Analysis of the movie "Useless"

Jia Zhangke filmed the documentary "Useless" with the famous fashion designer Ma Ke as the protagonist. The film tells three costume stories that took place in Guangzhou, Paris and Fenyang.

The main idea of ??the story: In a garment factory in hot and humid Guangzhou, young workers from all over the country are busy in the noisy and stuffy factory. Beautiful and trendy clothes are produced through various processes and sold all over the world. The clothing of the independent brand EXCEPTION was also born here; young designer Ma Ke founded a unique "Exception" with her friends. She integrated all her perceptions of fashion, history, and culture into clothing design. In the upcoming 2007 Paris Fashion Week, Marco will bring his "Useless" series to this fashion capital; thousands of miles away in Fenyang, Shanxi, due to the mass production of clothing industrialization, individual garment production has been strongly affected. Due to the impact of the crisis, some people choose to persevere, while others are forced to change careers and crawl into dark and dangerous cave dwellings to make a living... This film is the second part of Jia Zhangke's "Artist Trilogy" (the first part "East"), and won the The best film in the Horizon section of the 2007 Venice Film Festival

As an artist, Jia Zhangke often consciously displays his broad understanding of history and current situation on the big screen, which contains philosophical depths that need to be decoded. .

The documentary "Useless" after "East" has a three-part structure. The array of workers in garment factories in Guangdong, the groundbreaking fashion show of Parisian fashion designer Marco, and the most delicate and primitive relationship between "clothes and people" in Fenyang people's lives (these are stories that the author reveals excitedly). Completing the introduction process of an artist cannot arouse Jia Zhangke's actual interest. A biographical approach can only transform the demonstration and pile-up of the artist's experience in the biography into exhaustion for the director and the audience. The way Jia Zhangke can find is to include the person involved, the founder of the useless brand, as an important part of a collective thinking, and he will not think and work in the fashionable business inertia, but in a brand-new way. The artist's face creates an opening and closing package for a fashion show like this - Paris Fashion Week. This kind of cutting actually established the communication system between Marco and Jia Zhangke. A bridge can be built in such a system to complicate the process of reading Mark, thus establishing challenging modes of understanding that can be thought or reflected upon. Not only does it cherish Marco's creativity (such as the fantasy of burying handmade clothes), but it also exposes the industrial process of fashion itself, further integrating Fenyang's focus on the unpretentious pre-fashion "clothes and people" relationship with Marco's originality. made a comparison. It is precisely because of the development and expansion of the category that it can arouse a discussion about the life situation behind fashion. The so-called gradually recovered memories that Marco said gave this documentary a foothold in life itself. .