The Present Subjunctive: Silence as (Im)Possibility
The Present Subjunctive: Silence as (Im)Possibility
In Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew (2010)
---- “The most prominent characteristic of Shanghai is that almost all the important figures relevant to the modern history of China have some relation with this city. …This film is not about one Shanghai citizen’s impression of the daily life in the city, but the legendary experiences of the city, about wars, politics and cultural movements.” (qtd. in Mao)
---- “I get access to the details of history through cinematography; it is hard go make sense of history without details, especially the emotions and experience under the historical circumstances. … What I care about is what is hidden behind the abstract terms, the life details disturbed by politics and forgotten in time.” (qtd. in Shi)
---- “Apart from the 18 interviewees, the true legends of the city are the hundreds of thousands of Shanghainese who don’t have the chance to tell their stories.”(qtd. in Wang)
The words above, excerpted from the various interviews of Jia Zhangke on I Wish I Knew (2010), could possibly sketch some important aspects of his latest documentary – about its concept, form, and content. Shanghai, since its forced open-up to foreign trades in the late 19th century, has witnessed the vicissitudes of the century of modernization of China. It is thus both conceivable and intriguing that Jia Zhangke, whose previous features pose a “powerful critique about what is lost along the marathon route to modernization”, chooses to make a documentary about the history of such a city (M. Berry 14). Equally conceivable is the “assumption that it’s useful to examine the past to understand the frequently wretched circumstances of the present and their effect on the behavior and thinking of Chinese people”(Rayns), given the tradition of yishi weijian (“using history as a mirror”) – at least on the rhetorical level - in the practice of historiography in China. But in effect, the crux of this piece of historiography can never be tackled as neatly as it is in rhetoric. Examining the three excerpts in the beginning, we can at once notice a gap: on what grounds and by which means can the personal histories of the 18 legends be connected to the present of the broader public, “who don’t have the chance to tell their stories”? It is the intention of this paper to approach this question by disentangling the film in terms of its style and content and tracing a path back to Jia Zhangke’s documentary cinema.
Before proceeding to any analysis, a review of the responses to the film might be helpful in understanding the intricacy of the film. The complexity of its background (“being commissioned by the state-run Shanghai Film Studio” as the most conspicuous condition in this case), content and style of the film indeed provides every audience a handle on the film that will lead to a judgment potentially disparate from others. For instance, as described by Tony Rayns, some think “it’s just a by-the-numbers commission piece”, strongly implying that the official status of the film has positioned it safely in line with the mainstream ideology. Others, like Tony Rayns himself, better-informed of Chinese history, culture and politics, reads into the text and grasps the abundant implications that justify the attitude of the director as “inherently… challenging”. Among all the contemplations on the film, Yang Beichen’s article appeals to me with the argument that the interviews of the film provide a false text of oral history. The mission of oral history - to recuperate the covered minor histories so as to “challenge the accepted myths of history” (qtd. in Yang) – is undermined by Jia Zhangke’s problematic decoupage (cut-out) of history. Yang argues that the way Jia conducts (reminding the interviewee that it is an interview) and presents (with polished effects and corresponding the interviews with specific historical periods) the interviews encourages the logical integration of raw experiences on the part of the interviewee, and prompts the viewer to accept the legitimacy of history, for the end product on the screen is a collection of de-historicized, regularized and self-referential interviews. Although I don’t totally agree with Yang’s point of view in that he has completely ruled out other non-interview elements in the film, I would like to take this conclusion of his as my departing point: “by the means of imaging and writing the history, the film is undoubtedly reinforcing the relation between history and the author – not that between history and those who have experienced it.” In my approach to the problem announced in the first paragraph, about how the director bridges (or fails to) the gap between the history and the present, the legends and the ordinary people, the premise I would base my analysis on is that I Wish I Knew is a constructed, calculated collage on almost all levels, to the point that the kind of spontaneity and immediacy one would experience in a work like Shoah (1985) should not be a major criterion for evaluating it in the first place.
Although the “intention” and “philosophy” of the director should never be taken into full account, it is still a legitimate parameter by which one determines a feasible approach to the work. Interestingly, the declaration of Jia Zhangke made in 2010 to contribute to the genre of documentary in China with more “imagination and experimentation” (Mao) returns us to one of the director’s interviews in 2001. In that interview, Jia shows his cognition of “the impossibility of true objectivity for even the most realist style” (McGrath 84), stating that the realism in his film is a device to express his inner “feeling of the real” because it “is on the level of aesthetics whereas reality just stays in the realm of sociology”(qtd. in McGrath 110). Nine years later he says something similar: “…(for an unemotional historical account) you can refer to historic books, which record more accurately the historical incidents, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be an aesthetic work. Here the history is treated with cinematic apparatus, with a filmic work, it is supposed to impact emotionally” (“Phoenix” 5). In this sense, Jia Zhangke’s fiction films and documentaries are all set to appeal to the aesthetic experience and resonance of the audience, with the aid of cinematic devices. Therefore, I would argue that with such aesthetic philosophy, I Wish I Knew at every level intervenes with the objectivity presumed by the genre of documentary and breaks the particular principles of oral history presupposed by the talking-head-style. But the multiple interventions do not necessarily lead to what Yang posits as “a defense of the legitimacy of the current regime”, but, as far as I see it, to a point of ambiguity, where what is not spoken can be sensed, what is spoken can be denied, yet without reaching articulation. In the following paper, I will approach the film by the means of textual analysis, in which I will peel off the layers of subjective implants that construct and modify the history represented in the film and discuss the film’s connection to and difference from Jia Zhangke's previous works. By doing so, I will make my point of how (in)significant it is the ordinary Shanghainese and Shanghai as a city in its present tense, which are supposed to be the successor and manifestation of the consequence of history, are silenced in I Wish I Knew.
In order to disentangle the film, I will first break I Wish I Knew down to four levels: the socio-geographic-historic order by which the interviews are selected and arranged, the cinematic apparatuses used to modify the verbal content of the interviews (including sounds, mise-en-scène and movie clips), the phantom-like role played by Zhao Tao and the urban scenes in Shanghai. The four layers are not entirely separable but at some point closely interrelated, demonstrating Jia Zhangke’s effort to construct a cinematic Shanghai where different temporalities are introduced.
