Nostalgia in the Age of Change As a member of the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers, Jia Zhangke seeks social and historical significance through a variety of means, including through public consciousness. From other creators of this category, he is distinguished by a more thorough and precise distinction between everyday experience and collective memory, as well as a unique style, as far from pathos and nostalgia, as expedient. His work has a universal character, and the heroes are ordinary people who try to grow with the changing world, but often are unable to keep up with the times. Who better than his compatriots to talk about the era of change?
Most of Jia’s films are based on real events that reflect the same process – the transformation of the native state, primarily on an economic scale. But behind every such act there is always something more important than the mere appearance of new industrial facilities like the blood-and-sweat dam in Still Life, and the unchanging gap between the violent transformations of the new capitalist era and the slow change in human behavior and mentality is revealed. Being a living witness to the synchronously reproduced processes of destruction and rebirth, he skillfully synthesizes documentary realism with special effects and brings a specific problem to a truly futuristic level.
At City 24, such a problem is the closure of the 420th plant in Chengdu, which developed aircraft equipment. Of course, for all workers, this was more than an unpleasant event, because the enterprise for decades was their only source of income and a kind of cradle of stable existence. Particularly dramatic are the stories of those who worked at the plant for many years. Many hours of video material, containing many interviews with different in every sense people, has developed into a rather peculiar movie, and there was a place for both professional actors and genuine heroes - ordinary people. In their lives, the bright trace of the socialist legacy has not yet faded away, and capitalism, as it turned out, did not reduce the difficulties, but only aggravated them.
The collection of memories of the past and the fixation of moments of the present make the inanimate institution a microsymbol of global order. Against this background, Jia explores the limits of human memory and its representation. Time is unified, and realism will always outpace nostalgia, but Zhangke has worthy ways to reflect all the branches of his people’s unified path. To understand the meaning of each of the stories told in the first person, you only need to replace the mode of direct narrative with the silence of the ellipsis, leaving a small part empty, unfinished and open the door to the world of poetry, visual stylization and spiritual aspirations. Feelings play a very important role here. Without them, each element loses its significance. That is why, for example, Zhangke prefers to depersonalize the truck driver crossing the gray ramshackle streets of Chengdu and install the camera not in the booth, but somewhere on the side, maintaining complete anonymity of the scene. What matters is the process itself. The movement is the reality of the endless sea of Chinese society, the flow of which is unstoppable and, at the same time, synonymous with the inner anxiety of each of its members, trying in vain to catch up with these changes. Many of them are lonely at heart, as is the heroine called Flower. Alone with her, she is melancholy and silent, but attracts eyes, and in the silence of this woman is much more hidden, in all the phrases of the film. The same can be said for each of the characters.
Jia Zhangke’s film, with the seemingly straightforwardness of the genre and style, still directly appeals to the audience, giving the opportunity to see beyond the feelings of loss and nostalgia something more, and perhaps turn to your own world of memory and feel the degree of ability or inability to feel the nostalgic sadness and transience of time allotted. And his principle of the interchangeability of the real and the fictional is probably the most profound example of the study of the fundamental foundations of world history within a single country.