Hipótesis General

The death of a man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic – Joseph Stalin

Cut off from their home, migrant workers disappear into huge urban slums without the protection of a traditional rural mutual dependency system.… In Mexico City or Seoul, in Berlin or Chicago, migrants mix and compromise alongside other aliens from other regions.

Neither nativism nor pluralism are in their thought, only survival. – Masao Miyoshi (748)

Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation - Jean Baudrillard (12)

After the so-called “Hometown Trilogy,” Xiao Wu, Platform, and Unknown Pleasure, having left his home town both physically and metaphorically, what Jia Zhangke encountered was “the world.” This means that his fourth feature film The

World (Shijie, 2004) has two significant changes. The first, as mentioned above, is that it is the first of his feature-length films set outside of his hometown, Fenyang in Shanxi, although his first short film Xiaoshan Going Home (Xiaoshan hui jia) had also been set outside of Fenyang. The second change is that The World was also the first of Jia’s films to be officially released in the Chinese domestic market, following his removal from the blacklist by the Chinese authorities as it was co-produced with the state-run film studio Shanghai Film Studio.⁶⁸ In other words, it signifies not only the beginning of his physical move from Shanxi to Beijing, from the familiar to the strange, and from the self to the other, but also a shift in his status from “underground film” (dixia dianying) to so-called ‘aboveground film.’ As The World was officially approved by the Chinese government with cooperation of the state-run Shanghai Film Studio, the term

“underground,” which had been one of the most important key words for explaining the films of Jia and his contemporaries, became contradictory and controversial. In fact, since the majority of the so-called Sixth Generation directors, who were also known as

“underground film” makers, have moved to ‘aboveground’ productions, such as Zhang Yuan’s Seventeen Years (Guonian huijia, 1999) and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle (Shiqi sui de danche, 2000), it has become difficult to claim that “underground”

filmmaking is an exclusive characteristic of their films or that they fufill a certain subversive function by producing outside of the state system. Consequently, the distinction between “underground” and “aboveground” filmmakers has become flexible and negotiable, and some underground filmmakers have, to some extent, been able to move freely back and forth across the boundary between underground and aboveground

68 The World is a joint production by Office Kitano (Japan), Xstream Pictures (Jia’s own production company), and Lumen Films (France) in association with several Japanese corporations and the Shanghai Film Studio.

under the connivance of the government. For example, as Paul Pickowicz (2006) observes, one of the most influential Fifth Generation directors, Tian Zhuangzhuang, made an aboveground film Springtime in a Small Town (Xiaocheng zhi chun, 2002) after his underground film The Blue Kite (Lan fengzheng, 1993), and one of the most popular state-sector actors, Jiang Wen, went underground to make Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi laile, 2000). Also, on one hand, Zhang Xianmin, a seminal figure of Chinese independent film, is a producer of many independent films such as Raised from Dust (Ju zi chen tu, 2007), Fujian Blue (Jin bi hui huang, 2007) and Old Dog (Lao gou, 2011) but on the other hand, he is a professor of Beijing Film Academy as a government employee.

The state system dominates film production in China, therefore the term

“underground film” is often used interchangeably with “independent” (duli) filmmaking.

While the term “underground” was generally preferred by overseas media, which tend to focus on the subversive aspects of such productions in counter distinction to mainstream productions and the censorship of the state and the party, the majority of young Chinese filmmakers favor the term “independent”, and this has gradually become more prevalent in contemporary Chinese media and scholarship. While the concept of

“independent film” generally indicates a small budget art-house film that is financially independent of any major studio system such as Hollywood, Pickowicz (2006) has pointed out that, in the Chinese case, “independent” relates more to independence from the Chinese state system, rather than to offering an alternative or resistant to the dominance of the capitalist and commercial film production culture (3). The Chinese independent filmmakers want “greater freedom of expression, including freedom from oppressive and restrictive political and bureaucratic controls, more than they want vast

sums of money” (4). In this respect, Cui Shuqin (2005) argues the term “independent” is fraught with contradictions. This is because, while on one hand, the state system still holds hegemonic power over production and distribution despite the struggle of the young Chinese directors to be independent, on the other hand the filmmaking environment is moving towards a commercial model based on profit making (96).