The first layer is referred to the 18 interviews constituting the body of the film, loosely covering the important periods in the modern history of China: the anti-Japanese war, the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the economic reforms. Jia “use(s) chronologic order as well as the spatial order to structure the film.” (“Listen”) However, regarding this historiography, Jia is highly selective and formalistic. Before everyone else, Jia positions Chen Danqing, writer and painter, in the beginning of the array of interviews. Chen’s account about the period prior to and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution establishes itself as the keynote of at least a large part of the film: he recollects the demographic formation of the old lanes in Shanghai and his childhood activities there. It was a time of change, when the remnants of the “old society” - the life-style reminiscent of the 30s - were exposed in a state of dislocation and soon to be cleansed and when one’s political alignment would determine one’s fate, just like what Chen says in the interview: "In each lane there was usually one boy who was the best fighter… we had first to decide whom we should befriend. It made the difference whether you were the bullier or the bullied." Putting this talk at the very beginning, Jia extracts it from its historical context and transforms it into a transcending political allegory.
The following interviews can be divided into five groups: the three groups based in Shanghai are roughly arranged chronologically (Shanghai in the 30s, the Cultural Revolution, and after the economic reform), while another group of interviewees based in Taiwan and another in Hong Kong, are interspersed with the three Shanghai groups. Taiwan and Hong Kong, two alternative spaces, suggests the alternative social formations after 1949 and parallel temporalities that had been shut off from the public discourse after the takeover/liberation of Shanghai by CCP in 1949. In order to achieve the contrast, as Tony Rayns correctly points out, Jia sidesteps the period when CCP and KMT were faced with a common enemy and formed some cooperation. In Jia’s rendering of the period of 30s - 40s, once the historical external enemy is almost completely ruled out , internal conflict and the consequence change of political regime gains the significance as the main issue on the path of China towards modernization and source of sadness (beiqing) for the individual (“Phoenix” 5).
The fact that the leaving-or-staying dynamic is privileged over chronological order is highlighted in the transition from Wei Ran’s interview about his mother Shangguan Yunzhu to Wei Wei. Shangguan Yunzhu, who was already a popular actress before 1949, died a tragic death in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution. Wei Wei, on the other hand, is an actress of the similar period with Shangguan’s, yet she left Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1948 and indeed survived Shangguan. In Wei Ran’s recount, Hong Kong also happened to be the dream place of his sister, who attempted to flee to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution, but the plan was miserably aborted in the end. The transition from the absurd, fanatic 1968 back to the bleak, uncertain 1948, together with Wei Wei’s line in Spring in a Small Town (1948) (“If I say I’d like to come with you, will you still say as you wish?”) poses a retrospective question that is to be answered by no one. The impulse of looking back aroused by this contrast gets one to reflect on how easily a person’s trajectory of life could have been affected by a single choice, and what made the choice so excessively weighty was the arbitrary political environment.
On the second layer, the mise-en-scènes, camera movement, movie clips and the use of sound in the interviews further intervene with the meanings created by the literal accounts of the interviewees. Here, Jia Zhangke practices the “a lot of Eisensteinian montage”(“Listen”), whose imagistic collision between shots or within one shot can give rise to the perceptual truth out of material. This immediately opens up much more possibilities of “dialogue between the work and the viewer” (Antonine-Dunne 6) In the film, the most effective montage editing is found in the interviews of Wang Peimin and Huang Baomei. Both accounts are concerned with some kind of success with the socialist project: the CCP’s takeover of Shanghai and the rising social status and recognition of Chinese workers. The concomitant non-verbal elements, however, digress from the verbal grip of the interviewees and establish plentiful space for dialogue between the viewer and the film (in stead of the history narrator).
Introduced by the sound of telegraph clicking (a tribute to the underground communists as represented in The Eternal Wave (1958)), Wang Peimin takes the interview in Shanghai Chedun Film Studio. Before her interview, there is a staged shot of Wang watching the shooting of a scene of the PLA troops patrolling along the street of the studio, where an Old Shanghai before the takeover is rebuilt. In her recount, Peimin’s father Wang Xiaohe, an underground communist, was executed by the Nationalists before she was born, and on the day of liberation, her mother, who was already insane, rushed to the troops to look for her husband. Then the clip that follows is from a socialist propaganda film Battle in Shanghai (1959), which shows a boisterous, triumphalist celebration of the Liberation. Everyone in the greeting crowd wears an expression of enthusiasm identical to anyone else’s. The captain appears in a close shot, pompously declaring the victory of the people. The juxtaposition of Wang’s interview and the clip at once problematizes the official historical narrative and representation: how is the cost for revolution to be remembered in the public memory? The celebrating scene in the film is so artificial that it is of stark contrast with Wang’s genuine sorrow relating the loss her family has undergone for the communist ideal and the final victory. If the sadness of the “victor” hasn’t yet been included in the official historical narrative, what about the loser in this civil war? Why then the result of a civil war is distorted as “the annihilation of the imperialistic forces” (as is stated enthusiastically by the captain in the film)? These questions are responded to by Wang Tong's realistic depiction of the departure for Taiwan in 1949 and his anecdote about civil war, in which two former classmates had to turn adversary to each other.
The model worker Huang Baomei's interview is taken at two locations: the splendid USSR-style Shanghai Exhibition Centre, where she shook hands with Chairman Mao, and the dilapidated factory where she used to work. Against the background of the deserted factory, Wang cheerfully tells her experience as the delegate of Chinese youth to the International Youth Conference in Vienna and being cheered as “Beautiful Chinese”. The following clip from Xie Jin's docudrama, in which Huang acted herself, induces associations in two dimensions: with delicate lighting and emotional voice-over, it restores the pride and glory she had in the 60s as a worker and enhances the contrast between past and present; it also gives out an illustration of the Beautiful Chinese, resonating with what Zhu Qiansheng suggests in the previous interview about the “good” image of China as opposed to the Antonioni’s realistic documentary.
