Cinema as a privileged witness to history

Art today has the task of responding to, and taking responsibility for, this world.

Jean-Luc Nancy

A few weeks ago, I was on a panel, along with a number distinguished film scholars, whose charge was to explore the meaning of Jia Zhangke's films. The distinguished Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke himself was present, and it was his assigned task to comment on the comments we were to make.

Jia has emerged as one of the most important modern Chinese film directors. At forty years, he has established himself as a profoundly consequential filmmaker. The film critic John Powers has said that, 'he is the most important filmmaker working in the world today.' Not everyone would concur with this judgment; but it cannot be denied that Jia is compellingly important director whose career path will be watched by aficionados of cinema with great interest.

Jia Zhangke belongs to the Sixth Generation of filmmakers along with Wang Xiashuai, Zhang Yuan, He Jianjun and Lu Xuezhang. They introduced a note of critical urgency and social consciousness into Chinese cinema that was wholly vivifying.

They sought to look at modern Chinese society from the margins, and consequently were regarded as underground filmmakers. In order to understand the true nature and significance of the Sixth Generation of filmmakers in China, we need to contrast their work with that of the Fifth Generation of filmmakers.

Chinese filmmakers such as Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Junzhan, Wu Ziniu, Zhou Xiaowen, who have made a deep impression on international cinema ( and some of whom I have had the privilege of meeting and interacting with) are considered to be the Fifth Generation of filmmakers. They are referred to as the Fifth Generation of filmmakers because they were the fifth generation of film directors to graduate from the Beijing Film Academy.

They are credited with ushering in the new wave in Chinese cinema. These directors displayed a strong interest in moving away from traditional ways of filmmaking, and in effecting a productive connection between cinema and modernism, cinema and internationalism.

Directors associated with the Fifth Generation succeeded in generating a great international interest in modern Chinese cinema, and in winning for it a high international profile. These films were eagerly sought out by organizers and sponsors of international film festivals. There were, to be sure, a number of problems and hurdles that had to be cleared on the way.

Several of these film directors, at one time or another, had to confront the wrath of the officialdom. Some of the bureaucrats disapproved of the way these filmmakers sought to represent Chinese society, and the kind of vision they projected. At times, the audiences found these films lacking in the kind of narrative energy and generation of emotion they had now come to expect from cinema.

Chen Kaige was a leader of the Fifth Generation of filmmakers. As Prof. Kwok-kan Tam and I point out in our book 'New Chinese Cinema' (Oxford University Press), 'His Yellow Earth made in 1984, served to inaugurate a new phase of Chinese film.

Many of the most discerning commentators on Chinese cinema are united in their opinion that this constitutes the first major work of the fifth generation and that it had the effect of formulating Chinese film language and aesthetics for the newer generation. It is hardly surprising that 'Yellow Earth' has become a reference point in the discussion of contemporary Chinese cinema.'

Filmmakers associated with the Sixth Generation abandoned some of the agendas of their immediate predecessors and wished to chart a new course. Their departure was reflected in both content and form. Instead of cultural myths and national narratives privileged by the Fifth Generation, the Sixth Generation aimed to explore the problems of urbanization, of globalization, and sought to represent them in highly personal cinematic styles. At the beginning, the film directors linked to the Sixth Generation paid scant respect to the wishes and decrees of the government. It is against this background that the work of Jia Zhangke should be examined.

Jia emerged first as an underground filmmaker. His first three films were made outside China's state-sponsored system. He was, in certain quarters, seen as a rebel. However with his fourth film, 'The World', he had gained the blessings of the government and he was perceived as a mainstream filmmaker. With the release of 'The World', Zia Zhangke began to attract critical acclaim both national and international.

His next film 'Still Life' won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival and served to cement his reputation as one of the most important filmmakers of China. In addition, he has also made a number of documentaries which also manifest his indubitable cinematic intelligence. His films display the attachment of concerned citizenry and detachment of wit. His camera is good at uncovering the landscapes of fact.

'The World', which is Jia's first state approved film, examines the lives of a group of migrant workers from Shanxi province who are employed by a flashy theme park in Beijing. They are portrayed as unwitting victims of the much-vaunted globalization. It is Jia's intention to map cinematically the human cost of globalization. Clearly, a powerful moral imagination animates the film giving it an inescapable note of urgency.

Jia is careful to deploy symbols imaginatively to reinforce his convictions. For instance, the recurring symbol of the airplane conveys to us both the desire for freedom and its illusory nature.

Jia Zhangke's film 'Still Life' also focuses on modernization and its human costs. The story centers round the gigantic project of the three gorges across the Yangtze River The story takes place in Fengjie, a town along the Yangtze river which will in all likelihood be submerged by the waters from the three gorges project.

