By Nicholas Elliott
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreader: Qin Tian
Source: BOMB (February 12, 2016)
Jia Zhangke's new film "Mountains and Rivers" inherits all the characteristics of his seven previous works, and those works have made him one of the most important filmmakers of our time. As usual, Jia Zhangke weaves intimate moments in his personal life into an oil painting, both as a silent melodrama and as a large-scale reflection on Chinese society. However, there was also a major mistake in the film that left many fans curious about what went wrong.
The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers (2015)
The film is divided into three chapters and is set in three eras: 1999, 2014 and 2025. The story begins in Jia Zhangke's hometown of Fenyang, a dusty city in northern China, and since his debut novel Xiaowu (1997), many of his films have been set in Fenyang.
Two childhood friends, Liang Zi, a coal miner, and Zhang Jinsheng, a new entrepreneur, both had a crush on Shen Tao, the daughter of the shopkeeper. When Shen Tao decided to marry Zhang Jinsheng, Liang Zi threw away the keys to his dirty cottage and left the town. After returning to Fenyang in 2014 due to lung cancer, Zhang Jinsheng remarried in Shanghai, and Shen Tao, already a successful businessman, struggled to keep in touch with her son Zhile.
The overall effect of these two chapters is reminiscent of Jia Zhangke's signature mode: laying the groundwork with a close-up shot and then ending with a panoramic shot – fixing the scene in the story and raising the emotional tone. Taking a step back from this simple love triangle story, we see a chronicle of rampant capitalism, technological progress, and the loss of traditional values.
As the plot extends into the future, the film begins to change its flavor and shifts its focus to Shen Tao and Zhang Jinsheng's son, Zhile. Tole is a lazy young man who lives in Australia with his father, who is now a miserable, armed millionaire who can only communicate with his son through a translator. The overall tone of the final chapter is as subtle as the name "Dollar," and after the restrained but deliberate use of rich colors in the first two chapters, its exhausted photography is ugly.
The first time I saw the film, I wondered if Jia Zhangke was imitating a terrible Australian soap opera with a bunch of English-speaking burlesque actors. But deep down, I knew it was the director's own vision of the future, and in portraying it, he lost that understated acumen that made the emotions of the first two chapters of the film so intense.
I interviewed Jia Zhangke almost with a mission to understand why "The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers" has such a confusing combination of sublime and absurd. Eventually, we had a brief conversation with the help of an interpreter, in which the courtesy and high degree of restraint kept me from asking too many sharp questions.
However, I have a clearer understanding of the background of Jia Zhangke's entire work, and I am eager to give "Mountains and Rivers of the Past" another chance. And, in order to avoid the impression that Jia Zhangke is a technophobic patient after watching the interview , it should be noted that Jia Zhangke has 8.5 million followers on Weibo, a highly influential blog site in China. The interview took place in late September, when Jia Zhangke's film premiered at the 53rd New York Film Festival.
Reporter: In an early discussion about Xiao Wu (1997), you wrote, "While we watch this movie, the people in the movie are watching us." Does this statement also apply to your other films?
Jia Zhangke: I really want to use the film to communicate with my audience. I want an equal and reciprocal interaction. I want to create enough space in my films — enough white space — so that audiences can fill those gaps with their own experiences. That's how I interact and communicate. I want to present things more objectively, not to give them some subjective assertion, some kind of statement I want to make.
Xiao Wu (1997)
I really want to invite the audience in so they feel like they're part of the movie. I want them to go from observer to participant. This is important to me. Of course, this has to do with the issues and problems we encounter in Chinese films. Chinese films are often one-way, and what we make you believe cannot be questioned, and you cannot oppose it. But the director must oppose this one-way filmmaking. I wanted the film to be equal, and I wanted two-way communication.
Reporter: How does your new film "Mountains and Rivers" encourage the audience to participate? Specifically, how is this two-way relationship established?
Jia Zhangke: I divided the film into three chapters: 1999, 2014 and 2025. There are great distances in time and space. Viewers can fill in the blanks with their own life experiences. It was as if I wanted to show the audience three buildings. The distance between them is so far that you need to pass them in turn, and the viewer will walk from point A to point B based on their own experience, and you can only see fragments of each specific character at different times.
Of course, there's a big gap between these three years, but the film guides us very well about how we feel about them — and it seems to me that things get worse and worse over time. Visually, the first part is pretty and the colors are saturated. The graphics in the third part are less appealing. In my opinion, as the story moves on to the next stage, the filming becomes more traditional — by the third stage, you rely on the front and back — and you don't worry about the audience being pushed away when the film unfolds in this way.
Jia Zhangke: This should be the first time I have presented the future on the big screen. These are all things that we haven't experienced, so of course it's very subjective. If you look at the new technology — not just social media, not just phones, and what's going to happen in 10 years — I think that alienation has already happened. I can only imagine that the situation will get worse. In my opinion, everything has become so flat now.
