In the last decade or so, China, one of the world’s economic titans, has grown into a similarly important and influential role in modern cinema. With a population four times as large as the United States and a rapidly growing film culture, we have seen a rise in not just the production of Chinese film, but also in Hollywood co-production and marketing to the Chinese audience. Every year now, one or more of the top box-office films world-wide is something that went unnoticed in the West, like The Mermaid, Wolf Warrior 2, Operation Red Sea, or Monster Hunt; and Hollywood films able to entice the Chinese audience are given a huge boost in revenue, like the Transformers and Fast and the Furious franchises.
The question of who this audience is, despite their size and importance, isn’t really answered by these films; they just reflect what the public like, not unlike Depression-era American audiences and the upper-class romantic comedies and opulent musicals they watched. Many of these films are also from Hong Kong, a city-state that’s responsible for a large part of Chinese cinematic presence and visual representation since the Cultural Revolution. Of course China’s tumultuous 20th century history has impacted the means of its film production and distribution, whether its because of war, revolution, or autocratic censorship, Chinese cinema has been something of a touch-and-go operation, historically speaking. Films about China, made by mainland Chinese creatives and free from government censorship, are something that hasn’t happened for any reliable amount of time, but with the coming of the sixth generation and post-sixth generation filmmakers, the last couple of decades have provided a more authentic and reflexive national cinema in China.
This sixth generation of Chinese filmmaking, defined by directors who began working in a post-Tiananmen China, has been one of the most fascinating movements in modern cinema. The censorship and strict government policies that were implemented in reaction to the protests in the late ’80s affected several film careers, but they also resulted in an independent movement with documentary influences that played well overseas, capturing in authentic and poetic ways the life of the mainland Chinese people. The largest figure of this generation, and indeed one of the largest cinematic figures of the young millennium, is Jia Zhang-ke. His early films are provincial stories set in small towns that carry an uncanny scope, a reach that’s able to express, through immaculate writing and visual craft, the discontent and confusion of those who came of age in post-Cultural Revolution China. These were independently made and very successful on the world stage. As he gained popularity and began to work with larger budgets (and in obligation with the Chinese government), he only broadened his scope of critique. He has set his sights on China’s campy sense of globalization (The World), the flooding and relocation of citizens along the Yangtze (Still Life), the violent despair of the working class (A Touch of Sin), and even the hypothetical future of China, proposing an exodus and loss of national identity (Mountains May Depart). More than one of these films was banned or impeded on release in China.
His effort this year, Ash is Purest White, is, like his own 24 City and Mountains May Depart, a film set in three successive time periods: in this case 2001, 2006, and modern day. The story concerns the life of a regional gang boss, Bin (Liao Fan) and his loyal girlfriend Qiao (Jia’s wife and muse, Zhao Tao). The first section of the film, rich in coloured light, viscera, and surprising camp, plays mostly as an idealistic crime film, set in smoky hangouts and dance clubs, capturing a lively cast’s sense of community. A lack of security and sustainability continuously shows its head however, through Qiao’s father, an alcoholic miner resisting the privatization of industry affecting their hometown, and in the targeting of Bin and his collaborators by rival gangs. The threats on Bin’s life reach a head, and both Bin and Qiao are arrested and put in prison, with Qiao serving a longer sentence by claiming a weapon’s charge.
We move to 2006, where the film becomes Qiao’s. She leaves prison in search of Bin and to resume life as she knew it, traveling down the Yangtze, which is already in the early stages of the Three Gorges Dam project. Disconnected from everyone she knew, she traverses a society that takes advantage of her but is equally exploitable by her own skills and charisma. Zhao’s performance, in this section specifically, is magnificent, as she finds humour and frustration, sadness and resolve, in her portrait of a woman attempting to maintain her dignity in a society that she’s divorced from. Her goal is simple but unattainable, as Bin has moved on with a new, English-speaking girlfriend and vaguely defined work prospects since China’s economic heel-turn. Qiao’s journey in this chapter takes on a semi-mythical quality, and arrives at a couple of unexpected and beautiful interactions that pull the chapter to a close.
