Time, History, and Memory in Jia Zhangke's "24 City"

Author(s): Shu-chin Wu
Source: Film Criticism , Fall, 2011, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Fall, 2011), pp. 3-23
Published by: Allegheny College

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24777809

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Time, History, and Memory in
Jia Zhangke's 24 City

Shu-chin Wu

Henry Lefebvre once said that "[i]t is now space more than
time that hides things from us.... [T]he démystification of spatiality
and its veiled instrumentality of power is the key to making practical,
political, and theoretical sense of the contemporary era" (qtd. in Soja
61). In recent years, the research focus in academic disciplines such as
history and sociology, which traditionally have framed their research
questions in terms of time, has been undergoing a conceptual shift
from time to space. This trend is evident in the popularity of concepts
such as world history, transnationalism, and globalism, all of which
are conceptualized in topological forms and structures. This interest
in space also has infiltrated discussions of China's underground
and independent films, many of which center on the experience
of urbanization and locality as well as the issues of modernity and
globalization.
In Gilles Deleuze s colossal works on cinema, The Movement
Image and The Time Image, he uses 1945 as a demarcation and argues
that the development of cinema in its pre-1945 mode was obsessed with
space while the post-1945 cinema has been preoccupied with time and
modernity. Important works on China's contemporary underground
and independent films, such as Cinema, Space, and Polylocality in a
Globalizing China (2010), The Urban Generation (2007), and From

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Underground to Independent (2006), all focus extensively on cities as
sites of social, economic, and political transformation. These works
help to explain many underground and independent filmmakers'
singular preoccupation with space, specifically demolition and
reconstruction in cities, and the related issues of sociopolitical change
in contemporary China. These recent studies raise important theoretical
questions of whether this current preoccupation with space signals a
new phase in the development of cinema, a return to Deleuze's pre
1945 classical mode of obsession with space, or something completely
new. This vexing question, however, exceeds the scope of the current
study. My intent here is to point out that in these important works
on China's underground and independent films, the issue of space is
frequently emphasized in a way that leads to the critical neglect of
tpmnnral rnnsideratinns

There are dangers when time is neglected in discussions of

modernity and globalization in China. Homi Bhabha aptly criticizes
Foucault's Eurocentric spatialization of the time of modernity and
questions its "ambivalent temporality" (207). As Bhabha puts it, "each
repetition of the sign of modernity is different, specific to its historical
and cultural conditions of enunciation" (207). Temporal considerations
are crucial to understanding modernity, especially the modernity of the
non-European countries, because modernity exists in different times.
In Anthony Giddens 's concept of globalization as a consequence of
modernity, globalization is best understood as expressing a fundamental
aspect of time-space distanciation (King 108). Arjun Appadurai, in his
influential Modernity at Large, goes even further to link globalization
and modernity by articulating the relationship between the modern and
the contemporary. For Appadurai, the modern is not a fact, an epoch,
or a stage. Rather, it is a vision and a project. The contemporary, on
the other hand, is a condition. Even though migration, media, mass
mediation, ideology, technology, and money existed in different forms
in the past, we now live in a postnational or transnational world in
which current global flows occur: they occur through the "relations of
disjuncture" that are strikingly different and painfully new (Appadurai
45-47). The global flows occur without precedent not only in Europe
but throughout the world. The particular relevance of Appadurai's
conceptions of global flows and locality to this essay is that these
concepts open up the question of time and temporality. As Appadurai
states, "the project of the production of locality is an effort to work

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against the constant erosion of the present, both by change and by
uncertainty" (Perspecta 47). This change and uncertainty, in turn, are
exciting aspects of global cultural flows beyond the nation-state. Not
only are modernity and globalization intimately linked, but so are the
production of temporality and locality.
Appadurai's idea of global flows implies an intimate link
between temporal and spatial dimensions in investigating the issues
of modernity and globalization, thereby avoiding Lefevre's and
Faucault's prioritizing of space over time. In Appadurai's analysis, a
"global" place is not only one that can cross boundaries. It is situated
in the contemporary, inescapable condition in which we find ourselves.
His idea of global flows is especially helpful in understanding the
films of China's underground and independent filmmakers, because a
central theme in these films is to participate in or challenge the project
of modernity and the official, media presentation of global capitalist
ideology. I contend that at the same time as they negotiate a space
between the local and the global, the underground and independent
filmmakers also bring into focus a temporal complex in which the
relationship between and the coherence of past, present, and future
are at issue. Moreover, for these filmmakers, the complexity of time
often is expressed in terms of locating the meaning of history through
memory.
The terms underground (dixia) and independent (dull) deserve
some attention here. Since the early 1990s, young filmmakers in
China have begun to challenge the state media system and censorship.
Wu Wenguang's Bumming in Beijing (1990), first to earn the label
of "underground," depicts the struggles of marginal artists without
official support and approval. Although some Chinese filmmakers
identify their works as "underground" films, others prefer not to use
the term, because "underground" denotes the secret and politically
subversive message that is not a main characteristic of these films and
therefore not all filmmakers share. In addition, some of these films are
aboveground during production, and some directors have made both
"underground" and state-approved films. In the Chinese case, the term
"independent" means independent from the state and from official or
mainstream productions. Here I use the compound "underground and
independent" to indicate the nonmainstream, alternative filmmaking
in contemporary China that occurs outside the state studio system as
discussed by Paul Pickowicz and Yingjin Zhang (vii-xi).

