City, the Chinese economy was transitioning from a planned
economy to a market economy. During the age of the planned economy in
China, workers and factories had a unique relationship. In factories like the
one I shot the film at, it ­wasn’t just workers but their entire families who
relied on the factory for virtually ­every aspect of their lives. A big-­scale fac-
tory like the one in the film had thirty thousand workers and fifty thousand
dependents. A factory of this size had its own nursery school, elementary
school, ­middle school, hospital. They even had their own funeral parlor—­
from birth to death, all of life’s major events could be taken care of without
even leaving the factory gates! For de­cades, workers relied on the factory
to take care of ­every aspect of their lives. They ­were indeed the “masters”
of the factory. Once the transition to a market economy started to kick in,
they found themselves reduced to nothing more than a ­labor force. Large
numbers of workers ­were laid off due to their age, and suddenly society was
faced with a rising tide of unemployment, and workers w ­ ere forced to fend
118 for themselves. ­There ­were a lot of p
­ eople still in their thirties who suddenly
found themselves without a job. This marked a major shift for society. I am
a firm supporter of a market economy system, and yet I am also extremely

chapter four
concerned with the fate of workers when they are faced with this violent,
revolutionary, overnight change that suddenly takes away their livelihood
and throws them into a very painful state. So I wanted to use this film to
express the sudden shift in the fates of so many Chinese workers.
I actually wrote an entirely fictionalized screenplay about workers called
Leaving the Factory, but I never felt it was good enough, so I never shot it.
But I had always had the idea to make a movie about a factory, and ­later I
settled on shooting a documentary film. The first question I faced was which
factory to shoot. I started to visit a w ­ hole lot of factories. My hometown
region of Shanxi is an agricultural area, so t­ here ­aren’t many factories t­ here,
so I started to look at factories in Wuhan, Chongqing, and Shanghai. I kept
searching for a factory that would draw me in. Each factory has its own
personality. Then one day I came across an article in the newspaper about
a factory in Chengdu that produced engines for the Chinese air force that
was slated for de­mo­li­tion ­after the land was purchased by a real estate de-
veloper. I immediately de­cided that was the factory I wanted to shoot. The
reason I was so certain had to do with the fact that in the age of the market
economy the real reason so many of t­ hese factories ­were shutting down and
factory workers w ­ ere being forced to leave had a lot to do with the real estate
market. Back during the socialist period, a lot of the factories w ­ ere set up
in the downtown section of major cities, but ­later, as ­these cities expanded,
the location of t­ hese factories ­didn’t make much sense anymore. Once ­these
factories are torn down, ­these sites that once produced so many memories
end up being completely destroyed.
­After I started to dig a l­ittle deeper, I discovered how massive the scale
of this factory truly was. Including dependents, more than fifty thousand
­people ­were tied to it. It was a true product of the Cold War era—­due to the
fear of a coming armed conflict with Amer­i­ca, a lot of factories ­were moved
from coastal regions into the mountains. This was a so-­called Third Line
Construction Proj­ect (sanxian gongcheng), so the factory was closely tied
to Cold War history.2 At the same time, it was also tied to the cap­i­tal­ist real
estate economy of ­today, so it was a site imbued with dif­fer­ent stories. That
is what led me to select this factory.
In some sense, searching for this factory was very similar to the pro­cess
of casting an actor for one of my films. The first t­ hing I had to do was s­ ettle
on a character—­which was the factory itself. Once I had settled on this factory,
I needed to approach it from the outside, through interviews with the former 119

workers. That’s b ­ ecause I initially ­couldn’t get access to get inside the ­actual
factory. It was a top secret military fa­cil­i­ty, and now it was on the verge

Film as Social Justice

 4.3 ​Zhao Tao in 24 City

of being demolished. During that transition period ­there ­were two entities
overseeing the factory: the man­ag­ers of the original factory and the real
estate development com­pany that purchased the land. With two groups in
charge they kept a very tight lid on the site. But they had no control over
me if I talked to workers in their dormitories. So I went over ­there and had
them tell me their stories. Whenever I heard something in­ter­est­ing, I would
turn the camera on. It was over the course of this rather blind pro­cess that I
gradually discovered which individuals I wanted to focus on, so I gradually
began to get closer to them. ­After ­going through this pro­cess, I was fi­nally able
to ­settle on just a small handful of ­people to profile.

But besides ­these real-­life workers, you also designed a few composite
characters for professional actors to portray.

That’s ­because over the course of conducting t­ hose interviews I discovered

the need for fiction as a tool to tell the ­whole story. The real­ity of the stories
as I understood them ­wasn’t coming through any single individual. Instead,
each person had certain ele­ments in their stories, and by combining them I
120 thought I could reveal a kind of truth, a real­ity that was missing when you
just looked at their individual stories. L­ ater, when I was writing the screen-
play, I de­cided to add some fictional ele­ments, so I added Joan Chen’s Shang-

chapter four
hainese character and a younger worker’s story, portrayed by Zhao Tao. Lü
Liping’s character had an in­ter­est­ing story—­virtually every­one I spoke to
had told me about her, but she was no longer with us, and I d ­ idn’t want to
rely on second­hand accounts to retell such an impor­tant story, so I designed
it so Lü Liping could directly convey the story to the audience.

And how did you get access to the factory site?

Well, eventually I did end up getting access to the a­ ctual factory site, which
was an in­ter­est­ing story. I went directly to the office of that real estate
com­pany that had purchased the factory and asked to talk to the boss. The
receptionist asked me: “And why would our boss want to see you?” [laughs]
I said: “­Because I’m a very impor­tant film director!” [laughs] And the boss
immediately came out to see me. [laughs] I told him that I wanted to shoot
a film inside the factory and explained why. Once I had finished my pitch,
he responded: “It looks like we are on the same page! I’m actually a poet! I
also feel we should shoot a movie to have a rec­ord of the ­people who worked
­here!” [laughs] That’s how t­ hings got started. L ­ ater he asked me: “What do
you say about me investing in your film?” [laughs] I responded: “Of course
that would be fantastic!” [laughs] He ended up being the second-­biggest
investor in the film! He was, ­after all, a poet! [laughs] So we had a good col-
laboration. But of all my films, this one had the most difficult time getting
through the censorship pro­cess. It was a most painful experience. In the end,
this poet investor wrote an official affidavit on behalf of the factory stating
that the factory workers w ­ holeheartedly supported this film, every­thing de-
picted in the film was true and accurate, and that the factory approved of the
film’s release. It was only then that the film was fi­nally approved for official
distribution in China.

Speaking of poets, 24 City also featured one of con­temporary China’s best

poets, Zhai Yongming, as a screenwriter.3 What role did she play during
the screenwriting pro­cess?

Zhai Yongming’s main contribution was in creating t­ hose four compos-

ite characters. I sent her all of the raw interview material and told her
what my rough ideas w ­ ere for each of the characters. Since she is from
Chengdu, she is quite familiar with the local dialect and was able to cap- 121

ture all of the vari­ous details specific to that location and express them in
the screenplay.

Film as Social Justice

 4.4 ​Zhao Tao (left) and Jia Zhangke (right) on location shooting 24 City

And what about the screenwriting pro­cess for A Touch of Sin, where you
adapted ­those real-­life news stories? How did you approach four completely
unrelated stories and tie them together so that they worked as a coherent
film narrative? How did you first discover t­ hese four stories, and what was
the pro­cess of piecing them together? It also seems that A Touch of Sin is
deeply connected to the rise of Weibo and social media in China? Can you
also talk about how social media played a role in this film?

Whenever new forms of media come on the scene, I tend to be a year or

two ­behind every­one when it comes to adopting them. I only started using
Weibo in 2011 or 2012. At that time, I ­really had the sense that in the age of
Weibo and new media every­one was now a reporter. It was during that time
that I started to notice a very large number of reporters coming out from all
over China about vari­ous random acts of vio­lence. Every­one was reporting
­these t­ hings, with both words and a­ ctual images. Amid all of t­ hose vari­ous
reports I was reading, t­ here w
­ ere seven or eight that r­ eally grabbed me and
122 made want to make them into a movie. It was at that point that I started to
play with dif­fer­ent structures for this film. Why was I so intent on making
this film? Part of that reason has to do with the fact that I started to realize

chapter four
 that all of the p ­ eople in t­hese stories reminded me of characters from The
­Water Margin. Actually, The ­Water Margin is in many ways like a Weibo
micro-­novel. ­There are 108 characters, and each one is like a short descriptive
account you might read on Weibo—it is like 108 short real-­life profiles. So
I de­cided to try my hand at making one film that featured multiple charac-
ters and stories.
In the end, ­there ­were two main social considerations that led me to fi­
nally write the screenplay: first off was seeing the inequalities in terms of
distribution of wealth, and second was the inability of ­people to express
themselves. What I mean by that latter issue is that t­ here are a w ­ hole lot of
­people who lack the ability to express their frustrations and predicaments
with o ­ thers; even if they are able to, no one listens, no one cares. For them
­there is no ave­nue other than to use vio­lence as a means of expressing their
predicament in life.
The second segment in the film is a portrait of someone’s psychological
state. In many cases vio­lence functions as a means for someone to express
themselves. For a person like Wang Baoqiang’s character in the story, ­there
are very few possibilities in life. But somehow violent acts give him a sense of
accomplishment, even a sense of romanticism. This is an alternative reason
for committing acts of vio­lence. Zhao Tao’s story explores the relationship
between vio­lence and dignity; in many cases, sudden acts of vio­lence are the
result of someone’s dignity being suddenly stripped away. The final segment
of the film is the famous Foxconn story, where everyday life in the factory
is extremely mechanical and the workers are desperate with no hope for a
better tomorrow.4 In the end, they choose to inflict vio­lence on themselves.
I also hope that, at the very least, Chinese audiences recognize that t­ hese
stories are all real, which is one of the reasons I de­cided to shoot each seg-
ment at the ­actual site where the incidents occurred in real life. So we ­didn’t
take a story from Shanxi and transpose it to Henan or a Guangzhou story
and set it in Hainan; wherever the a­ ctual events took place is exactly where
we shot the film. The other result of this is that the film is like a cinematic
tour of China; it takes the viewer from the northernmost areas of Shaanxi
to the southernmost areas in Guangzhou, so it ­really provides a panoramic
perspective on the nation.
Once I sat down to write the a­ ctual screenplay, I discovered that the real-­
life events only provided a very hazy outline, but t­here ­were no details, no
real content, no logic b ­ ehind the stories. Th
­ ere ­were only the incidents them- 123

selves, but they ­weren’t connected to anything larger. Let’s take Zhao Tao’s
segment as an example: in the original news report the only information we

Film as Social Justice

 had was that a ­woman who worked in a foot massage parlor stabbed a cus-
tomer to death ­after he tried to rape her. That’s it. But my screenplay requires
rich details, so when I wrote the screenplay I needed to rely on my imagina-
tion: Why did this ­thing happen? The news report might be only two hun-
dred words, but from that I have to create an entire character. What is her
­family life like? Where did this knife come from? Part of the plot concerning
the extramarital affair provides a narrative logic to explain where the knife
came from, so my imagination often begins with ­these small details. ­Later,
as I follow that thread, I am able to create a set of relationships for that char-
acter. So ­there is an entire pro­cess I follow to develop the story.

By the time of A Touch of Sin you had already worked with Zhao Tao on
several films, but somehow I feel like A Touch of Sin reveals another side of
her as a performer; it is truly a breakthrough role for her.

It was over the course of shooting A Touch of Sin that I realized just what a
remarkable actor Zhao Tao truly is. The way she handled the murder scene at
the end was r­ eally amazing: that scene was actually shot in three dif­fer­ent lo-
cations over the course of several months. It was shot alternately in Changyi
in Hebei Province, Shennongjia, and Datong in Shanxi. The reason we had
spread it out like this was ­because we found a sauna parlor in Changyi, but
it was only suitable for exterior location shots. The shot where Zhao Tao is
walking on the street with mountains surrounding her was shot in Shennong­
jia. And the interior shots from the massage parlor where she is accosted
­were shot on a soundstage in Datong that we set up. ­These three locations
are separated by several thousand miles, with two or three months between
the shoots. Since we ­couldn’t shoot interiors at any of ­those sauna parlors,
we had no choice but to shoot the interiors in a soundstage in Datong. But
when we shot each sequence, the rhythm of Zhao Tao’s movements, the ca-
dence of her walk, and the power she exerted ­were all completely in sync
and matched up perfectly with the ­earlier shoots. What is especially hard to
match is the precise level of energy she captured in her e­ arlier per­for­mance,
but it was perfect. This is a real challenge for any actor b
­ ecause you need to
perfectly remember ­little details like exactly how tightly you held the knife
during the ­earlier shots and recapture that same spirit, but she nailed it.

124 Another special quality about A Touch of Sin is the character design and
costume designs, which r­ eally stand out alongside your e­ arlier films. When

chapter four
4.5 ​Zhao Tao in A Touch of Sin

Wang Baoqiang’s and Jiang Wu’s characters first appear, they ­really jump
off the screen.

The first time I saw images of the a­ ctual ­people the four stories w
­ ere based
on, I immediately thought of The ­Water Margin, which made me want to add
some ele­ments from Chinese opera. Somehow seeing ­those images helped
me have a renewed understanding of what my job is r­ eally about. Gener-
ation ­after generation, China has seen the rise and fall of all kinds of art
forms: traditional storytelling, the novel, opera, and ­today we have cinema.
When it comes down to it, all of us as artists are concerned with the fate of
man, and vio­lence is a theme that has always been with us.
Actually, all four of ­those main characters in A Touch of Sin have reference
points: Dahai’s design is based on the Peking opera character Lu Zhishen.5
Wang Baoqiang’s character is inspired by Wu Song.6 Zhao Tao’s character 125

was designed in accordance with the female martial arts heroines in the

Film as Social Justice

4.6 ​Wang Baoqiang in A Touch of Sin

4.7 ​Jiang Wu in A Touch of Sin

4.8 ​Jia Zhangke on location shooting A Touch of Sin

films of King Hu. The final factory worker character was inspired by t­hose
bare-­chested male leads in Chang Cheh’s films.7 I’ve been making films for
twenty years but have never used other films as reference models for my
own work. I ­haven’t even done that with the films I produce. Occasionally a
young director ­will show me someone ­else’s film and say, “This is what I am
­going for.” I always tell them: “That’s not what you should be ­going for! ­Don’t
ever use someone ­else’s film to tell your own story!” So when I make films,
I’m always adamant about not watching reference films, I just start shooting.
I also go out of my way not to watch other films from the same genre. But
A Touch of Sin is the one and only time I made an exception to this rule and
watched a film for reference. That was Chen Huai’ai’s Peking opera drama
Forest of the Wild Boar (Yezhu lin, 1962).8 The red pants that Zhao Tao wears
are directly taken from that film; in Peking opera ­those red pants mean that
the character is a prisoner. Of course, your average audience ­doesn’t neces- 127

sarily need to know that the reference ­here is Lin Chong, the prisoner, but
­those familiar with Chinese opera ­will immediately get the reference.9

Film as Social Justice

 I ­really love the film Forest of the Wild Boar, and genre films play an
impor­tant role in my work ­because they are able to build a bridge between
traditional narratives and this con­temporary moment. At the same time, it
takes a story that should be set during the Song dynasty and allows us to see
that the same story is still playing out ­today. It feels like a story that should
have come out of Touch of Zen (Xia nü, 1971) or King Hu’s world, but it’s
happening right now. So by utilizing genre as method, I can tell a story that
gets to the heart of ­human experience removed from time; ­these are age-­old
stories that are still playing out before our eyes. So I hope to create a link
between ­these classic literary works or past h
­ uman experiences to show that
we all share the same challenges. So both A Touch of Sin and Ash Is Purest
White share a connection with genre cinema.

You mentioned the importance of Peking opera in A Touch of Sin, but ele­
ments of Peking opera have actually appeared in several of your films. Still
Life features a group of Peking opera actors in full makeup and costume
appearing amid the ruins of Fengjie, and your short films The Hedonists
and Revive both feature ele­ments from Peking opera. Could you say a bit
more about the place of Peking opera in your films?

I’ll start with the m ­ usic I used during the opening sequence of Still Life. Once
the initial shooting was finished, I sat down with Lim Qiong to discuss the
­music. During our discussion I mentioned the possibility of using S­ ichuan
opera m ­ usic ­because the film is set in the area of Sichuan not far from Chong­
qing. I told Lim Qiong that the story was in some ways very similar to the
traditional story Lin Chong Feeling by Night ­because the two protagonists
(Zhao Tao and Han Sanming) had both come from afar to resolve some
long-­standing issues. In the story of Lin Chong, he had to resolve a prob­lem
that impacted his own survival; for my characters they had to resolve an
emotional prob­lem with their respective relationships. Lim Qiong tracked
down some el­derly Sichuan opera actors to sing the melody to Lin Chong
Fleeing by Night and mixed it with electronic ­music, which was then used
in the film.
Actually, t­ here are a lot of predicaments that we find ourselves facing in
our con­temporary lives that often make me think about premodern China.
In some ways, we ­really ­haven’t made that much pro­gress and ­haven’t changed
128 that much. [laughs] So some of the techniques I use in A Touch of Sin and
Still Life, like the visual references to landscape painting and scroll painting,
are all an attempt to express this classical sensibility. Th
­ ese days we may have

chapter four
high-­speed railways and iPhones, but in many ways our fate is not that far
from what it was for ­people a long time ago.

In your previous films, you used a lot of long shots and carefully orches­
trated setups. Compared with ­those films, A Touch of Sin uses a more con­
ventional approach: you have a lot of close-­ups, and the pace of the editing
is much quicker. How do you account for this change in film style? Was it
purely aesthetic sensibilities driving this, or ­were t­ here practical challenges
you ­were trying to surmount?

­ ere w
Th ­ ere no specific issues I needed to surmount; I just wanted to make a
film that felt like a wuxia martial arts film. All the characters in A Touch of
Sin are like characters out of a wuxia story. I wanted the audience to also
have this association with martial arts cinema. When you see Ash Is Purest
White, you can see traces of the gangster film genre. [laughs] Basically both
of t­ hese films ­were not only well suited for a genre film approach, but in some
way they needed ­these ele­ments from genre cinema.

­ arlier ­today, one of my film students from China pulled me aside to express
E
a predicament he is facing: he loves films that are critical and introspec­
tive like A Touch of Sin; at the same time, he is quite concerned that if he
goes on to make that type of film in China, they ­will just end up getting
banned. What would your advice be for a student like this? To move forward
and make films he is passionate about, even if they are risky, or to make
more conservative and “safe” films?

Never take the conservative path. What­ever kind of film you feel like mak-
ing at this stage in your life is the kind of film you should make. If you have
a proj­ect you want to film now and you are twenty-­five or thirty years old,
do it now. If you wait another ten years to shoot it, it ­will be a dif­fer­ent film.
Let me tell you a ­little story about when I made Platform. So Xiao Wu
somehow ended up being labeled a so-­called under­ground film, and I ­really
wanted to make sure my second film could be commercially released in
China. I de­cided to collaborate with Beijing Film Studio, since it is a state-­
owned studio. Beijing Film Studio loved my screenplay and assigned Tian
Zhuangzhuang as a producer to work with me on the film.10 ­After working
together for a while to develop the proj­ect, we officially applied to the studio 129

for permission to begin shooting. ­After some deliberations, the censorship

department sent us a memo that stated: “This film is a large-­scale historical

Film as Social Justice

 film that spans more than a de­cade from the 1970s to the 1980s. We looked
into the background of the director and discovered that he is only twenty-­
nine years old and we feel that, in order to achieve the proper results, an
older and more experienced director should direct this film.” Once we re-
ceived that memo, I just said: “Thanks anyway, I’ll just go ahead and shoot
the film myself.” That’s b ­ ecause Platform is a film that only the twenty-­nine-­
year-­old me could have made; the forty-­nine-­year-­old me would have shot a
dif­fer­ent film. [audience applause]
Of course you should shoot the kind of film you want to make, but some-
times ­there is a price to pay for that, especially in China. But, to speak frankly,

4.9 ​
A Touch of
Sin US film poster

130

chapter four
if you are someone with a strong ­will, you can bear it, you can make the sac-
rifice. ­Because I guarantee you that t­ here are a lot of p
­ eople out t­ here making
much bigger sacrifices for all kinds of ­things ­every day. ­After all, compared
to ­those ­people that are unemployed, ­those ­people facing vari­ous forms of
injustice, ­those ­people who have been falsely arrested, what is this t­ hing called
film anyway? We can make that sacrifice; we can pay that price. Once you have
seen p­ eople who are facing true suffering in this world and ­those facing injus-
tice, the strug­gles of making a film ­aren’t even worth mentioning.

­ ere ­were several audience questions about how you design w

Th ­ omen char­
acters in your films. For the past de­cade or so, most of your films have been
structured around female characters, most notably t­ hose portrayed by Zhao
Tao. Could you talk about how you think about female characters in your
work? Are ­there common themes that tie ­these dif­fer­ent ­women together?

All of t­hese characters have a commonality, which is they are all northern
girls. And that is b ­ ecause Zhao Tao is a northern girl, and she is good at
portraying ­women from northern China; she knows how they speak, and
having grown up in that area, she has a rich imagination to fill out the details
of what life is like in t­ hose northern cities. Up u
­ ntil this point in my c­ areer,
all the female lead characters I have written have been from the north, and
Zhao Tao provides a lot of help in fleshing them out.
I actually ­don’t make a big distinction between male and female charac-
ters; it r­ eally all depends on what draws you in during the writing pro­cess.
Often not even I know what kind of character someone w ­ ill turn into when
I first begin the writing pro­cess. For instance, in the beginning of Ash Is
Purest White, Zhao Tao’s character is quite weak, but a­ fter she starts hanging
out with Bin, he begins to change, as does she. Eventually, Bin grows weaker
and she grows stronger. By the end of the film, she has become even more
power­ful than he was, even in his prime.
What I ­really want to emphasize is the importance of leaving some ele­
ments of your characterizations or the story somewhat hazy; you need to
leave room to flesh t­hings out as you complete the film. I have always felt
this to be an essential tool. Even up ­until ­today, when I write my screenplays
I never write an outline, and that’s ­because I need to leave some ele­ments
to the unknown. That way, as I am writing the screenplay t­ here is a sense of
discovery, and I have room to let my characters grow over the course of the 131

writing pro­cess. If I start out with a complete outline, it is like I am using a

mold and simply punching my character out according to a predetermined

Film as Social Justice

 4.10 ​Jia Zhangke

pattern. But I never liked that method; instead, I much prefer the pro­cess
of gradually fleshing out my characters out of a blank canvas. I like to take
­things step by step, scene by scene, letting what­ever mood I happen to be in
each day gradually guide the characters in a way that allows them to naturally
reveal themselves. The character that eventually emerges is like a tree that
has been nurtured to adulthood. When you plant a tree, you have no idea
what it w
­ ill look like once it has grown. It has its own life force. So I am always
132 resistant when it comes to getting too deep ­under my characters’ skin at the
very beginning of the writing pro­cess; if you set your story in stone too early,
you end up losing part of the magic.

chapter four
 mountains may depart (2015)
ash is purest white (2018)

5 Return
to Jianghu

5.1 ​Jia Zhangke
 ­Those of us in the film industry are also
part of a kind of jianghu.

The original Chinese title of Ash Is Purest White is actually Jianghu ernü,
which roughly translates into “sons and d ­ aughters from the land of rivers
and lakes.” The central notion h ­ ere is jianghu, which is a concept you also
played with in your e­ arlier films. The world of Xiao Wu, in which the pick­
pocket protagonist operates outside mainstream society according to his
own moral code, is very much an example of this kind of jianghu. What
is your definition of “jianghu”? Besides the core concept, in both A Touch
of Sin and Ash Is Purest White, we can also see the impact of wuxia fiction
and film. In what ways has the wuxia genre impacted your work?

