I saw Jia Zhang Ke’s recent film, 24 City (2008), at the Athens International Film and Video Festival in Ohio in late April. Before starting to write about this film, I have to admit that a month or so has passed since I watched it and it was the very first Jia Zhang Ke’s film I’ve ever watched.
With my laziness being shamefully acknowledged, I can say that I really enjoyed watching 24 City. I had very little knowledge about the movie and its director except that Jia was one of the Chinese Sixth Generation directors, who were known for their underground filmmaking produced outside of the state government’s support. To be honest, I was more familiar with Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiaoshuai among the Sixth Generation directors.
24 City focuses on the story of former workers and their children at Factory 420 – a state-owned factory established in the1950s to provide military aircraft. The city of Chengdu, where Factory 420 used to be, has now transformed into a state-planned urban center, called 24 City, filled with high-rise apartment complexes and five-star hotels. The film mostly consists of a series of talking-head style interviews with the former and present residents of Chengdu – diverse in terms of their gender, age, and social mobility – while they recount their life experiences in the last 50 years or so.
At the beginning of the film I thought that it would be a very long and depressing two hours. However, as time went by, I felt that the film was not a conventional documentary whose primary purpose was a faithful documentation of real events and people. At one point I began to realize some of the interviewees were performing their roles and their actions were apparently staged. My suspicion about the fictional components of the film came to be certain with the appearance of the actress Joan Chen playing a former middle-aged female worker. According to this character’s own account, her nickname was “Little Flower” because of her physical resemblance to Joan Chen – Little Flower (1980) is a Chinese film in which Joan Chen starred. One of the interviewees, a personal shopper and former factory worker’s daughter who purchases luxury goods from Hong Kong for the rich in China, also looked familiar to me. I searched this actress’ name on the Internet Movie Database and found out that she was also an actress who had starred in a few films by Jia Zhang Ke.
I think that it’s a clever choice on the part of the filmmaker to fictionalize parts of the film blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. The film generally evokes sympathy with previous and present residents of Chengdu and nostalgic feelings toward the good-old days in pre-industrialized China. However, fictional interview footage functions to pull the audience out of the nostalgic, melodramatic identification with the subject by creating a critical distance between the subject and the audience. This postmodernist interplay between nostalgia and irony is the strongest aspect of the film.
The life stories that the interviewees (both real people and actors) told the audience are in fact very sad, but I don’t think the director wants us to remain sorrowful for what has happened to the residents and the city of Chengdu since the 1950s. I think that the film invites us to critically examine, rather than romantically identifying with, the disconnection and disorientation experienced by Chinese people in the past few decades in the midst of fast urbanization and industrialization. This type of anti-romantic view is what distinguishes the Sixth Generation directors from their predecessors, Fifth Generation directors, such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.
JaeYoon Park © 2009