In the future, thanks to the introduction of technology, we will have a feeling of abandonment, like orphans. On Twitter and WeChat, you can express your feelings with emojis. But when you actually see these expressions, do you really understand how this person really feels? Or are you just seeing a flat digital icon? I often think of this sense of anxiety and isolation about the future, and I think of all these fears, what we fear most is that one day we will no longer be able to understand and feel the emotions of the people we love.
Interviewer: Was your intention in the last part to alienate the audience? There is a strong nostalgia in the first part, and it seems that everyone who watches the film will be deeply moved— but in the third part, this disconnection begins.
Jia Zhangke: I'm not too worried about this because I do think my imagination of the future is not so surreal.
Reporter: In fact, you have become the ambassador of China in the eyes of international film fans. I know a lot of people expect you to understand what's happening in China, and for many of us, it's a fast-growing, mysterious society. I wonder how aware you are of this, and if you feel an obligation to report on a country with billions of people, rather than just being allowed to tell a story about three people for more than two decades, wouldn't you be frustrated.
Jia Zhangke: I don't see myself as a communicator of China's reality. People can naturally feel this reality from my films, in other words, I didn't make them to introduce China's reality to a wider audience. I try to focus on the lives of individuals and the environment in which they live. Although "Mountains and Rivers" focuses on the very intimate emotions between three different characters, these private emotions are also influenced and impacted by the society in which they live. Overall, I amplify the emotional side of Chinese society rather than the outward side.
Reporter: It is said that your initial motivation for making this film came from wanting to use a video clip you shot in 1999. Can you tell us why?
Jia Zhangke: I wanted to look back at the documentary clip I shot in 1999. I thought it was very moving and thought it would fit well with the story I wanted to tell. This original footage may actually turn into a new movie. My process of making films is natural and organic. Once I had the idea of telling a story, I would go back and look at the video I had taken before. I actually went with the flow, and after looking back at this video, I thought to myself: Wow, this is amazing and fits well, and it should be put in the movie.
Reporter: You did a lot of investigative interviews for this film.
Jia Zhangke: A lot. I went to North America to interview immigrants from Shanxi Province. One of the most interesting conversations was with a father in Washington, D.C. This has a lot to do with language. He could only communicate with his son via Google Translate. It's amazing. It is also a possible future. You can see the culture passed down from generation to generation – whether it's the way you eat or the way you perform certain rituals, in my opinion, disappears completely in the next generation. I'm not trying to say whether it's good or bad. I was just shocked.
Reporter: 1999 was a turning point for China. Can we talk about what happened at the time? Why did it become a particularly powerful starting point for your films?
Jia Zhangke: This traumatic transformation did not happen in 1999. This actually began in 1978 (at the beginning of China's reform and opening up). So, by 1999, two decades had passed since the shift brought about by the policy of opening up. But in 1999, you could suddenly feel that China was developing at the same rate as the rest of the world in some way.
When we listened to a foreign song in the 1980s, there was a lot of ideological pointing, because it was probably one of the few songs you could hear after the Cold War. But by 1999, when we heard the pet store boys' song "Go West," the song that audiences heard in the movie, it didn't have any ideological weight, just a catchy rhythm.
The same is true of Coca-Cola: in the 1980s, as an American product, it had very important symbolic significance, but by 1999, it was just a bottled beverage. In 1999, the popularity of mobile phones and the Internet was not unique to China, but worldwide, and it fundamentally changed the way we communicate with other people. 1999 was very different from the late 1970s, and you can see it in my movie Platform.
Platform (2000)
From the late 1970s to the end of the 1990s, China's economy developed rapidly, and by 1999, in terms of telecommunications and infrastructure, China was basically the same as other developed countries. It's important for me to show the other side of China's reality. On the one hand, you have traumatic economic development and progress, but at the same time, there are some people who are left behind by a society in transition. It is unfair to ignore this part of our society.
I think there are people who are blindly optimistic about everything, and they say that we should see the bright side and that we should not deal with poverty. But poverty is a problem in every country. I want to make sure it's obvious. My film expresses contemporary reality through the class differentiation between three friends: one is an emerging capitalist who is moving toward the middle or upper classes. But there are also working classes like Liangzi, who work in coal mines and simply cannot accept this downward economics.
Reporter: This is powerfully reflected in the first shot of the second part of the film, the picture of the miner and LiangZi together, and he is the one who is left where he is. We've been talking about the past — not far from the past — and we're talking about the future. I want to talk about the present, or the present in your movie – that is, 2014. I want to ask if this is a particularly important time to shoot a movie.
Jia Zhangke: Yes. The violent transformation of economic development and how this violence can have a huge impact on our relationship with each other is very important. I think now is a good time to catch violence. I am not opposed or dismissive of the idea of technological progress. For me, the most important thing is to consider the costs and consequences of this progress. I want my films to reflect that.
The internet is a way to enjoy freedom. It has this feature. But this medium will also be used to manipulate public opinion. I'm not saying the internet is bad, or the phone is bad. I'm just watching cautiously. I always come back to the question of what we lost, which is just as important as what we get.