I started writing the screenplay for Ash Is Purest White in 2015, right a­ fter
completing Mountains May Depart. Part of the reason for writing that film
was ­because I had always wanted to make a film about this underworld of
jianghu. I have also always had a strong affinity for ­those Chinese jianghu
films, especially ­those Hong Kong gangster films from the 1980s. So the pri-
mary reason I wanted to make a film like this is ­because I’m a fan of the
genre; besides that, when I was growing up—­especially in the late 1970s—­
even though I was young, I was basically living in a kind of jianghu! [laughs]
At the time t­ here ­were a lot of young p
­ eople who w­ ere unemployed and just
spent their time hanging around the streets, so somehow seven-­or eight-­
year-­old kids like me would end up hanging out with t­hese guys in their
twenties! You might won­der, what did we do together? Well, the big kids
would fight with each other, and us l­ittle ones would help them gather up
bricks and stones as weapons. Through that experience, I started to gradu-
ally gain some understanding about h ­ uman nature and h ­ uman be­hav­ior. By
the 1980s, when video rooms started to become popu­lar, I discovered that
134 ­those gang bosses w ­ ere all starting to imitate ­those Hong Kong gangster
films. All of a sudden, they started to foster a kind of jianghu culture: they

chapter five
would worship Lord Guan, watch out for each other as b ­ rothers, and started
to talk about ­things like “fraternity” and “loyalty.” This jianghu culture car-
1

ried on all the way up ­until the past few years; that’s when I started to realize
­there was a fundamental change in the way jianghu culture functions ­today.
When I was shooting Mountains May Depart, I heard a story about
gangs ­today: as it turns out, if two young guys get into an argument on the
street, ­there is a number they can call to summon some thugs to help them
out. ­These thugs work for a com­pany and charge a fee for their ser­vices!
[laughs] ­There was one case where both parties called for backup, but they
called the same com­pany! [laughs] In the past p ­ eople fought for what they
thought was right—­perhaps to stick up for a friend who got cheated—­but
­today even the passion of youth is for sale!
At the core of the concept of jianghu is a very complete philosophical
system. Loyalty, righ­teousness, courage, and fraternity are all central con-
cepts around which Chinese ­people have constructed their relationships for
thousands of years. But t­oday ­those concepts and relationships are gradually
breaking down and beginning to dis­appear. When I was writing the screen-
play to Ash Is Purest White, the disappearance of ­those relationships led me
to reflect on just what is this ­thing called jianghu. As far as I am concerned,
jianghu represents a place in society filled with danger, such as the chaotic
period of the Ming dynasty portrayed in King Hu’s films or the social en-
vironment of 1980s Hong Kong during the economic boom as seen in the
gangster films of John Woo. So I have always thought of the historical back-
drop of t­ hese jianghu stories as being tied to the dangers lurking amid times
of rapid social transformation.
Another dimension of jianghu is the type of complex interpersonal rela-
tionships that often appear in ­those stories. Th ­ ere are more characters that
appear on-­screen in Ash Is Purest White than in any of my other films. That’s
­because jianghu is inherently made up of a mishmash of all kinds of dif­fer­
ent ­people from a variety of backgrounds and their complex relationships.
When you talk about chuang jianghu, or someone who “makes their way
amid this jianghu,” you are essentially talking about someone who has ex-
periences interacting with a broad cross section of ­people who have faced
dif­fer­ent kinds of challenges in life. ­There is also the saying sihai weijia, or
“everywhere between the four seas is my home,” which describes t­ hose
jiang­hu characters who move from place to place throughout their lives
without ever settling down. In this sense, most ­people are all living in a kind 135

of jiang­hu. They all start out in small country towns and make their way to the
cities; from t­ here they go from one city to another, and eventually from China

Return to Jianghu
 they travel abroad: ­people are always searching for new possibilities in life.
So in the end, we are all part of this jianghu world. Gradually, I began to under-
stand just how attached Chinese culture was to this concept of jianghu. So,
in some way, it is through the perspective of jianghu and t­ hose ­people who
live amid that world that we are able to get a clearer understanding of how
our age has been constructed and what is happening in society.
For me the main takeaway is just how much this concept of jianghu has
changed. Classical notions of what is impor­tant in a relationship have begun
to fall apart and dis­appear as t­ hings move forward.

How did the title of the film evolve?

I realized that whenever the term jianghu appeared in vari­ous movies, it is

usually not translated into En­glish. Usually they just used the Romanized
pinyin form of jianghu b ­ ecause ­there is r­eally no good equivalent in En­
glish. When you think of jianghu, you think of someone who has no home
and travels the world, someone who lives his life on the road in search of
new possibilities. This is a rather general definition of the term. Of course,
in Chinese, jianghu can also have a more specialized meaning, referring to
­those jianghu figures at the bottom of society.
The first time I heard the term jianghu ernü, “the sons and ­daughters of
jianghu,” which is the Chinese title, was when I was shooting I Wish I Knew
and interviewed the veteran actress Wei Wei.2 Wei Wei was the star of Fei
Mu’s masterpiece from the 1940s, Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi
chun, 1948). During our conversation, Wei Wei told me that during Fei Mu’s
­later years he was actually planning to shoot a film called Sons and ­Daughters
of Jianghu, which was ­later completed by Zhu Shilin. As soon as I heard that
title, I was immediately drawn in b ­ ecause in traditional Chinese relation-
ships the concept of jianghu was built on emotion, loyalty, and fraternity. So
you can see that concept expressed throughout Chinese film and lit­er­a­ture,
­because so much is based on the logic and philosophy of jianghu. ­People’s
relationships with one another are built on qing, or “emotion.” This meant
that all of ­these characters had rich emotional bonds and deep friendships.
So I have always liked this term “sons and ­daughters of jianghu,” which like
my previous film Mountains May Depart also has a certain classical sensibil-
ity to it. And both of them explore how t­ hese classical layers of meaning that
136 had been with us for so long are now gone.
I remember when we ­were just getting ready to shoot the film, one of my
colleagues complained: “This title sounds like something out of an antique

chapter five
 5.2 ​
Ash Is Purest
White film poster

store! It’s sounds like it’s from another era; every­one ­will think it is a classical
costume drama! ­Can’t we change the name?” But I insisted on keeping the
name; jianghu is, ­after all, a very classical-­sounding name.

­ ere are some directors who start ­every film with a clean slate and tell an
Th
in­de­pen­dent stand-­alone story through that film. But t­ here are a hand­
ful of film directors who seem more interested in intricately constructed
cinematic worlds where each film seems interconnected to the previous
one. I am thinking of François Truffaut and Tsai Ming-­liang as two clear 137

examples of directors who like to intentionally play with the intertextual

lines between their films. You also fall into that category: your films often

Return to Jianghu
 reveal subtle moments of connection and dialogue with one another. When
looking at your entire body of work, dif­fer­ent characters, actors, themes,
cities, and even camera a­ ngles reappear. One of the more obvious examples
of this type of an intertextual connection can be seen between Unknown
Pleasures and Ash Is Purest White. As a director, how do you navigate t­ hese
intertextual relationships?

In 2016, when I first started shooting Ash Is Purest White, I discussed some
of the prob­lems regarding the historical setting with my art director. We
­were finding it r­ eally difficult to capture all the nuances of t­ hose ­earlier sec-
tions of the film ­because it was a full de­cade ­earlier, and a lot of the finer de-
tails w­ ere already a bit hazy. But as it happens, that was right around the time
that digital cameras became available, and I had shot a lot of raw material
on my digital camera. So we watched all the material that I shot, and then
we also watched Unknown Pleasures. As soon as I saw Unknown Pleasures, I
immediately realized that the male and female protagonists in Ash Is Purest
White could very well be Qiao Qiao and her boyfriend from Unknown Plea-
sures. ­After all, I never ­really developed that par­tic­u­lar story line when we
­were shooting Unknown Pleasures. Her boyfriend was certainly a gangster
type, and their story was left open. At the time of its release ­there w ­ ere even
reporters who asked me: “Hey, what­ever happened between Qiao Qiao and
her boyfriend?” I just replied: “This is what in traditional Chinese brush
painting you would call liubai, or ‘leaving empty space for the imagination’!”
It was only many years ­later when I completed the screenplay for Ash Is
Purest White that I realized that ­there perhaps ­really was something lurking
­there in that empty space. I de­cided to change the characters’ names in Ash
to match the two lead characters in Unknown Pleasures; I also had them
wear the same costumes from the previous film. Of course, ­those original
costumes ­were long gone, but I had my costume designer make a new set of
outfits to match the ones we originally used in Unknown Pleasures.
I also realized that we never ­really cleared up the narrative line in Still Life
where Shen Hong seeks her husband, so I felt that Ash could also explore
that thread as well.

You have shot three films that take place against a broad historical time­
line. Besides Platform as an epic of the everyday depicting 1980s China,
138 Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White both feature bold timelines
that span more than a de­cade. Perhaps most daring is Mountains May De-
part, which, besides the past and pre­sent, also delves into the f­ uture. What

chapter five
kinds of challenges did you face when you needed to imagine a “­future
tense”?

Back in the 1990s—it was actually in 1995—­I completed my very first feature-­
length screenplay for Platform. The film spanned an entire de­cade, and at the
time I had a very power­ful sense the 1980s w ­ ere over. For me it r­ eally felt
like the end of an era. That was my era—it was the era of my youth—so I felt
like I needed to make a film with a broad historical perspective to ­really deal
with that experience. ­After that point, virtually all of my subsequent films
took place over a fairly compact timeline, at least up ­until Mountains May
Depart.
By the time I wrote Mountains May Depart, I was forty-­three years old, so
I think it is related to where I was in life during that time. Before that time,
I ­really d­ idn’t have a good grasp of time, I was simply too young and ­didn’t
have the perspective to understand many facets of life, nor did I want to
understand them. But by the time I hit my forties, I had seen a lot of t­ hings
in my life, and the hand of fate had touched me in dif­fer­ent ways. Th ­ ere are
certain ­things we are destined to experience in life; if ­there was a screenplay
for one’s life, it would certainly have to include, as the Buddhists say, “birth,
aging, illness, and death.” I fi­nally got to a point in my own life where I
wanted to make a film about t­ hese natu­ral challenges we experience over the
course of our lives. Young love, marriage, having ­children, facing the real­ity
of one’s parents aging, and all kinds of other ­things that arise—­these are all
­things that none of us can escape from. At the time, I also started to think
about what the f­uture would be like. So for the very first time, Mountains
May Depart also includes a section of the narrative set in the ­future.
When it came time to write Ash Is Purest White, I suddenly realized that
I was still very much interested in placing my characters within a much
broader period of time to observe them and reflect on their lives. This is
all related to my personal experience. When I was a kid, ­there was this “Big
­Brother,” a local gangster, who I ­really admired. Back then he was quite
handsome and charming. When I was ­little my dream was to one day grow
up to be just like him! He was ­really an impressive character. Fast-­forward
many years ­later, I was visiting home one summer from college and saw a
dejected-­looking middle-­aged man eating noodles at some street-­side stall.
I took a closer look and realized it was that Big B­ rother that I had admired
in my youth! I thought to myself, My God! What a toll the years have taken 139

on this guy! How did he end up like this! When I de­cided to make a film
about jianghu, it ­wasn’t just to express the passion and excitement of ­these

Return to Jianghu
 5.3 ​Sylvia Chang (left) and Dong Zijian (right) in Mountains May Depart

young guys on the streets; it was also to explore what time eventually does to
someone who was once so full of vitality and life. So I ended up writing yet
another film that spans many years. It is a film that represents where I am
in life now, b
­ ecause I have begun to realize that you gain a dif­fer­ent under-
standing of p­ eople when you place them in a broader historical framework.

Speaking of the broad time span, when you made Platform ­there ­were two
specific historical markers that served as a framing device for the film—­
the beginning of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform Era in 1978 and the 1989 student
protests in Tian­anmen Square. Ash Is Purest White spans 2001 u ­ ntil 2018.
Was t­ here a similar set of historical markers you wanted to explore ­here?

I have made three films with this broad historical perspective. My second
feature film, Platform, was set between 1978 and 1990; it was basically a film
about the entire de­cade of the 1980s. When I wrote it I was at the Beijing
Film Acad­emy and ­really felt that that era was gone. That de­cade represented
the happiest childhood memories for a kid like me—my formative years
from the ages of ten to twenty all played out during that decade—­and it all
corresponded to the first de­cade of the Reform Era.
Ash Is Purest White opens in 2001; that’s ­because that is the year that Chi-
na’s social development went into high gear and entered a new phase. That
was the year that China’s bid to host the 2008 Olympics was approved, China
140
entered the World Trade Organ­ization, the popularity and accessibility of
mobile phones started to ­really take off, and the influence of the internet

chapter five
 5.4 ​
Mountains May
Depart film poster

began to spread. As we stood at the crossroads of a new c­ entury, we could

feel that society was transforming at blinding speed, but none of us knew
where ­things w­ ere ­going. But we ­were all filled with curiosity and excite-
ment for what was to come. I r­ eally wanted to make a film that looked back
to reflect on this moment from a de­cade or two in the ­future. I wanted to
be like a time traveler, returning to that bygone era, and also return to t­ hose
places where I had previously shot my films—­Shanxi, the Three Gorges, and 141

Chongqing—to create a new story in order to reflect on how times have

changed and how we have changed.

Return to Jianghu
 More than a de­cade ago I made a film called Still Life, which reveals a
lot of readily evident social change taking place in China. You can see the
Three Gorges Dam construction proj­ect, you can see a three-­thousand-­year-­
old city being torn down u ­ ntil all that is left are ruins waiting to be sub-
merged, you can see the results of more than a million ­people being forcibly
relocated—­all of that is laid out before your eyes, so that type of change is
easy to capture on film. But over the course of this past de­cade or so what
has moved me even more is seeing the gradual transformation that is taking
place within p ­ eople and seeing how h ­ uman emotions have changed. Chi-
nese society has always had a traditional way of navigating interpersonal
relationships, which places ­great emphasis on loyalty and emotional con-
nections. But over time t­ hese traditional bonds that tie us together are being
gradually revised and dismantled; more and more what ties ­people together
­today is profit and money. This kind of internal transformation often leaves
me feeling very uneasy. In some way, it is just like that old song by Sally Yeh
that you hear in the film.3 It is like a beautiful voice that is about to dis­appear,
so you need a character like Qiao Qiao to bring that precious beauty from
the past back into our pre­sent so we remember it.

What was the greatest challenge when it came to portraying such a broad
historical period?

The greatest challenge was with the actors ­because they had to cover seven-
teen years over the course of the film. The lead actors needed to convinc-
ingly portray a character from their twenties all the way up to their forties,
which is very difficult for any actor to do. I never liked the method of using
two actors to play a single role—­that is, getting a twenty-­something actor to
the play the young version of a character and then a forty-­something actor
who somewhat resembles him to play the old version. Whenever I see that
tactic being used, it always feels fake ­because you can immediately tell it is a
dif­fer­ent actor. I much prefer to see the mark left by time imprinted on the
characters’ f­aces; that is always much more power­ful. So casting for a film
like this was a g­ reat challenge; I r­ eally ­wasn’t sure if t­here w ­ ere any actors
willing to take on ­these roles. Fi­nally, I just had to carefully ask Zhao Tao to
see if she might be interested. [laughs]
Once Zhao Tao read the screenplay, she d ­ idn’t feel t­ here was any prob­lem
142 in terms of conveying the age of the character; for her the biggest challenge
was that she simply c­ ouldn’t get a good h ­ andle on this type of a female char-
acter’s personality. [laughs] I told her that I d ­ idn’t know any w ­ omen like her

chapter five
­either! [laughs] Although I know plenty of men like her! [laughs] In order
to get a better understanding of the character, Zhao Tao started to do some
research; she collected all kinds of documents and read all kinds of court
rec­ords and police interrogation reports; she also read all kinds of reportage
lit­er­a­ture about ­women and oral history accounts. ­After reading all of ­these
materials, she fi­nally came to me one day and asked if Qiao Qiao reminded
me at all of She Ai’zhen.4 She Ai’zhen was a well-­known female gangster ac-
tive in Republican Shanghai during the 1930s. [laughs] She started out work-
ing in a casino and l­ ater married a notorious gangster named Wu Sibao. She
eventually became famous for her gunfights and was labeled as a “traitor to
China” during the War of Re­sis­tance against Japan. A ­ fter the war she spent
some time in prison before moving to Japan, where she married the writer
Hu Lancheng.5 Zhao Tao asked me: “­Isn’t she similar?” I could see some sim-
ilarities, but I was also very surprised by how far she had taken her research. I
even said: “Wow, you even dug back as far as the Republican era!” [laughs]
Not long a­ fter that she told me she was done with her research. She said: “I
think I fi­nally understand this concept of jianghu, but when it comes down
to it and you strip every­thing e­ lse away, I am portraying a ­woman.” That
sentence ­really was a revelation for me.

And once shooting began, w

­ ere ­there other practical challenges she had to
face? When it came to the ­actual portrayal? Or capturing the character’s
personality?

The greatest challenge Zhao Tao faced was actually her “skin prob­lem.”
The real question was how to create the proper skin effect for the younger
iteration of Zhao Tao’s character from the 1990s. As a man, I am fairly igno-
rant about makeup and not particularly sensitive when it comes to how the
skin looks, so I had no idea how to ­handle this. [laughs] So we hired a ­really
good makeup artist to help with this issue. I thought what he did was fine,
but Zhao Tao insisted that it ­wasn’t good enough. Eventually, I had to turn
this task over to Zhao Tao, who hired a French makeup artist and worked
closely with the lighting designer and cinematographer to ensure they got
the effect they wanted. I jokingly referred to them as the “skin team.” So I let
her tackle this prob­lem, and I think she did an incredible job ­because when
I looked at the final footage, I r­ eally did believe it was the younger version of
Zhao Tao that I was seeing on-­screen. 143

Besides that, Zhao Tao also adapted her voice for the role. I remember her
one day suddenly asking me: “Do you hear any difference in my voice?” It

Return to Jianghu
 was indeed dif­fer­ent than usual. She told me that this was the voice she had
found for the younger version of her character. Her voice was clear and sharp
but at the same time felt very natu­ral. She took a long time to find the right
voice for that younger version of the character. Then t­ oward the latter portion
of the film, she dropped her voice down a bit and the texture became a bit
coarser. Her breathing also got a bit heavier during the second half of the film.
But what impressed me most about her per­for­mance was when she picked
up that b ­ ottle of mineral w
­ ater. In the original screenplay her character never
carried a ­water ­bottle. But that b ­ ottle of mineral ­water is a carryover from
Still Life. She asked me: “Since we are g­ oing back to the Three Gorges to
shoot, how about if I carry a w ­ ater b­ ottle around with me, just like I did in
Still Life?” I just casually replied: “Go ahead! It’s hot ­there anyway!” [laughs]
The first time I r­ eally discovered her using that w ­ ater b
­ ottle was when she
arrived in Fengjie and went to that office building to look for Bin. When the
automatic door was about to close, she suddenly whipped out that b ­ ottle
and jammed it between the closing doors. As soon as that take was over, my
cinematographer Eric Gautier and I looked at each other in awe; we w ­ ere
both blown away by that. [laughs] ­Later when Zhao Tao tracked down that
­woman in black who had stolen her money, the same b ­ ottle suddenly trans-
formed into a kind of weapon. L ­ ater still when she met the ufo guy on the
train and he wanted to hold her hand, she handed him the ­bottle to grab
hold of, which was yet another brilliant per­for­mance. Per­for­mance is r­ eally
the most essential component that holds up this film.

Liao Fan also delivers an incredible per­for­mance in Ash. Can you talk
about your collaboration?

In terms of the aging issues, male actors are a bit easier to deal with ­because
the skin changes are not so noticeable. When I discussed how to manage
the physical change of his character for the portions set in 2018, he just said:
“­Don’t worry about it, I’ll just grow a beard.” So before shooting he grew his
beard out, which had a lot of gray in it. I always look at Liao Fan as a handsome
leading-­man type and have never seen him in any film with a gray beard. It
­really moved me that he was willing to have the courage to openly display
that side of himself.
As for all of the other details in Ash Is Purest White that we needed to
144 convey the passage of time, such as costume design or vari­ous props like cell
phones, we just used a method of historical research and verification. For
instance, what model of Nokia cell phone was in popu­lar use in 2001? We

chapter five
5.5 ​Zhao Tao (left) and Liao Fan (right) in Ash Is Purest White

had to look all t­ hose details up. Actually, t­ hese details are all quite easy to get
right as long as you are willing to put in the time. A lot of the locations we
used w­ ere actually sets we had to build b ­ ecause the original locations are all
gone. For instance, the tea­house where the gangsters all hang out and play
mah-­jongg was a set we built.

Besides the lead actors Zhao Tao and Liao Fan, another fascinating as­
pect of the cast in Ash Is Purest White is the cameo appearance of some of
China’s leading film directors, including Feng Xiaogang, Xu Zheng, Diao
Yinan, and Zhang Yibai.6 You also did something similar in The World,
which featured cameos from Zhang Yibai and Wang Xiaoshuai. What made
you decide to cast so many film directors in ­these films, and what do they
bring to the t­ able?
145

As I was writing the screenplay, I discovered that t­here w­ ere an especially

large number of characters in this film. ­These other characters are all ­people

Return to Jianghu
 the leads encounter during their adventures in jianghu, but I needed to cast
all of ­these roles. Often when I am writing I am already thinking about who
I should cast for a par­tic­u­lar role. Sometimes that person is an actor I have
collaborated with, and sometimes it is just a friend, including some of my di-
rector friends. Since ­these characters only appear on-­screen for a very short
time and have only a few scenes each, I needed actors with a special qual-
ity that would ­really jump out. I thought all of ­these directors w ­ ere quite
special! [laughs]
For the role of Lin Jiadong, I immediately thought of Diao Yinan, since he
is tall, wears glasses, and looks cultured and refined. When Zhang Yibai fin-
ished his scenes, he told me: “Now I understand why the film is called Sons
and ­Daughters of Jianghu in Chinese. Liao Fan and Zhao Tao and the sons
and d­ aughters and the rest of us are collectively portraying jianghu! [laughs]
You need a lot of ­people to make up an entire jianghu!”
On another level, I feel that ­these directors are better able to understand
my screenplay ­because ­those of us in the film industry are also part of a kind
of jianghu. We travel the world with our sworn ­brothers to make movies,
and over the course of our journeys we run into all sorts of crazy situations.
So when they read my screenplay, they have an approach that is almost in-
stinctual; ­after all, we are all part of this same jianghu world!

Normally when we think of the traditional world of jianghu, it is usually

positioned as a man’s world—­from the 108 heroes in The ­Water Margin
(also translated as All Men Are B
­ rothers) to the masculine martial arts cin­
ema of Chang Cheh. When you made Ash, what made you decide to have
a female character be our guide into this jianghu world?

That was an unconscious decision b ­ ecause when I first started writing the
screenplay I looked at both the male and the female protagonist as equal repre­
sen­ta­tions of the jianghu world. But by the time I got to the end of the screen-
play, I realized that their transformation was somehow interconnected—as
Bin grew increasingly weaker, Qiao Qiao grew stronger. This was perhaps
the first time I was writing a screenplay where I found myself uncon-
sciously reflecting on masculinity. In the world of jianghu t­hose elders are
always talking to their subordinates about lofty concepts like “loyalty” and
“brother­hood,” but not even they themselves necessarily believe in any of
146 that. But the younger generation—­Qiao Qiao and her generation—­absorbed
all of ­those ideas and made them a fundamental part of their belief system.
Amid the social order of jianghu, men tend to lose their way more easily

chapter five
5.6 ​Zhao Tao in Ash Is Purest White

­ ecause, over time, their values have become overtaken with money and
b
power, which override every­thing ­else. Th
­ ose other values such as friend-
ship and fraternity and loyalty all end up getting tossed by the wayside. But I
discovered that ­women somehow are able to remain more loyal to their own
emotional core and remain true to themselves. ­These are some of the reflec-
tions I came to over the course of writing Ash Is Purest White.

