Blog - Thursday, July 2, 2009 18:17 - 3 Comments

Returning to 24 City

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Daniel Gorman

“During those rare moments of reflection when I’m not doing what film critics are supposed to be doing – watching and evaluating movies that propose various escapes from modern life – I wonder what a different kind of cinema might be, a cinema that would lead us back into the modern world and teach us something about it. To imagine such a cinema requires traveling some distance from where we are…”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Essential Cinema”

“…the way the world is changing in general: How the big history of modern society changes the small history of a group of people, how the globalization we deal with in abstract terms – we read about it, we watch movies about it, we hear it in the news – is in fact something that hits home in very dramatic ways. Ultimately I wanted to show how those characters are defined in ways we are not so aware of, by the way global economics are changing…. These bigger trends are about the intimate daily lives of individuals.”

Olivier Assayas on Summer Hours

“The picture becomes evidence of the general human condition. It accuses nobody and everybody.”

John Berger

In this day and age, returning to a film for a second (or third) viewing is increasingly anathema to our critical apparatus. After all, movies are simply “product”, and the old product must be consistently, continually replaced with the new – as if they were items in a grocery store, complete with expiration dates. Not unrelated, we must pay less and less attention to, and spend less and less time with, even the newest releases, lest we inadvertently miss what comes next (always there is a next). Call it an assembly line of critical thought, churning out ideas and words with increasing speed, quality control be damned. The most recent Cannes proved particularly fertile in this respect, with “tweets” and live blogging establishing opinions and consensus before the last frame had advanced through the projector gate. Never mind the notion of grappling with complex works after only one viewing – speed is of the essence here. This doesn’t leave much time for contemplation or reflection, not withstanding those increasingly rare films that linger in ones mind for days or weeks - in with the new (Next!). One might be tempted to link this back to the Kael school of critical thought, although that seems both unfair and too limiting in scope. Our entire society has advanced past the point of lingering – to linger is to admit defeat in advanced capitalism.

I tinkered with some thoughts on Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City after a first viewing last year during the Chicago International Film Festival, despite my own misgivings (with my writing, not with the film). Such a complex work was bound to have details I hadn’t retained, rhymes and compositions that I hadn’t quite processed the first time through. Feel free to read those musings here. While I don’t fundamentally disagree with or recant any of those words (2008 is so long ago – do words themselves have expiration dates?), I admit to giving short shrift to several key elements of the film. The film’s structure, for instance (the two of us being reintroduced after a seven month hiatus), takes on an even more essential function. It is a testament to the stories being told on screen that the occasional fades to black might only register as punctuation to the inattentive (or first time) viewer. Far from it, as the fade outs become a key indicator (ala Resnais’ Love Unto Death) of expression – it becomes a matter of “Where the Stress Falls”. Zhang-ke indicates emotional beats, certainly, but also possible elisions – what someone doesn’t say becomes as important as what they do say. I also noticed a clearer sense of chronology, which is indicated in a series of visual motifs. A sign above the factory entrance is reduced, gradually, letter by letter. The flow of people into the factory is reversed later in the film with their flow outward, into a world they no longer know, with no work and a culture that has left them behind (it is a brave new world). A factory worker recalls the story of his first love dumping him while at a roller rink – an hour later, a young girl roller skates on the roof of a building, telling the filmmakers that her parent both work “at the factory”. The elderly worker who recounts his affection and admiration for his foreman is mirrored in the last interview, a young woman who reconnects with her parents in an effort to advance their social status and living conditions.

Most essential is the woman who recounts a testimony of profound loss – on a sanctioned leave from a passenger ship transporting workers to the munitions factory, the mother is separated from her child. Words can barely express the sense of loss projected from her eyes – her gaze, her tears indicate a trauma that few of us can even begin to fathom. And this trauma becomes the key organizing factor of the film – violent, irreparable separation, literal but also as broader metaphor - the violent wrenching of history progressing leaves a trail of collateral damage. The human psyche can only bear so much.

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Zhang-ke has already arrived in the upper echelon of essay film/documentarian hybrid artists – Godard, Marker, Varda, late period Kiarostami, some Hou, early Weerasethakul - none of whom have totally abandoned certain aspects of narrative (read: fiction) film. But the point is that, increasingly, such distinctions mean less and less. Here we have artists intuitively engaing in the world around them, using any and all tools at their disposal. I hesitate to use the term “mix-artist”, which seems to refer to the more pop-art inclined, and any way my laundry list of luminaries pre date the terminology. Regardless, after a second viewing, the use of both professional actors and real documented factory workers becomes, paradoxically, both more and less important. Less because the inherent human drama is so profound, the impact so great, that one might be inclined to simply erase, or ignore, such distinctions. More so, because, as Manohla Dargis has pointed out, such distancing effects “can work beautifully for a movie about profound dislocation”. I originally suspected that actress Joan Chen recounting tales of her own first film was simply too pat, too meta, to be anything other than a overreaching, cute idea. But the complex ways in which the personal and the hisorical intermingle seem to demand such attention – legend has it that Mrs. Mao herself hand picked Ms. Chen for her first starring role. The “Great Leap Forward” was many things to many people, and Zhang-ke’s latest would seem to be so as well. Nostalgia and regret intermingle seamlessly, in fact as well as in fiction. Funny how few people realize that the past will point the way to the future, leaving us to sort out an increasingly complicated “now”. Welcome to the present tense.