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 In this essay, using JiaZhangke's24 City (2008) as an example, I
explore the much-neglected dimension of time in China's underground
and independent filmmaking, investigating the relationship among
the temporal structures of film, history, and memory. By doing so, I
attempt to shed light on the way in which film, as narrative texts and
visual images, deals with the question of remembering and forgetting
while responding to a specific historical condition. My work draws
on Rudy Koshar's notion that "the 'constructedness' of film, its
placement in a studio 'reality' far away from the historical reality to
which it gestures, could be used by historians as a springboard for
considering the strategies, advantages, and shortcomings not of the
film but of previous historical narratives, filmic and written" (161).
Therefore, this study not only sees film as a way of representing and
constructing pasts but also suggests that the temporality represented
in film has the potential to forge, maintain, or contest historical or
personal memories.
Jia Zhangke is widely regarded as one of the most original and
talented of the leading figures of China's underground and independent
cinema. Like some of the other underground and independent directors,
Jia is better known overseas, especially at international film festivals,
than he is within China. Jia's films have received much praise from
film critics and scholars. Dudley Andrew calls Jia "a poet of cinema,"
Jonathan Rosenbaum compares Jia to the Hungarian filmmaker
Miklos Jancso, and Stephen Teo invokes Raul Ruiz in extolling the
quality of Jia's films. On March 5, 2010, the Museum of Modern Art
in New York began a full retrospective of Jia's films, making Jia the
first Chinese filmmaker to have an exhibit in the Museum of Modern
Art in more than twenty years.
More than any other of the underground and independent
directors, Jia Zhangke is noteworthy for exploring in his films the
connection between cinematic and historical visions in relation to
specific formulations of time, history, and memory. In discussing Jia's
1998 Mm Xiao Wu, Jason McGrath asserted that the director's signature
long takes demonstrate a "bleak urban reality" representative of
"postsocialist realist time." This new sense of time, which contradicts
Mao's idea of Utopia, also opposes the post-Mao official ideology
of modernization and reform, and a homogenous global capitalist
ideology (McGrath 89-90). In this essay, I take this style of analysis
further and offer a new approach—use theory of time to examine the

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paradoxical relationship between nonfiction and fiction in 24 City
and its implication on two different versions of time, namely history
and memory.

The Paradoxical Relationship between Fiction and Documentary

24 City is part fiction, part documentary film. Before he made
24 City, Jia had directed both documentary and fiction films. And
since his 1997 fiction-film debut Xiao Wu (aka Pickpocket), Jia has
been known for his signature "documentary style and realist aesthetic
that favor the representation of bare events as the most efficacious
way to capture reality" (Liu 166). Xiao Wu, the first part of Jia's
Hometown Trilogy, is set on the actual streets of Jia's hometown
Fengyang in Shanxi province and was filmed without studio control
or artificial lighting. The characters in the film are nonprofessional
actors who speak their native dialects in the film. The naturalistic,
realist-style "bare events" depicted in Xiao Wu are crude, raw, and
local. They are conveyed through techniques such as long takes,
wide-angle compositions, and synchronized recording without noise
filtering—techniques reminiscent of the Italian neorealists of the
1940s. As such, Xiao Wu, a fiction film, shares certain similarities
with Jia's documentary Xiao Shan Going Home (1995) (McGrath
89). This infusion of the documentary style in fiction filmmaking has
become one of Jia's hallmarks as a director. However, it is one thing
to draw from reality in fiction film and another to combine fiction and
documentary in one film. The reception of Jia's most recent film, 24
City, has been fragmented and contentious precisely because of the
innovative combination of fiction and documentary. Some reviewers
see this as a positive feature while others see it as cheapening the
film's historical veracity.
(.Aiy recounts me aecnne ana nnai ran 01 factory 4zu, a
state-owned, semisecret governmental facility established in 1958 in
the city of Chengdu for the manufacture and repair of military aircraft.
Factory 420 housed 30,000 workers and 100,000 of their family
members. After the Vietnam War ended in the 1970s, the factory was
downsized to make consumer appliances. In 2006, the entire site of
Factory 420 was sold to a private developer, who demolished the
factory and built a modern apartment complex and a five-star hotel on
the land. After interviewing approximately 100 workers, Jia originally
planned to make a documentary recording the workers' oral histories.