­ arlier you talked about how you used makeup to help accentuate Qiao
E
Qiao’s aging pro­cess in Ash, but another impor­tant tool to reveal the pas­
sage of time was through the cinematography. Not only did you replace
your regular cinematographer Yu Lik-­Wai with the French cinematogra­
pher Eric Gautier, but you also used a multitude of cameras and formats to
shoot the film. Could you talk about this film’s unique visual style?

First off, I d
­ idn’t replace Yu Lik-­Wai! Yu Lik-­Wai is also a film director, but he
has been so tied up shooting my films t­ hese past few years that he h ­ asn’t had
time to shoot his own films! [laughs] As I was getting reading to shoot Ash, 147

Yu Lik-­Wai was also planning his own film, so we de­cided to bring in some-
one ­else to shoot my film. We both si­mul­ta­neously suggested Eric Gautier;

Return to Jianghu
 I have been a big fan of his work. Since Yu Lik-­Wai can speak French, he
wrote a letter to Eric to see if he might be interested in collaborating with
Jia Zhangke. Eric happened to have an open slot in his schedule, and that is
how it came together.
Starting in 2001, I developed the habit of shooting documentary footage
whenever I had ­free time. Often I would have no idea what I was g­ oing to
shoot, but I had just purchased my first digital camera, so I would shoot
all kinds of ­things. When we ­were working on Ash, my art designer and I
wanted to refresh our memories about what t­ hings looked like back in the
early 2000s, so we started to look at all of that old documentary footage I
had shot. Once we started digging through t­ hose old files, we realized that
I had used quite a few dif­fer­ent cameras over the course of the previous de­
cade or so: I had shot on Mini dv, hd dv, Betacam, 16mm, 35mm, Red, Red
One, Fed 5b, and an Alexa. That was a period when the technology for digi-
tal cameras was constantly changing and upgrading. That’s when I suddenly
got the idea of using dif­fer­ent formats to portray dif­fer­ent historical periods.
Eric loved the idea, so we started to run some tests. He did all kinds of ex-
periments to see what would work, and then we discussed w ­ hether or not
we wanted each format to stick out and emphasize t­ hese shifts. The question
was ­whether or not to have each change in format be marked by a sudden
evident shift in the film, or w ­ hether we wanted to h ­ andle t­hese transitions
more subtly and blend them in. I thought we should go for a subtler style
with soft transitions between the vari­ous formats. I wanted the audience
to gradually enter t­hese dif­fer­ent visual spaces and textures without even
noticing it. In order to see ­these dif­fer­ent subtle shifts, Eric did a lot of tests,
including adjustments to the pixelation b ­ ecause the material ranged from
low-­resolution images all the way up to 6k. Each stage of the film uses a
dif­fer­ent format; we also used some of the old documentary footage that I
had shot on dv. Take, for example, in the scene at the Three Gorges where
Zhao Tao is watching a per­for­mance: ­there is a twelve-­year lag between the
time the footage of the per­for­mance onstage was shot and the reaction shots
of Zhao Tao sitting in the audience w ­ ere shot. But with dv we w ­ ere able to
edit ­these dif­fer­ent shots together. So when you look at all the pieces of the
cinematography put together, it is ­really quite impressive. [laughs]
The most impor­tant ­thing is that Eric ­really made sure to fully employ all
of that old equipment. He ­didn’t seem to mind that a lot of the old cameras
148 ­were out-­of-­date dv cameras; he was r­ eally flexible. ­There ­were times when
we had almost two hundred p ­ eople in our crew, and we would drive out to
a shooting location with nearly four hundred extras, and every­one was per-

chapter five
forming for a tiny handheld camera the size of a cell phone! [laughs] Some of
the extras even thought we ­were a bunch of swindlers. ­After all, who shoots
a movie with a tiny camera like that? [laughs]

A ufo first appeared in your 2006 film Still Life, but more than a de­cade
­later it returned in Ash Is Purest White. What is the symbolic meaning of
the ufo?

As you mentioned, I also used a ufo in 2006’s Still Life. That was my first
visit to the Three Gorges, and I visited the two ancient towns of Wushan
and Fengjie, which ­were in the final stage of being torn down. As soon as
I arrived, I was struck by the surrealist atmosphere ­there. Since the entire
town was basically demolished, walking amid ­those ruins left me with the
impression that what I was seeing w ­ asn’t even real. It was as if aliens had
come down from space to destroy Earth. I felt t­ here was something magical
and monstrous about the changes grappling China. Since the real world was
already touched by this surrealist vibe, when I was trying to capture that
sensation I had felt, I began to imagine t­hings like ufos appearing in my
screenplay.
By the time I got to Ash Is Purest White, ­there was a scene in which Qiao
Qiao was leaving the Three Gorges ­behind on her way to Xinjiang. Before
shooting I had taken a trip out to Xinjiang with my producer for location
scouting. I told the local producer that I wanted to find a place where I
could see stars and the Milky Way. My producer responded: “You can see
the Milky Way everywhere h ­ ere!” So we drove about ten minutes outside
the city, looked up, and t­ here was a sky full of stars and the Milky Way! You
can never see t­ hose stars in the city—­I ­don’t think I have ever seen stars
in Beijing. Standing ­there gazing up at the stars, I thought of all the dif-
ficult relationships that Qiao Qiao had to navigate—­her relationships with
her boyfriend, her f­ather, t­ hose hoodlum guys. All she faced was trou­ble
and obstacles, and she was always forced to deal with other ­people; it was
only at that moment standing ­under the Xinjiang sky that she was fi­nally
alone. That was her most solitary and vulnerable moment, and in that mo-
ment, I wanted to give her something—so I sent a ufo down to send her
a greeting.

Your films often feature per­for­mance sequences. In Ash Is Purest White ­there 149

are several, such as Qiao Qiao watching a street per­for­mance in Fengjie

or attending a small concert. Th ­ ose per­for­mances provide an emotional

Return to Jianghu
 outlet for the characters, and at other times they provide an opportunity
for a lonely soul to be part of a collective. How do you look at t­ hese per­
for­mance sequences?

My two most recent films both employed disco. [laughs] Mountains May
Depart featured the song “Go West” [by the Pet Shop Boys] in a disco club
scene, and Ash Is Purest White used “ymca” by the Village P ­ eople. The most
impor­tant part of this is using disco dancing to tell the story of the charac-
ters’ youth. During our youth, it was actually a very boring era, and besides
dancing, playing pool, drinking, and playing mah-­jongg ­there r­ eally w ­ asn’t
anything ­else to do. When I was writing the screenplay, no ­matter how I ap-
proached it, ­there was ­really nothing ­else for ­these young ­people to do in the
story! [laughs] ­Those ­were the only forms of entertainment at that time. Of
course, many of my films have t­ hese per­for­mance scenes, which I ­really love.
According to our traditional education, Chinese p ­ eople should be reserved
and ­shouldn’t reveal their emotions; but ­those moments when a person is
singing karaoke or dancing represent one of the rare moments in which they
are able to express their true selves and get some kind of a release, even if
only for a short time. That’s why I always love shooting scenes of ­people
singing and dancing, b ­ ecause it is only then that they are not hiding b ­ ehind
something.

Ash Is Purest White opens with a song by the Cantopop singer Sally Yeh.
Starting with Xiao Wu and continuing on through Touch of Sin, you have
actually used her m­ usic several times in your films. Her m
­ usic can also be
heard in the classic John Woo gangster film The Killer (Diexue shuangxiong,
1989), which immediately brings us back to that world. Could you talk
about Sally Yeh’s ­music in the opening sequence?

I made Ash Is Purest White ­because I have wanted to make a film about
jianghu for a long, long time—­I actually wanted to make a film about the
con­temporary version of what jianghu is ­today. But as I was getting close
to the film, I de­cided I also wanted to experiment with genre film ­because
the characters w­ ere all quite similar to the kind of characters you find in a
typical gangster film, even if they are not exactly the textbook definition
of “gangsters.” They ­don’t pass on their gang titles to dif­fer­ent generations,
150 practice strict rituals, or pass down a strict set of rules to each generation
like they do in Hong Kong gangs. They are simply a bunch of guys from a
certain street or district who started to get into trou­ble together! [laughs]

chapter five
5.7 ​Jia Zhangke on location shooting Ash Is Purest White

Gradually they somehow became defined as part of a jianghu. I just wanted

to capture that feeling.
From the perspective of the screenplay, I was hoping that this film would
be able to play with certain ele­ments from genre films, especially Hong Kong
gangster films. So while I made sure to emphasize that jianghu atmosphere,
I also ­didn’t want the film to be typecast as a typical genre film. At the same
time, I also wanted the film to be able to explore multiple subjects. I wanted
to make a film about the world of jianghu and ­those gangsters who grew up
in mainland China during that era. One of the impor­tant cultural ­factors
that led them to foster this self-­conception of themselves as gangsters was
the video room culture of the 1980s. That is where they first saw t­ hose old
John Woo gangster films, and then they took to the streets and tried to
mimic the attitude and manner of speech of ­those gangsters they saw on-­
screen. This was a crucial turning point in how this jianghu culture evolved
in the mainland. In the film Bin watches Taylor Wong’s film Tragic Hero
(Yingxiong haohan, 1987), so we show a clip of that film. But as for ­music, I
always think of the theme song from John Woo’s film The Killer, Sally Yeh’s 151

“A Lifetime of Intoxication” (“Qianzui yisheng”). I also saw that film in the

1980s, and that song has stayed in my heart ever since. The song has a certain

Return to Jianghu
 jianghu vibe about it; it expresses the ­will of someone who dares to explore
deep emotions. The song has an inner truth to it. This is what most attracts
me about the emotional side of jianghu—­the raw emotional truth of what
that jianghu world represents. Pop ­music is always evolving, and ­these past
few years ­there are quite a few good songs that have come out. The rhythms
and melodies are ­great, but something has changed—­people have changed
and our emotions have changed. But Sally Yeh’s songs carry with them a
traditional emotional dimension. If Ash Is Purest White is a film about how
traditional interpersonal relationships and emotional bonds are falling apart
and disappearing—in the end, every­one ends up like Bin—­then ­music too is
changing, from something with deep and rich emotional content to some-
thing that is pleasing to the ear and relaxing but utterly devoid of meaning
on the inside. In some sense, that original truth and genuine emotion are
gone, and it is very difficult to ever get them back.
I also faced this situation in 2006 when I was shooting Still Life, when
the changes ­there ­were reaching their tail end. Fast-­forward to 2018 when
I was shooting Ash Is Purest White and I again had that feeling that I was
saying goodbye to something. The ways in which we used to interact with
one another are gone, and even ­those lingering vestiges of truth that we find
in ­music can only be found in t­ hose old classic songs from the past. Society
is ever changing, and though I ­don’t consider myself a nostalgic person, I
feel like we ­don’t have that many good t­hings from the past that we have
preserved for ourselves ­today. All of the good ­things seem to somehow be
sealed in the past. Perhaps Qiao Qiao is one of the few p ­ eople who is hang-
ing on to something from the past for us.

We just talked about Sally Yeh’s song “A Lifetime of Intoxication,” which

opened the film. It has a special warmth that immediately creates a certain
mood for the audience. The mood created by the last shot, on the other
hand, could not be more dif­fer­ent. At the end of Ash Is Purest White, our
perspective suddenly shifts from that of the detached observer to that of
the state. Instead of the filmmaker’s perspective, we see Qiao Qiao through
the lens of the security camera that has been installed across the street
from her tea­house. Once that is paired with Lim Qiong’s unsettling ­music
and a series of almost violent jump cuts, we are left with a very dark and
uneasy feeling. Can you talk about ­those final moments in the film?
152

The final sequence you see in Ash Is Purest White is not the original ending
I had in mind. According to the original screenplay, Bin left on the first day

chapter five
of the new year, and Qiao Qiao sat down at the ­table, poured herself a drink,
and sat t­ here alone drinking. That was it. But I somehow always felt like this
ending was too nostalgic and sentimental. The script even had a line at the
end: “ ‘A Lifetime of Intoxication’ rings out one last time.” [laughs] But I just
felt that that image of drinking alone while listening to “A Lifetime of Intoxi-
cation” just ­wasn’t my style. I’m not so sentimental! So I kept thinking about
a better way to end the film.
When it came time to actually shoot the film, we got to the scene where
Bin suddenly left and Qiao Qiao ran outside to look for him; then I remem-
bered that we had shot some footage of the police installing security cameras
across the street from the tea­house and I wondered if it might work to get
a shot from the perspective of the security camera. Once we shot Zhao Tao
through the lens of the security camera, she was reduced to a blurry digital
image; the image was extremely fuzzy. No exaggeration, at that moment I
wanted to cry. I was so moved ­because I realized that this was the world we
are living in ­today. It is said that by 2020 ­there ­will be two surveillance cam-
eras in China for e­ very person, recording our e­ very move. But this is how we
are being documented, through hazy and blurry pixelated images. You ­can’t
see any emotions, nor can you see our lived experience—it is all rendered
invisible and ready to be deleted at a moment’s notice. It was in that instant
that I suddenly realized what my job is. Film is an essential art to rec­ord the
details of the average person’s everyday life. So that is why we need cinema,
and not surveillance cameras! [laughs]

­ usic has an impor­tant place in your films, but generally speaking you
M
seem to exercise a lot of restraint in terms of using film scores. Could you
talk about the place of m­ usic in your films? What I am particularly inter­
ested in is, what are the f­ actors that help you decide when to include m
­ usic
in a scene and when to leave it out? Do you have a guiding princi­ple when
it comes to utilizing ­music for film?

Film m­ usic is one of ­those subjects that is ­really hard to talk about! [laughs]
Usually as I am editing a film, I come to certain portions where I just natu-
rally feel the need to add ­music! [laughs] But it is very difficult to explain
why I need m ­ usic at that specific juncture! [laughs] ­Every film has a kind of
subtle overtone that lingers, and when you make a good film it needs to have
­those overtones. The same ­thing goes for acting. Actors deliver their lines, 153

but at the same time, ­there is another level of meaning that they can subtly
convey. Directors also need to have ­those overtones in their work. When

Return to Jianghu
 you get to ­those moments where you feel the audience needs that ­little extra
something, a subtle overtone, perhaps ­those are the places where you need
to add a ­little m
­ usic.

You have been working with the Taiwanese composer Lim Qiong for more
than a de­cade now. What is your collaborative relationship like?

Lim Qiong and I started to work together on The World in 2004. He mostly
works on electronic ­music. To be fair, I actually hate electronic ­music—­but
I love Lim Qiong’s electronic m ­ usic! [laughs] If you use traditional instru-
mentation, ­whether it be piano, violin, cello, or Chinese instruments like the
erhu, the emotions ­those instruments tend to convey are already familiar to
us. But when you incorporate electronic m ­ usic into the mix, you get new
possibilities, and it is particularly suited to the atmosphere in con­temporary
China t­ oday, which is represented by an unpre­ce­dented mixture of the fan-
tastic, the surreal, and the sexual. It is at once classical and new; and the new
aspects feel as though they represent a stage of h ­ uman development never
before seen! Somehow electronica is able to perfectly capture and express
that abstract feeling.

With Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White we also begin to
see more philosophical reflections about the passage of time sneaking
into your work, and with that comes a commentary on aging, illness, and
death. What w ­ ere some of your personal takeaways ­after making ­these two
reflective films?

I think t­hose themes are all connected to t­hings I have experienced in my

own life t­hese past few years. When I first started making films I was only
twenty-­seven years old, and life h ­ adn’t yet ­really opened up. Not only was
I still single, but I ­don’t think I even understood what marriage was about.
Life was still very fresh and new to me, so mostly I focused on shooting films
that recorded my reactions to what was happening in that pre­sent moment.
By the time I reached my forties, it was as if I had done my homework and
had a richer life experience to draw upon, which, in turn, made me want to
use a larger historical canvas to convey more of life’s complexities. One of my
biggest takeaways from this stage in life are the myriad challenges one must
154 face: the environment in which we live is transforming at breakneck speed,
and ­there are a lot of judgment calls we need to make amid this changing
environment. With ­these new situations also come new technologies that

chapter five
 5.8 ​Production shot
from Mountains May
Depart

appear within this helter-­skelter world—­the only t­hing we can do is make

the best decision on how to navigate this new environment. For me what is
crucial is to look at the world through the perspective of a large cross section
of ­people and only then can we make the best decision on how to proceed.

Let’s round out our discussion with a game of f­ ree association based around
keywords from Jia Zhangke films. Can you talk about what randomly comes
to mind when you hear: Sally Yeh.

“A Lifetime of Intoxication,” video rooms.

Realism.

I ­can’t think of anything! [laughs] I think of truth. Truth in art. Why did so
many Chinese directors during the 1990s stubbornly pursue realism? B ­ ecause
they had a real hope that Chinese cinema could represent a kind of truth. I’m
not sure if ­there are other national cinemas that have this same fixation, but
my generation of film directors in China certainly did, and that’s b ­ ecause the
films we ­were watching growing up ­were all so artificial! [laughs]

Fenyang.
155

Fenyang alcohol! [laughs] As I get older, all I want to drink is alcohol from
my hometown! [laughs]

Return to Jianghu
 In­de­pen­dent.

Freedom. Without freedom you can never be in­de­pen­dent.

The h
­ ere and now.

I think of 1905 ­because I have always wanted to shoot a traditional Chinese

costume drama. It’s been eight years, and I still h
­ aven’t begun shooting. But
when you say the ­here and now, I think of that film, which is set in 1905!
[laughs] That was the year China abolished the official examination system.

On location.

Box lunches! [laughs]

Break dancing.

I still secretly break out some moves e­ very now and then! [laughs] Some-
times at the office I find myself dancing without even realizing it! But my
colleagues always notice, and they immediately whip out their cell phones
to rec­ord me! [laughs] But I’m not as good as I used to be! I used to be able
to do all kinds of twists and flips. The other day I suddenly had the urge to
pull one off, but I de­cided I better not, I’d prob­ably break my neck! [laughs]

ufo.

I think of t­hose times when I am all alone. Every­one seems to think I am

always so busy, juggling all kinds of dif­fer­ent proj­ects. Actually, ­every day
­there is always a lot of time that I spend by myself. From my twenties ­until
now, I always make sure to carve out some alone time for myself. I recently
moved back to my childhood home, and at night you can see the moon and
stars, and I can imagine ufos. So ­these days I am spending more and more
time longing for outer space. A few years ago I even wrote an essay on astro-
physics. ­After I wrote it, I showed it to a friend of mine who is a sci-fi fan,
and he said: “Director, this is what you call ‘trash sci-­fi’!”

156

chapter five
 student years
xiao shan ­g oing home (1995)
the aesthetics of an opening shot
master class

6 ­Toward
an Accented
Cinema

6.1 ​Jia Zhangke
 Actually, if we use the meta­phor of
language to analyze film, you can look at
a filmmaker’s style as an “accent.” One
of the most fundamental questions for
a filmmaker is: Does your film have an
accent?

Over the course of the more than two de­cades that you have been making
films, in what ways has your notion of cinema been transformed?

It is hard for me to clearly describe in exactly what ways my understanding

of film has changed b ­ ecause it is a pro­cess of transformation that is forever
unfolding. I think each film I shoot unconsciously incorporates new ideas
into a new form. Film is an art form that relies on the summation of a lot of
dif­fer­ent ele­ments: ­there are screenplay ele­ments, location issues that need
to be resolved, timeline issues you need to figure out, as well as per­for­mance
components with actors. All of ­these certainly change over time, but for
me perhaps one of the biggest changes occurred around the time I made A
Touch of Sin when I began to incorporate ele­ments from genre cinema into
my work. For me that was a r­ eally addictive pro­cess that gave me a lot of
satisfaction.
I increasingly feel that the most impor­tant t­hing you can do in a film
is to innovate or develop something new. Besides innovations in cinematic
language, perhaps even more impor­tant is to discover a new type of char-
acter to be seen on-­screen. I am thinking of iconic characters like Charlie
Chaplin’s Tramp, or Lu Xun’s Ah Q. I think we need to invent t­ hese types of
archetypal characters in order to articulate the new challenges, situations,
158 and prob­lems that face us. ­These past few years I keep asking myself w ­ hether
we are able to create a unique new character like that. Are we able to create a

chapter six
type of character unlike any we have ever seen before on-­screen, yet one that
reminds us of someone around us that we see e­ very day in our normal lives?
That’s the kind of character I want to create.

As a director, you need to synthesize a broad knowledge of many areas,

including cinematography, editing, lighting, and screenwriting. However,
besides ­those technical skills you also need experience, vision, interpersonal
skills, communication skills, et cetera. What area of knowledge do you
feel is most essential for young film students to spend their time on? Back
when you w ­ ere a film student, what areas did you focus on the most?

I began my studies at the Beijing Film Acad­emy in 1993, and my major was
film theory, which was focused on training talent in film theory, film history,
and cultural criticism. But ­there is something quite unique about the curricu-
lum at the Beijing Film Acad­emy b ­ ecause ­there is a common curriculum for
all freshmen and sophomore students. ­Those core common classes include
cinematography, per­for­mance, screenwriting, and film history, and students
from all dif­fer­ent majors take ­these courses together. Even though my major
was film theory, during ­those first two years I was able to get a solid educa-
tion in all the vari­ous basic aspects of filmmaking, including producing and
directing.
As I was pursuing my studies, I also took advantage of my time outside
of class to do some ­things for myself, like write screenplays. When I first
applied to the Beijing Film Acad­emy, I applied to the school of lit­er­a­ture,
which included theory and critical studies, ­because it was much easier to
get into—­back then t­here w ­ eren’t that many p ­ eople interested in studying
film history or film theory. Moreover, back when I applied, I r­ eally d ­ idn’t
have a strong foundation in film studies—­the only ­thing I knew how to do
was write. At the time, ­there ­were very few film publications that ­were read-
ily available. Th
­ ere was also the fact that most of t­ hose classic films that are
always cited in film history books w ­ ere completely unavailable; t­here was
simply no outlet where I could see them. So, at the time, I felt like I ­really
­didn’t have much of a choice b ­ ecause I ­didn’t have the specialized knowledge
to apply for any other major. So I ended up getting into the film theory track,
since that major required strong writing skills. But at the same time, I had
a very strong urge to explore my creative side. Starting from my freshman
year, I was already writing screenplays, and I maintained that habit all the 159

way through college.

Toward an Accented Cinema

 Another ­thing I started to do was to create an environment in which I
could actually produce short films. We studied a lot of dif­fer­ent areas such
as theory, sound design, and art design, but making short films was essen-
tial in terms of applying that knowledge to my own real-­life experience and
understanding of ­things. Making shorts ­really helped me with that pro­cess.
It was only when I ran into curious creative prob­lems when I was a director
shooting ­those short films that I truly understood the value of the knowl-
edge I was acquiring.
­Because I was a film theory major, I actually only had two five-­minute
short film homework assignments that I was required to produce over the
course of my college years. That meant that I r­ eally d­ idn’t have a lot of op-
portunities to make films through my classes—­two five-­minute shorts r­ eally
­weren’t enough. In order to create more opportunities for us to make films
on our own, my classmates and I or­ga­nized a club which we called the
Beijing Film Acad­emy Youth Experimental Filmmaker Group. Although
the club was made up of students from vari­ous departments, it ­wasn’t of-
ficially sponsored by the acad­emy. We had students majoring in lit­er­a­ture,
cinematography, sound design, and vari­ous majors who would get together
to shoot short films. I made two films with this group, Xiao Shan ­Going Home
and Du Du.

And how impor­tant was that experience of making short films during
your student years for your overall growth as a filmmaker?