The story is a simple one dealing with two people who have arrived in Fengjie from the provinces looking for their spouses. The first, Han Sanming, a coal-miner has come looking for his wife he bought fifteen years ago. She had a daughter; she left him suddenly. The other, Shen Hong, a nurse has come to Fengjie looking for her husband. She had left for Fengjie two years earlier and since then had stopped communicating.

How the characters move through the landscape, is portrayed very persuasively. Jia Zhngke’s eye for composition, his use of color, reminds one of the innovativeness and creative audacity of a film director like Michelangelo Antonioni. It is not only the visual beauty of the landscape that is important; it is the complex way in which he allows the landscape to define the characters that merit our closest attention. The filmmaker has succeeded in juxtaposing the small lives of these unknown people with the gigantic development project so as to bring to the surface untold stories of displacement, dislocation, frustration and misery. For Jia Zhangke social consciousness opens on to a moral awareness.

Jia is a film director who should hold a special appeal to local film directors, film critics and concerned film-goers as he is deeply interested in the function of the film director as a witness to history. In both The World and Still Life, how modernization and globalization can have profoundly unsettling effects on the lives of ordinary people is depicted with sympathy and discernment. What is interesting about Jia’s films is the way in which emotions move through the narrative, the weight they exert, are inextricably linked to a definition of his social vision. One aspect of his social vision is committed to the demonstration of the modes in which human and social desires are twisted into futile and obsessional chimeras.

The characters in Jia Zhangke’s films lead their dreary lives in the shadow of the transformation of society from a socialist to a capitalist one. This is indeed an experience that most Asian movie-goers can respond to. As Jia’s social diagnosis is persistently acute, his preoccupation with social change signposts various layers of meaning that one often tends to ignore. Jean-Paul Sartre once observed, ’The reflective consciousness is the moral consciousness.’

This is absolutely true in the case of Jia’s films. Going beyond the immediate exigencies spawned by the problems the characters encounter, he is intent on juxtaposing cinematic art and life in a larger equation. The spreading ripples of existential misery in his films reach out towards a more comprehensive meaning of the responsibility of the filmmaker.

Jia Zhangke’s films like ‘The World’ and ‘Still Life’ constitute an argument against mindless development and the neglect of the subalterns in the putative march towards progress. He avoids the twin perils of insolent solipsism, evident in many Western films, and social propaganda, manifested in earlier Chinese films. His aim is to create a cinema that is committed to both society and art at the same time. Here, we in Sri Lanka can learn a great deal from a filmmaker like Jia. In this regard I wish to focus on six points.

The first is his imaginative use of space. A mark of a good filmmaker is his or her ability to invest space with diverse layers of meaning, thereby converting it into a vibrant place. Jia Zhangke has displayed his talents for this creative transformation. In films such as ‘The World’ and ‘Still Life’, we observe the complex ways in which trans-local flows of capital and labor, infusion of new values, the upheavals generated by large scale migrations from rural areas to cities and towns, have invested place with a newer set of meanings. This newer set of meanings is vital to Jia’s ambitions and agendas as a creative filmmaker.

It is important to bear in mind a fact that social thinkers such as David Harvey have stressed, namely, that globalization has a way of ushering in a geographical reorganization of capitalism whereby the natural geographical units within which capitalism’s historical trajectory developed appear less and less tenable.

Second, Jia Zhangke’s films have a way of putting into play the idea of nostalgia in an interesting conceptual context. The turbulence and dislocations brought about by modernization and globalization cannot but generate a sense of nostalgia, a longing for a past, in which things were less chaotic and more tranquil.

However, it is important to point out that Jia is not invoking nostalgia as a convenient retreat into a glorified past. On the contrary, he juxtaposes this nostalgia with another – the nostalgia for the ideal globalized world that is fast disappearing in China and elsewhere - to pursue a line of thinking initiated by Fredric Jameson. In a film like ‘Still Life’ it is the conjunction of these two nostalgias that underwrites the social vision of the film.

Third, Jia Zhangke is a filmmaker who is fascinated by the ordinary, the everyday; for him it is indeed the site of continuing interest. The ordinary, if one is perceptive enough to see, contains the extraordinary. Raymond Williams once remarked that culture is ordinary, thereby drawing our attention to the sedimented layers of cultural meaning in everydayness. In the discussion with Jia Zhangke that I participated in, he made the point that he prefers long takes because he has a deep respect for place he is dealing with and its inhabitants and their activities. In other words, his interest is decidedly in the everyday life – an interest that has been given an academic profile by scholars such as Lefebvre and de Certeau.