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The final version of the film documents the factory's demolition and
tells the stories of five real and four fictional characters representing
five generations.
Jia's use of both real and fictional characters in 24 City raises
significant questions concerning the function of genre blurring of
documentary and fiction. On one hand, the film uses interviews of five
real former workers in Factory 420, several portraits of unidentified
workers and their families posing for the camera, and six shots of
the real front gate during various stages of demolition. On the other
hand, three actors (Lu Liping, Joan Chen, and Chen Jianbin) play the
(fictional) roles of former workers and one actor (Zhao Tao) plays the
fictional young daughter of a worker. All four actors are stars in China,
known for their skilled performance and virtuosity in acting. For the
Chinese audience, the fictional characters are readily recognized as
fictional and thus distinguishable from the real workers. For audiences
outside China, this distinction is uncertain because the cinematic codes
remain unclear.
1 he mise en scene in 24 City treats real and fictional characters
similarly. All characters, real and fictional, are framed in medium shots
in realistic settings. Most of them are arranged in a sitting position
slightly tilting to the right or the left of the frame and facing gently
sideways in conversation with the director, who asks questions from
off screen. The work identification card of the first interviewee, He
Xikun, is shown on screen to indicate that he was a real worker in
Factory 420. Hou Lijun, interviewed on the bus, does not always look
at the director during the interview. This belies the fact that she is
not a professional actor, especially in comparison to the famous actor
Lu Liping, who plays the character Hao Dali. Little Flower, played
by Joan Chen, gets her nickname because she resembles a character
played by Chen in a 1980 melodrama named Little Flower. This detail
constitutes an in-joke as well as an indication that the role of Joan Chen
is scripted and performed. The reference might be obvious to domestic
viewers but might not be so clear to foreign viewers unacquainted with
the popular 1980 film. The real or fictional status of other characters
seems to remain in suspension for the audience outside of China. This
is especially evident when in the middle or at the end of each interview,
a black screen appears with white lettering designating the character's
basic identification—name, year bom, position in Factory 420—as if
all of the characters are real, thus blurring the distinction between the
documentary interviews and the scripted, performed interviews.

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 The blurring between real and fictional characters is different
in Kore-eda Hirokazu's After Life (1998). In After Life, the lack of
distinction between documentary and performed interviews serves a
particular aesthetic purpose, suggesting that the reality of everyday
life and memory are closer to cinematic images, thereby challenging
the facile distinction between reality and artifice. In comparison, Jia's
24 City seems to be more ambiguous in its aesthetics. Jia's aesthetic
ambiguity of fusing documentary and fiction needs to be explained
within the context of Chinese film history.
A number of critics have pointed out that China's
contemporary underground and independent filmmakers, including
Jia Zhangke, share a "documentary impulse" to chronicle the effect of
recent social changes in China, tell a different story from the official
version of history, and make visible their personal perception of
history and memory because they believe that they have been denied
access to history (Leary 1). In Jia's own words, "Remembering history
is no longer the exclusive right of the government. As an ordinary
intellectual, I firmly believe that our culture should be teeming with
unofficial memories" (Cheng Qingson and Huang Ou 370). Jia's
indignation, however, is aimed not only at the Chinese government.
He was also discontented with predecessors such as Zhang Yimou
and Chen Kaige, whose films did not have "anything to do with the
Chinese reality that I knew," the reality of the marginalized, ordinary
people (Berry, Speaking 183). Jia's resentment of the monopolized
official history contributes to his cinematic rendition of unofficial
history through a "personal" point of view. It is important to note
that implicit in Jia's social orientation is an artistic vision that aims
to provide a version of history—a personal, alternative version—to
supplement rather than to replace the official version. This personal
perspective, sometimes hiding behind the visual artifice, helps explain
Jia's intention of blending fiction and documentary in 24 City and its
ambiguous aesthetics.
The quasi-documentary style of combining documentary with
fiction in 24 City, I argue, renders "imaginative variations on time,"
to use Paul Ricoeur's term, which contribute to a richer understanding
of history and memory (Ricoeur 127). Exploring the tension between
fictive time and historical time liberates Jia from the need to provide
documentary proof, permitting him to reveal certain possibilities that
were not actualized in reality and provide an alternative version of

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reality from the official version. When the events that actually occurred
at Factory 420 are incorporated within the temporal experience of the
fictional characters, time becomes "human time," as Ricoeur calls it.
It is called "human time" because it unites the time that stands for
the past in history (historical time) and the "imaginative variations of
time" (fictive time). Human time transcends history, which denotes
only what was in the past. When the quasi-historical moment of
fiction overlaps with the quasi-fictive moment of history, the time of
the characters, both real and unreal, cannot represent historical time
anymore. However, it can become "human time" that is not real in the
historical sense but is imbued with many possibilities. The historical
events in the film therefore are divested of their function of standing
only for the historical past. This mode of representation does not
deprive imagination and imaginative variations of time of their power
to mediate between historical time and fictive time. Here we see fiction
resembles history and history, becomes quasi-fictional. The tension
between fictive time and historical time in 24 City articulates and
challenges projects of modernity and the official communist vision of
time and history, questions time lost and time regained, and shows that
film, like history, is a form of knowledge production.

