He [Jia Zhangke] is the most unselfish director among the so-called Sixth Generation directors.
–Tian Zhuangzhuang
When I shoot fiction, I usually want to maintain a certain objectivity in presenting the characters in their settings. But when I shoot documentary, I want to capture the ‘drama’ that’s inherent in reality – and I want to carefully express my subjective impressions – Jia Zhangke
The youngster painter says, “Art is not a reflection of reality, It is the reality of a reflection.” To me it means something. Art is not only a mirror. There is not only the reality and then the mirror-camera. I mean, I thought it was like that when I made Breathless, but later I discovered you can’t separate the mirror from the reality. You can’t distinguish them so clearly. I think the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera. It’s between them. – Jean Luc Godard
Since Still Life and Dong, two modes of filmmaking on the same subject, Jia Zhangke has further explored how the film medium can address the subject to be filmed
and what the filmmaking means to himself by making a series of documentary films such as Dong, Useless, 24 City, and I Wish I Knew. Although he has got a worldwide reputation for his feature films from Xiao Wu to Still Life which especially won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, it is Dong, a documentary film that is more linked with his subsequent films rather than Still Life, a fiction film, and his cinematic interests has turned to making documentary films in his own ways.
Given that documentary films are less popular in the contemporary film industry, it is unusual that the filmmaker like Jia Zhangke successful in the feature films focuses persistently on making documentary and short films, while the opposite cases moving from documentary or short films to feature films are even more common. To name the films he has made since Still Life, they are Our Ten Years (Womende shi nian, 2007, short film), Cry Me a River (Heshang de aiqing, 2008, short film), Useless (Wuyong, 2007, documentary), 24 City (Ershisi cheng ji, 2008, documentary), and I Wish I Knew (Haishang chuanqi, 2010, documentary). In fact, this list of short films and documentaries might seem like an incoherent group of impromptu production on their situational conditions rather than Jia’s certain intention to make a series of documentary project, because the most of them were commissioned by different commercial companies or public organizations as he had difficulties in fundraising for his next feature film project right after Still Life. For example, Our Ten Years, an experimental short film running less than ten minutes, is made to celebrate tenth anniversary of Southern Metropolis Daily (Nanfang dushi bao) from 1997 to 2007. A documentary 24 City shot in Chengdu is co-produced by the real estate developer Huarun group which is also famous for one of the largest supermarket chains in China, and I Wish I Knew, a documentary on Shanghai, is originally commissioned by the 2010 Shanghai World
Expo Organizing Committee to be screened at the World Expo site in Shanghai.
Despite these different topics, styles, locations and sources of funding, they have certain aspects in common to show Jia’s changes since Still Life and Dong. First of all, reflecting on himself, Jia questions his own way of filmmaking. He, on the one hand, critically examines his cinematic hallmarks shown in his previous works, on the other hand he further explores the relation between himself as a filmmaker and the subject to be filmed. For example, if the main characteristics of Jia’s earlier films, generally regarded as virtues, were on-the-spot realism, hand-held camera work, long takes, locality of Fenyang, amateur actors/actresses, individual stories/memories, the private, marginal characters, and so forth, then in his later films, he rethinks realism/reality, edits the scenes with more shots, moves to other places outside Fenyang, juxtaposes amateur and professional actors/actresses, considers the public and people, wonders collective or spatial memories, and makes interviews with intellectuals and celebrities. Challenging his earlier films in this opposite way, Jia has endeavored to explore his cinematic world including genre, style, subject, and attitude. Thus, his later works move outside himself physically and cinematically to reflect on himself in a reverse way, while his earlier films are generated from Jia Zhangke himself and his neighborhood to meet, understand, and communicate with the world. In other words, as he accepts not only he and his surroundings have changed but also his outer world which was out of his interests has changed spanning over about ten years since Xiao Wu (1997), he attempts to embody these changes as his cinematic changes in his later films.
Second, it is documentary that Jia Zhangke focuses persistently on to develop his cinematic questions. In fact, “documentary-style” has been generally considered as one of the most notable features of Jia’s films as it constructs the “on-the-spot” realism.
