Chinese Postsocialist Realism: Jia Zhangke
Presented by Jason McGrath

Thursday, April 5, 2007
7pm in Nicholson Hall 155, University of Minnesota

Jia Zhangke is often considered to be the most talented of the generation of mainland Chinese filmmakers that emerged in the 1990s. This group has been variously called the “Urban Generation” or the “Sixth Generation”—both appellations being meant to distinguish them from the often rurally set “Fifth Generation” films of well-known auteurs such as Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou. Jia Zhangke's career, however, shows two very divergent influences. The first is the homegrown “New Documentary Movement” of the early 1990s and the group of neorealist independent fiction films that began appearing around the same time, with features such as on-location shooting without permits, non-professional actors, natural lighting and sound, and episodic narratives focusing on the “losers” in China's booming new capitalist economy. The second inspiration was in fact the transnational art-house scene, into which directors such as Jia Zhangke, to the extent that they found success at all, generally had to integrate themselves if they were to maintain “independence” from the domestic film industry and market forces. This program features the Jia Zhangke film that was most ecstatically received by Western critics, representing Jia Zhangke's “realism” at its most aestheticized.

Jia Zhangke's "Platform"

This 3-hour long epic traces the momentous changes that swept China in the immediate post-Mao era by following the transformations of a single “cultural troupe” from a small, nondescript city in a relatively remote province (Jia's own hometown of Fenyang in Shanxi province). As the 1980s break, the young members of the troupe are still performing revolutionary propaganda skits for audiences, but in their real lives they are becoming enamored of Western fashions and popular music. As the decade advances, the troupe itself is forced to privatize to follow the tide of marketization in China, and its performances become increasingly commercialized and sensationalized. More important than the macro-social changes, however, are the telling incidental life moments that are sensitively captured to convey the sense of anticipation of an approaching fulfillment through modernization that nonetheless seems perpetually just out of reach. J. Hoberman of the Village Voice called this film “a major work by a striking new talent” and “one of the richest films of the past decade,” while Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader proclaimed it “one of the most impressive Chinese films I've ever seen” and even said it “might be the greatest film ever to come out of mainland China.”