Temporal Structure of 24 City

The opening scene of the film is a panorama shot of the gate of
Factory 420, with a crowd of workers in blue uniforms bicycling
into the factory. This scene is reminiscent of some of the famous
late-19th- and early-20th-century factory-gate images that occupy a
pivotal place in film history. Like the factory-gate scene in La sortie
des usines Lumiere (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory), a film by
the Lumiere brothers made in 1895, Jia's shot of the factory gate of
Factory 420 captures the image of modernity and its time and space. In
the Lumiere brothers' film, individual acts are shown to be regulated,
are repeated, and seem transferable. In Sean Cubitt's words, the event
of workers leaving the factory gate represents the "mechanism of
time," which means the event is "at once singular and typical" (Sutton
65-71). The next few scenes in 24 City seem to emphasize this same
mechanism of time by focusing on workers pounding and drilling
inside Factory 420. The scene immediately following these, however,
begins to present a different relationship between the factory and the
time of the modern in China and, in so doing, imbues the first gate
scene with a different meaning than that which opens the Lumiere

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brothers' film. It is plausible to say that the time consciousness in 24
City is more complex than that of La sortie des usines Lumiere. The
first factory gate scene of 24 City, a shot on its surface very similar to
the shot of the early European factory gate, shows the crowds of blue
clad male and female workers—nameless and countless individuals—
entering the factory. The event of workers leaving their factory in
Lyon in the Lumiere brothers' film is a repetitious event. Day in and
day out, there were the same crowd, engaged in the same event, at the
same factory. In 24 City, however, the event of the workers entering
the factory represents a division of time; it is the dividing line between
past and present. The workers come to the factory, not to work, but
to bid goodbye and to attend the ceremony marking the transfer of
Factory 420 to a private real estate developer. The day being recorded
is not the same as every other day any more. It is a day of change.
Six factory-gate scenes appear in 24 City. In the Lumiere brothers'
film, time remains more or less still and repetitive; in contrast, the
factory-gate scenes in 24 City set the stage on one hand for the future,
gradual process of demolition of the factory, as illustrated by the
subsequent five gate scenes, and on the other, for introducing the
factory workers' pasts through individual and collective memory,
through the interviews of five real factory workers and four fictional
characters. The first gate scene, therefore, denotes a time that divides
the present and introduces the temporal structure of the film. The
present—the first gate scene—becomes the marker between a before
anrl an affpr

The first gate scene in 24 City also is reminiscent of the ope

sequences of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), which opens with
medium close-ups of giant machines operating in fast tempo fo
by a shot of a wall clock signifying the time of the modem. Th
a medium shot, we see the first gate scene where numerous nam
workers arrive and leave the factory with mechanized, heavy s
slow tempo. The opening sequences set up the dichotomy betwe
technological affluence of the city and the desperate conditions
workers. This dichotomy is further illustrated when, in a pan
shot, the children of the affluent leisurely play sports in the
above the underground city where the workers dwell. The gate
therefore, dramatizes the victimization of workers and a criti
of the repetition of mechanized labor and of the privileged few
benefit from the technology. The opening sequences of Metro

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focus on the city as the quintessential embodiment of modernity and
technology as its evil twin.
This gloomy depiction of modernity and technology is in stark
contrast to Dziga Vertov's optimistic portrayal of the relationship
between man and machine in his The Man with a Movie Camera
(1929). In Vertov's work, each individual worker is connected to
a larger social, economic, and political reality, which can appear
"fragmented and disconnected to the naked eye" (Delgado 4). It is
important to note that Jia's 24 City shares neither Lang's criticism of
modernity and technology nor Vertov's faith and optimism concerning
the organic nature of Communist society of which each individual
forms an integral part. The gate scenes in 24 City were taken from
above while those of Lane and the Lumiere brothers were taken

at ground level. The ground-level shots of Lang and the Lumiere

brothers situate the factory and the workers firmly in the present
time, which is still and repetitive. Jia's elevated shots of the gat
scenes, on the other hand, lead the audience to see the transformation
of the gate from its being in use, to gradual destruction, and then
total abandonment. The six elevated shots of gates scenes in 24 City
serve the function of providing the organization of time for the film
and signify a clear division of past, present, and future.
Jia's organization of time in 24 City does not imply a simple
opposition between past and present in the framework of history and
memory. The present of the first gate scene actually reminds us of
the threefold Augustinian dimensions of the present: "the present
of past things, the present of present things, and the present o
future things." While the first gate scene represents the present of
present things and the subsequent gate scenes represent the present
of future things, the characters' recollections stand for the present o
past things. The present moment, no matter how fleeting and short
lived it is, becomes a pivotal moment of history's coming toward th
future and going backward to a remembered past.
At the very heart of the threefold present in Jia's 24 City lies the
tension between the imaginative, fictive time produced by Jia's four
fictional characters and the fixed term of historical time as expressed
through the five actual workers. Dudley Andrew observes that these
nine characters in 24 City represent nine different roles in the factory
community and comprise five generations, making up the temporal
axis (81). Jia Zhangke explains:

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 I think that the nine characters become one when put
together. I like the group portrait because I feel that
it gives one realism and complexity. Because of my
decision to film a group portrait, I need a lot of people
to appear in the film. On the one hand, there is an
intertextual relationship among these characters. They
run a relay of narrating history chronologically from
the 1950s till today. This creates a sense of temporal
continuity. On the other hand, the storytelling, which
unfolds moment bv moment, snans fiftv vears of time.
I like such complexity of time. (Andrew 82)
The motif of time in 24 City is clearly expressed in this quote. Rather
than adopting a chronological, linear narration of history from the
1950s to the 2000s and making 24 City as a documentary, Jia's use of
fictional characters alongside real ones enables him to explore aspects
of lived time that the historical narrative cannot reach. Historical
narrative and fictional narrative are often seen as contradictory;
however, as Paul Ricoeur pointed out, despite the distinction in
principle between "real" past and "unreal" fiction, the interweaving of
history and fiction can reveal deep structures of temporal experience
that historical narrative alone does not reach (Ricoeur 262-264). The
purpose of the four fictional characters in 24 City, I argue, is to bring
out the question of the actual reconfiguration of time and its relation to
memory. Through the interweaving of history and fiction, the time that
the fictional characters experience becomes human time, which is not
less real than historical time. The use of the fictional characters in 24
City is to provide "imaginative variations on time," helping to reveal
unactualized potentialities in the past (Ricoeur 180-192).
Here I use one character, Hao Dali, as an example. Actor Lu
Liping plays Hao Dali, a woman who had lost her child on the trip
from her native Shenyang to Factory 420 in Chengdu in 1958. Seen
first in a medium shot, Hao, holding an intravenous-fluids bottle, walks
through the neighborhood that is home to the Factory 420 apartment
complex. The residential nature of Factory 420 is explicit. Then, in a
long shot, Hao walks past two planes, symbolizing the bygone glory of
the factory. She arrives at an office complex and is greeted by a young
woman who works at a computer. The interview of the fictional Hao
Dali is conducted mostly in a series of long takes, punctuated with
intermittent fades to black. The interviewer, the director Jia Zhangke

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himself, audibly interacts with her via questions and comments during
the interview.
In the interview, Hao recounts a fictional past as though it
actually happened. She recalls that in the 1960s, during the wave of
natural disasters and famines, the factory gave its employees 1.5 kilos
of meat a month, a luxury no one other than the people who worked
for the factory could afford. Now, Hao is retired and struggling with
both physical and financial difficulties. Although she used to send her
impoverished sister money and clothing for her nieces and nephews,
the tables have turned and her sister's son has sent her 500 yuan for
support.
The fictional narrative of the fictional character preserves
the feature of "positing" and of asserting the past in the mode of the
"quasi." Hao's character is a quasi-character. The events were quasi
events. The past is quasi-past. History is quasi-history. Because the
character is fictional, she does not have to be connected to the single,
spatial-temporal network constitutive of chronological time. The time
consciousness of this character is polarized between the elements of
the threefold present—the lived present, the immediate future, and
the present of the past. For Hao, this threefold present consists of her
memories of a lost child and participation in the glory of the factory's
past, the lived present of physical and financial difficulties, and the
immediate future that implies a gap between her and the younger
generation.
The fictional story, however, has an implicit focus on the
present. In the entire interview, not a single flashback is used. In
recounting her remembered past, Hao expresses a strong sense of loss.
She not only lost her child by coming to Chengdu to work for Factory
420; she spent most of her adult life working for the government and
ended up poor and sick. And now she is torn out of the living present
by her memory of her lost child. The lost time cannot be regained.
Through use of a fictional character and imaginary time, the
story becomes not just about Chengdu Factory 420 in the 1950s, 1960s,
1970s, 1990s, or 2000s. The historical calendar time is neutralized,
and the lived time of the character is emphasized.
Against the background of the rapid change and lost time,
Jia introduces the characters' experiences of lived time by using long
takes as well as empty gaps. Jia is known for his long shots and long
takes, which signal the actual duration of time. The fade to black, to