Another important fact is that the Chinese “independent film” is largely dependent on international channels. Indeed, “going abroad” is necessary for independent filmmakers to get any recognition or acclaim, due to the lack of alternative production and distribution channels in China. Moreover, international film festivals programmers and art-house distributors welcome Chinese independent films in order to ‘discover’ a brand new Chinese cinema and support their subversive performance of the political predicament. In other words, the Chinese independent films “meet the need of international film circles in the desire for a new ‘other’ to succeed the fifth generation and a new vocabulary to define Chinese cinema” (97). Although this kind of collusion makes it possible for Chinese independent films to be produced, they are still limited by the fact that they cannot be screened in the Chinese domestic market. As Cui suggests, independent filmmaking should be understood as a strategic mode of survival within and outside the mainstream system, rather than the achievement of artistic autonomy.

For the filmmakers outside the system like Zhang Yuan, an official stamp of sanction is still crucial to get international distribution, and they need to be skillful at dealing with official censorship. Filmmakers inside the official system, like Lu Xuechang, are also conscious of self-censorship required to get financial support from the government.

They cannot help but adjust to the political situation and to think about commercial

success in the film market. Thus, they face the double burden of the political restrictions of socialism and the commercial pressures of capitalism (78-79).

Despite the significance and effectiveness of the terms “underground films” and

“independent films”⁶⁹ to explain new Chinese films of the young filmmakers in the 1990s, they also have disadvantages to only focus on the specificity of Chinese political issues and film production conditions neglecting their artistic achievement. It is, as mentioned above, because they were welcomed and labeled through the international films circuits. Circulated in the outside of China, they were underlined by their political context of “underground” and “independent” instead of their cinematic characteristics.

Although many of these films are apolitical, they are often categorized as

“underground” or “independent” in an attempt to theorize them. Indeed, since the early 1990s, this politics of naming has been employed to describe the young Chinese film directors who were born in the late 1960s and 1970s and grew up in the 1980s under the reform era. However, various other formulations have been suggested to name this group in an attempt to avoid the problems that attend the use of “underground” or

“independent” and to produce more accurate definitions of the generation. These include “sixth generation,” “urban generation,”, “post-Fifthth generation,” and

“newborn generation (xinshengdai)”. (Pickowicz, 2006: ix). Although each of these terms highlights specific contexts of these films makers and/or different characteristics of their films, it is clear that such a diverse range of expressions can be used to describe Chinese film makers of this generation demonstrates that it is inappropriate to bind and label them with just one term. For instance, the term “urban cinema” is one of

69 For more detailed discussions, see Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang eds. (2006) From Underground to Independent, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers and Shuqin Cui (2005) ‘Working From the Margins’ in Sheldon Lu and Emilie Yueh-Yu Yeh eds. Chinese-Language Film, Honolulu: University of Hawaii.

the most prevalent concepts used to refer to Chinese films made in the late 1990s and the 2000s. It literally refers to the tendency of most contemporary Chinese films to use urban settings and the city as a cinematic backdrop, and to explore the everyday life of people living in the ever-changing Chinese urban milieu. As the term Chinese urban cinema in fact easily reminds of the early Chinese urban cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, the use of the term urban cinema is largely dependent on the specificity of the Chinese national film context. Thus, the significance of urban cinema can not be considered without reference to the particular historical contexts.

First of all, urban cinema is distinguished by the contrast with the rural backgrounds commonly seen in Fifth Generation films. In other words, the term “urban cinema,” which is hardly ever seen in discussion of other national cinemas, is not only unusual for explaining contemporary cinema, but also meaningless without reference to previous Chinese films. To some extent, it seems that the spatial shift from rural to urban in Chinese cinema was caused by the transformation of Chinese society from the 1990s onwards, rather than by any significant cinematic change. Indeed, as urbanization and modernization have accelerated, contemporary Chinese cinema has paid increasing attention to urban life and space Thus, this tendency is not confined only to the Chinese young directors called “underground”, “independent,” or “sixth generation”, but is also found across the spectrum of contemporary Chinese film production, including commercial films and those made by fifth generation directors, as well as those of other young directors. In a similar sense, not all young directors produce films that can be labeled “urban cinema.”⁷⁰

70 An example of commercial film as “urban cinema” would be Feng Xiaogang’s Be There or Be Square (Bujian busan, 1998), A Sigh (Yisheng tanxi, 2000), Cell Phone (Shouji, 2003).

