Fairfield University DigitalCommons@Fairfield Modern Languages & Literature Faculty Publications Modern Languages & Literature Department 2015 China Unraveled: Violence, Sin and Art in Jia Zhangke’s Touch of Sin Jiwei Xiao Fairfield University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/modernlanguagesandliterature- facultypubs © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. The final publisher PDF has been archived here with permission from the copyright holder. Peer Reviewed Repository Citation Xiao, Jiwei, "China Unraveled: Violence, Sin and Art in Jia Zhangke’s Touch of Sin" (2015). Modern Languages & Literature Faculty Publications. 33. https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/modernlanguagesandliterature-facultypubs/33 Published Citation Xiao, Jiwei. “China Unraveled: Violence, Sin and Art in Jia Zhangke’s Touch of Sin,” Film Quarterly, 68.4, 2015 (Summer): 24-35. This item has been accepted for inclusion in DigitalCommons@Fairfield by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Fairfield. It is brought to you by DigitalCommons@Fairfield with permission from the rights- holder(s) and is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses, you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CHINA UNRAVELED: VIOLENCE, SIN, AND ART IN JIA ZHANGKE’S A TOUCH OF SIN Jiwei Xiao Increasingly ubiquitous, technologized, and spectacularized, cause it is politically prophetic. Has the Chinese director violence in contemporary mainstream cinema fascinates intuited “something in the air”? Only the future will tell. audiences worldwide. Key to this collective attraction is the A Touch of Sin was approved by the Chinese Film Bureau factor of fantasy: audiences particularly enjoy watching in April 2013 and set to be released in November of that filmic violence in Hollywood blockbusters set in fictive year. In October, however, officials “started worrying that universes without any real-world referents. Occasionally, the film might provoke social unrest” and the film was put however, an extraordinary film can shake such viewer com- on the shelf; there it’s remained, perhaps unofficially banned, 2 placency toward the representation of violence. In 2013, ever since. Thus, while generating huge enthusiasm inter- Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 A Touch of Sin (天注定)wassucha nationally after winning the best screenplay award at the film. Like Joshua Oppenheimer in The Act of Killing [see the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, A Touch of Sin has languished dossier in FQ 68:2], Jia explores violence mainly from the in limbo in mainland China and currently has no hope of perspective of the perpetrator and through the tension be- a theatrical release there. Perhaps it was jinxed by its fatal- tween cinematic realism and theatrical artifice. But unlike istic title, which means in Chinese literally and ironically, The Act of Killing, a documentary concerned with historical “heaven decides.” trauma, A Touch of Sin uses drama to draw attention to A Touch of Sin opens a new chapter in Jia’s filmmaking violent occurrences in China that are ongoing and looming career that is self-reflexive and formally eclectic, marked by larger every day. profuse self-references as well as an attempt at aesthetic hy- A Touch of Sin is composed of four stories loosely adapted bridization with techniques adapted from literature, theatre, from real-life incidents of violence spanning the first decade painting, and other art forms, both Chinese and Western. of China’s twenty-first century. The models for Jia’scentral With such stylistic changes, Jia also shifts his focus to put the characters are: Hu Wenhai, a peasant vigilante who killed whole of Chinese society on trial. fourteen villagers in 2001 in Shanxi; Zhou Kehua, a fugitive A Touch of Sin is an angry film, something that can be in- who carried out a series of armed robberies in 2012; Deng stantly perceived in the opening sequence where violence Yujiao, a pedicure worker who stabbed a harassing customer saturates almost every frame in a plethora of riotous colors, (and local government official) to death at a hotel in Hubei sounds, and sensations. Whereas the cold echoes of gunshots in 2009; and the fourteen young Foxconn employees who startle the viewer, the hot blaze of a blast is even more sur- 1 ’ 三峡好人 2006 jumped off buildings to their deaths in 2010. Despite its prising. In Jia s earlier films Still Life ( , )and 24 二十四城记 2008 real-life corollaries in isolated incidents, Jia’s film presents a City ( , ), explosions were tied as much to picture of the whole fabric of Chinese society unraveling at destruction as