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empty space, is another important structure of the film's narrative,
symbolizing the time that is unknown, not given. Nevertheless, it is a
time that is there. As Andre Bazin expressed when discussing the films
of Italian neorealism, "... the empty gaps, the white spaces, the parts
of the event that we are not given, are themselves of a concrete nature:
stones which are missing from the building. It is the same in life: we
do not know everything that happens to others" (39). In other words,
the fact that we do not know does not make it disappear. Empty space
is a "lacuna in reality." It is a reminder against forgetfulness and an
acknowledgement that what we know is by nature limited.
If the purpose of long takes is to preserve real time and to
keep time intact, then the purpose of empty space is to make time stop
to provide room for reflection. Jia's interviews of the nine characters
appear to simultaneously go forward to the immediate future and back
into the past with each character's recollections. The interweaving of
history alongside fiction from history opens up the possibilities that
were not actualized. Through interviews with individuals who were
caught up in the circumstances of dramatic change, not only in the
dimension of space but also in time, Jia raises the question of home in
our temporal experience. Home as a physical place is spatial. Home
is also temporal. The moment of Factory 420's transfer to the private
developer in the first gate scene signals the workers losing their physical
possessions of home and highlights its temporary nature. Home, in Jia
Zhangke's 24 City, is not only a place; it has to be situated in time.
History, Memory, and the Temporal Dimension of Home
In an interview with Stephen Teo concerning his 2000 film
Platform, Jia said, "I think this feeling of home is something basic in my
work—it is a motif' (4). Michael Berry groups Jia's first three feature
films—Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasures
(2002)—as the "Hometown Trilogy" because he believes the idea of
guxiang (native home or hometown) plays a central place in these
films. All three films are set in Jia Zhangke's home province, Shanxi,
in northern China. Xiao Wu and Platform are set in Jia's hometown,
Fengyang, a small city in the poverty-stricken Shanxi, while Unknown
Pleasures is set in Datong, a city near Fengyang. Many critics have
emphasized the physical "location" of home in Jia's films—small rural
towns such as Fengyang or Datong. For example, Cui Shuqin sees
Jia's exploration of hometown in terms of space and as a negotiation
between the periphery and the center, the local and the global (Cui

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107). And Michael Berry in his analysis of Jia's "Hometown Trilogy"
went so far as to claim that the small towns such as Fengyang and
Datong in Jia's films indicate Jia's "conscious attempt to remap small
town China as the true heart of the country" (Berry 16-17).
Jia's cinematic embrace of his hometown, Fengyang, cannot
be denied, especially in his early films. However, Jia's vision of home
is more than a physical, local space situated in rural China. Jia made
three more feature films after the Hometown Trilogy: The World
(2004), Still Life (2006), and 24 City (2008). The World is set in Beijing,
China's capital city; Still Life is set in the ancient town Fengjie, a site
of China's controversial Three Gorges Dam project; 24 City is set in
Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in southwest China. The fact
that these three films invoke a feeling of home—despite being set in
geographical areas distant from Jia's birthplace (Fengyang)—places
Jia's earlier Hometown Trilogy in an entirely new context.
The idea of guxiang in Jia's films therefore is better translated
as "home" than as "hometown," because it denotes more than a
physical location. It indicates a primary "structure of feeling" and
provokes a melancholic, nostalgic longing for home. According to
Raymond Williams, a structure of feeling is a "particular quality of
social experience and relationship, historically distant from other
particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a
period" (Williams 131). The structure of feeling represented in Jia's
films is a sense of forever being in transition and involves a nostalgic
longing for home, which in this case is a community of space and
time. The title of Jia's second feature film, Platform, can be used to
illustrate this structure of feeling. The name "Platform" is inspired
by a song from the mid 1980s. In terms of space, platform refers to a
place from which one sets out and to which one also returns. However,
platform also indicates where we stand in the temporally extended
sequence and serves as a reminder of where we have been and where
we are going. Moreover, it implicitly questions whether the temporally
extended sequence has gone astray or lost its coherence.
The narrative of Platform traces the evolution of the lives of
members of a "performing arts troupe" (wengongtuan) in Fengyang
as they experience and negotiate the difficult and constantly changing
reality under Deng's market reforms. In the span of 12 years (1979
to 1991, the time during which the film is set), we see the temporal
displacement of the troupe. Most of the members of the troupe still