Likewise, the Fifth Generation films Zhang Yimou’s Keep Cool (Youhua haohao shuo, 1997)

Therefore, the term “urban cinema” might be more suitable for describing Chinese contemporary cinema as a social phenomenon, rather than as the product of a particular film generation or group. Chinese society changes rapidly year on year, and therefore the film production environment also changes in unpredictable ways. Moreover, the more the film production system has diversified, the more eclectic contemporary Chinese cinema has become. There have been sweeping changes in film production and film directors have altered both the form and content of their cinematic work, with the result that it is more difficult to label them with any certain term. In other words, they differ from each other in various ways, and films and directors have been disassembled and individualized out from the group label of “Chinese cinema.” In a sense, this differentiation of contemporary Chinese cinema seems to echo the way in which the character is individualized from the crowd in Jia Zhangke’s films, as discussed in previous chapters.

Despite the diversity of their films, many film scholars like Cui Shuqin (2005) argue that Chinese young filmmakers “share the core quality of wanting to tell one’s own story from one’s own perspective,” and their films “from a personal point of view are no longer traumatic histories and allegorical narratives” (98-99). In a similar sense, Paul Pickowicz (2006) points out that the picture of China in their films is not simply diverse, but “a view that reveals a China that is fractured into many parts and strikingly disconnected, a China in which people go about sorting out their own individual identity” (15). However, he takes a negative stance towards this tendency, and feels

and Happy Times (Xingfu shiguang, 2000), Chen Kaige’s Together with you (He ni zai yiqi, 2002) are also set in the urban milieu. On the contrary, some young filmmakers have made their films away from the urban space like Zhang Ming’s Rainclouds over Wushan (Wushan yunyu, 1996) and Weekend Plot (Miyu shiqi xiaoshi, 2001); Huo Jianqi’s Postmen in the Mountaions (Nashan, naren, nagou, 1999); Lu Chuan’s Mountain Patrol (Kekexili, 2004).

that after many decades of “group-oriented” socialist filmmaking Chinese young filmmakers are too obsessed with the search for individual identities. While the past was the collectivist excesses, the present is the individualist excesses. Pickowicz (2006) further argues that “many of the characters who appear in documentaries and feature films seem superficial precisely because they are so self-absorbed.” (15) The films often look claustrophobic, and seldom move beyond private spaces or connect their problems to larger social and political contexts. Thus, they seem asocial, apolitical, and ahistorical, and the characters are hollow, self-indulgent, and unattractive (14-16). Pickowicz assumes that this results from the “self-Orientalism” through which Chinese filmmakers are so eager to provide the foreign audience with what it seems to expect. In fact, “the dynamics of the global market force marginalized Chinese artists to deliberately engage in self-Orientalization.” Consequently, he is critical of the way in which globalization operates one-dimensionally in contemporary Chinese films; ignoring internal factors, and focusing all attention on external factors only. Hence, the films/the directors “fail to locate globalization in the context of recent domestic history”, and globalization easily becomes “an excuse for neglecting research on the internal factors that have shaped the current cultural scene” (18). In other words, according to him, excessively self-centered, the films of young Chinese directors are indifferent to exploring the relationship between the internal problems of China and globalization.

In this light, The World could be a counterexample to Pickowicz’s argument, and comprises, at the same time, Jia Zhangke’s conscious response to both his previous works and his contemporaries. In this chapter, I attempt to explore how Jia Zhangke moves from self to others, from local to national and global, and from aesthetic realism to the feeling of the real in The World. As a turning point or intermezzo in his

filmography, The World illustrates the transitional process towards the cinematic concerns that he developed in his subsequent films. However, the change in Jia’s work is not a one-direction shift from one set of concerns to another, but is a significant experiment in generating meaning through the paradoxical tension between those two.