Jia Zhangke on Film

The few how-to books I read recently left me with no urge to express anything at all. Last night I quickly went through these two books on WeChat Read, and some passages really moved me. When I watched his films, I always felt they had too much emotional content, but I didn’t expect his writing to have a completely different style. Because the books are compiled from pieces and conversations he published from 1996 until now, they don’t have that wise-after-the-fact smell of writing done by looking back once the work is finished.

PS: WeChat Read’s note export is very friendly. No messy formatting to deal with, it just copies straight to the clipboard. Very comfortable.

Jia’s Thoughts I: Jia Zhangke’s Film Notes (1996–2008) By Jia Zhangke, edited by Wan Jiahuan 6 notes

◆ Preface: Jia Zhangke, an Animal Unlike the Others — Chen Danqing

I remember Jia Zhangke being interviewed in the behind-the-scenes extras of one of his films. He said that when he was drifting around in that run-down little county town, he had many chances to go astray, to become a bad kid and ruin himself. That was an honest confession. In my years as a sent-down youth, I also had too many chances to fall apart and give up on myself. Just now a young person asked, “Who can save us?” My answer may make young people uncomfortable: that is a slave’s way of thinking. Never wait for someone to come and save us. Everyone should save themselves, starting from when they are young. What does it mean to save yourself? As I understand it, it means being true to your own feelings and doing each thing seriously: don’t get impatient, don’t give up, don’t just go through the motions. Even when you write an article, get the punctuation right and don’t make typos — that is what I mean by saving yourself. We all have to save ourselves step by step. I rely on painting, one brushstroke at a time; Jia Zhangke relies on film, one inch at a time. November 23, 2008, at the Peking University Centennial Hall

Be true to your own feelings, keep up your daily life by your own standards, and save yourself step by step.

◆ Have You Bought the Fake Section Chief’s Platform?

At first I thought I was really something: look how persistent I am, I went after my ideal and reached it. But when I got a bit older, I suddenly realized that giving up an ideal is actually harder than holding on to one

Every choice has consequences. You just have to bear them.

◆ I Hear Spring Is About to Come for Film

What is different from the past is that today even people outside the film industry are starting to know about the problems of film censorship. Newspapers discuss a film rating system, and why it is so hard to change an unreasonable system that everyone knows about, one that has already harmed the development of the film industry and our culture. Now we can discuss this question out loud, and maybe that is progress. I don’t know whether I should believe in this spring I heard through a microphone.

This was written in 2003. Now it’s 2019, and there are still all kinds of “force majeure.”

◆ Blockbusters Spread Germs That Damage Social Values (Conversation)

The makers of blockbusters always stress the audience’s choice and the market’s choice. But the problem is that behind the market’s choice is administrative power. As for the audience’s choice, audiences are actually very easily influenced by mainstream values. How many viewers really have independent judgment? I think the role of culture is to give the public a habit of thinking, so that the inner makeup of the people in this country develops in a healthy direction.

It’s similar to the logic of a lot of products: “This is human nature. If I don’t take up their time, other products will, or they’ll waste the time on their own anyway.” But a little idealism can always bring some positive effect.

Jia’s Thoughts II: Jia Zhangke’s Film Notes (2008–2016) Jia Zhangke 11 notes

◆ Arty Young People in the Hutongs

On weekends I would go to the Academy of Fine Arts to see friends from back home and look at paintings. A few steps out of Xiaowei Hutong was the academy’s gallery; a little farther on was the National Art Museum of China. In the evening I could go to the Beijing People’s Art Theatre to see a play, and if I really had nothing to do, I would go to the China Bookstore next door and leaf through old books. The art institutions in the city were not isolated. We young artists, newly arrived, ran here and there through the hutongs, and the crowded shared courtyards and the temples of art lived side by side in peace, all of a piece, with no line between them.

Living a 995 life outside the Fifth Ring Road, even one trip to the China Film Archive costs a huge amount of enthusiasm.

◆ A Few Words from the Principal

Part of what draws me to film is also the unique way of life it gives us. I need that wandering life of making a home anywhere, and I also like working together with all kinds of crew members. Film gives me the chance to go to unfamiliar places, to film wind and rain, thunder and lightning, to gaze at mountains, rivers and the land. Film has helped me keep my passion for connecting with people, and has helped me keep my curiosity about life. Like right now, I’m curious: who are you? Why did you choose film?

◆ 2015 Mountains May Depart

Describing the beauty of a film in words is a real test of a critic’s cultivation. Symbolic final verdicts and pedantic comparisons full of references are both relatively easy. The director’s job is to film the part where “words run out” as images; good criticism turns the meaning of those images back into words.

This was a preface he wrote for Mu Weier. It suddenly gave me an answer to a question I was asked before: compared with books (images compared with words), do films only widen the ways of expression while limiting the imagination people have when they read? Actually, the biggest strength of images is expressing this state where “words run out.” It is also why so often, after a film, I feel something but find it very hard to turn it back into words.

◆ They Are Lonelier Than Jia Zhangke — A Conversation with Xu Zhiyuan

(Xu Zhiyuan) He has influenced me deeply. His trilogy set in the small Shanxi town where he grew up made me realize, for the first time, the importance of my own life: the everyday things we look at without seeing also hold something moving and sad. After we became friends, I found, somewhat to my surprise, that his talking and writing have even more power than his film language. An artist’s sensitivity and an intellectual’s analysis are closely fused in them. (Jia Zhangke) A lot of people tell me they didn’t expect me to write so well. I tell them that in my generation, there were plenty of people who wrote better than me.

This was also the most pleasant surprise of the book. Watching his films, I often found them very imagistic, and I didn’t expect the director’s writing to be so candid.

It took him three years of exams to get into the Beijing Film Academy, and after graduating he cut into society from the most niche angle there is, that of an independent filmmaker. I went to Peking University and joined a mainstream commercial newspaper before I even graduated. We both set out to portray a changing China. It is like a kind of irony about life: he honestly carried his county-town experience with him and entered the world with ease, while I imagined a world experience from the very start, only to find I had no place to put my feet down.

A very interesting angle. I can easily picture that melancholy intellectual gaze of Xu Zhiyuan’s.

When I first started making films I felt incredibly passionate. I thought film could change the world. But now I feel the world changes too slowly. Twenty years counts as three generations, and three generations have passed without any change in the way people think

Creators have to face one reality: how these works ultimately have a real effect on the public, because every creator has to think about the relationship between the individual and the public. The people you are speaking to are the public, so what state is the public in now? That may offer new inspiration for telling stories and making films, to communicate and interact with society at large.

Products are somewhat similar. Keeping your head down and building features or products that only you think are valuable is meaningless. You still have to look at how people are changing and what state they are in right now, even though a lot of the time it is disappointing.

Xu Zhiyuan In the twenty years you’ve been involved with film, China has also gone through dramatic changes in the world. How do you see the changes brought by China’s rise? Jia Zhangke What I felt first was the surge of nationalist feeling in the younger generation. The main issue here is still independence of the soul. For most of these kids, their way of thinking is still the state’s way of thinking, and they overlook what is human-centered. When the size of the economy gets them excited and fired up, they ignore everything else completely. Because they are not individualists; they are statists.

I’ve felt this more and more clearly recently, and it gets clearer every time I talk with people around me. Everyone talks nonstop about concentrating resources to do big things, for the sake of overall economic benefit. When it comes to the public as a group, it’s always like this, and keyboard warriors are all stupid. But when you go deeper and talk about individuals, about each person and each minority group within that whole, it always ends up that someone has to be sacrificed.