I would like to discuss Xiao Shan ­Going Home in more detail ­because that
was a film that was r­ eally impor­tant for my growth. At the time, t­ here ­were
twenty-­odd members of our film club, and we de­cided that we would make
a short film together. Each of us wrote our own screenplays and then we
selected the script that we most wanted to shoot. I wrote Xiao Shan G ­ oing
Home, and every­one seemed to feel that was the best one, so we went ahead
with me as director. ­Because this proj­ect was not directly connected to any
of our coursework, it was very hard to get access to equipment through our
school. Somehow our cinematographer was able to get his hands on a Be-
tacam, and the sound designer managed to pull some strings to borrow a
microphone and some old Nagra recording equipment from that era. We all
pooled together what­ever resources we had to make that film. At the time,
160 I was ­doing some “hired gun” freelance work, basically writing uncredited
scripts for tele­vi­sion, and used that cash to cover what­ever production costs
we had.

chapter six
 Back when we shot Xiao Shan ­Going Home, ­there was actually one nar-
rative line that I never shot. In the original screenplay, ­there was one more
character that Xiao Shan was supposed to seek out. That character was a
nanny working for a rich ­family, and she was having an affair with the head
of the h ­ ouse­hold that she was working for. But b ­ ecause we ran out of money
and needed to return all the equipment that we borrowed, we ­were never
able to shoot that sequence. I was ­really disappointed by that, and without
that narrative thread I always felt the film was somehow not quite finished.
But I eventually pushed forward and de­cided to try and edit it together
anyway—­I had to force myself to finish the editing. Besides the regret that
the film was somehow incomplete, I also felt r­ eally bad for the actress we
had cast in that role that got cut. That role had already been cast, and one
of my classmates who was an acting major was scheduled to portray that
role; she had already done all the prep work! The editing pro­cess ended up
being extremely drawn out ­because we ­didn’t have any money; we had to
keep hustling to find a way to finish it. We would find some editing rooms
that would allow us to use their space for f­ ree, but only for an hour h ­ ere or
three hours ­there. Sometimes we would just ­settle down to start editing and
be chased away by a paying client. So it took quite a while to fi­nally complete
the editing.
You might won­der if anyone actually saw this film once it was done.
Well, one of my classmates made a poster advertising a screening in one of
our dormitories. A lot of our classmates all came out to see the film; the
dorm where we held the screening was packed. Xiao Shan ­Going Home has
a run time of approximately fifty minutes; within ten minutes the room was
empty—­every­one had walked out! [laughs] That was a crushing blow to me
at the time. [laughs] Editing that film was a truly torturous experience. I was
so self-­critical of that film and felt like it was so poorly shot: ­there ­were also a
lot of shots that ­were missing. But all that chaos was a result of our inexperi-
ence. Sometimes t­here was no narrative logic to tie certain shots together;
­there ­were all kinds of prob­lems. But through this prolonged pro­cess of edit-
ing I gradually came to understand where t­ hese prob­lems ­were, and when I
was able to fi­nally piece every­thing together into a coherent w ­ hole it ­really
felt like a miracle. [laughs] When you look at the film, ­there are still all kinds
of prob­lems with the subtitles and vari­ous materials, but what inspired me
to keep ­going was that famous quote from Jean-­Luc Godard: “All films can
be saved during the editing pro­cess.” I felt that if Godard can do it, then I 161

can do it! [laughs] Yet deep down I knew ­there ­were a lot of prob­lems with
the film.

Toward an Accented Cinema

 Once all my classmates left, I started to harbor deep suspicions about
my own abilities. But then I started to think back to ­those moments during
the shoot that ­really moved me; although I knew we ­hadn’t executed them
well from a technical perspective, t­here w ­ ere a lot of ele­ments that stuck
out during the writing and ­later shooting pro­cess. For instance, we used
real locations to shoot the film and selected au­then­tic locations appropriate
for the story, which ­really opened up the space; we also had the charac-
ters speaking dialects, which was forbidden at the time. In order to promote
standard Mandarin spoken Chinese, you ­weren’t supposed to use dialects in
film. This r­ eally frustrated me when I was writing the screenplay b ­ ecause I
knew that my character, who was a mi­grant worker in Beijing, would not be
using Mandarin in real life; he would certainly be speaking some local dia-
lect. So in the end I simply ­couldn’t accept the fact that he would be speak-
ing Mandarin; it just ­wouldn’t make sense and would not feel au­then­tic. So
when it came time to actually shoot the film, we used local dialects and non-
professional actors, which when used together created an effect that was, on
the one hand, very gritty but also very unadorned and true to the real world;
this pro­cess ­really moved me.
In the end, I found myself arguing with myself—­perhaps it’s b ­ ecause I’m
a Gemini—­but part of me felt like the film was a piece of garbage that was
never even complete, and the other side of me felt like t­ here w­ ere still some
good qualities about the film. In the end, one of my classmates suggested
getting out ­there and showing the film to students at other schools. So we
went on the road with the film and exhibited it on videotape to students at
Peking University, Renmin University of China, and Central Acad­emy of
Fine Arts along with a bunch of schools outside of Beijing, including Shanxi
University. That was r­ eally an unforgettable journey. For each screening we
sought out other students our age from the class that entered in 1993 and
asked around to find students majoring in Chinese, film, journalism, or other
related fields who might be interested; then we found an empty classroom
and played the movie. ­After each screening we held q&a sessions, just like
what ­we’re d ­ oing now. Through that pro­cess of interacting with audiences, I
gradually came to understand what it was I was d ­ oing with that film. For
instance, when we ­were at Peking University, ­there ­were a lot of students
who brought up questions concerning China’s peasant population and other
socio­log­i­cal questions that the film touched upon. They ­weren’t film stu-
162 dents, so they d ­ idn’t pay too much attention to t­hose sloppy shots or the
choppy editing, but they ­were drawn in by the main character, which gradu-
ally gave me more confidence in the work.

chapter six
 6.2 ​Wang Hongwei
in Xiao Shan ­Going
Home

Sometime ­later another classmate told me about a short film festival in

Hong Kong, and we submitted Xiao Shan ­Going Home. Then one day I heard
that it had been selected, so I went to Hong Kong, and Xiao Shan ­Going Home
won an award for Best Short Fiction Film! It was at that same festival that
I met two of my most impor­tant collaborators—my cinematographer Yu
Lik-­Wai and my producer Lee Kit-­Ming. We de­cided we wanted to work
together, and that led to my first full-­length feature, Xiao Wu.

Looking back on Xiao Shan ­Going Home ­after all ­these years, what is your
biggest takeaway from that early filmmaking experience?

Reflecting on the pro­cess of making Xiao Shan ­Going Home fills me with all
kinds of emotions: back then I had all kinds of doubts about my abilities,
and that pro­cess was so painful since I r­ eally felt it was a lousy film at the
time. But ­there is one crucial aspect of all this I want to emphasize: I saw it
through. I stuck it out and made sure that this film was able to go through all
the vari­ous stages that a film needs to go through: planning, drafting a script,
casting, shooting, editing, exhibition, discussions about the film, all the way
up to submission to film festivals. I am very thankful for this film ­because
it made me hunker down and experience all of the vari­ous stages of a film’s
production pro­cess, so it was an extremely impor­tant experience for me.
When you think about it, even though the principal photography was never 163

finished, I insisted on editing the film. If I ­hadn’t done that, I would have
never gotten that crucial editing experience, and none of t­ hose other t­ hings

Toward an Accented Cinema

 that came ­later would have happened. ­After editing the film, I screened it for
my classmates. I was crushed by their reaction, but if I ­hadn’t insisted on tak-
ing it to other schools, I would have never had the opportunity to have ­those
deep exchanges about the film with other students, nor would I have ever
submitted it to that film festival. In some sense, the most impor­tant t­hing
about a short film ­isn’t necessarily the film itself but the entire pro­cess of
making the film and being conscious of what we can learn from that pro­cess.
­People often ask me what the greatest ­thing I learned from making ­those
short films was. Actually, a lot of the knowledge used during production—­
knowledge about vari­ous aspects of the aesthetics of film, including art design,
cinematography, and lighting—­were all topics we learned about in class. The
most impor­tant ­thing I learned when making t­ hose short films was how to
make a decision. You might have a single scene, but according to the way it
is written in the screenplay, you could shoot it a variety of ways: you could
shoot it this way or that way; you could choose this actor or that actor. Making
a film is actually the pro­cess of continually making vari­ous decisions. Once
I had started actually working in the industry, I realized that my previous
experience making short films had already helped me grow accustomed to
making decisions and committing to them. It also helped me grow accus-
tomed to understanding myself; actually, when it comes down to it, making a
decision is the same t­ hing as understanding yourself. You might have a scene
that you want to shoot as one long take, but why d ­ idn’t you chop it up into
shorter shots? In what context do you need to use a long take? Sometimes
the reason boils down to intuition, but at other times t­ here is a concrete ra-
tionale. But, in the end, you as the director have to make a call; so with the
job of film director comes the responsibility of making clear decisions and
committing to them.

While at the Beijing Film Acad­emy, what classes did you gravitate to?
What was the greatest t­ hing you learned from ­those classes?

Back when I was still in school, ­there w ­ ere two classes that I enjoyed most,
­those ­were my film history classes and classes in my own major of film theory.
That was back during the early 1990s, which was the age of theory: feminism,
new historicism, postmodernism, postcolonialism w ­ ere all the rage, yet a lot
of ­those film theories had yet to be translated into Chinese. Then ­there was
164 linguistics, phenomenology, and all kinds of other forms of philosophy that
­were often interwoven together. We had quite a few teachers who had stud-
ied abroad, and they ­were trying their best to understand all of ­these new

chapter six
theories, but t­ hings w ­ ere still quite chaotic back then. We would study one
theory ­today and another one tomorrow. Only ­later would I realize that that
experience would become a very impor­tant step for my l­ater creative work.
Since I have been labeled as a Sixth Generation director, ­people often
ask me how my generation differs from previous generations. Naturally, one
big difference is our personal experience: the previous generation all lived
through the Cultural Revolution and only a­ fter that began to study film and
direct films in the 1980s. My generation all experienced 1989 and started
making movies amid the height of the Reform Era. But I think that the main
difference actually comes down to a fundamentally dif­fer­ent understanding
of p ­ eople and society. While we ­were so starved for knowledge that we ­were
just swallowing every­thing w ­ hole and forcing all ­those ­things down, the re-
sult was a very dif­fer­ent way of looking at the world, a new perspective on
­things. Film was new, the characters ­were new, and in the end, our method
of understanding the world was new. The “newness” came from what we
­were reading and studying at that time. So even ­after all ­these years of making
movies, I am still very thankful that I was exposed to all t­ hose philosophical
works in college.
Some ­people ask me why I made my first feature film about a pickpocket.
Why did I make my second film about a group of touring performers? Why
do I make films about coal miners and ­people like that? A lot of this of
course comes down to an emotional connection, but another side of that is
simply from the fact that I have never had any interest in making films about
heroes or icons of any kind. This is something I feel quite strongly about. So
you never see heroes in my films, and I have no interest in shooting any films
about ­those idols most p ­ eople look up to. If you see my film A Touch of Sin,
­there are four characters and four stories about vio­lence. Why did I put them
together? It all boils down to structure. None of ­those individual stories was
able to fully describe my complex feelings about vio­lence in China t­oday.
That film was shot just as social media and Weibo ­were gaining popularity
and every­one suddenly had the power to be a reporter. E ­ very day I was see-
ing all kinds of shocking new events being reported on Weibo. But how do
you capture that in a film? I de­cided I needed to use a format that allowed
me to tell multiple stories and r­ eally try to portray their power and density
in the film. But none of t­hese are stories about idols or icons, and none of
them are complete stories. Actually, any one of ­those four stories could have
been made into a more classical form and expanded into a feature-­length 165

film: you could easily make four in­de­pen­dent stand-­alone films out of that
content. But that w­ ouldn’t have represented the sense of the world that I was

Toward an Accented Cinema

 getting from this era of new media; instead, I needed a new structure to
interpret this era. This new structure called for multiple stories taking place
in dif­fer­ent locations separated by thousands of miles, like Shanxi, Hubei,
Guangdong, and Chongqing, but playing out si­mul­ta­neously in our lives.
So I used the structure of four shorts to bring them together—­I needed this
par­tic­u­lar structure to express my understanding and feelings about my
real­ity and the atmosphere of vio­lence pervading our real­ity during this par­
tic­u­lar time period. So the structure was essential to this proj­ect, and I very
much relied on that structure. As far as I’m concerned, a closed narrative
structure simply does not have the ability to express my feelings about the
con­temporary world; instead, I needed this new structure to tell the story.
When it comes to film history, as someone who works in this industry, I
feel we need to understand the vari­ous stages the art form has gone through
over the course of its development. This is essential b­ ecause as we search for
new possibilities for film, ­those explorations are built on the foundations of
previous chapters in film history. When studying film history, t­ here are two
components I focus on: besides the history of world cinema, as a Chinese, I
also feel it is essential for me to have a solid understanding of Chinese film
history as well.

Since we are talking about film history, I wanted to jump in. In 2013 you
made a short film for the Venice International Film Festival entitled ­Future
Reloaded. That short functioned as an homage to some of the g­ reat classics
in Chinese film history: Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess (Shennü, 1934), Xie
Fei’s Black Snow (Benmingnian, 1990), Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang
tudi, 1984), and Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhichun, 1948).
­Earlier you spoke of the impact Yellow Earth had on you when you first
saw it. When thinking about Chinese film history, are t­ hese the films that
have had the greatest influence on you?

That’s right. I made this short in cele­bration of the seventieth anniversary

of the Venice International Film Festival. The festival invited a few directors
to make shorts about their own conception of film history. I selected t­ hese
four films that I was fond of to pay tribute to. I should say that studying film
history is not just a means of understanding how films are made; it is also a
power­ful method to understand your own local audiences.
166 Even up u ­ ntil t­oday, when we refer to Chinese cinema in Chinese, we
often use terminology borrowed from theater. For instance, when we are
making a film, we say we are “shooting a drama” (pai xi); this use of the term

chapter six
xi reflects audiences’ expectations about film ever since the art form first
entered China. What it means is that when audiences go to the cinema, they
hope to see a drama. The earliest Chinese films w ­ ere all adaptations of Peking
opera stories or stage dramas. More realistic, documentary, or experimental
forms of cinema have a much weaker tradition in China. So in this context,
when audiences go to the cinema, what most of them want to see is theat-
ricality, which is a result of what has gradually evolved over time. With a
strong background in film history, I can make documentaries or more ex-
perimental films and have a much clearer idea of the role they play in our
culture and the challenges they face. Film history can teach us why [Chinese
audiences] are not fond of documentary films or experimental films. Back
when I made Xiao Wu, I appropriated a lot of documentary film techniques,
and a lot of ­people, including some film directors, reacted by saying: “This
­isn’t a film! Since every­thing in it is real, it cannot qualify as a real film!”
[laughs] That’s why it is so essential to understand film history. By studying
film history, we can understand our bloodline, our lineage.

Our film students often have short film proj­ects they have to make for
their classes, which is not dissimilar from the kind of proj­ect you took on
for the Venice Film Festival. Getting back to ­Future Reloaded, how did that
proj­ect come about, and what led you to select ­those four films that ­were
featured?

When I was invited to take part in this proj­ect, I started to think about what
Chinese films had the biggest impact on me. I started from the s­ ilent film era
and Wu Yonggang’s The Goddess, which is my favorite Chinese film from the
­silent period. Chinese film was quite modern back then, and I also felt the
lead, Ruan Lingyu, is the single greatest actress in Chinese cinema; I r­ eally
love all of t­ hose close-up shots of her in the film. Since it is a s­ ilent film, the
emotion that she is able to convey through her eyes is so very power­ful and
moving. It is actually r­ eally impor­tant to study t­ hose old ­silent films ­because
back then the art form was still in its infancy and t­here ­were still all kinds
of possibilities that ­were open. It is like a child: when they are very young
­there are infinite possibilities for their ­future, but once they grow up ­those
possibilities start to narrow. Once sound film came into being and the liter-
ary dimension of cinema came to be emphasized, the medium became less
malleable, its vitality diminished, and it became less experimental. I have 167

always paid close attention to the s­ ilent film era in China, and The Goddess
is ­really a masterpiece.

Toward an Accented Cinema

 Yellow Earth is a film very deeply connected to me personally b ­ ecause I
have always loved that film. It was back when I was a student that I saw Yel-
low Earth and de­cided that I wanted to become a filmmaker.
When I was in film school, t­here ­were two directors that I studied in
depth: Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin. I actually spent very ­little time study-
ing art films with long takes. The reason I was so enthralled by Eisenstein
was that his research expanded the possibilities of film language. I may never
make a film like him, but the method he used to understand film is an in-
credible tool. For instance, he was the one who first argued that by juxta-
posing two dif­fer­ent images you can create new meaning. He represents an
extremely subjective approach to images, which is very dif­fer­ent from the
more objective approach I tried to reveal in my ­later films. But it is only
­because I spent time researching Eisenstein that I was able to understand
what subjectivity in film meant, so when I set out to make films that w ­ ere
more objective and observational in style, I knew what I had to do. Charlie
Chaplin is a film director who can never be duplicated, and ­there w ­ ill never
be another actor like him. His films always serve as a reminder of where
we came from, a reminder of our film lineage. That’s b ­ ecause film was born
out of a sleight of hand, a trick. When film was in­ven­ted, it was very closely
related to magic and acrobatics. That is a reminder for me to continually
adjust my own mode of making films, ­because embedded in the very dna of
cinema itself are ­these populist genres; Charlie Chaplin helps us understand
that film is a popu­lar art form. ­Whether you make art ­house films or com-
mercial films, I feel like all filmmakers need to reflect on this issue.
Spring in a Small Town is a film that I feel represents the absolute pinnacle
in artistic achievement in Chinese film history. It is very hard to articulate in
words what that film accomplished, but I strongly recommend anyone who
is a student of cinema to watch Spring in a Small Town.
Black Snow is a rather unique case b ­ ecause it is a film that I feel has been
tremendously underappreciated in China. It is a film by Xie Fei, who is usu-
ally categorized as a Fourth Generation director; however, in many ways this
film has a deep connection to the work that the so-­called Sixth Generation
would ­later make. Jiang Wen’s portrayal of Li Huiquan in Black Snow pre-
sented the image of a marginalized urbanite, which would l­ater inspire a lot
of Sixth Generation directors to portray dispossessed individuals who ­were
living on the margins of society. That film opened up a space for portraying the
168 malaise of modernity in China. Before that time, virtually no one in China
was making films that explored loneliness, which is essentially a symptom
of modernity. We never saw that expressed in ­earlier films, not even in the

chapter six
work of the Fifth Generation, but Xie Fei’s film had it. That was the very
beginning of the Reform Era, and we w ­ ere just starting to have a new urban
culture and adopt modern lifestyles, so that ­really was the first film to use
­these types of characters to express one’s reflections on modernity.
I just mentioned the generational concept in categorizing Chinese film
directors. Actually, even I am not entirely clear on the difference between
the First, Second, and Third Generations of Chinese filmmakers! [laughs]
My understanding of the so-­called Fourth Generation is that is the genera-
tion that studied film before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. They
had their ­careers interrupted by the po­liti­cal turmoil of the Cultural Revo-
lution and only began to actually make films during the Reform Era. The
Fifth Generation refers to the group that went to film school around 1978
and started making films in the 1980s. But the Sixth Generation is a large and
strange category. It refers to the group that studied film in the 1980s and
1990s, and even some filmmakers who went to school during the 2000s are
included—­all of them are lumped together as the Sixth Generation. For a
filmmaker, none of this ­really ­matters; I frankly ­don’t care what generation
you want to label me as. But this issue brings up a prob­lem: when you are
still at a very active stage in your creative ­career, and suddenly critics and
historians refer to you as part of a collective or slap a clear label on you, how
are you supposed to respond? Even if they ­don’t lump you into a certain
movement, critics always try to summarize the unique qualities of your
work. I feel that this is the moment that a director needs to ­really summon
up his spirit of re­sis­tance. You need to resist the labels that other p­ eople are
assigning to you. For instance, a­ fter I finished my second film, Platform, one
critic wrote a r­eally glowing review; it was r­eally flattering, but t­here was
one line where the critic stated he hoped I would go on to continue making
more films about t­ hese types of provincial towns throughout my c­ areer. He
felt that my film helped him discover the existence of ­these provincial cities
in China, but I ­don’t want to be labeled as a director who only makes films
about provincial cities; I want to make movies about the moon! [laughs]
When it comes down to it, the most impor­tant ­thing is to have an un-
derstanding of who you r­ eally are. ­Every time you make a movie, write a
screenplay, or commit to an artistic act, you have to ask yourself if it is some-
thing you are truly interested in and committed to. It ­doesn’t ­matter what the
outside world says about your work; even if some aspect of your work has
become a marketable asset, you need to resist. This spirit of re­sis­tance needs 169

to be built on the foundation of loyalty to yourself. If you want to make this

film t­ oday, do it! If you want to make that film tomorrow, do it! I remember

Toward an Accented Cinema

 when I was just starting out, a veteran director recommended that I prepare
a bunch of dif­fer­ent scripts. Once you are ready to start shooting, you should
weigh which one is best suited for the critics and the market at that specific
time; that way you w ­ ill have a smoother c­ areer. But I never liked that kind of
approach. As far as I am concerned, film is not like gambling. Just ­because
martial arts films are hot at the box office right now ­doesn’t mean I should
run off and shoot a martial arts film! At the same time, if I am set on mak-
ing a martial arts film, you better believe that I am ­going to make it, even if
no one is interested in that genre! That’s b ­ ecause I am making films out of a
spiritual necessity; you need to always re­spect yourself and never lose sight
of that.

The opening shot of a film is extremely crucial. In just a few minutes you
need to provide so much information: introduce the main character, an­
nounce the setting of the film, and provide some clues about the larger
historical background. Even more impor­tant is capturing the audience’s
attention by setting up a conflict or plot details for the action to follow.
Your filmography is filled with several brilliant opening sequences, from
Xiao Wu to The World. Could you walk us through the design and ideas
­behind the first few minutes of one of my favorite opening sequences, the
first few minutes of Still Life?