On the third level, Zhao Tao's wandering throughout the film is the most mysterious part. According to Jia and Zhao's explanation, it is supposed to be a character “coming from the past in search of something”. If anything, she reminds one of the angels in Wings of Desire(1988). They all wander through the urban landscape in contemporary clothes, but never get into contact with anybody, as Zhao says: “Others don’t see me. Only I can see them.” The discussion of the angels in the Wenders’ film applies here in terms of the association between the lonesome wanderer’s figure with “ruins and the destructive forces of history”: the angels in Wings are bearing a sense of historical task to “to observe, collect, testify, preserve” (Casarino 170). It also invokes Benjamin’s prophetic writing of the “angel of history”: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage .... The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” (qtd. in Casarino 170) The angel played by Zhao, however, appears more concerned, more experienced and more reserved. Her only reaction to any other figure in the film occurs before the interview of Wei Ran: she is watching a clip in a theatre. The clip, at its first appearance, does not have credits recognizing the title and actress. At the question one character asks another: “Isn’t that the former Queen of Yueju Opera Shang Shuihua?” Zhao, for the first time and the only time in the film, acts as if she has recognized the protagonist. Then she steps out of the theatre and walks along the debris of the Bund then under reconstruction, all soaked in a shower, as Wei Ran's voice cuts in off-scene. The suspense of who it is in the clip is finally solved in the replay of the clip (extended to an additional close-up of Shangguan) showing credits. The act of recognition in the movie, by Zhao Tao, and belatedly by the audience, in this light, can be interpreted as an act of “awakening the dead”- or in this case, awakening the damaged from the depths of historical trauma.
Another reference to history, interestingly, is Zhao’s walk in the Shanghai EXPO Park. It in some way “testifies to” the observations made in Jia Zhangke’s 2004 feature The World, in which the theme park in Beijing replete with miniatures of the landmarks around the world is sarcastically represented as a capitalistic dream that traps the working class migrant young men and women in this virtual world of “model reproductions… and digital reality” (M. Berry 123). If her reaction to Shangguan Yunzhu’s screen image can be read as recognition, then can her aimless wandering through the debris of the city (although they are for the construction of the new) be interpreted as an failed attempt to find what she is seeking? The angels in Wings of Desire come down to the mortal world for they find the poeticism of the human world. Is it why Zhao Tao keeps isolated from the city – that she finds so few to recover and nothing to preserve? Or maybe just the opposite? The enigmatic figure, the only active agent that bonds the history and the present of the city (even the interviewer is concealed in all the interviews), leaves just a large void of silence.
The final level is the contemporary urban landscapes in the film. Visually, Shanghai is presented as a city of transition. Unlike the images of Hong Kong and Taipei, which are cities in a fixated state, most of the shots in Shanghai are filled with the contrast of the established and demolition in the same frame. In the film, on the train just like that in Dust in the Wind (1985), Hou Hsiao-Hsien mentions old locations in Shanghai were being demolished in the 90s. In Hong Kong, the shot of the sign of Shanghai Road, and also the Cantonese song “The Bund” (shanghai tan), the only famous song that has Shanghai in its lyrics, imply that the identity of Shanghai is being shaped in nostalgia by the diasporas and lost in its birthplace. In the interviews based in these two places, Shanghai becomes “an idealized site … etched on the Chinese psyche” (M. Berry 15), an object of nostalgia and imagination, tinted with “a melancholic longing and projected from a site far removed” (15).
Then what is happening in side Shanghai, for the time being, in the rapid development and startling transition? The two figures speaking out for the contemporary period (after the economic reform) are Yang Huaiding and Han Han. The two interviewees are both forerunners of the market economy, while the former benefited from the burgeoning stock market in the late 80s, the latter from the age of media. But in comparison with the previous delicately structured interviews around the 49-complex, the question of leaving or staying, what is the counterbalance to these two legends? Where is the sadness of the present life, since Jia claims that he has been “repeating the message: our lives are actually passive. There is always a great power controlling us. We have not yet acquired a more relaxed environment and space for the self? (“Carving”)”
At this point, the film has fallen adverse to the principle of oral history, which is supposed to allow “heroes not just from the leaders, but from the unknown majority of the people” (Thompson 23). But in the first place, Jia with the project titled “Legend” did not start in the spirit of “naïve realism” to break the qualifications for the entries into the “accepted myths of history”(24). He is, with all the structural devices and cinematic apparatuses, constructing a counter myth of history as opposed to the communist history of class struggle and Leninist partyism. Regarding the interviewee’s memories about 1949, what Jia is concerned about is that the diverse memories of people on different stances “are far from forming a kind of ‘public memory’” (“Phoenix” 4). Working on something in the hope that it can become “common” sense, one cannot help resorting to the “authoritarian judgment inherent in the tradition” (Thompson 24) of historiography. In the case of I Wish I Knew, Jia Zhangke explains that he’s criterion for the interviewee is that they “are more conscious of the historical progression and more articulate about the details” (“Carving”) and “how much historical complexity he has, how much historical association he can evoke, how appealing his language is”(Mao). But again, the contrast between the interviews, the directorial intervention like mise-en-scene and movie clips, at times challenge the privileged position of the interviewee with the use of language.
