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Cinematheque Ontario marks its fifteenth anniversary by launching an ongoing series, “Film Now,” which, as its name suggests, features the most important emerging directors in contemporary cinema – artists who, after only three or four works, are clearly masters. It might be reckless to claim that they represent film’s future – predictions of sustained greatness often founder on unforeseen factors – but the directors in “Film Now” are, according to critical and curatorial consensus, the most significant to have appeared in the last decade. Our first choice, the young Chinese director Jia Zhangke, signals a remarkable transformation, in which Europe and the States have been displaced by Asia as the indisputable centre of international film culture. Along with our previous retrospectives of the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai, and Tsai Ming-liang, upcoming “Film Now” installations, including those dedicated to Thailand’s Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda, and South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo, will illustrate this exciting development.

– James Quandt

UNKNOWN PLEASURES: THE WORLD OF JIA ZHANGKE

“The world’s greatest filmmaker under 40.” – Dennis Lim, The Village Voice

“The most gifted and stylistically and thematically contemporary Chinese filmmaker to have emerged in years.” – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“One of the most exciting filmmakers of our time.” – Kent Jones, Film Comment

Not since Hou Hsiao-hsien has an Asian auteur produced a body of work of such poetic density and formal authority as Jia Zhangke – and, given the recent emergence of numerous important directors in Thailand, South Korea, and China, that is saying a great deal. Though the thirty-four-year-old Chinese director has made only four feature films and a clutch of short video works, Jia already stands with Hou, Wong, and Tsai in the elite of Asian cinema, his each new work anticipated with the fervour once accorded the giants of European cinema.

Like Hou, a bard of his country whose tone tends to the bereft, Jia has charted China’s transformation from communism to a market economy (from Mao to Thatcher, dialectical to brute materialism, as it were) in a quartet of superbly exploratory films, from the low budget, underground XIAO WU (1997) through his most recent work THE WORLD (2004), the first Jia film to be approved by Chinese officials. (Ironically, the latter is as subversive and arguably more damning a critique of the new China as Jia’s three previous features, all banned and available only on pirated DVDs in his home country, the source of a bitter in-joke in UNKNOWN PLEASURES.)

Born in 1970 in Fenyang, a small rural town in Shanxi province, Jia has always been attuned to those “left behind” by the convulsive changes in Deng Xiaoping’s go go China. Jia’s first films, set in dusty, peasant outposts far from Beijing, portray a series of luckless provincials – a pickpocket, a young theatre troupe, two unemployed teenagers – oblivious to or uncomprehending of the invisible forces that buffet their lives. Bewildered or merely benumbed, they change with the styles of pop culture (karaoke bars and the influx of consumer products in XIAO WU, bell bottoms, perms, and breakdancing in PLATFORM, Taiwanese pop and international fashion in UNKNOWN PLEASURES), constantly revising their identities (like Qiao Qiao’s succession of wigs in PLEASURES), even as they are trapped in helpless stasis – a point made by THE WORLD, in which Jia’s characters finally make it to Beijing only to be immured in the artificial world of a theme park.

To compare Jia with Hou runs the risk of detracting from the younger director’s originality, but the similarities of their respective approaches are often striking, especially the combination of poetry and analysis, tenderness and dispassion, embodied in a visual style that emphasizes the long, observational take. Hou remembers intuitively telling his cinematographer, “Pull back! More detached!” In Hou, history inheres in the everyday, and the aim of his remote camera, which moves laterally or parks itself at a distance to observe, is, paradoxically, empathy and intimacy. Similarly, Jia’s watchful style, which suspends time and forces attention to social detail in XIAO WU, imposes tableaux and frieze-like compositions on the restless itinerants of PLATFORM, and conversely roves and floats in the weightless DV mobility of UNKNOWN PLEASURES, is employed with almost ethnographic objectivity, but achieves greater emotional effect than any heavy editing or close-up. “If I were to break up a scene which lasts for six or seven minutes into several cuts,” Jia has said, “then you lose that sense of deadlock. The deadlock that exists between humans and time, the camera and its subject.” To the impatient, Jia’s “deadlock” will translate as aloofness or aesthetic impasse, but his withholding pays off, as we shall see, in poignancy.