Employing natural light, amateur actors/actresses, long takes, noise in the street, and local dialects, what Jia has tried to capture in his earlier films is spontaneity, directness, and liveliness which refer to on-the-spot realism, one of the most significant values of the “new documentary movement” (xin jilupian yundong) since the early 1990s. In other words, Jia makes his fiction films just like documentary, or his fiction films share their techniques, aesthetics, and attitudes in common with contemporary documentary works. However, his documentaries, on the contrary, include parts of directed scenes like fiction film to respond to, intervene, and mediate rather than pursue the old myth of documentary to be pure, transparent, and truthful. Thus, his documentaries tend to be subjective while his fiction films were inclined to be objective. Even though they include Jia’s subjective perspectives, what his documentaries pay attention to is the public rather than the private. They focus on people rather than an individual, factory rather than home, and big city rather than small town. Besides, celebrities as public figures also play an indispensable role in his documentaries while marginalized subjects are highlighted in most of contemporary Chinese documentaries. As making documentary in a subjective way has a paradoxical relation to general sense of documentary genre as well as his former filmmaking, it is contrary to contemporary Chinese documentary that Jia’s documentaries are interested in the public because his colleagues endeavor to make the private visible with their DV cameras. In this way, developing the cinematic problematics from Dong and Still Life, he challenges the conventional distinction between documentary and feature film, and explores further what the film medium itself could/should convey across the boundary of them.
Third, for Jia, making documentary is a process to approach and understand the unfamiliar people as a new subject to be filmed. After he left his home town Fenyang
and Beijing where he was born and educated, as discussed in chapter 6, he had to consider how to film the different people in other places such as Sichuan and Bangkok (Dong), Guangdong (Useless), Chengdu (24 City), and Shanghai (I Wish I Knew).
Traveling around, he films a variety of people including unknown physical laborers, ordinary people, celebrities, and even foreigners. Unlike his earlier films, his documentaries are interested in a group of people rather than a particular individual, and led by celebrity figures rather than the marginal characters. Although Jia displays various celebrities such as a painter Liu Xiaodong (Dong), a fashion designer Ma Ke (Useless), an actress Joan Chen (24 City), a filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, and a writer Han Han (I Wish I Knew), it is hard to simply say that he becomes interested in being successful or his film moves from the marginal to the center. Rather, Jia looks at the marginal anew through those celebrities onto whom he projects himself. In the making of documentaries with the appearance of the celebrities, Jia gets to identify with not only those celebrities as he himself already becomes a well-known artist, but also the marginal people who have been Jia’s cinematic subject all the time in his previous fiction films. With this double identity with both of them, Jia, on the one hand, reconsiders reflectively the marginal people from the perspective of the celebrities inside the film, on the other hand, realizes the distance to the marginal people as his cinematic subject outside of the film, as he is now a world-class celebrity as a successful filmmaker though he called himself “cinematic migrant worker” (dianying mingong) in his early days. In other words, while he made his fiction films with the concentration on the marginal individuals, he now confronts the “celebrity” individual and the marginal “people” in his documentaries. In this regard, his documentary shows his changes of filmmaking, rethinking the relationship between the individual and the
collective. He extends his cinematic interests from the self, the familiar, and the private to the other, the unfamiliar, and the public, or oscillates between both of them. With this contradictory relationship, Jia critically examines his previous works and appropriates it to his own method of filmmaking.
This chapter, focusing on Dong and Useless, discusses on how Jia employs documentary genre to reflect on his own filmmaking by questioning the codes and conventions of documentary. Dong is not only a documentary film as a counterpart of a fiction film Still Life, but also a starting work of his subsequent series of documentary films. In this respect, Useless extends his self-reflection on his filmmaking, at the same time, shows how he tries to address others, which is developed in his later documentaries. They, on the one hand, show his attitude towards filmmaking or the ethical ground for his later documentaries, on the other hand, function as a kind of turning point of his whole filmography constructed in a paradoxical way. It is by making documentary that Jia rethinks/reconstructs his filmmaking between fiction film and documentary, self and other, and the individual and the collective.