The third chapter, set in the now drastically altered town the film began in, reunites Bin and Qiao. Both of them have changed in some surprising ways, and must confront what their town, their relationship, and their previous place in society mean to them now. Both seem aware that their past, as well as their country’s past, is unattainable, and yet it’s ostensibly all they are. How each of them differently approach their own previous definitions and what they ask of one another is what makes this closing segment so mournfully engaging. Jia’s films generally end with a statement, an exclamation point, but Ash is Purest White ends in a deflating, brutal ellipsis.
It’s a very character-driven film for Jia, like Mountains May Depart before it, but it sheds that film’s melodrama and occasional awkwardness for a more naturalistic, performance-led storytelling strategy that can allow for slice-of-life imaginings to exist within a conceptual structure. Jia, well known for a deliberate shooting style, really amplifies the pace of his writing and direction. There’s an attention to motion, to a roaming camera that follows sauntering characters, drifting boats, crowded buses, and rolling trains. China’s industry, its people, time itself, continue to move forward, even for those in stasis—more than happy to leave them behind.
Though it may not sound it, the film is also quite funny. Many circumstances in the film are strategic in their timing, allowing for ironies to play and humorous reactions to overcome supporting players. Dialogue is similarly elastic at times, and these occasional bits of levity help with the flow, but a couple scenes that dip into camp seem to be after something a little more substantial. In the film, there are, in two separate chapters, two garish public displays of the performing arts: a pair of disciplined and fully made-up ballroom dancers, and a lanky, shirtless singer with some flamboyant production. However, both of these acts are reintroduced a little later (after a death, after heartbreak), and take on an entirely different comedic and even dramatic nature. Kitsch becomes camp; frivolity becomes significance. It’s this kind of fluidity of emotionality and meaning that makes this film so memorable and disarming.
Ash is Purest White is perhaps Jia’s most accessible film yet, a human drama that charts political and social change without an overt thesis or the narrow cultural specificity that may have alienated some viewers of his work in the past. Its odyssey is a strange and beautiful one that likely can’t be entirely digested with a single watch, but I believe further viewings and time itself will be very kind to it.
If there is a Chinese filmmaker of 2018, of 2018 alone and no further, it’s Bo Hu. Bo, aged 29, an accomplished novelist and–as evidenced by his debut feature An Elephant Sitting Still–a massive filmmaking talent, killed himself late last year only a few months before the film’s debut in Berlin. His suicide is undivorceable from the film itself, which is one of the bleakest, most acutely despairing films of recent years. Yet there’s a terrible, cathartic beauty to the nearly four hour film, which offers no blatant answers for its doomed protagonists, but lays their numbing, human journey for hope bare for the audience to appreciate and sympathize with.
An Elephant Sitting Still follows four lower-class Northern Chinese city-dwellers for a wintery day in the life: there’s Yucheng, a 20-something hoodlum who opens the film by sleeping with a friend’s girl, and then is walked in on by this friend, who then hurls himself out of the apartment window; there’s Weibu, a troubled high-schooler who attempts to stand up for a friend and badly injures Yucheng’s younger brother in a confrontation; there’s Huangling, another high-schooler and friend and possible crush of Weibu’s, who lives with an alcoholic mother and is in a relationship with her school’s vice-dean; and there’s Laojin, a dog-owning pensioner whose child’s family is attempting to put him in a nursing home against his will. A short time into the film his dog is killed by a larger dog that escaped its owner.
The reaction of the attacking dog’s owner when Laojin confronts him is a display of one of the film’s central themes: the inability of people to claim responsibility for their actions and the shifting of blame. When he approaches their door quietly, clearly hoping for an apology for the death of his best friend, he is instead railed against. He must be a scammer; it couldn’t have been their dog; etc. When the dog owner follows him out into the street in his SUV (he’s the wealthiest character seen in the film) to further intimidate Laojin, Weibu, who is Laojin’s neighbour and has run away from his own violent incident, responds with threats of his own, and is assaulted by the driver. It’s a profoundly upsetting spectacle, but it reveals something about age and generation. Weibu is emotional, angry, shocked at the injustice he’s witnessing, but Laojin is calm, accepting; he’s lived through the Cultural Revolution, the protests in the late-’80s; he is used to these injustices of life.