Actually, whenever I am writing a screenplay and first start conceptualizing

the opening sequence, it is usually an unconscious pro­cess, and the opening
usually evolves by chance. As I see ­things, opening sequences usually fall
into one of two categories. The first is a dramatic opening where you quickly
get into the story and plotline; something happens, or a character f­ aces some
kind of predicament and needs to figure out what to do. This a classic dra-
matic opening. But I much prefer the second category, which is more expe-
riential in nature; that is, ­there are no dramatic ele­ments, but instead you get
a portrait of a person and learn what kind of environment he is from. The
opening sequence establishes the atmosphere as the most impor­tant com-
ponent. This approach is devoid of drama and plot, but it is experiential and
atmospheric. Still Life is an example of this latter, antidramatic approach;
instead, it is immersive and experiential; it brings the audience into the envi-
ronment in a way that makes them feel as if they too are sitting on that boat.
170 A crucial aspect to setting up an opening sequence is the type of film
language you want to use and how you set the shot up. For ­those opening
shots I used a set of dolly tracks that we put the camera on. We laid the tracks

chapter six
down on the boat and slowly shot portrait-­style images of the passengers’
­faces. ­Because of the topography of the Three Gorges region, whenever I
am ­there ­either walking along the river or on a boat, I am always reminded
of the visual sense you get from looking at a traditional Chinese landscape
scroll painting. I am thinking of ­those horizontal scroll paintings that gradu-
ally reveal a landscape. As you roll the painting open, the scenery constantly
changes and you see dif­fer­ent characters in the painting being revealed. The
natu­ral landscape of the Three Gorges region is very similar to what you see
in t­ hose paintings. If you are sitting on a boat and look out in one direction,
it is ­really just like a scroll painting! If you ­ride on a motorcycle along the
river’s edge, you get the same effect. So that led me to use a lot of dolly tracks
in this film so I could capture the visual style of a scroll painting. This was
completely inspired by my gut reaction to the environment ­there.
­Later in postproduction we emphasized the green tints in the landscape
­because that is the color you always see in ­those landscape scrolls. We wanted
to capture that classical feeling on film. If you ask me why, it is ­because the
Three Gorges always left a very strong impression on me. ­Those mountains
and that river have been t­ here for thousands of years, and what we see are
the same vistas that the ­great poet Li Bai saw back in the Tang dynasty. Thou-
sands of years ­later, that scenery is still ­there unchanged, yet humankind has
changed so much. I wanted to use this method to tie a con­temporary story
together with a classical sensibility. The way we de­cided to execute that was
by using a slow-­moving camera on dolly rails to mimic the effect of looking
at a traditional scroll painting.
Once we had settled on the method, the next challenge had to do with the
per­for­mances. We cast all of t­ hose p
­ eople who appear on the boat right t­ here
at the dock! Some of them are dockworkers while o ­ thers are local residents;
we selected them based on their ­faces and led them aboard—­but then ­there
was the prob­lem of per­for­mance. A lot of ­people think I just picked a few
nonprofessional actors, led them aboard, shot the scene, and that’s it. That
would be impossible. If you ­don’t design the shot, if you ­don’t coach ­those
performers, all you w ­ ill end up with is a bunch of blank f­ aces staring at you
in confusion! [laughs] The first ­thing to do was to imagine a task for each
one of them to be d ­ oing: it might be playing cards, drinking a beer, fortune-­
telling, talking on a cell phone, eating a snack, but you need to design all of
that carefully. You have to imagine what the vari­ous possibilities are for them
as passengers on that boat. We ended up breaking up into dif­fer­ent units to 171

tackle this: I was responsible for one group, and my two assistant directors
­were responsible for two other groups. Each of them did some rehearsals

Toward an Accented Cinema

 with their groups, and then we started shooting. When you are working with
extras or nonprofessional actors, you need to provide them with crystal clear
instructions; you need to tell them exactly what to do, other­wise they just
end up staring at you. [laughs]
Then ­there was the prob­lem when it came to executing the scroll effect—­I
wanted to re-­create the effect of opening a long horizontal scroll, but our boat
­wasn’t long enough to achieve that effect! A ­ fter discussing the prob­lem with
my cinematographer, we de­cided to begin the shot out of focus, then as the
camera moves along the track gradually come into focus, then just as we are
almost out of track, transition back to out of focus. Then we set the shot up
again with the next group of extras. ­Later in postproduction we ­were able to
edit ­these shots together by overlapping t­hose out-­of-­focus portions, which
gave the illusion that the boat was much longer than it r­ eally was and cap-
tured the scroll-­like effect I was looking for. But you have to plan all of this
out before you start shooting so you have the right material when it comes
time for editing; that way the series of shots you capture are able to produce
the feeling you are looking for. Since I was ­really insistent on capturing that
scroll painting effect, we had to use t­ hose out-­of-­focus fades and reconstitute
the sequence in order to make the scene flow as if it was a single shot.

172

6.3 ​Production shot from the opening sequence of Still Life

chapter six
Audience: I just shot a short film and discovered that sometimes ­there
would be a lag between the instructions I gave the actors and their ability
to match that with the practical real­ity on set. Your films always feel so
genuine and real to me, so I am wondering, what techniques do you use to
communicate with actors on set?

The first ­thing to note when explaining acting issues with performers is the
fact that no two actors are alike, so t­here is no one-­size-­fits-­all approach.
­Every actor requires a dif­fer­ent approach. For instance, I have worked with
Zhao Tao longer than any other actor, and whenever we collaborate, she has
a method for approaching her role that involves writing a short biography
for her character. She w ­ ill write out all the biographical details that d
­ idn’t
appear in the film: for instance, what street the character grew up on, where
she went to elementary school, what happens to her a­ fter the film—­she builds
up a detailed biography based on her imagination. Once she is done, she
always discusses it with me to figure out which aspects match with my own
conception of the character and which aspects feel off. The reason for this
kind of deep character discussion is ­because when the character appears
in the film, it is just a cross section of one aspect of that character’s life, but
­there are a lot of ele­ments that go into deciding which possibility to pursue
for any given character. As an actor, Zhao Tao needs to imagine her charac-
ter as being three-­dimensional. When I work with Zhao Tao, she explores
a lot of dif­fer­ent ideas, but in the end, it all comes down to the question of
making the right call for that par­tic­u­lar character. So when working with an
actor like Zhao Tao, clear communication is essential. As long as I am able
to clearly express what I want, she is able to deliver it.
Another example is the actor who played Xiao Wu’s ­father in Xiao Wu.
He is a nonprofessional actor, so at first his per­for­mance was very much in-
fluenced by the overly dramatic acting style he was accustomed to seeing in
films. I loved the way he looked and he had a g­ reat presence, but as soon as
he started acting, you could see he was obviously acting! When he walked,
he took ­these exaggerated steps like he was an actor in a Peking opera per­
for­mance! [laughs] Let me demonstrate it for you. [Jia Zhangke gets up and
takes several g­ iant, exaggerated steps and speaks in a loud theatrical voice]
“Xiao Wu, ­you’re back!” [laughs] So that’s what I had to work with! But I still
­really liked him, and since I d ­ idn’t have that much time to work with him,
I thought of a way to guide him in the right direction: I de­cided to demon- 173

strate the scene to him using an even more exaggerated style. I told him his
acting was off, and I repeated the scene in a manner that ­really was right out

Toward an Accented Cinema

 of a Peking opera per­for­mance. When he saw it he said: “Huh, I guess that’s
not quite how we look in real life.” So I asked him: “Well, what do you think
a more real-­life version would look like?” And then he did much better.
During that first take his approach was completely unconscious. He never
­imagined that when he walked he was taking huge steps like that, whereas
he should have been performing in a much more natu­ral manner. So I func-
tioned as a mirror so he could see what he was ­doing, and he immediately
saw what he had been ­doing was wrong.
I worked with Joan Chen on 24 City; she is an incredible actor, but our
scene was set in a hair salon inside a workers’ apartment building. It was
a real-­life environment, and when we started shooting, she c­ ouldn’t get
through the scene ­because all the noise was distracting her. She was accus-
tomed to working on a soundstage or a closed set, and all the city noise made it
difficult for her to focus. But that was precisely the kind of environment that I
like. So in situations like that I have to just sit down and explain to the actors
why we need to shoot in this type of environment. I called for a break; then
I patiently explained to Joan where all t­ hose noises w ­ ere coming from. For
instance, when we heard the sound of a motorcycle, I told her that might be
a ­father dropping his son off at school; when we heard the piercing voice of
two old ladies talking, I told her that they ­were at the market haggling over
prices. So I just took my time and explained all ­these noises to her. And
she immediately adapted and nailed the scene; all she needed was a sense
of security in what was a new shooting environment for her. This is where
Joan Chen’s genius r­ eally shone through for me: she immediately understood
what I was trying to do and why we needed to shoot the scene in a real-­life
location—it all just clicked.
And then t­here are cases when you try every­thing, but nothing seems to
be working—­you just ­aren’t getting the per­for­mance you want. I also have
experience with ­those types of situations, and I usually just stop shooting and
go back to the screenplay. Sometimes the prob­lem is at the level of the script.
If ­there is something wrong with the screenplay, t­ here is no way the actors w ­ ill
feel comfortable. So sometimes you need to go back and check the screenplay,
and often the prob­lem is that the actors d ­ on’t feel the dialogue is believable or
the logic of the screenplay ­doesn’t conform to the logic of real life or the inter-
nal logic of that character. Once you revise the screenplay and make another
attempt to reshoot the scene, the results are usually much better.
174

Audience: You have mentioned that Lee Chang-­dong and o

­ thers have talked
about the need for Chinese art ­house movies to take the box office into

chapter six
6.4 ​Joan Chen in 24 City

consideration and think of ways to interest audiences in art films. I am

wondering, what kind of ele­ments can attract more mainstream audiences
to art ­house films?

I ­don’t look at this as a prob­lem with the box office; the question is ­really how
films can win over the audiences that they should be winning over. I feel that
­every individual must face his own market environment, or you could say
that the audience environment is dif­fer­ent for each filmmaker. I’m quite cer-
tain that Lee Chang-­dong’s comments ­were directed at the Korean market,
which has some fundamental differences with the Chinese environment.
The film environment in China is extremely complex. The first prob­lem is
that ­there is a group of directors who are not willing to let their films enter
into circulation, which I ­don’t think is a good idea. Socie­ties rely heavi­ly on
business structures to make vari­ous connections. The creative pro­cess can
remain in­de­pen­dent, but the most effective methods for promoting your
films and establishing a bridge to your audience are commercial networks. 175

So in order for this commercial bridge to flow freely, we need directors to

take part in this pro­cess.

Toward an Accented Cinema

 Another issue is related to the methods we use to make our films and
how we promote content we care about. Speaking frankly, Chinese art film,
especially during the 1990s, passively became extremely elitist. Why do I
say that? Well, when you think about it, by the time the Film Bureau held
that conference in 2003 t­ here ­were more than fifty directors who had been
banned from making films. With so many directors’ work cut off from Chi-
nese audiences for so many years, you end up with a situation where ­those
types of films are completely unfamiliar to mainstream Chinese viewers.
Over the course of ­these past few years, whenever I release a new film I travel
all around China giving lectures and ­doing interviews—­this is a necessary
step ­because most audiences are completely unfamiliar with art films. If we
as directors d­ on’t take our work out t­ here and introduce it to the p
­ eople, in
some sense, it is like rejecting our audience. And I think that it is starting
to have an impact b ­ ecause Mountains May Depart sold 1.2 million tickets at
the Chinese box office, but just a few years l­ ater that number increased to 2.5
million for Ash Is Purest White.
As for ­actual production of art films, it is somewhat awkward to explain
this, but I feel that ­there are some directors who intentionally try to make
arty films in a very calculated way that feels very inauthentic. [laughs] They
do ­things like bundling up their emotions, making their films unnecessarily
complicated, and deliberately mystifying, and employing art film tactics in a
calculated way. But when they do this, you can tell the films are missing gen-
uine emotional weight and the films end up just having a superficial artsy-­
fartsy tone. [laughs] With a film like that ­there is no way you can attract
an audience. I think we should do our best to rid ourselves of ­these types
of obstacles, which inhibit your in­de­pen­dent perspective and observations
or ability to explore new film techniques. ­There is a phenomenon in China
where directors often get ner­vous before their film is distributed and say: “I
tried to make a commercial film this time. I hope it gets the commercial dis-
tribution it deserves!” Then when it flops they say: “See what happens when
you make an art film and try to get it distributed commercially!” [laughs] So
I think we should all be more consistent about what kind of films we ­really
want to make.

Audience: I won­der if you can introduce your working method, espe­

cially when it comes to screenwriting. For film students, much of our
176 training is focused on more commercial films, whereas your films are
more observational and realistic. Could you talk about what methods you
use to capture that more true-­to-­life aesthetic?

chapter six
6.5 ​Michael Berry (left) and Jia Zhangke (right) during a film master class with UCLA students

You might not believe me if I tell you, but when I was studying screenwriting
in college, I started with a strict Soviet-­style screenwriting education, which
was then quickly followed by a strict Hollywood-­style screenwriting course!
Our professor required us to think of one hundred dif­fer­ent twists of fate
someone could experience in their life: being admitted to the hospital, get-
ting in a car accident, et cetera. We studied all of ­these dif­fer­ent prescriptive
methods. One exercise we did was to follow a narrative thread. We had to
basically provide the rationale for someone to buy a ticket to this movie and
sit ­there for the entire ninety minutes, so we had to explain where the narra-
tive direction was ­going. For instance, when the story feels like it is starting
to hit a dead end, what do you do? Each classmate was required to provide a
plotline to push the narrative forward. Some would yell out, “The character 177

moves to a new h ­ ouse!” and teacher would say: “­Great answer! One hundred
­percent!” [laughs] We did ­these kinds of exercises for an entire year.

Toward an Accented Cinema

 Honestly, ­these kinds of exercises w­ ere extremely impor­tant for me, even
if I never used ­those methods in my own screenplays. Take, for instance, the
first section from Xiao Wu, which focuses on Xiao Wu and his friendship
with Xiao Yong. The narrative keeps pushing forward u ­ ntil the point where
Xiao Wu confronts Xiao Yong about not being invited to his wedding. Ac-
cording to the rules of drama, I knew all too well that that scene should be
emotionally packed, filled with brilliant dialogue and heated exchange, and
both characters should r­ eally open up to each other! [laughs] But it was only
­because I knew about t­ hose princi­ples of dramatic tension that I was able to
step outside of that during the writing pro­cess and ask myself: What would
the logic of realism dictate for a scene like this? What would logic dictate
a native of Shanxi do in a situation like this? Well, my answer was that a
lot ­people from Shanxi would remain ­silent during an awkward moment
like that. [laughs] But he was able to express what he felt without words. In
the end, that is what I wanted—­I wanted the actors to express their feelings
without words; instead they just kind of beat around the bush. I knew all too
well that this was a crucial dramatic moment in the film, but I ­didn’t play it
as a typical dramatic confrontation. That’s what I wanted for that scene. But
when you are writing a screenplay, the ability to take liberties like that is
based on the foundation of t­ hose more conventional approaches—­you have
to understand what this ­thing called drama is and how it functions.
Normally when I write screenplays, I have two golden rules that I stick
to, which have always proved useful to me. The first rule applies to what in
traditional Chinese narratives is referred to as qi cheng zhuan he, or “intro-
duction, elucidation, transition, summing up.” ­After my first draft I always
analyze what I have written according to this princi­ple. I dissect the screen-
play to figure out which section serves as the “introduction,” which section
is the “elucidation,” where is the “transition,” and how I “sum every­thing up.”
I am r­ eally fond of this theory of qi cheng zhuan he. The second rule is that
in almost all of my films I always make sure to put the most emotionally
impactful scenes in ­those “golden sections” of the film that create a balance
in terms of the physics of the film. This is rather hard to explain, but I r­ eally
believe in maintaining this inner balance within the film. It is similar to how
you think of the eyeline in a par­tic­u­lar shot or the axis of a shot; the physics
of film has its own internal aesthetics, as does a screenplay.
Among all the vari­ous screenwriting theories out t­ here, the most popu­lar
178 one in China ­today is: Tell me what your screenplay is about in one sentence.
You hear directors being asked this question all the time by investors, pro-
ducers, and studio heads. ­People have also asked me that question, and I just

chapter six
say: I’m sorry, but I d
­ on’t make the kind of films that can be summed up in
one sentence. Life is complicated and messy; how can you sum it up in one
sentence? So in the end you have to rely on the logic of life and your own
internal sense of what makes sense.

What advice do you have for young filmmakers just starting out in the
industry?

­ ere have been several occasions when young filmmakers have asked me
Th
that question, and I was never good at responding. But in 2017 the Pingyao
International Film Festival invited Johnnie To (Du Qifeng) for a workshop
with young filmmakers, and I r­ eally liked the answer he gave to that ques-
tion, so I ­will share that with you now. Johnnie To summed his advice up in
two words: passion and vision.

Over the course of your c­ areer, your style has continually transformed. It
is as if you are eternally searching for new methods of expression and new
ways to tell your stories. At the same time, it only takes two minutes of
watching one of your films to immediately recognize it as a “Jia Zhangke
film.” What do you feel are the most impor­tant ele­ments that are t­ here in
all of your work? And as your style continually changes, what is that one
­thing that never changes? Is ­there a core ele­ment that is always ­there?

[laughs] It is very hard to respond to this question by citing any specific

details, but I’ll instead say a l­ittle bit about what I hope to achieve through
my films. In China t­ here are many languages we hear in our daily lives: the
Mandarin Chinese that most p ­ eople speak in everyday situations and the
kind of Mandarin Chinese you hear the newscaster speaking on the cctv
eve­ning news. [laughs] I think the type of Chinese I speak is more infectious
than what you hear on cctv ­because it is coming from me. [laughs] But if I
­were to speak Fenyang dialect, that would be much more colorful than my
Mandarin. You sometimes hear p ­ eople speaking extremely eloquently, but it
­doesn’t necessarily have that infectious quality that grabs you and brings you
in. On the other hand, t­ here are some p ­ eople who have something to say, but
all that comes out are stutters; they are unable to articulate their thoughts,
yet I am able to completely understand the emotions they are conveying
­behind the words. 179

Actually, if we use the meta­phor of language to analyze film, you can look
at a filmmaker’s style as an “accent.” One of the most fundamental questions

Toward an Accented Cinema

 6.6 ​Michael Berry (left) and Jia Zhangke (right) during a film master class with UCLA students

for a filmmaker is: Does your film have an accent? A film’s accent can be
revealed through ­things like how you deal with the passage of time, how
you render space, how you confront the rhythm of your narrative, This ac-
cent is actually very hard to define ­because it is made up of a lot of ­things
combined.
Sometimes I watch mainstream Hollywood films and fall asleep. [laughs]
That’s ­because the language is bland, boring—­I ­can’t hear the filmmaker’s
accent, nor can I feel their passion. And when that happens I d ­ on’t have
the interest to keep up with the story. ­After ten minutes of watching a car
chase sequence, I feel exhausted! [laughs] Why does it have to go on for ten
minutes? [laughs] Of course, t­ here are a lot of truly outstanding Hollywood
180 films, but t­here are a lot of lousy ones as well. Many of t­hose lousy ones
are typical industrial products, completely devoid of any individual accent.
Sometimes I’ll go to a Hollywood film and step out in the ­middle; then I ­will

chapter six
just stand ­there outside the theater and listen for a while. ­After a few minutes
I usually think to myself: I’m glad I left. That’s b­ ecause if you watch a hun-
dred Hollywood films and listen to the sound design, they are all the same!
Most of it is dominated by the sound of race cars and motorcycles: Vroom!
Vroom! Vroom! [laughs] They are all noises created by sound effect design-
ers, and they all sound the same!
What kind of sound do I like to hear in film? In Still Life I mixed a variety
of sounds: we recorded the sound of the river flowing, the sounds coming
from the boats docked at the harbor, and once we recorded all of t­ hese dif­
fer­ent noises from the environment, we edited them together like we ­were
composing a song, rearranging the structure and order as we went. Eventu-
ally, this pro­cess creates the environment for my films. When you use this
kind of a method to make a film, it ends up having an accent. It is as if you
are inside the film itself, and that is when a film starts to come alive.

181

Toward an Accented Cinema

chinese lit­e r­a­t ure
rural experience
swimming out till the sea turns blue (2020)

Coda
To the Sea

At what year, what time, what place are

we relaying this history? This is just as
impor­tant as the history being conveyed.

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue is very much a film about lit­er­a­ture.
When your generation of filmmakers—­the so-­called Sixth Generation—­
came to prominence, one t­ hing that set you and other filmmakers of that
movement apart was the drive to tell original stories. That marked a stark
break from e­ arlier generations of filmmakers. From 1949 all the way up
­until the heyday of the Fifth Generation, most Chinese films ­were adapted
from literary works. What ­were the novels and short stories that had a
strong impact on you during your teenage and young-­adult years in the
1980s and early 1990s?

During the 1980s when I was ­going to ­middle school and high school, it was
mostly con­temporary Chinese literary works that had the biggest impact on
me. The 1980s was an extremely lively period in the Chinese literary scene;
average ­people ­were all avid readers, and ­there was a wide assortment of lit-
erary journals available. But among the numerous writers active during that
time, the ones who w ­ ere most impor­tant to me on a personal level w
­ ere writ-
ers like Jia Pingwa, who is featured in Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
and was known for setting many of his stories in his home village.1 Another
writer who had a big impact on me was Lu Yao, the author of Life. ­Those
­were works that depicted Chinese society against the backdrop of the early
Reform Era and the tremendous changes taking place during that period.
The themes ­these works explored ­were especially attractive to young readers
of my generation at the time.
Then in the 1990s, during my studies at the Beijing Film Acad­emy, I
rediscovered the work of ­those writers from ­earlier generations. At the
time, I was most interested in the writings of Shen Congwen and Eileen
Chang.2 They ­were both writers who did not receive much attention in
China a­ fter 1949, but by the early 1990s we suddenly rediscovered this in-
credible page in Chinese literary history that had been largely overlooked.
I was especially drawn to Shen Congwen since his personal experience
was quite similar to my own. We both came from backwater rural villages
and went on to try to make it in the big city. That shared experience of
­going from a native place to an urban center led me to have a kind of spir-
itual identification with Shen Congwen’s writing, which was im­mensely
impor­tant to me.
Another branch of lit­er­a­ture that I was drawn to during the mid-1990s
was the Chinese avant-­garde movement. Gradually, a group of writers like
Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Sun Ganlu began to appear on the scene.3 Their liter-
ary style represented a major break with the e­ arlier generations of writers
who had preceded them. Of course, many of their works ­were also adapted
for film, such as Su Tong’s novella Wives and Concubines (Qiqie chengqun),
which became the source material for Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern
(Dahong denglong gaogao gua, 1991), and To Live (Huozhe, 1994), which was
also adapted by Zhang Yimou into a film of the same name. I feel like on a
spiritual level, my starting-­off point and approach to creativity is perhaps
closest to this generation of writers. But many film directors of my genera-
tion d­ idn’t go out of their way to adapt literary works by ­these writers for
the screen. Instead, we used ­those literary works as a portal to find our own
film language; ­those ­were works that helped us discover a brand new way
of understanding Chinese society. Some directors my age still like to adapt
literary works, but most prefer to write original screenplays as a means of 183

becoming an auteur-­style director.

To the Sea
 How did Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue evolve?

When it comes to the origin of this film, it actually goes back to a series of
films I have been making over the past fifteen years. In 2006, I made a doc-
umentary film about a painter named Liu Xiaodong titled Dong; in 2007,
I made a another documentary about a fashion designer named Ma Ke
titled Useless. ­After ­those films, I continued to explore my interest in con­
temporary Chinese lit­er­a­ture and art. I ­really wanted to make a film about
another artist, and at the time, I had a lot of dif­fer­ent choices. At one point
I wanted to make a film about an architect, then ­there was a proj­ect about
an urban planner I was considering, but in the end none of t­hose proj­ects
panned out b ­ ecause I ­couldn’t find the right subject to shoot. But a few years
ago I moved back to my f­ amily’s ancestral village. This village actually has a
deep connection with Chinese literary history. This was where the veteran
writer Ma Feng lived, worked, and wrote; during the 1950s and 1960s, his
novels ­were also adapted into numerous films.4 So it is the kind of place that
has deep literary roots.
­There ­were essentially two t­hings that led me to make this film. On the
one hand, it was tied to the experience of living in the countryside: Chinese
society has been evolving quickly, and the economic development has been
extremely fast paced, which led to a pro­cess of rapid urbanization. Waves
of young ­people left ­behind their rural homes to migrate to t­ hose big cities.
That marks a major break with thousands of years of Chinese history, which
has always been dominated by a more rural lifestyle for most p ­ eople. It is
that rural lifestyle that has created our personalities; it has created who we
are as a p­ eople and how we interact with the world. You can even say that if
you truly want to understand city life in China t­oday, you need to go back
to the countryside. But t­here are many young p ­ eople in China t­oday who
have absolutely no direct experience with what rural China is like. At the
same time, you can see that ­there is also a large group of writers who have
kept that connection with rural China alive through their work. Generation
­after generation, writers have used their work to observe, bear witness, and
rec­ord the rural experience. As far as literary works are concerned, this tra-
dition has never been broken.
I wanted to use this film to rec­ord the experience of rural life in China
from 1949 to the pre­sent; ­there was a drive to capture an experience that is
184 disappearing right before our eyes. Th ­ ere are a lot of p
­ eople in China t­ oday
whose parents came from the countryside to the city, and although they are
separated by just a single generation, the countryside is already a very distant

Coda
place. Take, for example, Liang Hong’s son: his ­mother has such a deep con-
nection with the Chinese countryside, but when we get down to his genera-
tion, so much is already forgotten.5 He can barely speak his ­mother’s local
dialect. So ­those are the two reasons that led me to make this film.

