24 City is a documentary about the
transformation of Factory 420 in Chengdu
from the secret manufacture of military
aircraft engines in 1958 to, after the
Vietnam War, a downsized and remodeled
facility producing consumer products,
and then, more recently, into a privately
owned real-estate development called “24
City”. This sounds pretty straightforward,
but because it’s a Jia Zhangke film, it
qualifies as an adequate description only
in the most skeletal fashion. Factory 420
employed almost 30,000 workers, so a
lot of life experience and displacement is
involved in this multifaceted story—a good
half-century of Chinese history. And Jia is
so desperate to discover the truth of his
subject that he’s willing to employ anything
and everything, including artifice, if this will
bring him any closer to what urban renewal
is in the process of quickly obliterating.
The theme of his film—of all his features
to date, in fact—is the displacement coming
from historical upheavals in China and
the various kinds of havoc they produce:
physical, emotional, intellectual, political,
conceptual, cultural, economic, familial,
societal. And sometimes the style involves
a certain amount of displacement as well,
such as when he cuts from a speech in late
2007 about recent changes in 24 City
before a full audience in an auditorium to
a shot of an almost empty stairway that
plays over the same speech, with one
figure climbing the steps on two successive
floors.
Jia addresses his ambitious theme
by mixing documentary and fiction, a
procedure he’s been developing in various
ways throughout his career. It’s apparent
here in the uses of music as well as in the
mix of actors and nonactors, in both the
mise en scène and the editing. But of course,
blatant employments of theater and fiction,
of pre-arrangement and construction, have
informed documentary filmmaking since its
earliest phases. It’s never enough simply to
assert that “capturing reality” is the aim;
there are always other agendas, and teasing
out those agendas is partly a matter of
discerning various stylistic decisions. When
the Lumière brothers filmed workers leaving
their own factory in 1895, using a stationary
camera setup explicitly recalled in 24 City,
the mode employed isn’t simply “actuality”
but also a form of surveillance. And by
the time Robert Flaherty makes Nanook
of the North (1922), the mixture of modes
has become still more complicated. In the
film’s first extended sequence, Nanook the
Eskimo in his boat paddles to the shore and
disembarks, performing the equivalent of
a circus act in which many clowns emerge
from a tiny car as he helps to bring out
each member of his family from the boat’s
concealed interior: several children, his
wife, the family dog. Documentary, in short,
is a form of show business from the very
outset, something constructed as well as
found.
So when Kevin B. Lee, in his review in
Cineaste (Fall 2009, Vol. XXXIV, No. 4)
rightly calls 24 City “an oral history project
transformed into performance art,” we
should acknowledge that Jia is being both
innovative and experimental in one sense
and highly traditional and commercial in
another. Even if he’s being more obvious
about the arranged and/or fictional
elements here than the Lumières or Flaherty
were—by utilizing four professional actors
and four actual factory workers for the
eight interviews featured in this film, as
well as a cowriter, Zhai Yongming, who
comes from Chengdu—he is none the less
adhering to certain conventions that are
as old as the documentary form itself. It’s
important to realize, moreover, that Lu
Liping, Chen Jianbin, Joan Chen, and Zhao
Tao are all recognizable as movie actors to
Chinese viewers. So the unconventional
ways these actors are used has to be
weighed against the various commercial
benefits derived from their presence. In
fact, although Jia started making features
with state approval only after Xiao Wu (1997), Platform (2000), and Unknown
Pleasures (2002), 24 City (2008) has
been his biggest commercial success in
China to date, surpassing both The World (2004) and Still Life (2006).
Let’s consider each of the roles played
by these actors, as well as the overall
historical development implied by the order
in which they appear—a pattern that was
carefully traced by James Naremore in
Film Quarterly (Summer 2009, Vol. 62, No.
4) when he placed this film at the head of
his annual ten-best list. Lu Luping, first
seen carrying an IV drip bottle, plays Hao
Dali, the oldest, who joined the factory the
same year it opened, when she was 21.
Her heartbreaking story about losing her
three-year-old son on a rest-stop during
her journey by boat from Shanghai to
Chengdu—whether this is a “real” story
derived from an actual interview, a fiction,
or something in between—followed by her
watching an old propaganda film on TV,
painfully dramatizes the degree to which
nationalist and military obligations could
supersede family in 1958. This is in striking
contrast to the final interview with Su Na
(Jia regular Zhao Tao), born in 1982 in
Chengdu, who voices a very different kind of
nationalist sentiment when she defends her
capitalist career as a “personal shopper”
who has purchased a new car to enhance
her “credibility”, and who tearfully says she
wants to buy her factory-worker parents an
apartment in the new 24 City development.
(It’s important to recognize that while
westerners tend to view communism
as “collectivist” and capitalism as
“individualist,” the Chinese state has tended
to view each practice over half a century of
social transformation as a particular form
of civic duty.) And in between these polar
extremes are the monologues delivered by
Song Weldong (Chen Jianbin), born in 1966
in Chengdu—an assistant to the factory’s
general manager, seated at a counter, who
recalls street-gang fights and having been
spared from one beating by the recent
death of Zhou Enlai—and by the somewhat
younger Xiao Hua (Joan Chen), a factory
worker named after the eponymous heroine
of one of Chen’s earliest films, who plays
on audience recognition by discussing her
close resemblance to Joan Chen. If the
latter registers as a joke, it’s a joke with
some serious intent, because Jia evidently
wants the Chinese viewers’ emotions
aroused by these monologues to echo those
solicited by the same actors in fiction films,
and he also wants the viewers to be aware of
these echoes. And clearly the juxtapositions
of nationalist consciousness with both
street fights and business, as emphasized
in these latter two monologues, are part of
the ambiguities and ambivalences that Jia
is intent on exploring, with pop culture and
state policy both playing relevant roles.
It’s important to add that the
performative role played by nonactors
is no less important to the film’s feeling
and design than the performances by
the actors, and not simply or necessarily
because they’re always closer to “the
truth”. (Some of the formal poses of the
portraits of workers are made to seem
more artificial than some of the staged
and written monologues, and the periodic
fades to black, disrupting the flow of the
interviews, discourages us from taking
them as seamless documentary or fictional
wholes.) Hou Lijun, born in 1953 and
interviewed on a bus, may have more to say
about displacements, family separations,
and job loss than anyone else in the film,
and her final statement, which Jia repeats
as an intertitle—“If you have something to
do, you age more slowly”—is clearly one the
key lines.
It’s no less important to bear in mind
that part of the financing of 24 City came
from the “24 City” development itself, much
as the theme park which The World both
explores and deconstructs also helped
to finance that film. So there are multiple
agendas at work here, some of them
seemingly in conflict with one another, and
the desire to experiment is tied to a kind of
ideological juggling act that has made some
Chinese viewers weep during portions of
this film (reportedly, especially during
the final sequence), but has also worried
some critics, Chinese and western alike,
about some of the implicit compromises
and cross-purposes involved in such an
enterprise. But Jia has been an ambitious
risk-taker throughout his career, and the
topics as well as the emotions that he
chooses to take on here are, perhaps by
necessity, as ambiguous and as openended
as China itself.
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Jonathan Rosenbaum is the coauthor, with Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa, of Abbas Kiarostami (University of Illinois Press, 2003) and the author of Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia (University of Chicago Press, 2010), among other books.