24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008)So all the Jia films I've watched concern themselves with the cost of China's economic boom. Where we see economic boom and progress, Jia's films focus on what they replaced - the upheaval, dislocation and the broken lives. They highlight not the construction of the new but the thoughtless demolition of what was. In
Platform, we see a theater troupe coping with the consequences of Western cultural influence. In
Still Life, we see the dislocation of masses of people to make way for the Three Gorges dam. Here we see a once-bustling factory that provided employment to thousands of workers being razed to the ground to make way for a sparkling new luxury apartment complex.
On the surface,
24 City feels like a conventional, talking heads documentary. I love the opening shots where the camera moves around the factory floor capturing the final days of production in Factory 420. We see burning ingots of steel being pounded into shape. It's a living, breathing, active factory in these shots and that just makes it even more chilling when we later see the floor emptied of all the machines and being stripped for materials. The bulk of the film is interviews with a handful of workers at the factory. But unlike typical documentaries, there is something incredibly formal and controlled about the way the film is composed and shot. The interviews are intermingled with these beautifully framed tracking shots of the factory buildings and the machinery as well as silent portraits of anonymous workers who simply pose for the camera without saying anything. They seem so graceful and dignified and in the few seconds where we linger on their faces, we can see that there are hundreds of stories akin to the ones we hear that will probably forever remain untold. The stories we do hear are extremely personal ones - about being separated from family members, about sacrifices made in exchange for employment, about the lack of job security and one thing that comes across loud and clear is how these buildings that are being demolished constituted these peoples' entire world. I was already very much caught up in the film when one of the interviewees suddenly made me question my impression of the film thus far. That's when I came to realize that the film is interweaving documentary with fiction somewhat seamlessly and that in itself communicates something beyond what the stories from the interviews are conveying. There's a sense that even the documentary segments are stories that are in some sense "constructed" by the narrator. There are vicissitudes of memory at play and perhaps Jia wants to acknowledge that truth itself is imprecise and unstable. One of my favorite things about the film is just how restrained both the film itself and the individual interviewees are. The protagonists' stories are never played for sentimental value and the camera never lingers on the images of destruction longer than necessary. Really like the score too (I think it's just one piece that plays repeatedly throughout the film) and those digital images are stunning.
pix, please tell me this is going to be eligible for the Filmspots next year.
Grade: A-