Goldsmiths College University of London Cinema of Paradox: The Individual and the Crowd in Jia Zhangke’s Films Jung Koo Kim A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the department of Media and Communications August 2016 1 DECLARATION I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person nor material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of the university or other institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgment has been made in the text. Signed…… …………… Date….…10-Aug.-2016…… 2 ABSTRACT This thesis attempts to understand Chinese film director Jia Zhangke with the concept of “paradox.” Challenging the existing discussions on Jia Zhangke, which have been mainly centered around an international filmmaker to represent Chinese national cinema or an auteur to construct realism in post-socialist China, I focus on how he deals with the individual and the crowd to read through his oeuvre as “paradox.” Based on film text analysis, my discussion develops in two parts: First, the emergence of the individual subject from his debut feature film Xiao Wu to The World; and second, the discovery of the crowd from Still Life to his later documentary works such as Dong and Useless. The first part examines how the individual is differentiated from the crowd in Jia’s earlier films under the Chinese social transformation during the 1990s and 2000s. For his predecessors, the collective was central not only in so-called “leitmotif” (zhuxuanlü or propaganda) films to enhance socialist ideology, but also in Fifth Generation films as “national allegory.” However, what Jia pays attention to is “I” rather than “We.” He focuses on the individual, marginal characters, and the local rather than the collective, heroes, and the national. As Deleuze points out that “paradox is opposed to doxa” (good sense or common sense), the individual in Jia’s earlier films constructs a paradox against the collective doxa in Chinese film history. In the second part, the paradox is considered as a way for Jia’s filmmaking to address the crowd. Since his cinematic experiments in Still Life and Dong, he has developed his cinematic problematics around fiction/documentary, reality/fantasy, and 3 diegesis/non-diegesis by making a series of documentaries. In doing so, Jia discovers that there are people who live outside his films. Challenging traditional filmic conventions, he reflects on his own filmmaking and strives to film the people for whom he might not be able to speak. In this way, Jia questions how the film medium can represent the unrepresentable and where the filmmaker should be positioned between the camera and the subjects to be filmed. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………… .......3 Introduction…………………………………………..…………………………………6 Part 1: Rethinking Chinese National Cinema Chapter 1 National Cinema and Collective Subjectivity……………………………….25 Chapter 2 Jia Zhangke as a Method…………………………………………………….61 Part 2: A Man in the Crowd Chapter 3 Rescuing Individual from the Nation: The Emergence of the Individual Subject in Xiao Wu……………………………………………………………………..70 Chapter 4 A Song Unheard: Memory, Desire, and Frustration in Platform…………..101 Chapter 5 The Death of a Man: The Local and the Global in The World………..……122 Part 3: Voices of Multitude Chapter 6 The Discovery of Landscape: People and Space in Still Life and Dong…...149 Chapter 7 Rethinking Documentary: The Distance to the Object and Self-reflection in Dong and Useless…………………………………………………………………..…162 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….....185 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..…200 Filmography………………………………………………………………………...…223 5 Introduction This chapter briefly examines the existing literature on Jia Zhangke’s films, and introduces the concepts and the theoretical framework required to rethink his works from the perspective of the relationship between the crowd and the individual. It aims to challenge the understanding of his films within the old concept of national cinema, and reconsider them through the framework of “cinema and the national” which Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar (2006: 1-16) propose. This approach of “cinema and the national” as an analytic framework is invented to consider “a range of questions and issues of the national as constructed and construed in different ways”, since “the national in Chinese cinema cannot be studied adequately using the old national cinemas approach, which took the national for granted as something known” (2). As they argue, “within the framework of cinema and the national, the national appears as multiple constructed” (14). In this sense, the national which Jia’s films construct, cannot be considered as fixed, given, or homogeneous, but as contested, mediated and negotiated. As an auteur in an age of transnational cinema, Jia Zhangke addresses the individual and the crowd in the ever-changing society of contemporary China, rather than the essential Chineseness that was discussed in the discourse of Chinese national cinema. Here, the preference of “the