Wen 丨 Liu Qi
For veteran film fans familiar with Jia Zhangke, the interview book "The Accent of the Film" may not provide much fresh content beyond the previous jia zhangke books or interviews, but this book cuts into Jia Zhangke's works from the perspective of an external observer, and provides most audiences with an overall idea for understanding Jia Zhangke's works in a clear and concise way.
The Western perspective of the author Bai Ruiwen also suggests that there is a meaningful dislocation, deviation and deformation between interpretation and interpretation, allowing us to see the acceptance path of Jia Zhangke's works in the Western vision, as well as the limitations and openness of this path.
As an English scholar who studies Chinese directors more, Bai Ruiwen's interview subjects are mostly the most important directors of Chinese films, and his books include "Boiling Sea Time: Hou Xiaoxian's Light and Shadow Memory" and "Light and Shadow Speech: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Film Directors". Columbia University's academic background in modern Chinese literature and film studies and the field of modern and contemporary Chinese literature have brought his research methods for Chinese films closer to the analysis of literary works and cultural studies.
Jia Zhangke and Bai Ruiwen (After the release of "Children of jianghu", 2018)
The book is a compilation of interviews with Jia Zhangke's film retrospective held in the United States, mainly about 12 hours of post-screening dialogues and master classes and eight other activities. The form of the post-screening dialogue determines the scope, direction and depth of the conversation. Because they are facing the general Western audience in public places, these audiences are unfamiliar with Chinese films, Chinese society and Jia Zhangke's works, which has brought some limitations to the dialogue, making it difficult to be more professional and in-depth, unable to go deep into Jia Zhangke's subtle and sensitive feelings and deep aesthetic thinking as "Jia Xiang", nor is it as Fu Dong's analysis in the context of world cinema in "Jia Zhangke's World".
However, it cannot be said that the content of this dialogue is superficial. Some of Jia Zhangke's answers and narrations on the themes, directors' creative methods, and aesthetic concepts of several important works are accurate and unmistakable to the core issues, which can easily allow Western audiences to understand Jia Zhangke's works, understand the background of the times and the chinese social reality of the works.
Distant gaze
As an other in the English-speaking world, Bai Ruiwen's understanding of Jia Zhangke's works from the outside will also bring about a complicated situation. In his preface, scholar Dai Jinhua pointed out that the book contains a kind of "gaze from the outside and inside: looking at China, looking at movies, looking at art, looking at Jia Zhangke", and a kind of "reply and looking back from the inside out" from Jia Zhangke.
When the reader reads this book, he can indeed feel the uniqueness, strangeness and estrangement brought about by this external and inward perspective, but there is also a kind of outside, calm and objective bystander. In his analysis of Yang's films, Jameson once said, "The totality of society can be perceived, but it seems to be from the outside." For some Chinese film critics, the overall contours of society in Jia Zhangke's works are somewhat too clear and easy to be recognized, so occasional critics question the somewhat symbolic works of Jia Zhangke.
When Bai Ruiwen stands on the outside of China, a distant distance to understand Jia Zhangke's films, and uses the eyes of external others to obtain a grander, more detached, and more objective understanding of the totality of society, he will indeed find that Jia Zhangke's aesthetic approach is as accurate as a fable to present the strange landscapes of Chinese society in transition in the 1980s and 1990s.
The preface is Bai Ruiwen's introduction to Jia Zhangke and his works, including Jia Zhangke's growth and creative experience from Fenyang to Beijing, the background of the work, the aesthetic style, and its close connection with contemporary Chinese social reality, and also points out the uniqueness of his works in the history of Chinese cinema. Through his works, Jia Zhangke made a certain presentation and response to the great changes in Chinese society after the reform and opening up. Bai Ruiwen pointed out that the Hometown Trilogy "is one of the most complete and in-depth film reflections on the drastic changes in China in the past two decades", and his works also truly show the "invisible county town" and "invisible marginal figures".
At the same time, a Chinese reader must also be able to feel the complex meaning of Jia Zhangke's response from the inside out. For example, he repeatedly stressed that his aesthetic choices were different from previous Chinese films, that for a long time in the past, China has been revolutionary literature and art, literature and art should serve politics and society, and independent films in the 90s actually let art return to itself. It is true that the interpretation of Chinese films to Western audiences should be simplified to a certain extent, but what Jia Zhangke emphasized is that China as a socialist country has a certain distinct and recognizable label, which also simplifies and conceptualizes the complexity of Chinese films to some extent.