Along this line, the polarity of “those who can speak” and “those who cannot speak” is deliberately kept visible in the film. This tension is particularly detectable in the sequence after Han Han’s interview, when the hand-held camera captures the expressions of the white-collars waiting for the elevators in an office building. In contrast with Han Han’s confidence and vantage point of talking, their expressions are much less glowing. The off-scene ringtone of the elevators enhance the sense of suppression of the scene. However, Jia’s treatment of the silent public is basically ambiguous. The public scenes are shot with different styles, for instance, like the mahjong-playing and dancing, are shot with soft-lighting, close-ups and smooth camera movement. Are these remainder or reenactments of the “bourgeoisie life-styles (that) were transformed” in the socialist agenda (“Phoenix” 4)? A similar dilemma also takes place in the depiction of migrant workers at the construction site of EXPO. If the banner on the wall of the workers’ canteen shows, as Jia has always been doing, a critique of the fruit of globalization and the national project of urbanization not benefiting the individuals who have labored in it, then the break-dance the young man worker performs on the construction site is relatively depoliticized and opens up more possible associations. This shows the potential of montage in such a multi-layered, convoluted documentary. Without languages, the effectiveness of montage further (or going back to its original state) relies on “capacity of memory and mind to make images” on the part of the recipient, when “associative images (are) formed by assembling sense matter brought together through the mind’s propensity to leap to a conclusion.” (Antonine-Dunne 7)
In terms of the filmic techniques of the people in public space, it is noteworthy that people as subjects of the camera sometimes look staged, rehearsed and instructed. Staged or not, the smooth camera movement (like the panning shot of workers in the port), proper lighting (like the scene of playing mahjoon deep in the alley) or the tinted images are all proof that it by no means claims its status as xianchang(on-the-spot), but an authorial control over the media to convey “a feeling of the real”. In fact, this image quality can be attributable to the use of DV. Jia says in 2003 that “digital interacts with its subjects in a very quiet way enabling me to capture a cold, distant, almost abstract quality” (qtd. in M. Berry 138). This abstractness can be already sensed in his 30-min documentary In Public. In the opening long take panning around the waiting room, the regular-paced movement of the video camera (more free-moving) and the objects of the camera create a sense of alienation rather than illusion of reality. The introduction of the new media may have influenced the philosophy of the director of realism and objectivity. In Dong (2006) and Useless (2007), there are also staged scenes and actions that foregrounds the different states of working rather than the action, such as the demolishing scene of four workers choreographed to a certain rhythm. In the interview of 24 City(2008), Jia mentions his impulse to “integrate reality” on a “cultural level” and the urge to imagine, to fictionalize after documenting a large amount of historical facts (“Seeking”). At that point, the insistence on the “feel of the real” in the present converges with the turn to fictionalization so as to write the history in the subjective projection, redefining his definition and practice of documentary. However, in his previous works, the subjectivity of the people is not solely created through the stylistic staging and posing. In Dong and Useless, there is a bipolar division of speaking positions, where the artists, who are better with expression, and the workers, who take order from the artists in completion of the projects, both sides have the chance to talk. In I Wish I Knew, however, the people contemporarily living in Shanghai merge into the background and become real abstract symbols.
In general, I Wish I Knew is a collage of different images representing different temporalities, each temporality open to the association with a certain political or social condition. Edited in the Eisensteinian spirit, it creates new meanings outside the words of the talking heads through filmic tricks, but also runs the risk of uncertainty. In the paper, I discerned the film into four levels. Firstly, the personal historical recounts by the interviewers are integrated and rearranged into a tale of three locations: the CCP’s takeover of Shanghai in 1949 becomes the pivot of the film, the old tradition of Shanghai are transferred to Taiwan and Hong Kong, which in turn become two systems of reference. The talks based in Taiwan and Hong Kong supplement the basically lineal historiography of Shanghai with alternative temporalities and possibilities. Secondly, the elements outside the interviews, such as the mise-en-scene and movie clips, sometimes create shocking effects out of their collision with the interviewers’ recounts, falsifying and testing the verbal testimonies. Thirdly, Zhao Tao, wandering across the debris on the construction sites, can be regarded as the embodiment of a retrospective viewpoint, searching around to recover what has been forgotten, ruined and repeated. Fourthly, the contemporary urban scenes of the daily life in Shanghai are interspersed across the film. However, for the contemporary periods, the most intriguing point is that there is no direct counterbalance to the values and experiences mentioned by the two interviewees – the two triumphs. The silence of the ordinary people in the urban scenes thus significantly calls for the viewer’s attention. But on the other hand, shot in different styles, the urban scenes resist a generalizing analysis in terms of their to functions. If we examine the documentaries by Jia in these years, the director tends to recreate the reality that fit in with his subjective perception of what’s real and to integrate the complex realities through the recreation. However, due to the imbalance of this film, the subjectivities of the present Shanghainese are totally missed out, and cannot be recuperated by simply reading through their images. Just like Zhao Tao cannot find a way to participate in the present, the dynamics of testifying to and revising historical and political accounts in the first two-thirds of the film does not effectively connect to the present condition. The English title of the film is in subjunctive mood present tense and it actually means: “I don’t know at this point.” With the history part sort-of straightened out successfully, the contemporary conditions of Shanghai are dissipated into oblivion.
Notes
1. The Chinese title of the film, Haishang Chuanqi (“legends on the sea”) is derived from the original project title Shanghai Chuanqi (“legends of Shanghai”). Jia switched the first two characters to fit in with the diasporic identity of some of the interviewees, but the basic structure remains.
2. Other potentially “legendary” incidents are also missed out, such as (but not restricted to) the first National Congress of CCP in the 20s, which is much-propagated in the official history, and the Defense of the Sihang Warehouse in 1938, fought by a nationalist battalion of 800 soldiers against the Japanese army, known in China as the Eight Hundred Heroes.
3. The only information about the Resistance War against Japan appears in the account of Zhang Yuansun, whose grandfather, Zhang Yiyun, the mogul of Chinese modern industry, donated an airplane to the Chinese military. Even this is mediated by the experience of Yuansun’s father (ransacking of house and confiscation of personal possessions) during the Cultural Revolution.
Works Cited
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Berry, Michael. Jia Zhangke's "Hometown Trilogy". New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Casarino, Cesare. "'Wings of Desire' (Or, Fragmentary Representation as Historical Necessity)." Social Text 24 (1990): 167-181.
Jia, Zhangke. "Listen to Jia Talk about I Wish I Knew (Ting Jia Zhangke Jiangshu Haishang Chuanqi)." 26 Apr. 2010. Web. 5 May 2011. <http://i.mtime.com/926069/blog/4082465/>.
---. “Carving the Sculpture Complex through Cinema.” Times Weekly. 24 Jun. 2010. Web. 5 May. 2011. <http://time-weekly.com/story/2010-06-24/107674.html>.