­ ere are quite a few writers who appear on-­screen in Swimming—­Mo

Th
Yan, Su Tong, Li Jingze, Alai, et cetera. Why did you ultimately decide to
home in on Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong? Could you talk about
what drew you in to their work? Was it more about their body of work or
their on-­camera presence?

Once I de­cided to make a film like this, the first task was to select characters
that I wanted to feature. I d ­ idn’t want to restrict my film to just one specific
period; I knew I wanted something with a much more expansive historical
canvas. The Chinese ­people have experienced dif­fer­ent challenges during
dif­fer­ent historical eras. So I wanted to explore what we have experienced
during t­ hese past several de­cades. That is what lies at the heart of this film.
So when it came to selecting subjects to be featured, I knew I wanted to
highlight a group of writers instead of a single figure. In China we sometimes
also categorize writers according to their generation, with each of their for-
mative years representing a dif­fer­ent historical era. So the first individual we
selected was Ma Feng. He represents the period from 1949 through the 1950s
and 1960s; that was a period of socialist construction and collectivism. ­There
are questions from that era that we are implored to ask: Why collectivism?
What ­were the historical ­factors that led to collectivism? What prob­lems did
collectivism attempt to solve? That’s what led to my curiosity about Ma Feng.
But since Ma Feng is no longer with us, I had to interview his ­daughter and
other villa­gers who knew him to tell the story about what life was like during
that era. The two el­derly figures who are featured at the beginning of the film
are both in their nineties, and they are the survivors, they are the witnesses
to that history.
Jia Pingwa was born in the 1950s, so his memory begins with the late
1950s and early 1960s. By the time we get to Yu Hua, he is a writer born in
the 1960s, and Liang Hong comes a generation ­later, as she was born in the
1970s. So when you put their experiences together, we can collectively cre-
ate a relatively complete snapshot of social development during this period.
Another consideration has to do with location and space. Ma Feng and Jia 185

Pingwa are both from Northwest China; Liang Hong is from Henan, which is
in Central China; and Yu Hua is from a coastal region in Zhejiang Province

To the Sea
 called Haiyan. So from the perspective of the geographic mapping of China,
we traverse a course that goes from Northwest China to Southeast China. In
terms of time, we are covering seventy years of con­temporary social change.
But even more impor­tant is the fact that all of ­these writers share the experi-
ence of living in the countryside and have continued to observe and write
about the rural experience over the course of their c­ areers. Of course, many
of them also live in the city now; for instance, Liang Hong was educated at
Beijing Normal University and has been teaching at Renmin University for
many years, but she has maintained her connection to the countryside. She
has continued to write about rural China and is able to use this dual experi-
ence to express social change in China through her work.

Besides the dif­fer­ent locations the film explores—­Fenyang, Xi’an, Yellow

River, and Haiyan—­and the writers whose stories structure the film, you
also use images of traditional Chinese arts, including opera, calligraphy,
and poetry as a structuring device. Can you talk about how the structure
of Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue came together?

As you mentioned, the film highlights dif­fer­ent regional opera per­for­mances.

When the proj­ect began, I actually ­didn’t plan to include any local opera;
however, as the shoot continued I discovered that all of the writers featured
­were real opera fans! [laughs] Jia Pingwa is a true aficionado when it comes
to Shaanxi opera; during the literary festival held in Fenyang I discovered
that Mo Yan ­really wanted to hear Shanxi-­style Peking opera. One unique
characteristic about China is that e­ very location has its own local opera tra-
dition, which is marked primarily by the local dialect used to sing. I ­later
de­cided to feature t­ hese local opera per­for­mances in the film b ­ ecause it is,
­after all, a film about writers, and ­these writers—­Jia Pingwa, Liang Hong, et
cetera—­all feature a strong local color in terms of their use of language. Liang
Hong always writes about Henan, and you can see a lot of ele­ments from the
Henan dialect in both her fiction and her nonfiction writings. Jia Pingwa
also uses a quite a few ele­ments unique to Shaanxi dialect in his fiction.
Since the use of local dialect is a trait common to all of the writers featured,
it opened the door to this question of language, which can also be extended
through t­hose opera sequences. So that is what led us to shoot ­those local
opera per­for­mances, which represent the unique characteristics of t­hose
186 dif­fer­ent regions and dialects.
I talked about how Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue features mul-
tiple characters, a broad historical canvas, and traverses dif­fer­ent locations,

Coda
but ­those are ele­ments that are not l­imited to this film alone. In fact, for the
past few years I have been repeatedly pondering just what it is that keeps me
coming back to films that appropriate this kind of a structure. For instance,
both Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White employ a similar ap-
proach that spans many years. I think it is partly due to the fact that we are
now in the age of the internet, where we are inundated with dif­fer­ent voices
and dif­fer­ent perspectives; in order to truly understand Chinese society, we
need a more comprehensive perspective. I ­don’t want to spend too much
time on a tightly constrained time period or a specific prob­lem; instead, I
think we need to look at t­hings from a macro perspective to r­ eally under-
stand the inner structures. We need a longue durée–­style perspective to
observe, to feel, to understand, especially if we want to get deep enough to
reveal the true cause-­and-­effect relationships that have brought us to where
we are. I think this is impor­tant if we ­really want to understand Chinese
society. That’s why Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue also employs this
broad historical perspective. We could have chosen to focus on any one of
several historical periods. For example, we could have just homed in on Yu
Hua’s generation or Liang Hong’s generation; but if we ­really want to under-
stand the era that Liang Hong is living in, I’m afraid we must still go back to
Ma Feng’s generation. Liang Hong’s very personal, individual, and private
style of writing can be truly appreciated only if you understand the philoso-
phy of collectivism that dominated Chinese lit­er­a­ture and society during the
1950s and 1960s. So this is a film that includes four individuals—­Ma Feng,
Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong—­and spans seven de­cades; for me right
now, I feel that in order to properly think through real issues concerning
con­temporary China, this kind of an overarching approach and comprehen-
sive perspective is necessary.

Many of your documentary films have an in­ter­est­ing intertextual relation­

ship with your feature films. For instance, In Public is tied to many of the
locations used in Unknown Pleasures; Dong and Still Life are also very
much campaign pieces that are deeply linked. Does Swimming also fit into
the logic of your recent narrative films?

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue ­doesn’t have a direct connection to my
feature films in the same way that In Public was linked to Unknown Pleasures
or Dong was connected to Still Life. But I suspect that some of the approach 187

and experiments that I tried to put forth in Swimming may very well impact
some ­future narrative films as I move forward. We just discussed the structure

To the Sea
 of the film in terms of space and time, but as I was editing Swimming, I real-
ized that this is the single most subjective film I have ever made in terms
of the content. In the end, we divided the film into eigh­teen chapters. This
method of chapter division is, of course, a traditional structuring device
used in Chinese lit­er­a­ture, but ­these chapters follow a linear narrative that
evolves from the stories of the writers featured. We quickly discover that
each era and each generation are facing the prob­lems of their respective eras.
They are facing the challenges presented by the period in which they live.
Their pro­cess of coming of age is also a pro­cess of trying to figure out how
to solve t­ hese challenges. Each generation ­faces its own set of unique prob­
lems. In the end, we boiled t­hese down to a set of eigh­teen keywords. For
instance, at the beginning of the film we open with “Eating” (chifan); that is
the foundation of our existence, and during the 1950s and 1960s, it was also
the single greatest challenge faced by so many Chinese ­people who strug­gled
with famine. It was the greatest hurdle that so many ­people needed to face.
From ­there, we gradually begin to encounter other issues such as p ­ eople’s
right to choose their own romantic partners [instead of arranged marriage],
issues of illness and disease, and ultimately ­family prob­lems. By the time
the film gets to the story of Liang Hong, we end up confronting much more
personal prob­lems concerning her ­family, her ­father, her ­mother, and her
­sister. From this perspective, it is not a purely linear narrative; ­those eigh­
teen chapters are like eigh­teen monuments. Each one of ­those monuments
is a rec­ord of the pain we have experienced, like your own book, A History
of Pain, documenting the challenges we have lived through. Swimming Out
Till the Sea Turns Blue was the first time I attempted this kind of a subjective
perspective and structure, but I suspect it ­will impact how I approach ­future
proj­ects as I move forward.

Fairly early in the film we start to see images of young p ­ eople staring at
their cell phones, and we hear the sound of cell phones ringing. . . . ​­These
images seem to mark a stark contrast with the older writers featured, who
are usually portrayed in connection to traditional arts such as opera and
calligraphy. Do you worry about the young generation’s ability to enter
into more complex narratives like feature films, opera, and novels? Do you
feel we are facing a kind of crisis in terms of the state of traditional arts,
culture, and lit­er­a­ture in the face of tweets, texts, and the internet?
188

When I first started shooting t­ hose scenes of p

­ eople on their cell phones, I
was just thinking about the fact that this was a film about language, which is

Coda
the tool for t­ hese writers. They employ language in their speech and through
their writing, but every­thing they do is tied to language. In some sense, you
can look at ­these writers as documenting an oral history, using their indi-
vidual perspective to tell ­these stories. So it is only natu­ral for the film to
be filled with language. But I wanted the film to have two sides: filled with
language on the one hand and silence on the other. I need something outside
of language to balance the film. All the sections of the film dominated by
language point us t­ oward history, but all t­ hose stories are being related from
our con­temporary perspective, and that is also a very impor­tant vantage
point. What is our con­temporary economic and social real­ity from which we
are telling this story? At what year, what time, what place are we relaying this
history? This is just as impor­tant as the history being conveyed. So although
most of the film is about history, t­here are also a lot of images of our cur-
rent con­temporary moment, the h ­ ere and now, from which our perspective
emerges.
­There is also a private component to this film, the sections where ­people
are retelling their personal stories, which runs alongside the public compo-
nent. For the con­temporary ele­ments of the film, I mostly shot public spaces
like train stations, ­people riding on trains, and street scenes. Collectively,
­these shots serve as a complement to the interview content with the featured
writers, which reveals a more private and personal dimension. You could
even look at them as creating a kind of yin-­yang structure to the film.
In our everyday lives, if you shoot what is happening in public spaces
like trains or train stations, you w ­ ill see most young p ­ eople staring down
at their cell phones. But it’s not just young ­people: you can see ­people from
all age groups staring at their phones. The internet is quite well developed
in China, and most p ­ eople ­today spend much of their lives hunched over
staring at their phones—it is a portal through which ­people get their news
and information about the world. I’m not sure about the United States, but
in China short videos are extremely popu­lar. We used to get our information
from text sources, but now news comes to us primarily through short vid-
eos, which is a completely dif­fer­ent medium. This brings me back to an old
question I keep returning to: for the past few years, I have continued to make
films that span broad historical time frames. ­Every medium has its benefits
and unique characteristics: for the internet, the benefits are the speed with
which it can transmit information and its broad popularity. But that comes
with a price: it is also fractured and provides only a partial glimpse of the 189

­whole story; it has no ability to give you the kind of comprehensive narrative
description that lit­er­a­ture is able to provide. It d
­ oesn’t have the structure that

To the Sea
 literary works can provide. So in terms of the method we use to ponder the
world, at least in terms of structure and comprehensiveness, we are gradu-
ally beginning to lose our historical perspective. If we look at film as a tradi-
tional art form, that’s the reason why we insist on making full-­length feature
films instead of one-­or two-­minute-­long short videos.

Audience: You talked about the broad historical canvas you have used in
recent films like Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White, but how
did your historical perspective shift for a documentary film like Swim-
ming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue?

The biggest difference comes from the fact that Ash Is Purest White begins
in the 1990s, which was just before the economic development went into
high gear and moved forward into the period of rapid urbanization; that
film explores how the characters’ traditional views of morality and relation-
ships undergo changes over the course of this pro­cess. So in some sense, a
film like Ash explores fate and the forces that tear p
­ eople apart and separate
them over the course of this unpre­ce­dented economic transformation. But
Swimming begins in 1949, so it covers a much broader period of time dur-
ing which Chinese society encountered many dif­fer­ent challenges, including
many waves of economic and po­liti­cal change. So h ­ ere I am putting p­ eople
within a much longer historical framework to observe. For a film like Ash,
set in the 1990s, I myself am a witness to that history, so my attitude when
I approach that era is very dif­fer­ent from how I would approach the 1940s
or 1950s. I was born in the 1970s; I have absolutely no personal experience
when it comes to the 1950s or the 1960s, and that calls for me to use a histori-
cal approach where careful listening [lingting] is the most impor­tant trait.
When making a film like this, we d ­ on’t make too many judgments about
history; we just try to understand why t­hose t­hings in the past happened.
How did t­hose historical actors solve the prob­lems they faced? In order to
convey and portray the real­ity of history, unlike Ash, this film required us to
be more objective and to have a sense of distance in our approach.
Another reason we de­cided to structure the film along the lines of t­ hose
eigh­teen chapters was that we wanted to trace the transition from a Chinese
context to a more global perspective. ­Whether you are discussing themes
like having enough food to eat; having the dignity to choose your own ro-
190 mantic partner; issues of aging, illness, and death; or f­ amily prob­lems, t­ hese
are all told from a Chinese perspective. But when you r­ eally think about it
from a h ­ uman perspective, ­these are common issues faced by all humanity.

Coda
It’s not about Chinese p ­ eople, but all of us. Th
­ ese are prob­lems we all must
face in life. We may come from dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal systems, economic reali-
ties, and locations, our countries are all at dif­fer­ent stages of development,
but we all face t­ hese same issues. Sure, you could look at the stories in Swim-
ming as collectively telling the story of the Chinese nation, but for me, it is
­really a history of humanity. It is the story of what we all experience. It is a
film that emerges from a very local, nativist experience but opens up much
broader ave­nues for reflecting on more universal questions.

Audience: A unique facet to your work is the notion of genre crossing,

where you employ ele­ments from dif­fer­ent genres (martial arts, science
fiction, gangster films, et cetera) and forms (narrative film, documentary
film) in your work. Can you talk about this approach?

As an art form that is more than a hundred years old, film is a fairly closed
medium in some re­spects. It may be a massive industry, but I feel it still
needs to build bridges with other mediums and take its place as a part of
con­temporary art and culture. It s­ houldn’t just continue to exist as it always
has; it needs to be in dialogue with other arts. That’s why I spend so much
time interacting with artists, designers, and writers; that’s why I explore the
line between documentary and narrative film, and why I use my work to
respond to real-­life events that occur in the world. If we study film history,
we ­will see that as early as the 1920s, whenever a major event in the world
occurred, cameras would almost immediately appear on the scene to docu-
ment what was happening. So film has always been about creating dialogue
with the world around us. I have always held on to the hope that film as a
medium can retain its flexibility, which I think we need more of in terms of
what is coming out of the mainstream film industry ­today.
I also feel that interacting with artists from other mediums can open up
new possibilities for film. We all come from the same humanistic society, but
each medium has its own language: the language of painting, the language
of design, the language of film. Each language represents its own unique
method for observing the world. Film is a medium that has the benefit of
being able to easily incorporate ele­ments from ­these other worlds into its
own language. I think that is one of the main reasons I am drawn to ­these
genre-­crossing and discipline-­crossing explorations.
191

Audience: The title of the film comes from a quote from Yu Hua, but that
­wasn’t the original title. Could you talk about the film’s title?

To the Sea
 The original title was not Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue; it was actu-
ally So Close to My Land (Yige cunzhuang de wenxue). It was only ­after shoot-
ing the segment of the film involving Yu Hua that we de­cided to change the
name of the film. Of the four main subjects featured in the film, Yu Hua was
the last one we shot, and it was actually on the final day of shooting, when
we went to the ocean near his hometown, that he told the story about swim-
ming in the ocean when he was a child. [He was always told that the ocean
was blue, but when he saw the w ­ ater was green, he de­cided to swim out as
far as he could u­ ntil the w
­ ater turned blue.] Since we had already shot all the
other interviews by that time, when Yu Hua told that story, I immediately
felt like it encapsulated so much of the spirit of what the other writers had
talked about, so that is when we changed the title to Swimming Out Till the
Sea Turns Blue. All four of the subjects featured have experienced so many
challenges and difficulties in life, they have all lived through so much pain,
and yet they keep pushing forward. ­There is an old Chinese parable about
a foolish old man who tries to move a mountain; it tells the story of an old
man who insists that he can move a mountain, and even if he fails, his son
­will carry on the work, so generation ­after generation, they ­will eventually
move the mountain. It is essentially a parable about the Chinese ­people’s
willpower, perseverance, and lust for life. I thought that Yu Hua’s story not
only perfectly resonated with the stories of the other writers but also was an
ocean version of the “old man who moves a mountain” parable. No m ­ atter
what we may experience, we always strive to get to that beautiful place. So
that place where the sea turns blue is the place of our hopes and our ideals.

And what is next for you? How has covid-19 impacted your approach to
filmmaking?

In 2020, before the outbreak of covid-19, I had two completed screenplays;

then, during the pandemic, I wrote two new screenplays. So I now have four
screenplays in hand. But I still ­haven’t de­cided which proj­ect I ­will shoot
next; they span a lot of dif­fer­ent subjects, including historical subjects and
con­temporary stories about young ­people ­today. A ­ fter the experience of
covid-19, the world seems to have changed so much, and ­there are a lot of
­things that I need to rethink. I am still in the pro­cess of working through all
of this. I feel as if something brand new has arrived, but I still ­don’t know
192 what that is. So I de­cided that, at this point, it is best to wait and take some
time to understand myself.

Coda
Afterword

dai jinhua
Translated by Michael Berry

jia zhangke on jia zhangke might surprisingly expose something quite

deep about Chinese cinema as we are situated ­here in 2020, a year still play-
ing out, that is destined to be recorded in history and remembered.
This is a narrative carried out through conversation, and over the course
of the memories recalled, the story of a film director is told: his personal
story—­which every­one seems to have heard about, yet no one truly knows;
his creative life—­from what is nakedly displayed before the camera to what
is hidden b ­ ehind the scenes. Beginning during the final years of the twen-
tieth ­century and ­running through the first two de­cades of the twenty-­first
­century, Jia Zhangke’s films have unfolded and provided a consistent thread
through which to tie t­ hese two eras together, from the youthful and unyield-
ing spirit of “in­de­pen­dent cinema” where he first built his reputation to the
point when his ­career ran parallel with the rise of the Chinese film industry.
This is also a story whose form and meaning are revealed through dialogue:
a story about film, art, artistic creation, and the choices that artists make.
At the same time, it is a story about the river of life, tracing its movement
through the rapids and winding corridors and its encounters with the shore.
Over the course of the past few de­cades, Jia Zhangke’s films have left a
rec­ord of the key threads r­ unning through some of con­temporary China’s
most unusual stories. Initially he was unable to show his work in Chinese the-
aters and official screening venues; instead, he was met only with challenges.
 Thus, he was forced to go through the “narrow gate” of the Eu­ro­pean film
festival cir­cuit, eventually succeeding Zhang Yimou and Zhang Yuan as a
name synonymous with “Chinese film” in the world of international art
­house cinema. From ­there, as the Chinese film industry witnessed its own
resurgence and pro­cess of rejuvenation, Jia Zhangke would experience all
kinds of interactions (and sometimes clashes) with the commercial side of
the industry up ­until the pre­sent day in which he is now regarded as one of
the shining stars of Chinese cinema. However, the meaning of Jia Zhangke
lies not in identifying a dif­fer­ent culture or a dif­fer­ent phase in film history,
nor in describing or clarifying ­those binary symbols that had for so long
been projected on the coordinates of Chinese cinema: art versus commerce,
international film festivals versus the local Chinese market, the city versus
the country, the super metropolis versus the small inland town, “Mandarin
Chinese” versus local dialects, in­de­pen­dent versus official, “auteur” film ver-
sus genre film, or documentary film versus fiction film. Through it all, Jia
Zhangke has per­sis­tently held true to his ideals, flexibly adapting to changes
along the way. Rather than saying he has described or clarified t­hese bina-
ries, it would be more fitting to understand Jia’s films as continually clashing
with, and sometimes cutting through, t­ hose mutually opposing binaries and
seemingly fixed dividing lines. ­There seems to be an established consensus
on Jia Zhangke’s identity as a “Chinese auteur,” and yet he himself does not
seem at all attached or committed to a single “signature style.” Instead, he
repeatedly translates his interactions with China and the world into film
and, in the pro­cess, quietly extends the very bound­aries of what cinema can
be. Jia Zhangke’s “Fenyang” thus becomes a site that is highly distinctive and
brimming with rich details. All this makes Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke all the
more in­ter­est­ing.
In ­these interviews that Michael Berry has conducted and recorded, our
attention is drawn from the outside to the inside as we gaze ­toward China,
film, art, and ultimately Jia Zhangke as he responds and reflects. Along the
way, Berry intently listens as he tries to capture and identify the vari­ous
“accents” that are spoken. Is this a Chinese accent or a Fenyang accent from
Shanxi? But he seems to be more interested in the accent of the individual,
the accent of art, the accent of film, and the accent of style. He is interested
in hearing Jia Zhangke’s voice, hearing his “accent.” Pushing the interviewer
forward and supporting the conversation is a rich genealogy of knowledge
194 concerning film art, art ­house cinema, and film auteurs or, as we might call
them, film artists. Through t­ hese interviews, Jia Zhangke responds to ques-
tions and thinks back, reflecting on moments on set and moments in life, ar-

Afterword
tistic decisions and happenstance occurrences, his understanding of t­ hings
and vari­ous misreadings. And through the questions and answers contained
within this book you can also see the “faith” and “suspicions” lingering when
it comes to art/film art; the deep re­spect a scholar holds for the artist/auteur/
director; the artist’s willingness to answer the questions of the researcher;
and the humor, informal comfort, and deep connection between a filmmaker
and his friend. Undoubtedly, ­there is also a sense of dislocation and fluctua-
tion as we move from “inside” to “outside.” To gaze at Jia Zhangke’s films is
to gaze not only into the small city of Fenyang but also into one part of con­
temporary China. On the margins of ­those international metropolises, you
find t­ hese small provincial cities where you w ­ ill discover nameless individu-
als and floating laborers, but ­these w ­ ere never ­really ever “alien places” or
“somewhere ­else.” Ever since the time that Jia Zhangke’s films first appeared,
the movement ­behind China’s radical transformation and “­great migration”
­toward globalization has begun to spill “inward,” beginning in places like
Fenyang and extending outward, unfolding like a scroll of moving images.
Perhaps in some ways this book represents overlapping conversations and
perspectives about “inside” and “outside.” The book is not simply an Ameri-
can scholar of Chinese lit­er­a­ture’s focus on a Chinese film director; it also
represents the expression of an overlap between “the external side of what’s
inside” and “the internal side of what’s outside.” It is just like the ufo lin-
gering in the sky in Still Life or the “worldly” bullets loaded into a theme
park. During that unique period of transition between centuries, between
the rush hour of China’s hundred years of modernization and the period of
intermission as they prepared to change the stage; it was during this period
that “the West” was suddenly no longer regarded as some distant, faraway
place; it had already taken its place deep in our cultural self-­consciousness.
At the same time, China was no longer an “Other” space to be controlled by
Eu­rope and Amer­ic­ a; it was now at the cutting edge of the modern world.
In the form of the dialogue contained ­here, through ­these interlocking per-
spectives, the story of Fenyang is always the story of China, as it is also the
story of the world u ­ nder globalization. We set out from the platform and,
strolling through the crowds of ­people, look down from the cliffs in Fengjie
and see the “Shanxi” mines and t­hose sons and d ­ aughters of jianghu wan-
dering about the modern cities, and though it is hanging right ­there on a
string around their very necks, they still ­can’t find the key to get home . . .
Perhaps at the turn of the c­ entury, during this moment in Chinese cin- 195

ematic and cultural history, Jia Zhangke, his classmates, and ­people from his
generation consciously or unconsciously began to transform how Chinese