In the interview, we will also see some plots that only Chinese audiences can appreciate. For example, at the end of "Platform", Wang Hongwei is dozing off in a chair, his wife is taking care of the baby, and Bai Ruiwen borrowed the words of a commentator to point out that this scene is "the most beautiful moment of modern cinema".
Platform (2000)
Jia Zhangke explains, "In the end, the young man who gave up the pursuit of ideals and returned to the order of daily life, he chose to use his nap to express this unchanging life." One obvious difference between the lifestyles of China's big cities and small cities is the afternoon nap, a design that may be felt more deeply by Chinese audiences.
Interpretation of the offset
In the face of an interviewer who asks questions in terms of textual explanations, the creator often has two ways to cope, the most common being a gesture of rejection. For example, John Ford often answers many interview questions, "I don't think so" or "it's not like this," and directly shuts the visitor out.
One of the advantages of negating, rejecting, and even having a confrontational connotation is that the work is avoided from being interpreted too clearly and directly, maintaining the complexity, ambiguity and aftertaste of the text, and leaving room for interpretation. In Bai Ruiwen's interview with the intuitive director Hou Xiaoxian, there were several such awkward questions and answers, and in the face of Bai Ruiwen's interpretation intentions, Hou Xiaoxian would directly reply, "I rely on my intuition to create, no matter what."
The other is a gesture of acceptance. The gesture of affirmation, acceptance, and recognition is more out of respect for interpretation, but in order to retain the possibility of other interpretations entering, creators often accept it in a roundabout way, such as "Although I didn't think so when I made it, but you pointed it out that I think it is true."
Whether it is a speculative or emotional director, when creating a work, there will be a lot of thinking. These reflections are certainly an effective way to enter the work, but we must also be wary of an intention fallacy, a way of understanding that takes the author's "original intention" as the truth, and gives up the reader/audience's right to interpret the work.
Although Jia Zhangke answered every question sincerely and meticulously. But he does not belong to the two types of respondents above. He is the third type of respondent, a creator with very strong self-interpreting skills. His interpretations of his own work are even richer and more interesting than most other interpretations.
When a Western researcher, with an understanding and interpretation of the text, seeks to verify such a creator with strong aesthetic consciousness and rational thinking, he can see some very interesting questions and answers. As a Chinese scholar with a comparable level of academic research, Bai Ruiwen already understands Jia Zhangke's films better than most Western audiences, but occasionally finds some wishful thinking. Although these problems are not misplaced, but somewhat offset, readers can't help but smile during the reading process.
Jia Zhangke is undoubtedly a very good interviewee, he has a complete set of thinking about film aesthetics and social reality, his speculative ability and language ability, as well as Jia Zhangke's unique flexibility, so that each question is explained in a different way, he can even use the interviewer's incomplete or inaccurate questions to accurately open the text.
Using the wrong key can also open the right door, which is of course Jia Zhangke's superiority. In his preface, Dai Jinhua said that Jia Zhangke is "an alias for "Chinese film" in the vision of international art films", in addition to the accurate grasp of Chinese reality in the work itself, it is also inseparable from Jia Zhangke's strong explanatory ability, which is particularly eye-catching in his works and language expressions.
First of all, Jia Zhangke has an almost persistent insistence on material selection, creative intention, and aesthetic style. He is not a director of Hou Xiaoxian's intuition and feeling, he has a high degree of conscious design, to show the reality of the alternating new and old in the process of Chinese social modernization and the problems of modernity caused by this reality, but also to show the individuals who have been blown apart by the storm of progress. Secondly, he never rejects various interpretations, and also hopes that the audience will see the ambition of the work to reflect social reality. He has even provided excellent interpretations and interpretations of his work in various writings and speeches.
Therefore, in the face of Bai Ruiwen's questions, Jia Zhangke will be very proactive in providing his thinking path and aesthetic considerations. But when Bai Ruiwen proposed an interpretation of the text, Jia Zhangke would not refuse in order to reserve the space for interpretation, but would frankly express his intentions, and his answers were often more meaningful than Bai Ruiwen's interpretation.
