Are Jia Zhangke’s films catering to foreign countries or presenting reality?

To this day, Jia Zhangke's name is still always followed by labels such as "Famous Director of the Sixth Generation" and "Leading Figure of the Sixth Generation". "Sixth Generation" is something he cannot avoid but is also happy to do. Accepted title. In fact, compared with other "sixth generation" colleagues, Jia Zhangke was the last to start his creative career among this generation. When Wang Xiaoshuai, Lou Ye, Zhang Yuan and others who graduated from the film academy successively made their debut films around 1990, Jia Zhangke was still a "Fenyang boy" through and through. If it hadn't been for that legendary viewing of " After the experience of "Yellow Earth", it is difficult for us to know whether such an ordinary young man from a small town can transform into the great director he is today. However, it was precisely this delay of four to five years that made Jia's creations appear different from those of his contemporaries from the very beginning. When Zhang Yuan tirelessly explored the margins and taboos of society with various experimental styles, Jia's choice was to record this era; when Wang Xiaoshuai insisted on the memory of the Cultural Revolution of educated youths, Jia's choice was to record this era; when Lou Ye was obsessed with While using his stylized narratives and images to vent various personal emotions, Jia still chose to record this era. It is precisely for this reason that when the label "Sixth Generation" gradually became blurred, so vague that more and more people did not know how to define it, it seemed that they could only use the terms "underground film", "independent film" or even "banned film" These few labels define it, and only Jia Zhangke's films can clearly identify its identifying attributes at a glance - he is photographing the people and things he sees, knows, and cares about, and he is photographing you, me, and him* **We live in an era of rapid change. So when he later gracefully waved the flag for the "sixth generation", the former seniors Lou Ye and Wang Xiaoshuai were more like two first mates, maintaining the dignity and prestige of this group.

At a test screening of Wang Xiaoshuai's "Sunshine on Chongqing" at the Beijing Broadway Film Center in 2010, Jia published the famous article "I Don't Believe You Can Guess Our Ending". Wu proudly explained his "sixth generation" concept - challenging authority, challenging the market and challenging himself. The concise 12 words seemed to instantly allow this group to find some kind of ideological identity that they had been looking for for a long time but could not find. No matter which path they chose, they seemed to be able to settle on these 12 words. Since then, people's longing for the "sixth generation" has always been inseparable from breaking the existing commercial monopoly of the domestic film market. Every time a new film is released, they must seize the opportunity to advocate support for art films and art theaters (Lou Ye last year "Massage" and Wang Xiaoshuai's "The Intruder" sparked heated discussions when they were released this year.) The foreign media and film industry’s expectations for them have added a certain political color, from criticism of the film censorship system to descriptions of the dark side of contemporary Chinese society (Lou Ye’s open letter on the eve of the release of "Mystery in the Floating City", and Jia Zhangke's "Destiny"), to name a few.

Jia Zhangke is undoubtedly the one with the most political topics among this group of people. He is different from Zhang Yuan’s exploration of taboos, Lou Ye’s love and lust, and Wang Xiaoshuai’s indulgent memories. The latter challenges personal emotions. Unlike the settled history, Jia challenges the present. Therefore, starting from his shocking feature film debut "Xiao Wu", he has been in an awkward situation of being banned. This graduation film was shot under extremely crude and low-cost production conditions, but with a cold semi-documentary style, it showed novel time and space processing techniques, allowing the small town where Xiao Wu was to experience drastic changes and cold solidification. . There is no curiosity or overlooking, but the camera is directly pointed at the ordinary streets, recording the collision and overlap between the new things surging in Chinese society during the reform and opening up period and the old system and old ideas. The vision of "Platform" is undoubtedly more grand. It is like a chronological history of the 1980s, using a small art troupe to scan an entire generation of young people. In a sense, "Ren Xiaoyao" is the continuation of "Platform". It records how a new group of young people in the 1990s went from confusion to complete loss in the overlapping values ??of the old and new. The rough texture of "Hometown Trilogy" allows the world to see a real contemporary China, a transforming China that has been out of place in film for a long time. The international film industry has finally embraced the folk aesthetics and gradual changes of the "fifth generation". The proliferation of martial arts and costume masterpieces has given us a glimpse of another aspect of Chinese cinema, so it is logical that Jia Zhangke has become famous all the way from the small town of Nantes to Venice and then to Cannes.

By the time of 2006's "The Good Man from Three Gorges", Jia Zhangke had made a finishing touch based on his inherent aesthetics. The occasional flash of surreal elements matched the poetic tone that was not so obvious in the past. In the Three Gorges, a huge mirror of the times, the most brilliant light finally bloomed. Wrapped in eye-catching hot social elements such as demolition, black coal mines, and human trafficking, what Jia Zhangke tells is actually still the living conditions of contemporary lower class people, those dirty fly houses with tables and chairs mixed with people, and the chopping boards placed on the bedside. The tobacco, wine and tea served are the soul of this movie. The heavy golden lion brought back by "Three Gorges" can be regarded as the true vindication of the "sixth generation" - after the fifth generation, the highest honors of the three major film festivals finally reappeared in the Chinese figure.

Objectively speaking, Jia Zhangke’s series of films themselves do not have any clear political overtones. They just try to faithfully record the struggling lives of ordinary people. Although they are inevitably mixed with suffering, their intentions are not straightforward. Refers to social criticism.

But even so, there are still voices of criticism from time to time, accusing Jia of following in the footsteps of the fifth generation. In order to attract business and applause in the international market, he mixes the suffering and sorrow of the Chinese people and sells them to satisfy the Western world's ugly view of China. Desire is the theme of creation. Jia Zhangke could only smile at this. He was concerned about another issue - how to make his movies seen by the audience in his heart.