---. "Phoenix Records". 21 Jul. 1-16. Web. 5 May 2011. <http://ent.ifeng.com/fcd/special/jiazhangke/news/detail_2010_07/21/1808489_0.shtml>
---. "Seeking One's Own Aesthetics of Cinema (xunzhao zijide dining zhimei)." Film Art 323 (2008): 69-74.
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The essay is the final paper for the course "Chinese-language Cinemas since the 1970s" and primarily consists of critiques rather than compliments, while the rating is based on my personal appreciation of the film, especially the every single detail meticulously laid out by Jia Zhangke.
In Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew (2010)
---- “The most prominent characteristic of Shanghai is that almost all the important figures relevant to the modern history of China have some relation with this city. …This film is not about one Shanghai citizen’s impression of the daily life in the city, but the legendary experiences of the city, about wars, politics and cultural movements.” (qtd. in Mao)
---- “I get access to the details of history through cinematography; it is hard go make sense of history without details, especially the emotions and experience under the historical circumstances. … What I care about is what is hidden behind the abstract terms, the life details disturbed by politics and forgotten in time.” (qtd. in Shi)
---- “Apart from the 18 interviewees, the true legends of the city are the hundreds of thousands of Shanghainese who don’t have the chance to tell their stories.”(qtd. in Wang)
The words above, excerpted from the various interviews of Jia Zhangke on I Wish I Knew (2010), could possibly sketch some important aspects of his latest documentary – about its concept, form, and content. Shanghai, since its forced open-up to foreign trades in the late 19th century, has witnessed the vicissitudes of the century of modernization of China. It is thus both conceivable and intriguing that Jia Zhangke, whose previous features pose a “powerful critique about what is lost along the marathon route to modernization”, chooses to make a documentary about the history of such a city (M. Berry 14). Equally conceivable is the “assumption that it’s useful to examine the past to understand the frequently wretched circumstances of the present and their effect on the behavior and thinking of Chinese people”(Rayns), given the tradition of yishi weijian (“using history as a mirror”) – at least on the rhetorical level - in the practice of historiography in China. But in effect, the crux of this piece of historiography can never be tackled as neatly as it is in rhetoric. Examining the three excerpts in the beginning, we can at once notice a gap: on what grounds and by which means can the personal histories of the 18 legends be connected to the present of the broader public, “who don’t have the chance to tell their stories”? It is the intention of this paper to approach this question by disentangling the film in terms of its style and content and tracing a path back to Jia Zhangke’s documentary cinema.
Before proceeding to any analysis, a review of the responses to the film might be helpful in understanding the intricacy of the film. The complexity of its background (“being commissioned by the state-run Shanghai Film Studio” as the most conspicuous condition in this case), content and style of the film indeed provides every audience a handle on the film that will lead to a judgment potentially disparate from others. For instance, as described by Tony Rayns, some think “it’s just a by-the-numbers commission piece”, strongly implying that the official status of the film has positioned it safely in line with the mainstream ideology. Others, like Tony Rayns himself, better-informed of Chinese history, culture and politics, reads into the text and grasps the abundant implications that justify the attitude of the director as “inherently… challenging”. Among all the contemplations on the film, Yang Beichen’s article appeals to me with the argument that the interviews of the film provide a false text of oral history. The mission of oral history - to recuperate the covered minor histories so as to “challenge the accepted myths of history” (qtd. in Yang) – is undermined by Jia Zhangke’s problematic decoupage (cut-out) of history. Yang argues that the way Jia conducts (reminding the interviewee that it is an interview) and presents (with polished effects and corresponding the interviews with specific historical periods) the interviews encourages the logical integration of raw experiences on the part of the interviewee, and prompts the viewer to accept the legitimacy of history, for the end product on the screen is a collection of de-historicized, regularized and self-referential interviews. Although I don’t totally agree with Yang’s point of view in that he has completely ruled out other non-interview elements in the film, I would like to take this conclusion of his as my departing point: “by the means of imaging and writing the history, the film is undoubtedly reinforcing the relation between history and the author – not that between history and those who have experienced it.” In my approach to the problem announced in the first paragraph, about how the director bridges (or fails to) the gap between the history and the present, the legends and the ordinary people, the premise I would base my analysis on is that I Wish I Knew is a constructed, calculated collage on almost all levels, to the point that the kind of spontaneity and immediacy one would experience in a work like Shoah (1985) should not be a major criterion for evaluating it in the first place.
Although the “intention” and “philosophy” of the director should never be taken into full account, it is still a legitimate parameter by which one determines a feasible approach to the work. Interestingly, the declaration of Jia Zhangke made in 2010 to contribute to the genre of documentary in China with more “imagination and experimentation” (Mao) returns us to one of the director’s interviews in 2001. In that interview, Jia shows his cognition of “the impossibility of true objectivity for even the most realist style” (McGrath 84), stating that the realism in his film is a device to express his inner “feeling of the real” because it “is on the level of aesthetics whereas reality just stays in the realm of sociology”(qtd. in McGrath 110). Nine years later he says something similar: “…(for an unemotional historical account) you can refer to historic books, which record more accurately the historical incidents, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be an aesthetic work. Here the history is treated with cinematic apparatus, with a filmic work, it is supposed to impact emotionally” (“Phoenix” 5). In this sense, Jia Zhangke’s fiction films and documentaries are all set to appeal to the aesthetic experience and resonance of the audience, with the aid of cinematic devices. Therefore, I would argue that with such aesthetic philosophy, I Wish I Knew at every level intervenes with the objectivity presumed by the genre of documentary and breaks the particular principles of oral history presupposed by the talking-head-style. But the multiple interventions do not necessarily lead to what Yang posits as “a defense of the legitimacy of the current regime”, but, as far as I see it, to a point of ambiguity, where what is not spoken can be sensed, what is spoken can be denied, yet without reaching articulation. In the following paper, I will approach the film by the means of textual analysis, in which I will peel off the layers of subjective implants that construct and modify the history represented in the film and discuss the film’s connection to and difference from Jia Zhangke's previous works. By doing so, I will make my point of how (in)significant it is the ordinary Shanghainese and Shanghai as a city in its present tense, which are supposed to be the successor and manifestation of the consequence of history, are silenced in I Wish I Knew.