As a director with both theoretical vision, aesthetic thinking, and social concern, Jia Zhangke has consciously thought about sociology and aesthetics when creating, and transformed it into a clearly visible plot - which is why his works are very suitable for interpretation with various theories.
Another interpretation of the misalignment comes from the analytical approach taken by Barry. Bai Ruiwen's interpretation is different from the intuitive, ontological french film criticism method of the "Film Handbook" adopted by Fu Dong in "Jia Zhangke's World".
Although he will also ask About Jia Zhangke's ideas in audiovisual aspects, when understanding the film, his core idea is closer to the way of reading literature, which is a transformative interpretation of the theme and plot, trying to find the real meaning under the surface of the text - that is, the potential meaning. Most audiences are also accustomed to this kind of thematic analysis of the film. Therefore, Bai Ruiwen's question actually helps Western audiences to understand Jia Zhangke's works.
For example, Bai Ruiwen will ask, the destruction of this kind of ruin image and architecture in the movie seems to be more or less in response to the destruction of morality and youth. Or, based on the contrast between "stillness" and "movement" in Tang poems, he pointed out that "Platform" is also a film that explores "stillness" and "movement". "Jing" is Fenyang, the city wall, tradition, and daily life, and "moving" is the outside world, Guangzhou, Wenzhou, reform and opening up, and wandering life.
These interpretations, of course, cannot be said to be wrong, and may seem very reasonable, but this binary understanding, and even the way of extracting some elements from the text for a transformative interpretation (X means A, Y means B), is the kind of interpretation that Sontag has strongly opposed decades ago, a rigid interpretation that has the potential to destroy the vitality of the text.
But Jia Zhangke often cleverly dissolves the rigidity of this question. For example, Bai Ruiwen asked whether the problem with Xiao Ji's motorcycle in "Ren Yao" represents the theme of young people in the film, although young people are full of vitality, but at the same time they are very unreliable and have many problems. Jia Zhangke replied that according to the design of the original script, the motorcycle was not a problem, but when it was filmed, the motorcycle had a problem and could not get on. I was supposed to shout a halt, but I found that the actor's appearance was suddenly very similar to the character's situation, he was very anxious, wanted to climb up, wanted to spend his youth. This answer not only quietly negates Bai Ruiwen's translational interpretation, but also hints at a certain deep secret about filmmaking —how an occasional opportunity in filming enters the text, becomes part of the text, and even better fits the characters and story than the original script.
Ren Yao (2002) Ren Xiao Yao (2002)
There is also the design of Zhao Tao who has been holding a mineral water bottle in "Children of jianghu", and it is also the design of Zhao Tao who proposed during the filming process whether he can also hold a water bottle like "Three Gorges Good People", so the mineral water bottle has become a core element, and even changed the character action and character behavior. The details of her use of mineral water bottles to block automatic doors, including the holding of hands with mineral water bottles with men she later met on the train, are impressive.
Children of the Jianghu (2018)
I have always disagreed with some criticisms of Jia Zhangke, such as the intention is too obvious and too symbolic. I think Jia Zhangke's original intention is to clearly reflect the changes of the times and society like a mirror, and many of his aesthetic methods are of course modernist film techniques, such as the confusion of reality and fiction, the integration of documentaries and feature films, the abandonment of causality to a certain extent, the image of the wanderer, the surrealist elements, and so on.
But his aesthetic concept is not entirely modernist in essence, and he often does not pursue the ambiguity and ambiguity of the text, but presents social reality in a particularly clear and direct way, which contains a realistic aesthetic appeal. His creative intention has always been clear and penetrating through all his film works, and also throughout his every conversation and writing, which has also made Jia Zhangke, an irreplaceable and persistent director who presents the reality of contemporary Chinese society and the changes of the times.
The Good Man of the Three Gorges (2006) The Good Man of the Three Gorges (2006)
Unfortunately, because of the limitations of the interview form, Bai Ruiwen, as a researcher, his questions and analysis did not exceed the director's self-interpretation of the work, but in general, the book can still bring readers some reading pleasure and a smile, allowing us to see the sincerity, wisdom and cunning of a creator in the face of questions and explanations.