Jia Zhangke: Tales of Truth in Modern China

There’s a lovely meta-moment towards the end of Jia Zhangke's Unknown Pleasures. Somewhat self-deprecating, or perhaps just a bitter-tinged piece of social commentary, a DVD hawker is propositioned on the street: “Do you have Xiao Wu?” No, the man is told. “Platform?” Again no: the director’s Hometown Trilogy is apparently out of stock. Perhaps this is how Zhangke’s works have themselves remained unknown pleasures to the Chinese mainstream, living mainly through festival screenings and the international art-house scene. Presenting China’s modern truths appeals more to a niche market of global cineastes rather than those who live it.

From this trilogy, to the beautiful visual portraiture of Still Life, and the blended reality of 24 City, Zhangke has provided illuminating visions of Chinese life. Still Life is painted over the backdrop of the Three Gorges Dam project, where thirteen cities and hundreds of smaller conurbations were submerged, resulting in the relocation of 1.3 million people. We drift alongside the personal stories of an estranged husband and wife, their alienation and dislocation synchronised with the extended population. Striking images of a condemned town are beautiful and conflicted, more at home on a gallery wall than cinema screen. A building suddenly taking off like a rocket accurately reflects the surreal truth of the situation.

Bleak reality is later contrasted against the glossy eighties fantasy of A Better Tomorrow, playing on a small dirty screen. Weary workers on one side, men crushed between the cogs of capitalism and communism; Chow Yun-Fat on the other, confident, cool and lighting a cigarette with a burning one hundred-dollar note. This was followed in 2008 with 24 City, a merging of documentary and scripted scenes, telling the story of a collapsing state factory and way of life. The fictional moments are well camouflaged in the main, leaving the viewer to pray over which were staged, some stories too excruciating to contemplate as reality; a mother separated from her child, never to be reunited; insignificant causalities dwarfed by a country in inhuman flux. Truth and fiction are interchangeable, the artificial almost hyper-real, like Wang Bing’s The Ditch. Both directors prove there can be human truth in poetry as in reportage.

Zhangke brings bold new truths to GFF 2014 with A Touch of Sin making its Scottish premiere. His latest film remains true to modern China while exploring it in a more extreme, violent aesthetic. The film is made up of four loosely-interlaced narratives taken from actual news stories on Chinese internet site Weibo; individual expressions of anger against a system demanding inhuman social change. A politically provocative work then, even for him, but one which he hopes will reach mainstream Chinese audiences, mainly because he is now working within the system, co-producing with the state affiliated Shanghai film group. Let’s hope that broadening his audience will not dull his edge, nor bring him entirely into the fold alongside Zhang Yimou (until his recent illicit child scandal). It is more interesting For Zhangke to stay closer to outlaw social commentators Jie Han (Mr. Tree) or fellow 6th Generation and temporarily banned filmmaker Lou Ye (Summer Palace).

If there are eight million stories in the naked city, then what of China? A billion? As a mine owner in Li Yang’s stunning, banned début Blind Shaft remarks, China “Has a shortage of everything but people,” and each one a separate story leaving filmmakers much inspiration to choose from.