Jia Zhangke Documentaries First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

Few auteurs in the 21st century have had as fascinating a career arc as Jia Zhangke. While he has remained one of the most important directors alive since his debut with Xiao Wu (1997), his work can be divided into distinct periods, from the early independent, realist work of Platform (2000) and Still Life (2006), to increasing forays into genre and popular modes with films like Mountains May Depart (2015) and Ash Is Purest White (2018). Throughout, he has maintained a watchful eye fixed upon a rapidly developing China, weaving into his fictional narratives the cultural and economic history of a nation’s shifting landscape, and its impact on its inhabitants. Given this decidedly nonfiction aspect of his films, it may be something of a surprise that Jia has also made a notable number of features designed explicitly as documentaries. None of them have attracted quite the same level of attention as his fiction films, and while they may lack a comparable charge or urgency of purpose, they offer fascinating forays into his oeuvre, with a marked focus on artists in different media that his fiction films only glancingly deal with. His new film, Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue, is the latest and best of this master filmmaker’s strand of filmmaking, and one that draws upon the strengths and particulars of its predecessors. All of Jia’s previous feature-length documentary work was concentrated in a relatively brief period from 2006 to 2010, which produced three documentaries and one docufiction hybrid, before he returned to fiction filmmaking with 2013’s A Touch of Sin. Jia’s first documentary, 2006’s Dong, also resulted in the creation of his fiction film from the same year, Still Life. Its subject is the painter Liu Xiaodong, who spends most of the slim 66-minute runtime painting various models and interacting with various locals, in both the area surrounding the in-progress Three Gorges Dam and Bangkok, though it breaks off at a few junctures in this second half to follow some of the models on their quotidian activities. Arguably the most placid of Jia’s films, it acts primarily as an intriguing if less evocative take on the same landscapes that Still Life explored. Jia’s next documentary, Useless (2006), runs ten minutes longer and sharpens the points of its predecessor. Though it is putatively focused on the fashion label and exhibition of the same name by fashion designer Ma Ke, it takes on numerous subjects from pointedly different socioeconomic strata. The film begins in an average garment factory in South China, observing as the workers go about their tasks, and devotes its last third to garment workers in Jia’s own birthplace of Fenyang, even taking a detour to observe the coal miners. While the juxtaposition of haute couture and hometown is drastic, it understands the value of devoting the necessary observation to each, letting the designer and small-town tailors attain their own senses of reflection and creativity. The one Jia film with overtly fictional elements in this time period, 2008’s 24 City, initially appears to be cut from the same cloth as his documentaries, but gradually reveals itself to be built around a daring conceit: the interviews that form the bulk of the film are conducted with both actual factory workers and actors, including Zhao Tao and Joan Chen, playing composites. One of Jia’s best films, it also notably paves the way for a more traditional structural approach for his documentary work, relying more on interviews than the observational long takes that typified his previous two documentaries. Jia’s final documentary in this period, I Wish I Knew, expands its focus to the history of Shanghai, using a bevy of interviews, film clips, and interstitial footage around the city, sometimes featuring Zhao roaming the city as an almost spectral presence. A diffuse, mysterious film, it finds its structure through loose association, even bringing in Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien as a talking head, drawing out representative examples through personal testimony. Though there may be a slight disconnect between its stories and its poetic ambitions, it is a work that lingers, oddly sprawling and difficult to encapsulate, and often better for it. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue functions in much the same way, but it builds upon its predecessors by being both more focused and more ambitious, principally interviewing only three writers — Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, and Liang Hong — yet using their words to evoke essentially the entire history of China in the second half of the twentieth century. His subjects are allowed to speak at great length, often touching on piercing insights and ruminative memories, but they are never closed off from their broader social context, whether it be in the location of their interviews or in the intercutting of dinners, performances, and other interstitial moments, especially involving the youth of China, that lend a great vitality to the proceedings. With Swimming, Jia has achieved a strong synthesis between his documentary approaches; as much as Ash Is Purest White, it is a summative work, one as worthy of praise and contemplation as his more celebrated fiction films.