crowd” is not only to avoid the preconceived notions of other terms such as mob, multitude, mass, people, and collectivity, but also to understand that “the crowd” is a transitional and historical concept as the Chinese socio- cultural context changes. Thus, the term “the crowd” has a wide spectrum of related 6 concepts including class, ethnicity, women, subaltern, and others as well as mob, multitude, mass, people, and collectivity. In his early films, Jia pays great attention to the emergence of the individual subject. It is noteworthy that the individual subject appears in his films in the context of Chinese film history, because the collective subject has been highlighted not only in the films of socialist China after 1949, but also in early Chinese films during the colonial period before 1949. As Pang Laikwan (2002) argues, the 1930s Chinese left-wing cinema incorporates the collective subjectivity, which is mainly shown as the collective masculine subjectivity, in the name of building a new nation. (113-114) Collective subjectivity overwhelmed individual subjectivity in the logic of the priority of the collective to the individual in the 1930s Chinese left-wing cinema. The collective was more important than the individual. Since the establishment of PRC, the socialist Chinese cinema still had focused on the collective subjectivity to promote socialist ideology until the emergence of the 1990s so-called Sixth generation films. Although the individual subject had been one of the most distinctive features in his earlier films like other Sixth generation films, Jia gradually turned his attention from the individual to the crowd in various ways in his later films after The World (2004). In other words, he expands his cinematic interest from himself to others, from his hometown to other places, and from the familiar to the unfamiliar. And, this tension of the relationship between these two seemingly opposite subjects becomes his own way of filmmaking in a paradoxical way. In this process, he explores how the cinema can intervene in the relationship between the individual and the crowd, the local and the global, the national and the transnational, the subjective and the objective, and the 7 representable and the unrepresentable. The paradox between the individual and the crowd is how he constructs the national in his films. Jia Zhangke and Chinese Cinema Studies Jia Zhangke might be one of the most popular filmmakers in current scholarship on Chinese film. Since his debut feature film, Xiao Wu (1997), he has constantly attracted critical acclaim both from the international film festival circuit and the academic field of Chinese cinema for the last two decades. Each of his new works since Xiao Wu has been welcomed and most won prizes in a number of international film festivals; perhaps the climax of this process being the Golden Lion awarded to his fifth feature film Still Life at the 2006 Venice international film festival. With this scale of success in international film festivals, Jia has gradually become a sort of representative of mainland Chinese cinema. As he has carved out his career as world-class filmmaker, accordingly, there has been a proliferation of studies on his works from various perspectives. Most of these studies deal with Jia’s films as texts that vividly describe Chinese reality, especially the negative aspects of contemporary Chinese society in the context of Chinese national cinema discourse. Discussions of his films can by and large be classified into three main categories. First, Jia Zhangke and his films are discussed with the so-called Chinese Sixth Generation filmmakers who were born in the late 1960s and early 1970s and set out to develop their filmmaking careers in the 1990s. He is regarded as one of the most important filmmakers among the Sixth Generation filmmakers, and an exemplary case to confirm the generational discourse of Chinese cinema. In this respect, the most usual 8 discussions are the discourses of Chinese underground film and independent film, labels employed especially when their films are circulated around the international film festival circuit.1 Jia’s films clearly have the characteristics of independent film and underground film. He started his filmmaking career in the mode of independent filmmaking, and has never worked in the state-owned studio system. Since he had a good reputation in the international film festivals, he has worked in a transnational filmmaking mode, with access to foreign funding from diverse countries including France, Japan, and Korea. Although his recent feature films cannot be considered to be independent films, he still makes small budget films, which can be seen as a type of independent film, especially documentaries, such as Dong (2006), Useless (2007), and Our Ten Years (2007). In addition, Jia is also involved in the underground filmmaking movement. His three early films, Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasure (2002), generally known as the ‘Hometown Trilogy’, were prohibited from screening in the domestic Chinese market.