Ruin in the films of Jia Zhangke

Abstract

Ruin in the films of Jia Zhangke China is being remade. Economic reforms begun by Deng Xiaoping in1978 have gathered momentum and are now at a pace and scale that has never previously been witnessed, and, as a result of this, China has become the world's fastest growing economy. These reforms, which initiated the advent of what became known as the Reform era, were initially projected as a (final) cure to China's endemic problems of poverty and delayed technological and economic development, but this optimistic outlook has since waned. Several films by the Chinese director Jia Zhangke (b. 1970), such as Xiao Wu (1997),

The South China New Wave

“…In doing so, the camera gains what Deleuze ([1985] 2001, 20) calls a "camera-self-consciousness." According to Corey Schultz (2018), this camera-selfconsciousness suggests that the camera obtains an agency. It transforms from "an observatory lens"-which passively documents the scenes-to "an exploratory lens," which actively examines the characters and environments as "a mobile and engaged observer" (Schultz 2018, 124-25).…”

Realisms in East Asian Performance

“…The purpose was to foreground the pervasiveness of the ruin as a dominant visual cypher in the urban landscapes of demolition of postsocialist China. The fragmented rendition of Lu Xun's text within a setting of authentic "ruinscapes" 62 -itself a signifier of disjointedness and fragmentation-echoed the "poetics of vanishing" that are equally prominent in postsocialist cinematic articulations such as the films of Jia Zhangke. 63 The perception of reality as a ruin conveys the ontological disjunction and heterochronicity of postsocialism, for the crumbling "remnants of time" 64 excavated from the vestiges of postsocialist China's swiftly morphing urbanscapes resurface and reconstitute themselves in the present as both mnemonic residues of the past and dormant future possibilities.…”

“…61 Huang also noted that unlike mime and improvisation, l'expression parlée was not unique to Saint-Denis; it was fundamental training in all theater schools in England, although, as he also pointed out, "currently we are not paying enough attention to it." 62 What is notable, however, is the role this technique performed in Huang's innovative formal escapes from the strictures of fourth-wall realism-if still rather propagandist in content, as he readily admitted-in the aforementioned four productions from the 1950s to the late 1970s, including the 1978 New Long March: A Symphonic Poem. During the play's rehearsal, Huang used l'expression parlée to help the production's 250 actors rid themselves of the habit of shouting on stage, which was still highly prevalent at the time.…”

Poetics of Still Lives: Rewalking the Ruinscape of Still Life (English version)

“…It is read as a lament over an alien, estranged landscape that his characters cannot and will not inhabit, and a pessimist declaration of how the promised utopian future will never arrive. 14 This temporal disjuncture is seen as a postmodern intervention that communicates an absurd and alienating effect in the speedy urbanisation of China's post-socialist era, a symbolic representation of the spectral past that haunts the progressive narrative. 15 Such readings of Jia's ruinscape seems to be still grounded in a realist and documentary aesthetics that provides a cognitive mapping of the shabby, unshapely look of China's reality in the underbelly of the state discourse of progression and modernisation in the post-socialist reform era.…”

“…In his reading of Jia's films, Corey Kai Nelson Schultz touches upon Tim Edensor's conceptualisation of the act of walking in ruins. 4 However, the phenomenological nuances of ruin-walking do not challenge Schultz's ultimately realist and ideological conceptualisation of Jia's ruinscape. Zhang Yingjin draws on the notion of liminality and spectrality to discuss Jia's work, but again ignores the transcendental potentials inherent in these concepts.…”