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Jia Zhang-ke

Yellow Earth, Chinese Chen Kaige’s first feature made in 1984, was the film that altered the paths of future artist Jia Zhang-ke and led him to Cinema. The enormous impact that the film produced not only on Zhang-ke, then a student at the Tayuan School of Fine Arts but on a good number of young students of the time, also meant a symbolic point of contact between two cinematographic movements in China. The so-called Fifth Generation, responsible for the rebirth of cinema in the country and formed by filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou and Kaige himself, thus began to form a new group of filmmakers – the Sixth Generation. But to Zhang-ke, today the most important name among young Chinese directors, the influence did not go far beyond the discovery of a fascination for cinema. He studied at the Film University in Beijing and founded a group there devoted to experimental films and to independent production - and from then on, built a career without links with preceding colleagues.

His first feature was in 1997 - Pickpocket, which showed the marked difference between the two generations. While filmmakers born in the fifties sought in archaic centuries-old China the beauty and poetry they lost with the Cultural Revolution undertaken by communist leader Mao Tsé-Tung, the children of the seventies met head-on with the sudden changeover to the new capitalism and its inevitable transformations. Zhang-ke was born in 1970 in Fenyang in the province of Shanxi, a region that developed rapidly and became a film center. To the first-timer filmmaker, this was the ideal scenario to depict problems that he saw arise with the new economic order. His native region would thus become the perfect representation of what he sought in cinema.

Not only Pickpocket, when a pickpocket newly-released from jail goes back to his village, as also Unknown Pleasures (2002), stem mostly from this intimacy of the filmmaker with his site. Characters adrift, bored stiff by their tedious everyday routine and with not much else to do other than ride a motorcycle and chat in bars, begin to make up a human panel of frustration that marks all of the later cinema of Zhang-ke. The difference is that this clipping is very often amplified in the physical vastness of China, in the case of Platform (2000) or in exchanging the rural environment for the urban, for instance, in The World (2004) and Useless (2007) - the latter a new challenging documentary about clothing and its different connotations, which makes up the retrospective of the director at the 31st Mostra.

With an author’s mark that became more consistent in Still Life - a film that was awarded the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, Zhang-ke’s cinema is demanding and can be considered difficult in form but transparent in content. His initial passion for Fine Arts can be seen in the strict planes and in the concern to define color or make devoid of color to a maximum to reach the tone that is fitting to the plot. The filmmaker does not overdo paint not even when he opts openly for painting as a cinematographic tool as in the case of the docudrama Dong (2006). This is an option that is coherent with the contemplative pace, dispersed drama, and vague conclusions, for the development of the narrative for Zhang-ke lends greater priority to reason than to the conclusion of action. In this way, the director accentuates the vacuity in which his characters are caught - whether because they cannot carry an ideal in life to an end, as for instance, the theatrical troupe in Platform, or because they are obliged to alter it completely because of the implacable building of a hydroelectric power plant in Still Life. It is somewhere between Zhang-ke’s wandering camera and the urgency of delicate issues in a China of amazing transformation that the original strength of its cinema resides.