Fourth, his adherence to cinematic realism is significant; what he endorses is a kind of critical realism in which the presentation of a slice of life is combined with a critical examination of the forces which have contributed to the constitution of it. The lives of subalterns living in rapidly changing urban landscapes are presented by Jia Zhangke with a desire to uncover the social forces which have precipitated the situation he is depicting. Hence at times, he combines startling events and images, that border on the fantastic, within his realistic discourse of cinema. What he is suggesting by these unsettling juxtapositions is that reality is as strange and full of the bizarre as is fantasy.

Fifth, his emphasis on history as a way of understanding social predicaments is significant. Jia is a filmmakers who, though his work, would like to bear witness to history. Whether it is the way in which globalization is transforming Chinese society or the impact of three gorges project, it is the way that history is being played out through the lives of subalterns that captures his interest. His view of history is different from the traditional notions. It is closer to that of Michel Foucault which focused on discontinuities and discourses and ruptures instead of continuities and linear progressions.

Foucault said that his objective was, ‘creating a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects.’ When we study closely the characters in Jia Zhangke’s filmic narratives, it is indeed these modes of creating subjects that attract our attention.

Sixth, the way that Jia treats, represents, the human body in his films is important. In cinema, both at the level of narrative discourse and performative discourse, the role of the human body assumes a great significance. Bodies are both physical entities and symbolic constructs and this fact is vital for filmic communication. In films like The World and Still Life, and also in his earlier works, human body becomes a site of suffering and generating compassion in audiences. The body serves to establish a bond of identification between characters and spectators.

Jia makes use of this bond effectively, without giving into melodrama or high-handed didacticism. He fashions bodies into the common site in which humanistic impulses are allowed to radiate and history called into question. His effort also contains a moral imperative in that it works to unveil evil in society.

These six traits are interconnected and serve to define Jia’s cinematic agenda. In order to frame the efforts of Jia in more compelling terms I wish to invoke a formulation of the eminent French theorist Jean-Luc Nancy. No one, to the best of my knowledge, has made this connection between Nancy’s formulations and Jia’s cinema that I am here proposing. I have alluded to the significance of Nancy’s work in some of my earlier columns. Jean-Luc Nancy (1940 -) is a distinguished philosopher and writer who has been influenced by such thinkers as Heidegger, Bataille and Derrida, but also has ventured to critique some of their work. He has emerged as a formidable cultural analyst whose writings are beginning to inflect cultural theory in important ways.

In order to understand Nancy’s approach to cinema, we need to acquaint ourselves with his formulations on art. He is not a systematic thinker, and his conceptualization of art has to be pieced together from diverse and scattered writings on forms of art and individual artists. He repudiates the notion of art as imitation or mimesis; yet art exists in a specific relation to the world.

It is to clarify this notion that he has expended much of his energies. Nancy is interested in examining the complex ways in which works of art affect us without subscribing to a mimetic concept of art. The idea of touch is central to his thinking (Derrida has written a book on Nancy titled, ‘On Touching: Jean-Luc Nancy’).How art touches our senses in order to generate sense, in ways in which other signifying practices do not, is a question uppermost in his questing mind.

It is against this notion of art that he develops his concept of ‘evidence’ in cinema. He proposed this concept in relation to the work of the distinguished Iranian Film director, Abbas Kirostami, whose works have been shown at various film festivals in Sri Lanka. For Nancy, Kirostami is neither a maker of fiction films nor a maker of documentaries, but an artist who combines both and rises above both. He enforces this point by focusing on two ideas, the gaze and the concept of the world.

According to Nancy, the gaze that Kirostami induces in the spectator, with his ‘long cosmic shots’, is one that produces active critical involvement.

His point is that the world is not about meaning; it is the locus of meaning. How talented directors like Kirostami address this issue in their films is one that Nancy finds inspiring and challenging.

It seems to me that Nancy’s concept of evidence can be fruitfully applied to the work of Jia Zhangke. His works combine fact and artifice, documentary and fictional imperatives, only to rise above them and produce the evidence (whether it be about globalization or Chinese development projects) that Nancy is interested in and presents ‘an opening to the world’- a favorite phrase of Nancy.

It is in this context that Nancy’s statement, which I have used as a the epigraph for this column, takes on added resonances of meaning - ‘Art today has the task of responding to, and taking responsibility for, this world.’

Jia Zhangke is indeed a filmmaker who should provoke us –Sri Lankan filmmakers, critics, concerned film-goers, - into fresh pathways of cinematic imagination.