In order to disentangle the film, I will first break I Wish I Knew down to four levels: the socio-geographic-historic order by which the interviews are selected and arranged, the cinematic apparatuses used to modify the verbal content of the interviews (including sounds, mise-en-scène and movie clips), the phantom-like role played by Zhao Tao and the urban scenes in Shanghai. The four layers are not entirely separable but at some point closely interrelated, demonstrating Jia Zhangke’s effort to construct a cinematic Shanghai where different temporalities are introduced.
The first layer is referred to the 18 interviews constituting the body of the film, loosely covering the important periods in the modern history of China: the anti-Japanese war, the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the economic reforms. Jia “use(s) chronologic order as well as the spatial order to structure the film.” (“Listen”) However, regarding this historiography, Jia is highly selective and formalistic. Before everyone else, Jia positions Chen Danqing, writer and painter, in the beginning of the array of interviews. Chen’s account about the period prior to and the beginning of the Cultural Revolution establishes itself as the keynote of at least a large part of the film: he recollects the demographic formation of the old lanes in Shanghai and his childhood activities there. It was a time of change, when the remnants of the “old society” - the life-style reminiscent of the 30s - were exposed in a state of dislocation and soon to be cleansed and when one’s political alignment would determine one’s fate, just like what Chen says in the interview: "In each lane there was usually one boy who was the best fighter… we had first to decide whom we should befriend. It made the difference whether you were the bullier or the bullied." Putting this talk at the very beginning, Jia extracts it from its historical context and transforms it into a transcending political allegory.
The following interviews can be divided into five groups: the three groups based in Shanghai are roughly arranged chronologically (Shanghai in the 30s, the Cultural Revolution, and after the economic reform), while another group of interviewees based in Taiwan and another in Hong Kong, are interspersed with the three Shanghai groups. Taiwan and Hong Kong, two alternative spaces, suggests the alternative social formations after 1949 and parallel temporalities that had been shut off from the public discourse after the takeover/liberation of Shanghai by CCP in 1949. In order to achieve the contrast, as Tony Rayns correctly points out, Jia sidesteps the period when CCP and KMT were faced with a common enemy and formed some cooperation. In Jia’s rendering of the period of 30s - 40s, once the historical external enemy is almost completely ruled out , internal conflict and the consequence change of political regime gains the significance as the main issue on the path of China towards modernization and source of sadness (beiqing) for the individual (“Phoenix” 5).
The fact that the leaving-or-staying dynamic is privileged over chronological order is highlighted in the transition from Wei Ran’s interview about his mother Shangguan Yunzhu to Wei Wei. Shangguan Yunzhu, who was already a popular actress before 1949, died a tragic death in 1968 during the Cultural Revolution. Wei Wei, on the other hand, is an actress of the similar period with Shangguan’s, yet she left Shanghai for Hong Kong in 1948 and indeed survived Shangguan. In Wei Ran’s recount, Hong Kong also happened to be the dream place of his sister, who attempted to flee to Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution, but the plan was miserably aborted in the end. The transition from the absurd, fanatic 1968 back to the bleak, uncertain 1948, together with Wei Wei’s line in Spring in a Small Town (1948) (“If I say I’d like to come with you, will you still say as you wish?”) poses a retrospective question that is to be answered by no one. The impulse of looking back aroused by this contrast gets one to reflect on how easily a person’s trajectory of life could have been affected by a single choice, and what made the choice so excessively weighty was the arbitrary political environment.
On the second layer, the mise-en-scènes, camera movement, movie clips and the use of sound in the interviews further intervene with the meanings created by the literal accounts of the interviewees. Here, Jia Zhangke practices the “a lot of Eisensteinian montage”(“Listen”), whose imagistic collision between shots or within one shot can give rise to the perceptual truth out of material. This immediately opens up much more possibilities of “dialogue between the work and the viewer” (Antonine-Dunne 6) In the film, the most effective montage editing is found in the interviews of Wang Peimin and Huang Baomei. Both accounts are concerned with some kind of success with the socialist project: the CCP’s takeover of Shanghai and the rising social status and recognition of Chinese workers. The concomitant non-verbal elements, however, digress from the verbal grip of the interviewees and establish plentiful space for dialogue between the viewer and the film (in stead of the history narrator).
Introduced by the sound of telegraph clicking (a tribute to the underground communists as represented in The Eternal Wave (1958)), Wang Peimin takes the interview in Shanghai Chedun Film Studio. Before her interview, there is a staged shot of Wang watching the shooting of a scene of the PLA troops patrolling along the street of the studio, where an Old Shanghai before the takeover is rebuilt. In her recount, Peimin’s father Wang Xiaohe, an underground communist, was executed by the Nationalists before she was born, and on the day of liberation, her mother, who was already insane, rushed to the troops to look for her husband. Then the clip that follows is from a socialist propaganda film Battle in Shanghai (1959), which shows a boisterous, triumphalist celebration of the Liberation. Everyone in the greeting crowd wears an expression of enthusiasm identical to anyone else’s. The captain appears in a close shot, pompously declaring the victory of the people. The juxtaposition of Wang’s interview and the clip at once problematizes the official historical narrative and representation: how is the cost for revolution to be remembered in the public memory? The celebrating scene in the film is so artificial that it is of stark contrast with Wang’s genuine sorrow relating the loss her family has undergone for the communist ideal and the final victory. If the sadness of the “victor” hasn’t yet been included in the official historical narrative, what about the loser in this civil war? Why then the result of a civil war is distorted as “the annihilation of the imperialistic forces” (as is stated enthusiastically by the captain in the film)? These questions are responded to by Wang Tong's realistic depiction of the departure for Taiwan in 1949 and his anecdote about civil war, in which two former classmates had to turn adversary to each other.