Afterword
 films tell their story. We began with the Fifth Generation, for whom space,
ritual aesthetics of historical commemoration, and wandering lives w ­ ere
caught in time; what came ­later was a pro­cess of transformation through
which ­people came to distinguish between their frozen imagination about
China and the hyperfast, ultramodern real­ity of what China had become. Of
course, Jia Zhangke also attempts to traverse time itself in order to capture
remnants of a quickly fading past, yet as his films race t­oward the river of
time, it is perhaps only from the ­future that we can capture a true still life
image of what we have seen. Jia Zhangke may not be an old-­fashioned story-
teller, yet in this book he offers us the story of his films’ stories. In respond-
ing to Michael Berry’s questions, he recounts, reflects, and states his views.
Sometimes, he sidesteps, offering subtle counterstatements or self-­defensive
comments. It is through t­ hese moments that we can catch a glimpse of the
continuities and fissures between film time, narrative time, and world time.
It is 2020, and as the demonic shadow of covid-19 continues to haunt
the world, we attempt to restart the clock of modernity. And h ­ ere arrives a
book of conversations about cinema, situating itself amid a fissure whose
lines and scope are still not yet clear; a book of memories about cinema, which
is, ­after all, “an installation of memories.”
September 20, 2020
beijing

196

Afterword
Notes

introduction
1. Dai Jinhua, ­After the Post–­Cold War: The ­Future of Chinese History (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 75.
2. Corey Kai Nelson Schultz, Moving Figures: Class and Feeling in the Films of Jia
Zhangke (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 34.
3. For more on repre­sen­ta­tions of marginalized figures in the film of Jia Zhangke,
see Xie Xiaoxia, Research on the Image of the Lower Class in Con­temporary Cinema
[当代电影底层形象研究] (Kunming: Yunnan ­People’s Publishing House, 2009), 264–317.
4. Li Yang, The Formation of Chinese Art Cinema, 1990–2003 (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), 162–63.
5. Shaoyi Sun and Li Xun, Lights! Camera! Kai Shi! In Depth Interviews with China’s
New Generation of Movie Directors (Norwalk, CT: Eastbridge Books, 2008), 94.
6. Cecilia Mello, The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2019), 5.
7. Qi Wang, Memory, Subjectivity and In­de­pen­dent Chinese Cinema (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 96.
8. See Jason McGrath, “The In­de­pen­dent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocial-
ist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic,” in The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema
and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-­First C­ entury, ed. Zhen Zhang (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2007), 81–114; Yang, Formation of Chinese Art Cinema.
9. Yang, Formation of Chinese Art Cinema, 161.
10. When Jia Zhangke announced he was stepping down from the film festival,
he made a widely quoted public statement: “I ­should’ve left [the festival] ­earlier and
 begun to groom a new team to take over the festival, so that this festival can get rid
of ‘Jia Zhangke’s shadow.’ ” This version is from an October 19, 2020, report in Variety
by Vivienne Chow titled “Jia Zhangke Unexpectedly Quits the Pingyao Film Festival.”
The ambiguous nature of Jia’s statement led to widespread rumors and conjecture
about po­liti­cal meddling in the festival. On June 1, 2021, just over six months ­after he
left the Pingyao International Film Festival, it was announced that Jia would return to
the festival for its fifth edition in 2021, although his new role remains unclear.

one. a portrait of an artist as a young man

Chapter 1 includes some content excerpted from my 2002 interview with Jia
Zhangke, originally published in Speaking in Images: Interviews with Con­
temporary Chinese Filmmakers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
1. Ulan Bator would ­later become an impor­tant site for the film The World, which
not only references the city but also prominently features the Mongolian folk song
“Ulan Bator Night” (“Wulan Batuo de ye”).
2. Teresa Teng (Deng Lijun, 1953–95) was one of the most popu­lar Chinese singers
and performers during the second half of the twentieth ­century. Teng was the first
Taiwanese singer to gain widespread popularity in mainland China during the early
Reform Era. Best known for her love ballads, such as “The Moon Represents My
Heart” and “My Sweetie,” Teng released ­albums in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Cantonese,
Japa­nese, and En­glish.
3. Chang Ti (Zhang Di, 1942–) is a popu­lar Taiwan singer and talk show host.
Sometimes referred to as the “quick-­witted pop star” (jizhi gewang) for his ability to
respond in real time to audience questions with humorous lines of song, Chang is best
known for the songs “The Hair Song” (“Mao mao ge”) and “The Nation” (“Guojia”),
the latter being a patriotic song that became very popu­lar in mainland China.
4. “Go with Your Feelings” (“Gen zhe ganjue zuo,” 1988) is a popu­lar song from
Taiwan written and composed by Chen Zhiyuan and originally sung by Taiwan pop
star Su Rui and included on the ­album Taipei Tokyo. An excerpt of the lyr­ics reads:
“Follow your feelings, let them take me away / I hope you ­will be not far away waiting
for me / Follow your feelings, let them take me away / ­Those ­things we dream about
­will be everywhere.” This was one of the most popu­lar songs in late 1980s China.
5. Cui Jian (1961–) is one of the earliest innovators of pop and rock ­music in main-
land China during the early Reform Era and is generally referred to as the “­father of
Chinese rock and roll.” His representative ­albums include Rock Along the New Long
March (Xin changzheng lushang de yaogun), Solution (Jiejue), and Eggs ­under the Red
Flag (Hongqi xia de dan). Cui Jian is best known for his rock anthems from the 1980s,
including “I Have Nothing to My Name” (“Yiwu suoyou”), “It’s Not That I ­Don’t Un-
derstand” (“Bushi wo bumingbai”), “The Fake Monk” (“Jia xingzeng”), and “Green­
198 house Girl” (“Huafang guniang”), which ­were extremely influential. Cui Jian is
also active in film circles and directed the feature film Blue Sky Bones (Lanse gutou,
2013).

Notes to introduction
 6. Garrison’s Gorillas was a twenty-­six-­episode miniseries originally broadcast
on abc in 1967. It tells the story of First Lieutenant Garrison and the daring suicide
squad he led in Eu­rope during World War II, focusing on a series of their missions.
­After the reestablishment of Sino-­US relations in 1979, Garrison’s Gorillas was one of
the first American tele­vi­sion miniseries to be broadcast in China. The Chinese version
was dubbed by the Shanghai Film Dubbing Studio and broadcast on cctv in 1980,
and it was warmly received by Chinese audiences. Man from Atlantis was a thirteen-­
episode science fiction–fantasy miniseries originally broadcast on nbc between 1977
and 1978. It was one of the earliest American tele­vi­sion shows to be broadcast in
China during the early stages of the Reform Era.
7. Breakin’ was a mainstream 1984 film documenting the challenges faced by a
group of young break-­dancers. The film was extremely popu­lar in China and even
inspired Tian Zhuangzhuang’s film Rock Kids (Yaogun qingnian, 1988).
8. Life (Rensheng), a novella written by Lu Yao (1949–92), was originally published
in 1982 and was awarded the National Prize for Most Outstanding Novella of that
year. The story follows Gao Jialin, who travels back and forth between the city and the
countryside as he finds himself caught in a love triangle that included the peasant girl
Liu Qiaozhan and the city girl Huang Yaping. The story was widely acclaimed and in
1984 was adapted into an award-­winning film ­under the same title by Wu Tianming.
9. The film Old Well (Lao jing, 1986), which was adapted from a novel by Zheng Yi,
was produced by the Xi’an Film Studio and directed by Wu Tianming. The film starred
Zhang Yimou, in his first role as an actor, and Lu Liping. It depicted the difficult lives of
peasants in an impoverished village in northwest China and their strug­gle to dig a well.
10. Misty Poetry was a poetry movement that took place during the late 1970s and
early 1980s in large part as an artistic response against the Cultural Revolution. The
movement was criticized by officials who described it as “misty,” “murky,” or “hazy,”
which the movement’s found­ers eventually took on as a point of pride, standing in
opposition to the black-­and-­white directives of Maoist art. The representative figures
of the movement included Han Lu, Shu Ying, Bei Dao, Gu Cheng, Liang Xiaobin,
Ouyang Jianghe, Mang Ke, and Shi Zhi. Many of ­these poets published in the journal
­Today (Jintian), which became one of the most progressive and influential portals for
intellectuals and artists during the early Reform Era.
11. Bei Dao’s poem “The Answer” (1976) is one of the most impor­tant represen-
tative works from this early period of his writing. Originally published in the 1976
issue of ­Today, it was an attempt to interrogate what happened during the Cultural
Revolution and bring out the absurdity of that era. An excerpt of the poem reads: “Let
me tell you, world / I—­do—­not—­believe! / If a thousand challengers lie beneath your
feet, / Count me as number thousand and one. / I ­don’t believe the sky is blue; / I ­don’t
believe in thunder’s echoes; / I ­don’t believe that dreams are false; / I ­don’t believe
that death has no revenge” (translated by Bonnie S. McDougall from The August
Sleepwalker). 199

12. Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (Huang tudi, 1984) is considered one of the most
impor­tant early representative films of the Fifth Generation. Besides Chen Kaige, the

Notes to Chapter One

 film featured several other impor­tant figures from the Fifth Generation, including cin-
ematographer Zhang Yimou, art designer He Ping, and composer Zhao Jiping. Yellow
Earth was adapted from an essay entitled “Echoes from Deep in the Valley” (“Shengu
huisheng”) by Ke Lan. The story is about a soldier named Gu Qing (Wang Xueqi) who
travels to a remote village in northern Shaanxi Province to collect folk songs. While he
is t­ here, he witnesses ­great poverty and encounters an adolescent girl named Cuiqiao
(Xue Bai), who is desperate to escape from an impending arranged marriage and join
the Eight Route Army. But in the end Gu Qing is unable to save her from her circum-
stances. The film received numerous international awards but proved controversial at
home, becoming a key work of the “Culture Fever” that swept China during the 1980s.
13. The Story of Qiuju was awarded the Golden Lion and the Volpi Cup at the 1992
Venice Film Festival; To Live was awarded the prize for Best Actor and the ­Grand Prix
at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival; and Farewell My Concubine was awarded the Palme
d’Or at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival and the Best Foreign Language Film at the 1994
Golden Globe Awards and also was a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film at the
Acad­emy Awards.
14. Dingjun Shan, sometimes translated as Taking Army Mountain, was the first
Chinese film ever produced. First exhibited on December 28, 1905, it was directed by
Ren Qingtai and starred Peking opera star Tan Xinpei. The content of the film was
adapted from a Peking opera of the same name, which in turn was derived from a
story in Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi).
15. Besides being an established cinematographer who has shot such features as
Ann Hui’s Ordinary Heroes (Qianyan wanyu, 1999) and William Kwok’s In the Dumps
(Laji niantou, 1997), Nelson Yu Lik-­Wai (1966–) is also an established director in his
own right. His 1999 feature Love ­Will Tear Us Apart (Tian shang renjian) was an official
se­lection at Cannes the year of its release and is also playfully referenced in Unknown
Pleasures. Yu has served as cinematographer for almost all of Jia Zhangke’s feature films.
16. Robert Bresson (1901–99) was a painter and film director who became a key
figure in French cinema. ­After beginning to make films in 1934, Bresson directed
thirteen feature films over the course of more than four de­cades. His major works
include A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), Diary of a Country Priest (1951), and
The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962).
17. Eric Gautier (1961–) is an award-­winning French cinematographer who has
worked on films by Agnès Varda, Olivier Assayas, Walter Salles, Sean Penn, Alain
Resnais, Ang Lee, and Hirokazu Koreeda.

two. the hometown trilogy

Chapter 2 includes some content excerpted from my 2002 interview with Jia
Zhangke, originally published in Speaking in Images: Interviews with Con­
200 temporary Chinese Filmmakers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
1. A
­ fter the success of his work with Jia Zhangke, Wang Hongwei has been increas-
ingly in demand as an actor and was featured in Dai Sijie’s production of his novel

Notes to Chapter One

Balzac and the ­Little Chinese Seamstress (2002). He ­later eased into film production
and has produced several in­de­pen­dent Chinese films.
2. The ­Human Condition has been made into a film by producer-­director Michael
Cimino u­ nder the title Man’s Fate (2003).
3. Lu Xun (1881–1936), the ­father of modern Chinese lit­er­a­ture, gave up a ­career
in medicine and began writing ­after seeing a slide of a Chinese man being executed
surrounded by a crowd of his compatriots, who looked on numbly as the sentence was
carried out. Images of apathetic crowds would be featured prominently in several of
Lu Xun’s l­ater literary works, such as The True Story of Ah Q (Ah Q zhengzhuan, 1921).
4. Kent Jones, Physical Evidence: Selected Film Criticism (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2007), 24.

three. documenting destruction and building worlds

1. Liu Xiaodong (1963–) is a con­temporary Chinese artist. He studied at the
Central Acad­emy of Fine Arts, earning both a ba and an mfa in oil painting, and
­later furthered his study in Madrid. His work has been exhibited in major exhibitions,
museums, and galleries around the world. He has also had numerous ties with the
in­de­pen­dent Chinese cinema movement, starring in one of the first Chinese in­de­
pen­dent films, The Days (Dongchun de rizi, 1990), serving as art director for Beijing
Bastards (Beijing zazong, 1993), and even becoming the subject of documentary films
by Jia Zhangke and also Yao Hung-­I’s Hometown Boy (Jincheng xiaozi, 2011).
2. Takeshi Kitano (1947–) is a prolific Japa­nese actor, director, comedian, tele­vi­sion
personality, and film producer. Sometimes referred to as Beat Takeshi, he has directed
more than eigh­teen films and starred in more than fifty; his major works include
Sonatine (1993), Hana-bi (1997), Brother (2000), and Zatoichi (2003).
3. Shozo Ichiyama (1963–) is a Japa­nese film producer who has produced films
such as Violent Cop (1989), Lovers on Borders (2017), and Chasuke’s Journey (2015). He
has worked on several Chinese-­language films, including Hou Hsiao-­hsien’s Flowers of
Shanghai (1998), Good Men, Good Women (1995), and Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996)
and Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000). He has collaborated with Jia Zhangke on numerous
films, including Platform, Unknown Pleasures, and The World.
4. Jean-­Pierre Melville (1917–73) was a French filmmaker best known for classic
films like Le Doulos (1962), Le Samouraï (1967), Army of Shadows (L’armée des ombres,
1969), and Le cercle rouge (1970). His work had a major influence on the French New
Wave and ­later influenced a new generation of East Asian filmmakers, including John-
nie To, John Woo, and Takeshi Kitano.

four. film as social justice

1. The raw interviews upon which Jia Zhangke structured 24 City ­were published in 201
a full-­length collection, Interviews with Chinese Workers: 24 City [Zhongguo gongren
fangtanlu: Ershisi chengji] (Jinan: Shandong Pictorial Publishing, 2009).

Notes to Chapter Four

 2. The Third Line Construction Proj­ect (sanxian gongcheng or sanxian jianshe) was
a national government plan implemented in 1964 in response to escalating tensions
brought on by the Vietnam War, American military activities near the South China
Sea, and a small-­scale armed skirmish with the Soviet Union. The Third Line Con-
struction Proj­ect was aimed at expanding the infrastructure in China’s less populated
inland regions to bolster national defense, science and technology, industry, power,
and transportation. It originated with the Chinese military and ended up impacting
thirteen provinces and autonomous regions in central and western China from
1964 ­until 1980, resulting in the creation of thousands of factories, the relocation
of millions of ­people, and a fundamental shift in the priorities of national
development.
3. Zhai Yongming (1955–) is a poet from Chengdu who began publishing her work
in 1981. She has published more than a dozen collections of essays and poetry; one
representative work is the twenty-­poem cycle “­Woman” (“Nüren”).
4. This is reference to a series of suicides that took place at a Foxconn factory in
southern China in 2010. The suicides led to a large number of news stories about the
working conditions of Foxconn employees.
5. Lu Zhishen is a character from the novel The ­Water Margin. He is one of the
108 heroes of Liangshan who is known for his short temper, unmatched strength,
and uncompromising sense of justice. Originally named Lu Da, he was once an army
officer, but a­ fter being charged with murder during a ­battle, he deserted his post and
became a monk, assuming the Buddhist name Lu Zhishen.
6. Wu Song is another character from the novel The ­Water Margin who also ap-
pears in the classic novel The Golden Lotus (Jinping mei). An orphan raised by his
elder ­brother Wu Dalang, Wu Song was renowned for his uncanny strength and
became known for killing a tiger with his bare hands. ­Later, when his ­brother became
the victim of adultery and the target of a murder plot, Wu Song killed his b ­ rother’s
unfaithful wife, Pan Jinlian, along with her lover, Ximen Qing.
7. The wuxia films of King Hu (Hu Jinquan) frequently featured strong female pro-
tagonists, such as Golden Swallow (Cheng Pei-­pei) in Come Drink with Me (1966) and
Yang Hui-­zhen (Hsu Feng) in A Touch of Zen (1971). The En­glish title of A Touch of
Sin is also clearly inspired by the latter film. In a direct reaction against the dominance
of female stars in Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s, Chang Cheh’s (Zhang Che’s)
martial arts kung fu films like The Heroic Ones (Shisan taibao, 1970) and The Blood
­Brothers (Ci ma, 1973) featured male-­dominated casts and highlighted a new notion of
masculinity.
8. Forest of the Wild Boar (Yezhu lin, 1962) was an opera film produced by the
Beijing Film Studio. It was codirected by Cui Wei and Chen Huai’ai and starred Li
Shaochun, Du Jinfang, and Yuan Shihai.
9. Lin Chong is a fictional character from the classic Chinese novel The ­Water
202 Margin. Lin was a skilled martial artist and an instructor of the Chinese imperial
guards when the son of a power­ful official attempted to steal his wife. This plot led to
Lin Chong’s false arrest and exile. Eventually, Lin joined the 108 outlaws of Liangshan

Notes to Chapter Four

and became one of their leaders. Lin Chong’s story has been popu­lar in numerous
forms, also appearing in several traditional Chinese operas, including Rec­ord of the
Precious Sword (Baojian ji) and Lin Chong Fleeing by Night (Lin Chong yeben).
10. Tian Zhuangzhuang (1952–) is a representative figure from the Fifth Genera-
tion. While best known for his fifteen feature films as director, including On the Hunt-
ing Ground (Liechang zhasa, 1985), The Horse Thief (Daomazei, 1986), and The Blue
Kite (Lanfeng zheng, 1993), Tian has also served as producer for several in­de­pen­dent
Chinese filmmakers. He has also won acclaim for his acting in films like Love Educa-
tion (Xiangai xiangqin, 2017) and Us and Them (Houlaide ­women, 2018).

five. return to jianghu

1. Lord Guan (Guan gong), or Guan Yu, was a historical figure who served as a
general ­under the warlord Liu Bei during the Eastern Han dynasty. He was renowned
for his loyalty and military prowess. ­After his death, his achievements ­were glorified
through lit­er­a­ture (like the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and through vari­
ous dramas and stories. Over time, he came to be worshipped as a deity by vari­ous
Chinese folk religions, with shrines and statues found all over the Chinese-­speaking
world.
2. Wei Wei (1922–) is best known for her role in Spring in a Small Town. She was
most active between 1948 and 1964, during which time she starred in more than
fifteen films.
3. Sally Yeh (Ye Qianwen, 1961–) was born in Taipei and immigrated to Canada at a
young age before starting her singing ­career in Hong Kong in the early 1980s. She was
one of the most popu­lar Mandopop and Cantopop singers of the 1980s and 1990s and
has released more than thirty ­albums. Yeh also starred in more than twenty-­five films
from 1980 through the early 1990s.
4. She Ai’zhen first became involved with the Shanghai underworld during the
Republican period. She was the goddaughter of Li Yunqing and ­later married the
notorious gangster Wu Sibao. ­After Wu Sibao’s death, She began a relationship with
Hu Lancheng, who was serving in the Ministry of Propaganda for the Wang Jing­wei
puppet regime. In 1945, She was arrested and served a seven-­year sentence; on her
release, she moved to Hong Kong and ­later settled in Japan.
5. Hu Lancheng (1906–81) was a writer, intellectual, and politician who served in
the Ministry of Propaganda ­under Wang Jing­wei during the Japa­nese occupation of
Shanghai. His major works include China through Time (Shanhe suiyue, 1954) and
This Life, This World (Jinsheng jinshi, 1959). He was married to the noted writer Eileen
Chang from 1944 to 1946 and ­later served as a mentor to Taiwan writers Chu Tien-­
wen and Chu Tien-­hsin.
6. In the wake of the tax scandal that shook the Chinese film industry in 2018,
Feng Xiaogang’s scenes from Ash Is Purest White ­were cut from the domestically 203

released version of the film, although his scenes ­were still shown in versions screened
at vari­ous international film festivals.

Notes to Chapter Five

 coda
1. Jia Pingwa (1952–) is a prolific and popu­lar writer best known for the novels
Happy Dreams (Gaoxing), Broken Wings (Jihua), The Lantern ­Bearer (Dai deng), The
Mountain Whisperer (Laosheng), and Ruined City (Feidu). He is the winner of the
2009 Mao Dun Lit­er­a­ture Prize and is generally considered one the greatest Chinese
writers of his generation.
2. Shen Congwen (1902–88) was a leading Chinese writer active during the Repub-
lican period, when he wrote such classic works as The Border Town (Biancheng) and a
series of acclaimed short stories. ­After 1949, he turned away from fiction and spent the
second half of his life conducting research on traditional Chinese costumes and cloth-
ing. Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920–95) was a novelist, screenwriter, translator, and
essayist best known for her works of classic fiction like Half a Lifelong Romance (Ban-
sheng yuan), Love in a Fallen City (Qingcheng zhi lian), and Lust, Caution (Se jie). Her
work has been adapted into numerous films and has been widely influential across the
Chinese-­speaking world.
3. Su Tong (1963–) is a con­temporary Chinese writer best known for the books
Raise the Red Lantern (Qiqie chengqun), Rice (Mi), My Life as Emperor (Wo de diwang
shengya), and Petulia’s Rouge Tin (Hongfen). Yu Hua (1960–) is a con­temporary
Chinese writer whose major works include the novels To Live (Huozhe), Chronicle of a
Blood Merchant (Xu Sanguan maixue ji), and ­Brothers (Xiongdi) and the collection of
nonfiction essays China in Ten Words (Shige cihui li de Zhongguo). Sun Ganlu (1959–)
is an influential writer who came to prominence in the 1980s and was closely associ-
ated with the Chinese avant-­garde movement. His major works include the novel
Breathing (Huxi) and The Messenger’s Letter (Xinshi zhi han).
4. Ma Feng (1922–2004) was a veteran writer of numerous novels, essays, and short
stories including The First Investigation (Diyici zhencha) and Vendetta (Cun chou).
He fought against the Japa­nese during the War of Re­sis­tance and joined the Chinese
Communist Party in 1938, ­later ­doing cultural work, education, and propaganda in
Yan’an. He also wrote the screenplay to several films, including Marriage (Jiehun,
1953).
5. Liang Hong (1973–) is a professor of Chinese lit­er­a­ture at Renmin University.
She is also the author of several books of literary criticism, essays, and fiction. She is
best known for the book China in One Village (Zhongguo zai Liangzhuang).

