Hybrid Documentary: Jia Zhangke’s 24 City

Unedited -- midterm essay I wrote for a course at Harvard Summer School that literally changed my life. I learned so much about the art world the way it is now, what people are thinking about and writing about. I read a lot of works that I didn't really understand but they provoked so much thought in me. I find myself often going back on Canvas to redownload those PDFs and reread them and discuss them with my very intelligent editors at Sine Theta Magazine. I got an A for this and got an A in the class. I don't know if the teachers just gave everyone As. I had NO IDEA how to write this because I've never written anything like this before. 

Jiaqi Kang

Professors Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith

Documentary Aesthetics in Contemporary Art | VISU S-142

18 July 2016

Hybrid Documentary: Jia Zhangke’s 24 City

In Change Mummified, Philip Rosen muses on the distinction between ‘document’ and ‘documentary’, with the former being a completely pure chunk of indexical actuality and the latter being a category of non-fiction cinema. Documentary differs from document in its use of sequence—arranging numerous shots into a particular order—for the purposes of context. Most documentary film-makers have an aim in creating their film, whether it is for study or for a political message, and they must “centralise this meaning” (245) through sequenciation and, sometimes, narration. This is in opposition to the “decentralised” actuality (244), and in accord with the format of mainstream cinema—suggesting “a certain kinship between [documentary and fiction film]” (241). Rosen argues that “documentary is not actuality” (241)—it cannot be, and more importantly, it should not be.

The 2008 film 24 City by Chinese director Jia Zhangke effectively demonstrates Rosen’s argument, in that it documents a real event, yet does not represent it in actuality: it employs sequence and narrative to centralise its meaning, and even extends Rosen’s argument to include staged, non-authentic elements.

24 City is a hybrid documentary that chronicles the sweeping changes that China’s new economy is enacting upon its post-Communist society through the transition of a Chengdu state-owned factory into a luxury apartment complex. Presented in a documentary format, it subtly inserts fictitious interviews interpreted by actors into a series of interviews with real-life workers, leading to blurred lines between real and fake. To some audiences unfamiliar with actors such as Joan Chen and Jia’s longtime collaborator Zhao Tao, the entire film may feel like a documentary; others may interpret the whole work as fiction, with the actual workers being little-known or nonprofessional actors. Only upon further research and consideration does the ambiguity of the film become apparent.

24 City is an exemplary demonstration of the Griersonian concept that documentary is dramatisation of reality. As Jia Zhangke himself told film critic Scott Foundas through an interpreter in a 2008 interview,

[…] Now I am moving on to the next important component that the purpose or role of film must serve, [which] is to record and document memories of the time. […] The more I make documentary films, the more I realise that I need to have the fictional element to it. […] When we see history and see memories, there’s a mix of facts—reality—and imagination. And that’s why, although I started within documentary film, later on I found the need to incorporate the fictional components to it.

Jia’s aim in his film is his aim for his entire collection of works from his 20-year career: to portray a changing China from a varying range of perspectives, usually those of social misfits and the struggling working class. In 24 City, he creates a kind of eulogy to the real-life Factory 420, which started out producing weapons for the Korean and Vietnam wars before branching into household appliances following the economic reforms of the 1980s, and thus represents the tumultuous history of the People’s Republic of China. As it is demolished, it becomes part of the contemporary food chain in which remnants of a Maoist past are engulfed, digested, and churned back out by the state as domains for an envisioned future of capitalism and globalisation.

Jia Zhangke’s first feature films were fictions, but Still Life, the work he made before 24 City, begins to show what Manohla Dargis of the New York Times describes as “Mr. Jia’s increasing restlessness or perhaps frustration with some of the narrative strategies he has used in the past.” Though his films have always had a documentary-like quality (in part due to low budgets), Jia now experiments with the intertwining of imagination and reality. In the same way that oral history told subjectively embellishes aspects of the past, he embellishes the present that will become the past. Still Life, a film about the construction of the infamous Three Gorges Dam, inexplicably features a UFO disguised as a dilapidated building shooting into the skies, bringing an unexpected surrealist aspect into his work. For 24 City, Jia focuses on blurring the lines between actuality and mainstream fiction.