to construction, thereby often evoking loss and the edges, giving the impression that violence is fated to hap- hope at the same time. Now, unequivocally chilling and pen more frequently as a result of profound changes brought menacing, explosions establish the key tone of A Touch of about by Chinese modernization and urbanization. The Sin: a mix of bursting rage and grim despair. strong sense of a “state of emergency” emanating from the The dynamite of violence that Jia detonates here has had film makes one wonder if A Touch of Sin is so unsettling be- a long fuse. Most of his previous films conclude with discon- tent or despair, emotions that apparently have had a cumula- Film Quarterly,Vol.68,Number4,pp.24–35, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. tive effect: disaffection cannot be repressed or tolerated after © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please ’ direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through a certain point. Accordingly, the cold flintiness of Jia shome- the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www. town trilogy and the languorous rumination in his more re- ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2015.68.4.24. 3 cent elegies have largely disappeared. Instead of watching a 24 SUMMER 2015 A Touch of Sin thrusts audiences into the thick of the action. scene slowly unfold, the audience is thrust right into the guy,” in an otherwise identical frame, presages Jia’s shift of thick of the action. Jia’s attention, so keenly trained on quo- moral focus in the new film. Personifying violence, Zhou tidian life, has now shifted to out-of-the-ordinary events and San’er both binds the stories together and, as pulled by Jia, to moments already at a boiling point. A mise-en-scène of vi- rips apart their social “fabric” to expose the strands unspool- olence has emerged, one that is poised yet dynamic, gripped ing from it. by the tension between immediate action and theatricalized abstraction. 1. The Tiger Hunter: Violence and Spectatorship Tellingly, Jia gives a prominent role to Zhou San’er ’ (Wang Baoqiang), the only real criminal in the film who After killing three highwaymen, Zhou San er shows up at shoots both highway robbers and the conspicuously rich with the scene of an accident, joining a small crowd of passersby even-handed equanimity. As much a device as a character, that includes Da Hai (Jiang Wu), the lead character in the Zhou is a needle, with which Jia sews seemingly unrelated first episode. Da Hai will soon rampage through the town of characters and incidents into a larger tapestry of social ills Black Gold Mountain, killing the corrupt and the abusive, as and moral “sins.” Following Zhou San’er’s travel routes, the well as the innocent who happen to stand in proximity to his four stories progress temporally around the Chinese New rifle and rage; but right now, keeping his distance from the Year and spatially from the north to the south. Zhou’sstruc- toppled tomato truck and its dead driver, he looks unfazed, tural role is logical: a serial killer’s evasion from authority de- even bored. Meanwhile, glancing at this wreck, Zhou San’er pends upon fugitive mobility. Always on the run, he crosses slows down his motorbike but continues on, passing by Da paths with Da Hai (Jiang Wu), the killer in the first episode; Hai. For a split second, the two men, who will never meet Zhou is also indirectly linked with two other protagonists, again in the film, are inches away from each other. Xiao Yu (Zhao Tao) and Xiao Hui (Luo Lanshan), via the By placing two of his main characters in a group of indif- 4 character of Xiao Yu’smarriedlover. ferent bystanders, Jia draws attention to a spectatorial sce- No less significantly, in the boat scene that echoes the po- nario that is both new and reminiscent of the ending of his etic opening sequence of Jia’s 2007 Still Life (literally “the breakout film Pickpocket (小武, 1997), where the eponymous good man in the three gorges”), the camera tracks past Han character Xiao Wu, caught and cuffed by a policeman, is Sanming, the “good man” in the earlier film, and holds on gawked at by a crowd. This time, Jia turns up the viciousness: the face of Zhou before cutting away to the river. This the center of the film is not a small-time thief but a dead change of visual focus from “the good man” to “the bad victim. The body of the truck driver, under the apathetic FILM QUARTERLY 25 A fleeting meeting on the road and on screen in A Touch of Sin. gaze of passersby like Da Hai and Zhou San’er, becomes emerges from his film, especially in Da Hai’sstory,isamore no different from the crushed tomatoes on the ground.