204

Notes to Coda
Jia Zhangke Filmography

feature-­length films
1997 Xiao Wu aka Pickpocket [小武]
2000 Platform [站台]
2002 Unknown Pleasures [任逍遥]
2004 The World [世界]
2006 Dong [东] (documentary)
2006 Still Life [三峡好人]
2007 Useless [无用] (documentary)
2008 24 City [二十四城记]
2010 I Wish I Knew [海上传奇] (documentary)
2013 A Touch of Sin [天注定]
2015 Mountains May Depart [山河故人]
2018 Ash Is Purest White [江湖儿女]
2020 Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue [一直游到海水变蓝] (documentary)

short films
1994 One Day in Beijing [有一天，在北京]
1995 Xiao Shan ­Going Home [小山回家]
1996 Du Du [嘟嘟]
2001 In Public [公共场所]
2001 La condition canine [狗的状况]
2006 This Moment [这一刻]
 2007 Our Ten Years [我们的十年]
2008 Black Breakfast [黑色早餐]
2008 Cry Me a River [河上的爱情]
2009 Remembrance [十年]
2011 Cao Fei [曹斐]
2011 Pan Shiyi [潘石屹]
2011 3:11 Sense of Home [3:11 家的感觉]
2013 ­Future Reloaded [重启未来]
2015 Smog Journeys [人在雾途]
2016 The Hedonists [营生]
2017 Revive [逢春]
2019 The Bucket [一个桶]
2020 Visit [来访]
2021 My ­Little Wish [有一个小店叫童年]

other credits
2002 Overloaded Peking (actor)
2003 All Tomorrow’s Parties [明日天涯] (producer)
2003 My Camera ­Doesn’t Lie [我的摄影机不撒谎] (actor)
2006 Karmic Mahjong [血战到底] (actor)
2006 A Walk on the Wild Side [赖小子] (producer)
2008 Perfect Life [完美生活] (producer)
2013 Boundless [无涯：杜琪峰的电影世界] (actor)
2013 Forgetting to Know You [忘了去懂你] (producer)
2014 The Continent [后会无期] (actor)
2014 Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from Fenyang [汾阳小子贾樟柯] (actor/subject)
2015 Chen Jialeng [陈家冷] (producer)
2016 Every­body’s Fine [一切都好] (actor)
2020 Pseudo Idealist [不浪漫] (actor)

206

Jia Zhangke Filmography

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Index

“accent,” in filmmaking, 179–81 Beijing Film Acad­emy, x, xi, 2–4, 17,

acting. See nonprofessional actors; 33–35, 40, 42, 48, 57, 64, 65, 67, 84, 88,
per­for­mance 89, 109, 140, 159, 160, 164, 183
Alai, 185 Beijing Film Acad­emy Youth Experi-
alienation, 4, 6, 10, 13, 50 mental Filmmaker Group, 160
Anna Karenina, ix Beijing Film Studio, 129
“Answer, The” (“Huida”), 31–32, Berlin International Film Festival, 14,
199n11 88, 108
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 14 Black Snow (Benmingnian), 166,
Apocalypse Now, 34 168
art ­house cinema, 4, 13–15, 110, 111, 168, Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-­hsien’s
174–76, 194 Memories of Shadows and Light, 16
Ash Is Purest White (Jianghu ernü), bootleg film, 58, 90, 115–17
xiii, 7, 10, 16, 17, 108, 128, 131–54, 176, Boys from Fengkui (Fenggui laide ren),
203n6; actors, 63, 104, 131, 145, 146; 79
cinematography, 45; dialect, 61; and break-­dancing, xi, 3, 55
gangster films, 8, 11, 69, 129; jianghu, Breakin’, xi, 3, 28, 55, 199n7
8, 29, 134; m­ usic, 150, 152, 154; per­for­ Bresson, Robert, 14, 42, 200n16
mance, 149, 150; screenplay, 134, 135, Buddhism, 2, 139, 202n5
138, 147; time span, 139, 140, 187, 190; bud­get, x, 4, 70–73, 118
ufo, 149; and Unknown Pleasures,
138; wuxia, 134 calligraphy, 186, 188
Cannes International Film Festival, 14,
Bazin, Andre, 34 116, 200n13, 200n15
Bei Dao, 31–32, 199nn10–11 Cantopop, 24, 150, 203n3
 Cao Guoxiong, 12 destruction. See ruins
censorship, x, 15, 34, 116, 121, 129 dialect, 61, 100, 121, 162, 179, 185, 186, 194
Chang Cheh (Zhang Che), 28, 127, 146, Diao Yinan, 12, 145, 146
202n7 digital film, 4, 5, 11, 74–77, 98, 99, 138,
Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing), 110, 183, 148, 153
203n5, 204n2 Dingjun Shan, 37, 200n14
Chang, Sylvia (Zhang Aijia), 63 Ding Ling, 49
Chaplin, Charlie, 158, 168 disco, 150, 158
Chen Daoming, 102 documentary film: aesthetics, 4–5, 12, 13,
Chen Huai’ai, 127, 202n8 49, 58, 68–69, 75; influence on Jia, 22,
Chen Jianbin, 63, 107 41; about Jia, 14; by Jia, 7, 12, 14, 16–18,
Chen, Joan (Chen Chong), 7, 63, 107, 35, 37, 96, 98–99, 105–7, 119, 148, 184,
120, 174 190; vs. narrative/fiction film, 6, 7, 11,
Chen Kaige, x, 11, 33, 48, 199n12 37, 105–7, 167, 187, 190–91, 194
Cheng Taishen, 6, Dong, 7, 10, 18, 96, 98, 99, 106, 184, 187
Chengdu, 10, 107, 119, 121 Dong Zijian, 63
China Film Bureau, xi, 89–90, 176 Dongguan, 10
Chinese painting, 3, 30, 44, 96, 128, 138, Doyle, Christopher, 41
171, 172, 191 Du Du, 3, 35, 37, 39–40, 160
Chow Keung (Zhou Qiang), 4, 16, 35
Chow Yun-­fat (Zhou Runfa), 104 Eco, Umberto, 2
cinematography, 41, 42, 45, 68, 147–48, Eisenstein, Sergei, 34, 168
159, 160, 164 extras, 69, 148, 149, 172
City of Sadness (Beiqing chengshi), 110
Cold War, 119 Fa­bula Entertainment (Shanghai nuanliu
collective, the, 25–27, 51, 66, 110, 150, 169 wenhua chuanmei), 12
collectivism, 185, 187 famine, 188
commercial cinema, 1, 2, 8, 9, 11, 13–16, Farewell My Concubine (Bawang bieji),
111, 112, 176, 194 34, 200n13
composite character, 107, 120, 121 Faulkner, William, 10
Confucianism, 2 Feng Xiaogang, 145, 203n6
Coppola, Francis Ford, 34 Fengjie, 7, 10, 96–99, 128, 144, 149, 195
costume design, 70–72, 101, 124, 128, Fenyang, x, 3, 5, 12–15, 18, 32, 155, 195;
138, 144 companies based in, 12, 111; dialect,
covid-19, 192 61, 100, 179, 194; growing up in, 20,
Cui Jian, 2, 26, 198n5 21, 28, 33; literary festival, 186; and
Cultural Revolution, x, 1–3, 21, 26, 29, Platform, 60, 66, 73; presence in
30, 49, 165, 169, 199nn10–11 Jia Zhangke’s films, 10; stillness, 73;
Culture Fever, 1–2, 200n12 transformation, 47, 50, 51, 54; and
Xiao Wu, 47, 50, 51, 58
Dai Jinhua, 6, 13 Fenyang dialect. See dialect
dance, 6, 8, 28, 44, 45, 60, 72, 92, 100, 101 Fifth Generation, x, 2, 6, 8, 34, 42, 48,
Daoism, 2 78–79, 169, 182, 196, 199n12
212 Dark W­ ater, 14 film format, 4, 11, 74, 75, 148. See also
Datong, 10, 78, 124 digital film
Deng Xiaoping, 1, 140 Flash animation, 6, 90, 99

index
Flowers of Shanghai (Haishanghua), 55, hukou, 31
108, 201n3 ­ uman Condition, The, 79, 201n2
H
Forest of the Wild Boar (Yezhu lin), 127, hunger, sensation of, 22
128, 202n8 Huo Yuanjia, 27
Four Modernizations (Sige xiandaihua), Hu Tong Productions, 4
26
Freud, Sigmund, 27, 28, 31, 54 Ichiyama, Shozo, 14, 108
“Für Elise,” 81 “I Have Nothing to My Name”
­Future Reloaded, 166, 167 (“Yiwu suoyou”), 26, 198n5
“I Love You” (“Wo ai ni”), 25
gangster film, 8, 11, 28, 69, 129, 134–35, individualism, 25, 115
150, 151, 191 In Public (Gongong changsuo), 106, 187
Garrison’s Gorillas, 27, 199n6 internet, 51, 90–91, 140, 187–89
Gautier, Eric, 14, 45, 144, 147, 200n17 intertextuality, 11, 18, 137, 138, 187
genre cinema, 63, 69, 128, 129, 158 I Wish I Knew (Haishang chuanqi), 7, 14,
globalism, 6, 95, 96 18, 109, 136
Godard, Jean-­Luc, 161
Goddess, The (Shennü), 166, 167 Jia Pingwa, 183–87, 204n1
Godfather, The, 34 Jiang Wu, 63, 125
Golden Lion, 6, 14, 200n13 jianghu, 8, 17, 29, 30, 134–37, 139, 143, 146,
Goodbye South, Goodbye (Nanguo 150–52, 195
zaijian, nanguo), 55, 108, 201n3 Jia Xiang (Jia Zhangke Speaks Out), 12
“Go West,” 150 Jia Zhang-ke, A Guy from Fenyang, 14
“Go with Your Feelings” (“Gen zhe Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy: Xiao
ganjue zou”), 26, 198n4 Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures, 16
Guangzhou, 60, 61, 73, 123 Jones, Kent, 82
Joyce, James, 10
Han Dong, 12
Han Han, 12 karaoke, 24, 48, 51, 62, 79, 85, 150
Han Jie, 12, 35 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 96
Han Sanming, 9, 97, 98, 102, 103, 128 Killer, The (Diexue shuangxiong), 150,
He Ping, 49, 200n12 151
Hedonists, The, 102 King Hu (Hu Jinquan), 28, 127, 128, 135,
Hero (Yingxiong), 8 202n7
Hometown Trilogy (Guxiang sanbuqu), Kitano, Takeshi, 108, 201n2
4, 5, 16, 17, 20, 74, 77, 88 Kong Jinlei, 40, 45
Hong Kong, 4, 11, 24, 27, 28, 34, 35, 39, Kundera, Milan, 1
41, 47, 50, 55, 135, 150, 151, 163, 202n7, Kurosawa, Akira, 35
203nn3–4
Hong Kong In­de­pen­dent Short Film Laclau, Matthieu, 14
and Video Awards, 4, 35, 39 Lau, Andy (Liu Dehua), 102
Hou Hsiao-­hsien, 14, 16, 34, 41, 55, 79, Lee Chang-­dong, 112, 174, 175
108–10 Lee Kit-­Ming (Li Jieming), 4, 163
House of Flying Daggers (Shimian Li Bai, 96 213
maifu), 8 Li Jingze, 185
Huang Jianxin, 48 Liang Hong, 185–88, 204n5

index
 Liao Fan, 63, 64, 144–46 “Moon Represents My Heart, The”
Life (Rensheng), 29, 31, 183, 199n8 (“Yueliang daibiao wo de xin”), 25,
“Lifetime of Intoxication, A” (“Qianzui 198n2
yisheng”), 151–53, 155 Motorcycle Diaries, The, 14
Lim Qiong (Lin Qiang), 6, 14, 109, 128, Mountains May Depart (Shanhe guren),
152, 154 7, 12, 17, 20, 63, 108, 112, 134–39, 150,
Lin Chong, 63, 127, 128, 202n9 154, 187, 190
Lin Chong Feeling by Night, 128, 203n9 Mo Yan, 10, 185, 186
lit­er­a­ture, 2, 17, 30–33, 54, 73, 110, 114, 115, “My Sweetie” (“Tian mimi”), 25, 198n2
143, 182–89, 195; literary adaptation, 3,
78, 79, 118, 182, 183 Neon Goddesses (Meili de hunpo), 41, 42
Liu Xiaodong, 7, 96, 106, 184, 201n1, New Face of the Nation (Zuguo xinmao),
203n9 22
location shooting, 10, 43–45, 47, 65, 75, New Wave cinema, 1–3, 13
118, 119, 121, 145, 156, 162, 166, 174; New York Film Festival, 14, 16, 116
controlling locations, 69; scouting, Nietz­sche, Friedrich, 1, 27, 31, 54
44, 85, 86, 149; Still Life, 7; Swimming noise, 41, 174, 181
Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, 185–87; nonprofessional actors, x, 4, 7, 58–64,
Touch of Sin, 124 162, 171–73
Lü Liping, 63, 107, 121
Lu Xun, 81, 158, 201n3 Office Kitano, 108, 109
Lu Yao, 31, 183, 199n8 “old man who moves a mountain”
Lu Zhishen, 63, 125, 202n5 (Yugong yishan), 192
Olympics (2008), 93, 140
Ma Feng, 184, 185, 187, 204n4 One and Eight (Yige he bage), 2
Ma Ke, 184, One Day in Beijing, 3, 35, 37, 38
magic realism, 1–2, 6 On the Road, 14
makeup, 101, 143, 144, 147 Open Door Policy, 26
Malraux, André, 79 opening shot, 17, 170–72
Manchester by the Sea, 110 Ozu, Yasujiro, 14, 35
Man from Atlantis, 27, 199n6
Mao Zedong, ix, 1, 6, 30, 80, 114, 115 Peking opera, 6, 37, 125, 127, 128, 167, 173,
martial arts cinema, 8, 11, 28, 69, 125, 127, 174, 186, 200n14
129, 146, 170, 191 ­People’s Congress, 13
McDonald’s, 95 per­for­mance, 7, 56, 60–62, 64, 68, 71,
McGrath, Jason, 13 102, 103, 124, 144, 150, 158, 159, 171,
Mello, Cecilia, 10, 197n6 173, 174
Melville, Jean-­Pierre, 112, 201n4 Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden
Mermaid, The (Meirenyu), 8 Dragon International Film Festival,
mi­grant workers, 3, 5, 93, 103, 162 12, 15, 110–12, 179, 198n10
Misty Poetry (Menglong shi), 2, 31, 32, Platform (Zhantai), x, xi, 4, 14–17, 20, 38,
199n10 40, 79, 81, 89, 108, 118, 169, 195, 201n3;
modernism, 36, 98, 164 actors, 56–60; autobiographical, 56;
214 modernity, 6, 10, 168, 169, 196 cinematography, 67–69; collaboration
Monster Hunt (Zhuoyao ji), 8 with Beijing Film Studio, 129–30; cos-
montage, 2, 80 tume design, 70–72; ending, 82–83;

index
 format, 75; funding and bud­get, 55, 72; Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the
green tint, 43; ­music, 25–27, 29; radio, Cinema, 34
21; screenplay, 53–55, 64–67, 86; set- Shanghai Expo, 7
ting, 10, 73; time span, 5, 7, 74, 138–40; Shanghai Film Group, 89
video rooms, 28; Zhao Tao, 100–102 Shanxi University, 33, 162
poetry, 2, 31–33, 73, 96, 186 Shaw B ­ rothers, 44
popu­lar ­music, 2, 24–27, 41, 152 Shen Congwen, 110, 183, 204n2
Promise, The (Wuji), 8 Shenzhen, 92
provincial town/city (xiancheng), 10, 20, Sixth Generation, x, 2, 3, 8, 12, 79, 165,
21, 25, 28, 31–33, 55, 169, 195 168, 169, 182
public spaces, 76, 77, 106, 189 social change, 4, 5, 7, 115, 119, 141, 171;
Ash Is Purest White, 152, 190; during
qi cheng zhuan he (“introduction, childhood, 22–26, 32; and costume
elucidation, transition, summing design, 70–72; film industry, 64, 90;
up”), 178 Han Sanming, 103; Liang Hong, 186;
qigong, 2 Platform, 65–67, 74; Still Life, 97, 142,
149; Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns
Raise the Red Lantern (Dahong denglong Blue, 183, 186, 190; The World, 90–93;
gaogao gua), 183 Xiao Wu, 47–55
realism, ix, 12, 13, 69, 99, 155, 178 socialist realism, ix, 1, 3
Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker (Pao song-­and-­dance troupe (wengongtuan),
da Shuang deng), 48 x, 5, 27, 28, 55, 66, 74
Reform Era, x, 2, 5, 7, 13, 22, 27, 30, 54, 73, sound design, 40, 41, 160, 174, 181
74, 103, 115, 140, 165, 169, 183, 198n2, Soviet style of screenwriting, 35, 36, 84, 177
198nn5–6, 199n10 Speaking in Images: Interviews with
rehearsal, 62, 68, 71, 72 Con­temporary Chinese Filmmakers,
Renoir, Jean, 35 16, 198, 200
repetition, 79 Spring in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi
Revive (Fengchun), 16, 44, 128 chun), 136, 166, 168, 203n2
rock and roll, 1, 24, 27, 29, 198n5 Stars collective (Xingxing huahui), 2
ruins, 6, 10, 77, 78, 96–98, 128, 142 Still Life (Sanxia haoren), 4, 6–7, 10, 11,
14, 16, 17, 56, 86, 96–104, 106, 114, 128,
Salles, Walter, 14 138, 142, 144, 149, 152, 170, 181, 187, 195
Sandwich Man, The (Erzi de da wan’ou), story­board, 44, 86
110, 111 Story of Qiuju, The (Qiuhu da guansi),
sars, 90, 94 34, 200n13
Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 27 structuralism, 36
Scar (Shanghen) movement, 2 Su Tong, 183, 185, 204n3
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1, 27 Sun Ganlu, 183, 204n3
Schultz, Corey Kai Nelson, 7, 197n2 Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
science fiction, 11, 191 (Yizhi youdao haishui bianlan), xiii,
Scorsese, Martin, 14, 16, 34 16–18, 182–92
Scorsese on Scorsese, 34
screenwriting, 35, 49, 64, 84, 121, 122, 159, tai chi, 2 215
176–78 Taiwan, x, 3, 14, 24, 25, 27, 28, 34, 154,
scroll effect. See opening shot 198nn2–4

index
 Taiyuan, 3, 20, 21, 33, 61 down, 84; remnants of socialism, 10;
Tarkovsky, Andrei, 34 repetition, 79; transformation, 5
tele­vi­sion, 12, 20, 22, 27, 28, 51, 54, 160, Useless (Wuyong), 17, 18, 184
199n6
Teng, Teresa (Deng Lijun), x, 3, 25, Venice Film Festival, 6, 14, 166, 167,
198n2 200n13
Third Line Construction Proj­ect video rooms, 17, 28, 134, 155
(sanxian gongcheng), 119, 202n2 vio­lence, 11, 115, 116, 122, 123, 125, 165, 166
Three Gorges Dam, 6, 96–99, 141, 142,
144, 148, 149, 171 Wang Baoqiang, 63, 69, 123, 125
Tian Zhuangzhuang, x, 129, 203n10 Wang, Faye (Wang Fei/Wang Jingwen),
Tian­anmen Square, 5, 35, 38, 140 80, 81
Tian­anmen Student Movement (1989), Wang Hong, 12
5, 29, 54, 65, 74, 140 Wang Hongwei, 3, 4, 5, 56–58, 62, 67, 68,
tightrope walker, 6, 99 82, 100
Tiny Times (Xiao shidai), 8 Wang, Qi, 11
To, Johnnie (Du Qifeng), 179 Wang Xiaoshuai, 2, 3, 145
­Today (Jintian), 2, 199n10 war film, 1
To Live (Huozhe), 34, 183, 204n3 washing machine, 20, 22, 24
Tolstoy, Leo, ix ­Water Margin, The (Shuihu zhuan), 8, 31,
Touch of Sin, A (Tianzhuding), 7, 10, 15–17, 63, 123, 125, 146, 202nn5–6, 202n9
56, 112, 114, 115, 204n7; acclaim, 14; “We Are the New Generation of the
actors, 63, 69; censorship, 116–18, 129; Eighties” (“­Women shi bashi niandai
costume design, 124–28; film style, de xin yidai”), 25
129; genre cinema, 158; jianghu, 29, “We Are the Successors of Commu-
134; martial arts/wuxia, 11, 44; ­music, nism” (“­Women shi gongchanzhuyi
150; Peking opera, 127–29; revenge, de jiebanren”), 25
30; screenplay, 122–24; social media, Wei Wei, 136, 203n2
122; structure, 165; Zhao Tao, 124 “We the Workers Have the Power”
Touch of Zen (Xia nü), 128, 202n7 (“Zamen gongren you Liliang”), 25
Tragic Hero (Yingxiong haohan), 151 Wham!, 1
Truffaut, François, 137 “Wine with Coffee” (“Meijiu jia kafei”),
Tsai Ming-­liang (Cai Mingliang), 25
137 Wives and Concubines (Qiqie chengqun),
Turn East Media (Yihui chuanmei), 12 183
24 City (Ershisi cheng ji), 4, 7, 10, 12, 17, Wolf Warrior II (Zhanlang II), 8
63, 106, 107, 114, 117–21, 174, 201n1 ­woman characters, 131–32, 142, 143
Wong, Taylor, 151
ucla, 16, 17 Woo, John (Wu Yusen), 8, 14, 28, 125,
ufos, 6, 144, 149, 156, 195 150, 151, 201n4
Ulan Bator, 20, 21, 198n1 Wooden Man’s Bride, The (Wukui), 48
Unknown Pleasures (Ren xiaoyao), 4, 14, working with actors. See nonprofes-
16, 17, 51, 56, 58, 89, 118, 200n15, 201n3; sional actors
216 Ash Is Purest White, 138; destruction, World, The (Shijie), xi, 5, 6, 16, 17, 56,
77–78; digital filmmaking, 74–77; In 88–96, 100, 102, 108, 114, 118, 154, 170,
Public, 106, 187; motorcycle breaking 201n3

index
World Park, 5, 91–93, 95 Yellow Earth (Huang tudi), x, 2, 3, 11, 14,
World Trade Organ­ization, 140 33, 166, 168, 199–200n12
Wu Song, 63, 125, 202n6 Yellow River, 28, 47, 186
Wu Xiaobo, 12 “ymca,” 150
Wu Yonggang, 166, 167 “Young Friends Come Together”
wuxia, 28, 44, 63, 129, 134, 202n7. (“Nianqing de pengyou lai xiang-
See also martial arts cinema hui”), 26
Yu Hua, 183, 185, 187, 191, 192, 204n3
Xiao Shan G ­ oing Home, 3, 4, 16, 17, 35, 37, Yu Lik-­wai, Nelson (Yu Liwei), 4, 17,
38, 56, 57, 64, 93, 160, 161, 163 35, 40–45, 47, 76, 85, 102, 147, 148,
Xiao Wu, 4, 9, 10, 14–17, 22, 38, 39, 40, 41, 200n15
45, 59, 62, 65, 108, 118, 134, 163, 170; ac-
tors, 56–64, 173; approval, 88, 89, 129; Zatoichi, 108
destruction, 6, 77, 78; documentary Zhai Yongming, 121, 202n3
techniques, 167; ending, 81; Fenyang, Zhang Yang, 40, 41, 45
12, 20; format, 74, 75; jianghu, 29, 134; Zhang Yibai, 145, 146
karaoke, 24, 48; ­music, 150; open- Zhang Yimou, x, 29, 34, 42, 48, 183, 194,
ing scene, 80; origin of film, 47, 48; 200n12
relationships, 5, 51–53, 80, 81, 178; Zhang Yuan, 2, 3, 54, 194
screenplay, 53–55; sound design, 41; Zhao Tao, 5–7, 107, 121, 131, 148, 153; char-
structure, 49; title, 49, 50; Unknown acter in Platform, 66–69; character in
Pleasures, 77, 78; Wang Hongwei, Still Life, 97, 98; character in Touch of
56–58 Sin, 123–25; collaborative relationship
Xie Fei, 166, 168, 169 with Jia Zhangke, 100–102, 173; com-
XStream Pictures, 12, 110 ments on dance per­for­mance, 44, 45;
Xu Zheng, 145 contributions to The World screen-
play, 92; costumes, 72, 127, 128; dialect,
“Yan’an Talks on Art and Lit­er­a­ture,” 114 61; female characters, 131, 142–46;
Yang, Li, 13 makeup, 143–44; smoking scene in
Yangtze River, 6, 28, 96, 97 Platform, 60
Yeh, Sally (Ye Qianwen), 142, 150–52, 155, Zhong Dafeng, 37
203n3 Zhu Shilin, 136

217

index
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