The model worker Huang Baomei's interview is taken at two locations: the splendid USSR-style Shanghai Exhibition Centre, where she shook hands with Chairman Mao, and the dilapidated factory where she used to work. Against the background of the deserted factory, Wang cheerfully tells her experience as the delegate of Chinese youth to the International Youth Conference in Vienna and being cheered as “Beautiful Chinese”. The following clip from Xie Jin's docudrama, in which Huang acted herself, induces associations in two dimensions: with delicate lighting and emotional voice-over, it restores the pride and glory she had in the 60s as a worker and enhances the contrast between past and present; it also gives out an illustration of the Beautiful Chinese, resonating with what Zhu Qiansheng suggests in the previous interview about the “good” image of China as opposed to the Antonioni’s realistic documentary.
On the third level, Zhao Tao's wandering throughout the film is the most mysterious part. According to Jia and Zhao's explanation, it is supposed to be a character “coming from the past in search of something”. If anything, she reminds one of the angels in Wings of Desire(1988). They all wander through the urban landscape in contemporary clothes, but never get into contact with anybody, as Zhao says: “Others don’t see me. Only I can see them.” The discussion of the angels in the Wenders’ film applies here in terms of the association between the lonesome wanderer’s figure with “ruins and the destructive forces of history”: the angels in Wings are bearing a sense of historical task to “to observe, collect, testify, preserve” (Casarino 170). It also invokes Benjamin’s prophetic writing of the “angel of history”: “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage .... The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” (qtd. in Casarino 170) The angel played by Zhao, however, appears more concerned, more experienced and more reserved. Her only reaction to any other figure in the film occurs before the interview of Wei Ran: she is watching a clip in a theatre. The clip, at its first appearance, does not have credits recognizing the title and actress. At the question one character asks another: “Isn’t that the former Queen of Yueju Opera Shang Shuihua?” Zhao, for the first time and the only time in the film, acts as if she has recognized the protagonist. Then she steps out of the theatre and walks along the debris of the Bund then under reconstruction, all soaked in a shower, as Wei Ran's voice cuts in off-scene. The suspense of who it is in the clip is finally solved in the replay of the clip (extended to an additional close-up of Shangguan) showing credits. The act of recognition in the movie, by Zhao Tao, and belatedly by the audience, in this light, can be interpreted as an act of “awakening the dead”- or in this case, awakening the damaged from the depths of historical trauma.
Another reference to history, interestingly, is Zhao’s walk in the Shanghai EXPO Park. It in some way “testifies to” the observations made in Jia Zhangke’s 2004 feature The World, in which the theme park in Beijing replete with miniatures of the landmarks around the world is sarcastically represented as a capitalistic dream that traps the working class migrant young men and women in this virtual world of “model reproductions… and digital reality” (M. Berry 123). If her reaction to Shangguan Yunzhu’s screen image can be read as recognition, then can her aimless wandering through the debris of the city (although they are for the construction of the new) be interpreted as an failed attempt to find what she is seeking? The angels in Wings of Desire come down to the mortal world for they find the poeticism of the human world. Is it why Zhao Tao keeps isolated from the city – that she finds so few to recover and nothing to preserve? Or maybe just the opposite? The enigmatic figure, the only active agent that bonds the history and the present of the city (even the interviewer is concealed in all the interviews), leaves just a large void of silence.
The final level is the contemporary urban landscapes in the film. Visually, Shanghai is presented as a city of transition. Unlike the images of Hong Kong and Taipei, which are cities in a fixated state, most of the shots in Shanghai are filled with the contrast of the established and demolition in the same frame. In the film, on the train just like that in Dust in the Wind (1985), Hou Hsiao-Hsien mentions old locations in Shanghai were being demolished in the 90s. In Hong Kong, the shot of the sign of Shanghai Road, and also the Cantonese song “The Bund” (shanghai tan), the only famous song that has Shanghai in its lyrics, imply that the identity of Shanghai is being shaped in nostalgia by the diasporas and lost in its birthplace. In the interviews based in these two places, Shanghai becomes “an idealized site … etched on the Chinese psyche” (M. Berry 15), an object of nostalgia and imagination, tinted with “a melancholic longing and projected from a site far removed” (15).
Then what is happening in side Shanghai, for the time being, in the rapid development and startling transition? The two figures speaking out for the contemporary period (after the economic reform) are Yang Huaiding and Han Han. The two interviewees are both forerunners of the market economy, while the former benefited from the burgeoning stock market in the late 80s, the latter from the age of media. But in comparison with the previous delicately structured interviews around the 49-complex, the question of leaving or staying, what is the counterbalance to these two legends? Where is the sadness of the present life, since Jia claims that he has been “repeating the message: our lives are actually passive. There is always a great power controlling us. We have not yet acquired a more relaxed environment and space for the self? (“Carving”)”
At this point, the film has fallen adverse to the principle of oral history, which is supposed to allow “heroes not just from the leaders, but from the unknown majority of the people” (Thompson 23). But in the first place, Jia with the project titled “Legend” did not start in the spirit of “naïve realism” to break the qualifications for the entries into the “accepted myths of history”(24). He is, with all the structural devices and cinematic apparatuses, constructing a counter myth of history as opposed to the communist history of class struggle and Leninist partyism. Regarding the interviewee’s memories about 1949, what Jia is concerned about is that the diverse memories of people on different stances “are far from forming a kind of ‘public memory’” (“Phoenix” 4). Working on something in the hope that it can become “common” sense, one cannot help resorting to the “authoritarian judgment inherent in the tradition” (Thompson 24) of historiography. In the case of I Wish I Knew, Jia Zhangke explains that he’s criterion for the interviewee is that they “are more conscious of the historical progression and more articulate about the details” (“Carving”) and “how much historical complexity he has, how much historical association he can evoke, how appealing his language is”(Mao). But again, the contrast between the interviews, the directorial intervention like mise-en-scene and movie clips, at times challenge the privileged position of the interviewee with the use of language.