This atmosphere of public shaming and shifting blame strikes the female characters, even the periphery ones, as Huangling receives a despicable reception from those who become aware of her relationship, even the adult responsible for it. There’s also Yucheng, who confronts his ex-girlfriend over the suicide of his friend: if she had stayed with him, he claims, he wouldn’t have had to cheat with his friend’s partner and the suicide would have been prevented. It is these plot threads that don’t simply reveal a misogynistic culture, but one that has people forced into circumstances that are inescapable through honest means.
Bo brings a detail-oriented, novelistic approach to orchestrating the film’s many upsetting events, as character paths interact and overlap in intelligent and revealing ways while retaining a stark sense of realism. His camera follows these characters ruthlessly, with many of the scenes playing out in single claustrophobic tracking shots that transition between similarly sized close-ups, profiles, and over-the-shoulder angles, with its characters either centre-frame or uncomfortably pushed into corners. Using long lenses, focus is almost always trained on the four lead characters; even key supporting figures that lead conversations are kept in a blur to favour the reactions of those we are following. Its a focused, unfussy visual strategy, meant to suture the audience to character experience, and it only makes the events of the film more harrowing.
With its many trudges through cold, hazy avenues and dimly-lit apartments, An Elephant Sitting Still creates one of the most coherent cinematic geographies of recent mind. It feels inches from the freezing, dirty pavement, and though rarely resorting to establishing shots and wides, is almost as much about the space as it is the characters. It’s a film of urban strife that reaches beyond its subjects and into a societal condition, not unlike the postwar Italy of Bicycle Thieves or post-colonial Manilla as captured in Manila in the Claws of the Light. The other two Chinese films in this article are also about or feature underprivileged mainland Chinese characters and spaces, but they may be more concerned with their own artistic expressions (Jia’s with the conceptual, Bi’s with the aesthetic). This film feels born of its environment; emergent and necessary. It captures a Chinese society that refuses to extend its hand unless it’s to push someone down.
An Elephant Sitting Still is akin to watching cornered animals that show their teeth or bury their faces, but if the audience is able to harmonize with rather than be repulsed by the long, despairing journey (which is helped along by Hua Lun’s beautiful, melancholic electric guitar-led soundtrack that’s also worth mentioning), they will likely find it one of the most rewarding and moving films of the year. It’s a rare picture, one that brings to mind the texture and artistic scope of a great piece of Russian literature; think of “The Overcoat” or Crime and Punishment. It’s an enormous shame that it’s the only film we have to remember its director by.
A young filmmaker with a future, and one of the brightest in cinema today, is Bi Gan. His first film, Kaili Blues, will be remembered as one of the most adept and beautiful debuts of the decade; a film that exhibits a masterful technical ability, a distinctive sense of place, and a unified cinematic voice for its director. Its last act long-take, which lasts over 45 minutes, covers an astonishing amount of ground, captures the inertia of several characters, and appears to break its own reality by the end, standing as one of the most staggering and enrapturing technical displays in modern film. His sophomore effort, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (which has nothing to do with the O’Neill play) only intensifies in the realm of technical displays and artistic assurance.
The plot of Long Day’s Journey Into Night isn’t entirely legible, but at its core, it’s about a man who returns to his hometown to inherit a van from his father, and finds a picture of a woman with her face burned out in the back of a broken clock. He begins to track down this woman, whom he apparently loved, remembering his past and meeting a woman in what appears to be the present who resembles her. The film glides in and out of past and present, reality and fantasy in elegant regularity, sometimes in the same shot, building a dream-like sense of longing and mystery into the otherwise simple, often disconnected events of the plot.
Characters in this film don’t so much converse as they poetically present anecdotes and proverbs, rhyming with the many symbols and gestures that appear and reappear in the visual fabric of the film itself. Pomelo fruits, trains moving forwards and back, bitten cigarettes, falling water, apples being devoured, clocks, spinning rooms; there’s a veritable bucket of motifs here, some more successful than others in terms of telling or meaningfully informing the story, but they provide a surprising sense of comfort and internal logic to the phantasmagorical proceedings. It is likely that several of these symbols and miniature stories are more powerful to those with a better understanding of Chinese symbolism and folklore, but their mystical charm and purposeful implementation are enjoyable regardless of clear understanding.