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live in Fengyang or nearby cities. However, Fengyang in 1991 differs
significantly from Fengyang in 1979. Time has changed. The members
of the troupe find themselves standing at a point in time when the past
cannot be recovered and the future cannot be predicted, as if time has
gone astray. This change evokes a crisis of existential temporality.
Even though the members of the troupe still live in their physical
hometown, they have lost their home in a metaphysical sense.
One scene in particular conveys the sorrow of the metaphysical
loss of home caused by the crisis of existential temporality. Toward the
end of the film, in a scene set in the middle of the dust road connecting
Fengyang with its neighboring cities, two of the performers dance
on the open bed of their transport truck while other cars and trucks
swiftly pass by. By this time, the troupe's name has been changed from
Fengyang County Rural Cultural Work Team to Shenzhen All-stars
Rock and Break-dance Electronic Band. The new name reveals the
awkwardness of the place in which the troupe members find themselves
in the new world: their dream of being the stars of Shenzhen, a special
economic zone that modernizes under Deng Xiaoping's economic
policies, is a stark contrast to their reality. The social results of market
reform for the members of the performing arts troupe are a lost past, a
fictional present, and an unknown future. The social sense of home is
lost in the passage of time for the troupe members, and an emergence
of an existential, temporal homelessness is implied.
The existential, temporal sense of homelessness implied
in Platform is explored more fully in 24 City. In the narrative, after
Factory 420 was established in 1958, thousands of workers were
displaced from homes throughout the country to relocate to Chengdu.
For example, Guan Fengjie, a real person, moved to Chengdu from
Haicheng, Liaoning in the 1960s. In 1958, Hou Lijin emigrated with
her mother from Shengyang. The fictional character Gu Minghua,
originally from Shanghai, was assigned to Factory 420 in 1978. Some
people, real and fictional, are Chengdu natives. The dramatic story of
Hao Dali losing her child on the journey from Shengyang to Chengdu
has aroused some controversy because it is fictional. However, the
message of enduring unfathomable sacrifice, voluntary or coerced, to
follow an ideal assigned by the state is clear. It voices the anguish and
despair of ordinary people as an effect of politics. Here we see that
the workers in Factory 420 were uprooted from their native towns and
their original social milieus. Factory 420 became the promise of a new

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home for the workers under socialism. Individuals were to participate
in the common destiny, in all-embracing structures of community
inside Factory 420.
Jia's concern is not whether Communist China actually
provided the workers with a new home or not. His interest is not at all
historical in the traditional/usual sense. There is not a single flashback
in 24 City to bring the audience back to the past. Cui Shuqin observes
that a central theme of the Fifth Generation filmmakers such as Zhang
Yimou and Chen Kaige is the search for history through collective
memory, whereas for the younger generation of underground and
independent filmmakers such as Wang Xiaoshui and Zhang Yuan, the
central theme is the search for history through "personal memory."
She argues that Jia Zhangke departs from both the Fifth Generation
and the younger generation underground and independent filmmakers
in that Jia is only concerned with space and not the subject of history
and memory (Cui 106-107). However, in 24 City, Jia's concern with
preserving the memories of the workers of Factory 420 is clear. In the
director's own words, "My interest is not in examining history but to
know that we must listen in order to understand individual experiences
after they encountered massive social change" (249).
On the surface, it seems that the director is interested solely in
preserving the workers' individual memories. However, the temporal
structure of 24 City as well as Jia's use of fictional characters, discussed
above, provide important clues to Jia's attitude toward history and
memory and to the temporality in the film. In 24 City, memory is given
a more fundamental role than history in the understanding of human
condition and human emotion. For the professional historian, memory
is to be disciplined by history. As Hayden White notes, "History is
memory cultivated in the interest of producing a 'collective' past on
the basis of which a collective identity can be forged" (320). In other
words, there are historical criteria regarding the reconstruction of the
past which dictate what should be remembered and what should be
forgotten. Jia certainly is not interested in reconstructing the "real" in
history by following the professional or amateur historian's agenda.
For him, memory belongs to the province of imagination, not history.
To imagine what the workers in Factory 420 went through is to
remind others to remember it. The purpose of the fictional characters
in the film is to express emotions rather than facts. As Paul Ricoeur
expresses it, "Fiction permits historiography to live up to the task of

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memory; victims whose suffering cries less for vengeance than for
narration" (189).
Although Jia's use of both real and fictional characters is
controversial, it is possible to argue that 24 City achieves a "structure
of feeling" that is central to different generations of the workers in
Factory 420. Jia's interviews with the workers deal with the past
experienced in memory as "absent presence," to use Paul Ricoeur's
phrase. "Absent presence" indicates a temporal as well as a spatial
separation demanding remembrance. The loss for the workers of
Factory 420 is not only the physical home inside Factory 420 but also
a sense of common temporality at the community level.
In 24 City, the relationship of each individual character to the
others is temporally structured. As sufferers of a common situation,
the workers of Factory 420 are oriented toward a remembered past, a
struggling present, and an unpredictable future. Their memories (real
or fictive) transform the supposedly objective group of individuals
into a community. Jia's quasi-past of the film's narrative is very
different from the past of historical narrative. History and memory
belong to two versions of time: the time of history is "the past" while
the time of memory is to manifest the absent past in "the present." By
focusing on what ought to be remembered, Jia situates the workers in
their own time—the present—and reflects on the time that is now past
and the possibilities unrealized. By emphasizing memory over history,
Jia clearly expresses the emotions rather than the facts of history, the
aspects of the past experienced in memory that professional historians
do not and cannot deal with because of the lack of documents and
proof. In this way, Jia's 24 City can be seen as a vehicle of historical
representation in its own right.
The closing scene of 24 City is a panorama shot of the
city Chengdu, a striking visual of urban modernity complete with
tall buildings amidst hazy air. Jia's filming of 24 City in Chengdu
is anchored in the unprecedented large-scale urbanization and
globalization of China. Like many films of his contemporary
underground and independent filmmakers, Jia's 24 City is categorized
as a film of China's "urban generation," a term referring to films that
center on the experience of urbanization and deterritorialization (Zhen
1-2). However, as discussed earlier, Jia not only is aware that it is the
city that makes up the contemporary scene. He also notes that the city
is the now of the present. In the now of the present, if the demolition