Along this line, the polarity of “those who can speak” and “those who cannot speak” is deliberately kept visible in the film. This tension is particularly detectable in the sequence after Han Han’s interview, when the hand-held camera captures the expressions of the white-collars waiting for the elevators in an office building. In contrast with Han Han’s confidence and vantage point of talking, their expressions are much less glowing. The off-scene ringtone of the elevators enhance the sense of suppression of the scene. However, Jia’s treatment of the silent public is basically ambiguous. The public scenes are shot with different styles, for instance, like the mahjong-playing and dancing, are shot with soft-lighting, close-ups and smooth camera movement. Are these remainder or reenactments of the “bourgeoisie life-styles (that) were transformed” in the socialist agenda (“Phoenix” 4)? A similar dilemma also takes place in the depiction of migrant workers at the construction site of EXPO. If the banner on the wall of the workers’ canteen shows, as Jia has always been doing, a critique of the fruit of globalization and the national project of urbanization not benefiting the individuals who have labored in it, then the break-dance the young man worker performs on the construction site is relatively depoliticized and opens up more possible associations. This shows the potential of montage in such a multi-layered, convoluted documentary. Without languages, the effectiveness of montage further (or going back to its original state) relies on “capacity of memory and mind to make images” on the part of the recipient, when “associative images (are) formed by assembling sense matter brought together through the mind’s propensity to leap to a conclusion.” (Antonine-Dunne 7)
In terms of the filmic techniques of the people in public space, it is noteworthy that people as subjects of the camera sometimes look staged, rehearsed and instructed. Staged or not, the smooth camera movement (like the panning shot of workers in the port), proper lighting (like the scene of playing mahjoon deep in the alley) or the tinted images are all proof that it by no means claims its status as xianchang(on-the-spot), but an authorial control over the media to convey “a feeling of the real”. In fact, this image quality can be attributable to the use of DV. Jia says in 2003 that “digital interacts with its subjects in a very quiet way enabling me to capture a cold, distant, almost abstract quality” (qtd. in M. Berry 138). This abstractness can be already sensed in his 30-min documentary In Public. In the opening long take panning around the waiting room, the regular-paced movement of the video camera (more free-moving) and the objects of the camera create a sense of alienation rather than illusion of reality. The introduction of the new media may have influenced the philosophy of the director of realism and objectivity. In Dong (2006) and Useless (2007), there are also staged scenes and actions that foregrounds the different states of working rather than the action, such as the demolishing scene of four workers choreographed to a certain rhythm. In the interview of 24 City(2008), Jia mentions his impulse to “integrate reality” on a “cultural level” and the urge to imagine, to fictionalize after documenting a large amount of historical facts (“Seeking”). At that point, the insistence on the “feel of the real” in the present converges with the turn to fictionalization so as to write the history in the subjective projection, redefining his definition and practice of documentary. However, in his previous works, the subjectivity of the people is not solely created through the stylistic staging and posing. In Dong and Useless, there is a bipolar division of speaking positions, where the artists, who are better with expression, and the workers, who take order from the artists in completion of the projects, both sides have the chance to talk. In I Wish I Knew, however, the people contemporarily living in Shanghai merge into the background and become real abstract symbols.
In general, I Wish I Knew is a collage of different images representing different temporalities, each temporality open to the association with a certain political or social condition. Edited in the Eisensteinian spirit, it creates new meanings outside the words of the talking heads through filmic tricks, but also runs the risk of uncertainty. In the paper, I discerned the film into four levels. Firstly, the personal historical recounts by the interviewers are integrated and rearranged into a tale of three locations: the CCP’s takeover of Shanghai in 1949 becomes the pivot of the film, the old tradition of Shanghai are transferred to Taiwan and Hong Kong, which in turn become two systems of reference. The talks based in Taiwan and Hong Kong supplement the basically lineal historiography of Shanghai with alternative temporalities and possibilities. Secondly, the elements outside the interviews, such as the mise-en-scene and movie clips, sometimes create shocking effects out of their collision with the interviewers’ recounts, falsifying and testing the verbal testimonies. Thirdly, Zhao Tao, wandering across the debris on the construction sites, can be regarded as the embodiment of a retrospective viewpoint, searching around to recover what has been forgotten, ruined and repeated. Fourthly, the contemporary urban scenes of the daily life in Shanghai are interspersed across the film. However, for the contemporary periods, the most intriguing point is that there is no direct counterbalance to the values and experiences mentioned by the two interviewees – the two triumphs. The silence of the ordinary people in the urban scenes thus significantly calls for the viewer’s attention. But on the other hand, shot in different styles, the urban scenes resist a generalizing analysis in terms of their to functions. If we examine the documentaries by Jia in these years, the director tends to recreate the reality that fit in with his subjective perception of what’s real and to integrate the complex realities through the recreation. However, due to the imbalance of this film, the subjectivities of the present Shanghainese are totally missed out, and cannot be recuperated by simply reading through their images. Just like Zhao Tao cannot find a way to participate in the present, the dynamics of testifying to and revising historical and political accounts in the first two-thirds of the film does not effectively connect to the present condition. The English title of the film is in subjunctive mood present tense and it actually means: “I don’t know at this point.” With the history part sort-of straightened out successfully, the contemporary conditions of Shanghai are dissipated into oblivion.
Notes
1. The Chinese title of the film, Haishang Chuanqi (“legends on the sea”) is derived from the original project title Shanghai Chuanqi (“legends of Shanghai”). Jia switched the first two characters to fit in with the diasporic identity of some of the interviewees, but the basic structure remains.
2. Other potentially “legendary” incidents are also missed out, such as (but not restricted to) the first National Congress of CCP in the 20s, which is much-propagated in the official history, and the Defense of the Sihang Warehouse in 1938, fought by a nationalist battalion of 800 soldiers against the Japanese army, known in China as the Eight Hundred Heroes.
3. The only information about the Resistance War against Japan appears in the account of Zhang Yuansun, whose grandfather, Zhang Yiyun, the mogul of Chinese modern industry, donated an airplane to the Chinese military. Even this is mediated by the experience of Yuansun’s father (ransacking of house and confiscation of personal possessions) during the Cultural Revolution.
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The essay is the final paper for the course "Chinese-language Cinemas since the 1970s" and primarily consists of critiques rather than compliments, while the rating is based on my personal appreciation of the film, especially the every single detail meticulously laid out by Jia Zhangke.
这篇影评有剧透