Jia pays homage to the “preclassical” era as defined by Philip Rosen through his opening shot of workers in blue uniforms streaming through the gates of Factory 420. This alludes to the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895), one of the first films ever created and an example of what Rosen described as “[the strategy of] setting the camera in front of an unprepared chunk of reality, turning it on for a few minutes, and then presenting the result to audiences.” (242) Despite the tribute, however, Jia rejects actuality in order to pass on his social message about modern China. 

Jia intersperses scripted monologues delivered by actors between real interviews and shots depicting Factory 420’s transformation. At first, these performances by Lü Liping, Chen Jianbin, Joan Chen, and Zhao Tao respectively seem to blend into the rest of the documentary as ‘real’. However, their theatricality can be distinguished through small details insignificant to the uninformed: the actors’ characters speak with more standard accents in Mandarin and their speech sounds more rehearsed without superfluous repetitions, and the stories they tell are more structured, with an obvious rhythm, as well as being much more dramatic. Lü Liping’s character describes a tale of losing her child, and the fictional factory worker Gu Minhua goes so far as to talk about how her co-workers named her Little Flower due to her resemblance to the protagonist of the eponymous 1979 film—a film in which Gu Minhua’s actress, Joan Chen, starred. (It should also be noted that these performed narratives may in fact be true stories appropriated by screenwriters Jia Zhangke and Zhai Yongming, and so may not be entirely fabricated.)

Whereas, as Rosen writes, the “isolated document […] gives the filmmaker radically fewer textual means to direct the spectator’s comprehension of the real being transmitted” (247), such performances dramatise reality and give the non-fictional parts of the film a greater significance. Of 9 interviews, 4 were performed and 5 were genuine. These interviews are carefully presented in a sequence (beginning with an old man speaking about his mentor, one of the first generation of people who have worked at the factory, and ending with a businesswoman whose parents were workers but who she herself had only entered the grounds once) to achieve a desired impact on the audience. The narratives told by the actors, which can be more entertaining to an audience than the ‘real’ stories, can help to maintain interest for the latter. On the whole, the use of human narrative allows the audience to empathise with the demolition of Factory 420—and, with it, the metamorphosis of China—in a visceral manner.

Evidently, all films are in some way hybrids. Fiction films do not tell real stories, yet inevitably feature real actors who occupy a real time and space. Jean-Luc Godard said in 1968 that “the movie is not a thing which is taken by the camera; the movie is the reality of the movie moving from reality to the camera.” Although fifty years later the advance of technology has allowed for extensive manipulation of images, it is impossible to eradicate elements of reality from cinema. In the same way, documentaries and other films that claim to be non-fictitious will never be truly so as even the smallest input from filmmakers can alter reality. Documentaries cannot show all 360° angles of a scene at once (though this is in fact becoming possible in recent times), and so a conscious choice must be made to film one detail over another. This choice, and later the post-production choice of where in the sequence to place that shot, can and will affect viewers’ interpretations of reality.

Simply the presence of the camera affects the development of a scene, as the people being filmed react to the fact that they are being observed and judged—both in the present by the camera crew and potentially in the future by an audience. Interestingly, conventional documentaries attempt to prove their authenticity by having people on-screen openly acknowledge the camera; whereas fiction films attempt to make their stories more believable through the use of an omnipresent, omniscient, invisible eye. In 24 City, both ways of treating the existence of the filmmaking process—which is impossible to ignore and inexorably influences reality—are employed: interviews are arranged in the conventional format of having the interviewee sit in front of the camera and speak to someone off-screen, thus openly acknowledging the camera; in non-interview scenes, characters carry conversations whilst ignoring the camera and its movements, constructing shots similar to fiction films. Yet this false sense of fiction is always broken in some way: for instance, a scene featuring a girl rollerskating on a rooftop is interrupted midway so that a member of the crew may ask her some questions.

Additionally, some shots appear to have been staged. In one instance, in order to introduce the housing arrangements provided for Factory 420’s workers, a pan of a Chengdu neighbourhood is shown. It features a little boy staring at a wanted poster. The next shot is a cursory close-up of the poster itself, allowing viewers to catch a glimpse of what is written before the film cuts to a medium shot featuring the boy in profile along with another who has joined him. In the background, the gates of the factory can be seen looming above them. Due to the duration of these shots, which amount to 50 seconds in total, it seems unlikely that the child would be coincidentally reading the poster for a long enough period of time for his actions to be caught on camera, and more likely that he was asked to participate in the composition of a sequence of shots for aesthetic purposes.

