By Aliza Ma
Special to the Daily News

It’s difficult to believe more than a decade has spanned since Jia Zhangke made his debut, XIAOSHAN GOING HOME (1995), which won the highest honor at the 1997 Hong Kong Independent Short Film & Video Awards.

Since then, his oeuvre has garnered international recognition (including wins and nominations from Venice, Singapore and Pusan) and defined an aesthetic that put him in the urban poetic vanguard of 6th generation Chinese filmmaking.

In a recent interview, he recalled being in film school and seeing his predecessor Chen Kaige receive the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival with FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE. His own film UNKNOWN PLEASURES would be nominated for the same award at the 2002 Cannes, and a just a few years later, Jia would serve as a head juror for the Cinefoundation. This year, his film 24 CITY, which screens at AFI FEST, stood as the sole Chinese contender for the 2008 Palme d’Or.

24 CITY
3:00 p.m., Monday, November 3rd ArcLight Hollywood 14
7:00 p.m. Saturday, November 8th ArcLight Hollywood 8

24 CITY marks an important milestone on various levels: first, as an exposition of its disappearing subject, Factory 420; second, as a signal of China as it passes from its post-revolution milieu into a surreal post-Olympics era; and finally, as a benchmark of a major shift in Jia’s own visual style and method of narration.

The Sight of Disappearance

Susan Sontag made three main points about photography: that they furnish evidence of the past, they promote nostalgia by claiming a truth in the past and that they form a collective inventory of our history. Thus, she claims, “photography is an elegiac art.”

On the other hand, at the heart of film’s specificity is a hallucination of time and space; that is, the rapid succession of still frames that create the illusion of passing time and forming events. Yet, a common thread in critical and theoretical responses to Jia’s films has been to characterize them as national eulogies. Furthermore, there has been a general tendency to place his style within the genealogy of neo-socialist realism. Consequently, Jia’s films, which fix their nostalgia and realism onto the platform of such hallucinations linger in a negative space that both parallels and encapsulates the essence of his main muse and central subject- the lost past and disappearing landscape of post-Maoist contemporary China.

In this light, 24 CITY’s hallucinatory eulogy begins with the establishing shot of the factory. The long, still shot looks like a lot like a moving photograph. The camera would attempt to capture the same shot again near the end of the film, only to find that the signs have been dismantled and the factory emptied. This industrial factory in Chengdu was being turned into a new expensive loft building. As each character fills the void by telling their personal stories in a different room of the factory, the building itself becomes an integrated aspect of the film’s narrative structure as well as the visual and ideological signifier for a national future built on a disappearing past.

Characters of Loss

The characters who come from this lost past are defined by it. They also personify it and revisit it. Thus, they are introduced to us in still, long, deliberately framed shots in different parts of the abandoned building; shots that disguise themselves as photographs and evidence of the past. Therefore, Jia continues his tradition of weaving elements of fiction into reality, this time with significant revisions in his style-verite. In an interview, Jia explained that the fictional stories told by the three protagonists are composed from an inventory of stories gathered from 130 ex-workers over the course of a year. He sees this “kind of narration structure [as] both traditional and experimental.” This new form of narration conflates exposition and expression, adding to the surrealism of capturing “lost individual memories.”

A Departure of Sorts

Other elements of 24 CITY also mark a stylistic and thematic departure for the auteur. Atypical of Jia, the three protagonists are female, played by professional actresses, LiPing, Joan Chen and Zhao Tao. The localized female perspective of story was part of the reason for his first writing collaboration with ChengDu native poetess Zhai YongMing.

As his location moves from rural village to affluent metropolis, the subjectivity of his stories has also increased. This marks a shift from being an insightful onlooking flaneur of “a changing China” to tracking “a collective ‘on their way’ feeling.” Indeed, the socialist anthems sung by the workers and the aggressive bulldozers drown each other out as the factory’s walls are triumphantly demolished.

The reinvention of Jia’s visual and narrative representation is the only way to capitulate the slippery reality in a transitory and rapidly disappearing China. In a Q& A after its screening at the New York Film Festival, Jia explained that what began as the attempt to make a documentary about Factory 420 quickly made him realize that fictional elements must be added to include the “imagined aspects”, because history is necessarily a mix of “reality and imagination.”

A member of the audience asked what part of the film was real to Jia, he answered without hesitation “the fictional characters… the workers… all of them are all real.”