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of Factory 420 is a condition of the factory's workers, then Jia's
cinematic representation of 24 City can be said to be a project of the
production of locality as well as a product of the cultural dimensions
of the global flows, as discussed by Appadurai. However, whereas
Appadurai locates the global flows in a postnational or transnational
world, the specific historical and cultural conditions of China require
that we also locate them in China's postsocialist world.

Jing Xu and Dudley Andrew Comment:

Shu-chin Wu may have hit upon the reason why Jia Zhang
ke s films have achieved such a tremendous reputation, well above
others who ,like him, began as part of the urban generation. She shows
that 24 City, like the rest of his films but in a more blatant manner,
addresses three kinds of concerns: one kind, such as the change to
market socialism, is specifically Chinese; another, like global flows
across "relations of disjuncture, " pertains to "Modernity at Large, "
the title of Arjun Appadurai s book on which she heavily relies; and
still others amount to questions of the universal human condition,
like the anxiety over homelessness that is expressed at every moment
of this film. Her final sentence shows that in addition to articulating
certain rather disorienting conditions of our post-national epoch
(hence, addressing everyone who goes out of his way to experience
the film), 24 City formulates something of the specificity of "China s
post-socialist world" that aims first of all at Chinese spectators and
may lie out of the range of those viewers foreign to that society. May
we infer that the mixed genre (fiction/documentary) that articulates
a thick past (memory/history) is required to maintain this double
address (universal/Chinese)?
Wu realizes that Jia Zhangke s China has entered into a zone
of "post-socialist time, " and that this quite Sino-specific, tangible
structure of feeling provides motivation for his long-take aesthetic that
Western critics have been too quick to lump conveniently with the styles
of Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Tsai Ming-Liang, Bela Tarr, and Apitchatpong
Weeresthekal, that is, as part of the art film aesthetic preferred the
past two decades by sophisticated festivals and cinéphiles. Jia
Zhangke certainly shares something of this style, but in his case the
long-take is required to convey the recent draining away of prospects
for an organic social life in his homeland. Where previous Chinese

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filmmakers, including those critical of the State, organized optimistic
or satirical representations of social and personal progress, editing
their material rhythmically to produce the effects of human agency
and, through agency, the arc of a plot, Jia Zhangke s characters have
lost faith in action; even less do they believe in progress toward the
kind of social Utopia the Chinese proclaimed so fervently only a few
decades ago. His extended takes outlast action, trivializing the vain
pursuits of characters who feel increasingly useless; these shots
suspend society in the dullness of a present that advances only to the
jackhammer beat of economics and technology.
And yet, doesn't this film mark something quite dramatic, a
punctual moment that is anything but dull? 24 City was made at the
moment the carcass of this once-vibrant factory is being cut up to be
carted to the dump. This is the moment that the drudgery of routine
labor on the floor of the plant will be forever suspended. What lies
ahead will replace a massive, rusting factory together with something
like a "world theme park" on which the young can skate, like the girl
we see on the rooftop. 24 City is not a film about everyday life; it uses
the current trauma of the loss of home to put the entire community on
the couch of analyses, letting memories well up from the most distant
to most recent.

In his next film, I Wish I Knew, the process is reversed.

Present-day Shanghai claims to have achieved a plateau of plenty and
ofsocial peace, celebrating in its exposition all that has been gained in
recent years. But this naturally leads Jia Zhangke into retrospection, if
only to measure how far the city has traveled. And retrospection soon
turns up a series of personal and social traumas that deliver a kind
of shadow exposition. In this way, 24 City and I Wish I Knew are
united by more than their interviews and their mix of documentary and
fictional material. They comprise a dyad: in 24 City, anxiety about the
present leads to memories of a collective past, while in I Wish I Knew,
the smooth sailing of the modern social space of Shanghai leads to
anxieties coming from the city s past, not completely covered over by
the gaudy urban design, nor erasedfrom the well-dressed people who
probe their memories.

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