Indeed, it is the “aesthetic of the document” that, according to Philip Rosen, creates a “higher type of documentary cinema” (246). As Manohla Dargis writes of one of Jia Zhangke’s earlier fiction films,

When a woman walks down the hall during an extended travelling shot in The World [2004], you’re not just watching her on a long march to nowhere; you’re also watching a scene signed by an auteur.

It is Jia’s auteurship and reputation that give the film its significance. 24 City’s aesthetics, with the calm pans, tight shot/wide shot sequences, provincial dialects, and crumbling urban landscapes, allow the film to enter the greater Jia Zhangke canon of works. Actress Zhao Tao has starred in all but one of Jia’s feature films, and her presence as a character can be seen as also a part of the director’s flourished signature. It is not enough to record actuality, for, as Rosen writes, we “produce a seeming infinity of such documents” which “might seem to leave little function for the professional” (245). By “[insisting] on craft, skill, and sequence—in short on aesthetics and meaning” (245), Jia asserts himself as a member of the “professional-intellectual elite” (246)—an ‘artist’.

Knowing that it cannot and should not achieve indexicality, 24 City combines fiction and non-fiction in order to document the present in an effective manner, to imbue its social message with significance, and to highlight Jia Zhangke’s creativity as its director. Through its demonstration of Philip Rosen’s argument in Change Mummified, it functions as a documentary should.

However, 24 City fails to function as contemporary art, simply due to the fact that it is not presented in such a context. A common notion of contemporary art, pioneered by Marcel Duchamp and his Fountain in 1917, is the conception that anything can be art—as long as it is presented by an artist in an artistic context such as a gallery, a museum, or a bienniale, and art critics review it as art. In the case of 24 City, it is almost exclusively discussed as a film. It was screened in competition for the Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and is reviewed by film critics.

It can, however, be interpreted as an ‘art film’—a film with artistic intentions aimed at a niche market. In Jia’s case, he has always received more attention from international artistic and cinema circles than in his home country. In the same way that Harun Farocki began his career as a ‘filmmaker’ and is now considered an ‘artist’, Jia Zhangke may begin a similar transition. After all, experimental cinema and the art world are inextricably linked—for example, Mary Lea bandy, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, also curated the a program of hybrid films for the 2004 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival.

Additionally, Whose Utopia?, a 2006 film, was recently shown at the Kunstmuseum Bern as part of an exhibition entitled Chinese Whispers: Recent Art form the Sigg & M+ Sigg Collection. This work by Cao Fei takes place in a factory and combines imagination with reality: a sequence depicting how lightbulbs are created on the assembly line is associated with staged, slightly surreal scenes in which select factory workers who dream of becoming dancers or musicians showcase their talents—talents that can never be honed as they are stuck in the factory. Cao Fei has been nominated for and has won numerous art-related prizes, showing that the similarly themed 24 City is only not considered contemporary art because its creator has not willed it. As Jia Zhangke’s career progresses and he tiptoes on the fine line between art and cinema, one can only guess how he will define himself in the future.

Bibliography

Primary works:

24 City. Dir. Zhangke Jia. Perf. Zhao Tao and Joan Chen. New Wave Films, 2008.

DVD.

Rosen, Philip. "Documentary Is Not Actuality." Change Mummified: Cinema,

Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2001. 241-47. Print.

Other works:

Dargis, Manohla. "An Upscale Leap Forward That Leaves Many Behind." The New

York Times. The New York Times Company, 4 June 2009. Web. 16 July 2016.

“Jean-Luc Godard." Wikiquote. Wikimedia, 1 Mar. 2016. Web. 17 July 2016.

Jia, Zhangke. "Jia Zhang-ke in 2008." Interview by Scott Foundas. The Close-Up.

Soundcloud, 2015. Web. 13 July 2016.

Lau, Venus. "Cao Fei." Chinese Whispers: Recent Art From the Sigg and M+ Sigg

Collections. Munich: Prestel, 2016. N. pag. Print.

Svetvilas, Chuleenan. "Hybrid Reality: When Documentary and Fiction Breed to

Create a Better Truth." Documentary Magazine. International Documentary Association, June 2004. Web. 18 July 2016.

Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. Dir. Louis Lumière. Lumière, 1895. YouTube.

Google, 8 Feb. 2011. Web. 16 July 2016.