One could list many other similarities between Hou and Jia, including their marked sympathy for unmoored youth – though Jia’s is more autobiographical, Hou’s more distantly empathic – and concern with identity (national, individual); their elliptical narratives, complex employment of offscreen space, and acute awareness of how history impinges upon the personal; their vivid sense of landscape, use of pop music as both catharsis and commentary, neo-Brechtian emphasis on performance (Jia’s films are full of dances, songs, shows), and – most markedly – their tragic sense of life as an accrual of loss and injury, of broken or vanished ideals and irretrievable loves. Some of their films could profitably be paired to reveal affinities of theme, shooting style, or narrative approach: Hou’s THE PUPPETMASTER with Jia’s PLATFORM, GOODBYE SOUTH GOODBYE or THE BOYS OF FENGKUEI with UNKNOWN PLEASURES, MILLENNIUM MAMBO with THE WORLD.

Though Jia lists Hou’s FENGKUEI as one of his formative influences, along with Chen Kaige’s YELLOW EARTH, Bresson’s A MAN ESCAPED and De Sica’s THE BICYCLE THIEF, his debt to Hou can be overstated. Jia’s aesthetic, at least in the early films, owes more to neorealism and documentary, even reportage, than does Hou’s, and his singular, designed audioscapes, which incorporate copious amounts of stray or found sound in their inquisitive richness are distinctly different from those of Hou. Neither does Jia’s interest in history have the magisterial reach of Hou’s epics; the younger director sticks mostly to what he knows from direct observation. One cannot quite imagine in a Hou film the welter of contemporary political references in UNKNOWN PLEASURES: the bombing of a textiles plant, crackdowns on Falun Gong, China’s entry into the World Trade organization, a collision between US and Chinese military planes, the 2008 summer Olympics coming to Beijing. Likewise, though Hou is not immune to homage (to Ozu in GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN, for example), he would resist the blunt insouciance with which Jia invokes PULP FICTION in UNKNOWN PLEASURES.

Perhaps accounting for their popularity in Japan – both directors’ recent films have Japanese producers, including Takeshi Kitano – Jia and Hou, like Ozu and Naruse, are subtle chroniclers of societal transition whose rigorous visual and narrative styles are aesthetic accomplices to sentiment. Emotion in their films, particularly melancholy, nostalgia, and longing, is heartfelt, unstinting. Hou’s films can fell a viewer with their blinding sadness or their sudden release of hoarded sorrow – e.g. the conclusion of GOOD MEN, GOOD WOMEN. Jia’s are no less poignant. The pickpocket naked in a bathhouse and singing his soul out, or his presence crowded from the image altogether to express his humiliation in XIAO WU; the All Star Rock and Breakdance Electronic Band performing by the side of a highway near the Yangtze, literally and metaphorically sidelined by the setting, by time and history, in PLATFORM; Qiao Qiao doing a doleful dance after she breaks up with her boyfriend or Bin Bin being forced to sing his favourite song by a policeman in UNKNOWN PLEASURES; the peasant father tearfully stuffing the money he has been paid for his dead son into his coat in THE WORLD – the catalogue of such moments and images in Jia’s films, from the merely forlorn to the outright anguished, is ample. Datong, Fenyang, Beijing – all cities of sadness.

When it was rumoured that Jia’s new film, THE WORLD, was to be made in “the system” – i.e. with the approval of the Chinese Film Bureau – many claimed that the underground radical had sold out. Some erstwhile supporters contend that the film is more conventional than his previous three, either because of its comparatively lavish production values, its tonal sophistication, or its determinist narrative. Hardly. From its first plaintive, repeated cry, “Does anyone have a Band Aid?” to its ghostly final question about beginnings and endings, THE WORLD takes great aesthetic and political risks, extending in every way Jia’s formal methods and thematic preoccupations, and offers his most devastating critique yet of China’s rush to erect a shining facsimile of civilization over the broken hopes of a generation.

– James Quandt更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net