And if Kaili Blues’ monster of a tracking shot wasn’t enough, Bi outdoes it with the last shot of this film, which before it begins, drops the title card of the film and transitions to 3-D. And then it lasts an hour. Though a oner might imply a kind of spacial and narrative coherence, the opposite is true here, as the film fractures its sense of time and space further, using the incredible camera work to present a symbolic odyssey that continuously confounds, surprises, and delights. It starts in a mine and travels through a valley, over and amongst a town following different subjects, moving through walls and avenues, presenting visuals of a power and fidelity rarely seen in conventional setups, let alone tracking shots. The invention and proficiency on display can’t be overstated. The art is in the movement itself, as opposed to being a connected series of images or actions in a visual run-on sentence. It’s dreamy and purposeful in a way that’s comparable to uncommon filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Angelopoulos.
The Tarkovsky influence is perhaps a little on the sleeve, with more than one visual reference to his Stalker (a glass vibrating off of a table, the presence of a German Shepherd, a slow dolly shot peering into shallow water), and as enormously impressive this film is on a technical level, its abstraction doesn’t always have the most to base itself on. What governs the film, this man’s quest for a previous love, simply isn’t as involving or imaginative as the central character’s quest in Kaili Blues: a previously convicted doctor looking out for his neglected nephew and trying to process his troubled past—which includes a failed marriage. The pieces of that protagonist’s past, present and fantasy interacting with one another, were revealing. In Long Day’s Journey, it comes back to the woman again and again, and yet this woman is an enigma, an almost non-character. The thematic reach and emotional diversity that governed and propelled Kaili Blues’ story isn’t present here; and while there are some efforts to illuminate a little more of the central character’s past (there are parts dedicated to the death of a childhood friend, the assassination of a mobster, and his mother who abandoned him), they feel like diversions from, rather than emergent facets of, the central character’s quest.
Though Kaili Blues may be more unified, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is still one of the most incredible recent feats of cinematography and sound design, a film that pushes Bi’s impressive craft and artistic resume even further. It brings with it a curiosity of what he could follow this with. His fascinations with time, dream space, and massive feats of choreography may translate well to a historical epic, or maybe a musical. Regardless of what he chooses to do next, Bi Gan, still in his twenties, is a major talent in modern cinema, and a talent who should only grow and mature in the coming years.
If there’s a thread that binds these three very different films together, it’s a sense of velocity and cultural unease. This is represented visually in all three films, with extremely mobile characters and camera, but what these visual decisions are motivated by and what they reveal is a portrait of China that leaves its citizens looking in spaces other than their present or future for refuge. With its multi-decade scope and intimate character work, this ends up as one of the foremost thematic statements of Ash is Purest White, but the same attitude permeates the other two films covered in this article as well. The title of An Elephant Sitting Still gets its name from a far-off circus attraction in the film in which an elephant, despite any amount of harassment or interference, sits unmoving. All four principal characters are fascinated by this attraction, openly discussing and some eventually making an effort to visit it. This abstract beacon of hope for its several characters facing desolation implies a quest for stillness and peace in a chaotic, abrasive world. It might not be much, but it’s something; something other than now. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, like Jia Zhang-ke’s film, has its lead character searching for a previous love, but it ends its physical quest in a dilapidated space left behind by modern China, before transitioning to dream-space by way of a literal cinema. Of course this brings to mind the role of escapism and of cinema itself in modern China, but this film’s contextual and aesthetic transformation points more to a means of personal navigation set outside of reality—a synthesis of dreams and reminiscence.
None of these films propose an end point to China’s rapidly changing economic, social, and political landscapes, but capture the ongoing trajectory and its velocity with brilliant visual strokes and concern and sympathy for the many people struggling to cope with the realities of the present. This subject has been a primary focus in 21st century Chinese cinema, but that it’s colouring the narratives of films by people in their twenties like Bo Hu and Bi Gan tells us that concerns are shared across generations, even by those who probably don’t have the clearest image of China before its rapid growth at the start of the millennium.
Of course, three films will never provide the full image of a country, and China has even more than these to offer in 2018, with new films from proven greats like Zhang Yimou, Jiang Wen, and Wang Bing, not to mention the several box office hits that are becoming more frequent and profitable as time moves on. Regardless, these three films are among the most impressive the medium has to offer this year, from China or anywhere else.
-Tenzytile