Blurring Reality’s Edge in Fluid China (Published 2008)

IN the movies of Jia Zhang-ke, it can often seem that all of modern China is a ready-made film set. Either that or Mr. Jia has an uncanny gift for the metaphorically charged location. His films have taken place within the plastic confines of an Epcot-like Beijing theme park (“The World”), amid the forlorn public spaces of a declining post-industrial city (“Unknown Pleasures”) and in an ancient riverside town that is about to disappear underwater (“Still Life,” which won the top prize at the 2006 Venice International Film Festival and which opened in New York on Friday).

The story of a man and a woman on parallel quests to find their long-lost spouses, “Still Life” is set in Fengjie, 150 miles upstream from the Three Gorges Dam, the hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River that submerged thousands of towns and villages and displaced more than a million people. Shot while Fengjie was being demolished and prepared for its eventual flooding, the film has a powerful documentary flavor, but it also borders on the surreal. The protagonists wander through rubble-strewn wastelands. Entire buildings crumble on camera. The epic scale of the devastation matches, even as it violates, the region’s majestic natural beauty.

“Such a quick destruction of a 2,000-year-old town is simply unimaginable,” Mr. Jia said, speaking through a translator while he was in town for the New York Film Festival in October. “It’s as if there was an alien invasion.” (Accordingly Mr. Jia throws in a few sci-fi-like special effects: a stray U.F.O., a tower that takes off like a rocket.)

A meticulous record of a vanishing world — Mr. Jia’s cinematographer, Yu Lik-wai, surveys the wreckage with slow panning shots that evoke the horizontal expanse of Chinese scroll paintings — “Still Life” is an act of commemoration and of stoic protest. “I don’t start from a political standpoint,” Mr. Jia said. “But if you make a film about China right now, you have to talk about the politics and the changes that are affecting people.”

Convulsive change is the norm in capitalist China, and since it is also the subject of Mr. Jia’s films, he said, “I sometimes feel I’m racing against time.” At 37 he has amassed a body of work — seven feature-length fiction films and documentaries — that is remarkable for its formal ambition, ethnographic richness and moral weight.

In an increasingly materialist society he gravitates to the have-nots. His films expose the social and spiritual disarray beneath what has been called the Chinese economic miracle. If they never seem dry or academic, it is because they invariably show how large, abstract forces (like modernization and globalization) bear down on individual lives.

Mr. Jia’s first feature, “Xiao Wu” (1997), observes a small-town pickpocket as he struggles to adapt to the new black-market economy. His three-hour, decade-spanning follow-up, “Platform” (2000), traces the street-level effects of the “open door policy” of the 1980s by following the members of a provincial performance troupe from propaganda skits to break-dancing demonstrations. The film doubles as an autobiographical account of his formative years: Mr. Jia belongs to a generation that came of age as China was yielding to an influx of previously banned art, literature and philosophy. (And he was an avid break dancer.)

“Globalization is very complex in China,” Mr. Jia said. “It has accelerated the consumerist mind-set, but it has also allowed people more access, more information, more technology.” His films are especially attentive to how young people absorb pop culture. Favorite songs acquire talismanic significance; nightclubs and karaoke bars are important locations.

His characters are as plugged-in as any citizens of the 21st century. (Plots often turn on ill-timed text messages and cellphone calls.) But any sense of connectedness is illusory, sharply contrasted with an inner loneliness and a lack of real-world mobility. This is the overriding point of “The World” (2004), whose characters work at the Beijing World Park, an actual tourist attraction filled with replicas of landmarks like the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower. (The park’s somewhat ominous slogan: “See the world without ever leaving Beijing.”)

Mr. Jia moves so fluidly between fiction and documentary that he often blurs the lines between them. While shooting “Still Life” he made a companion piece, “Dong,” a documentary on a painter and his subjects, demolition laborers in Fengjie and sex workers in Bangkok. Mr. Jia’s latest feature, an essay-film called “Useless” that screened in the New York Film Festival last fall, compares the manufacture of clothing at a factory, a high-concept anticouture designer and a backwater tailor shop. The title is intended as a political point about art, artisanal work and the marketplace. “If your films must make money before they can be considered useful, there’s no space for independent films,” he said.

Mr. Jia is part of the sixth generation of Chinese filmmakers, which emerged in the 1990s with grungily realistic portrayals of contemporary China that stood apart from the historical epics that came before. (The fifth generation included filmmakers like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, who propelled mainland Chinese cinema to world prominence with films like “Raise the Red Lantern” and “Farewell My Concubine.”)

Despite a relaxing of standards by the government film bureau, making and showing a movie in China remains a fraught and often confounding process. Scripts must be vetted ahead of time. Blacklisted directors face years-long bans. The young rebels of the sixth generation, like Mr. Jia, Zhang Yuan (“Beijing Bastards”) and Wang Xiaoshuai (“The Days”), were at first content to work outside the system; that was often the basis of their reputation. But there is limited career potential in being an underground filmmaker in China.

“It’s the phenomenon of these directors having to confront the market,” Shelly Kraicer, a film consultant in Beijing who programs for the Vancouver International Film Festival, said in an e-mail exchange. “If they want to be seen by local audiences and want to receive financing from local companies, they have to make films that can earn a domestic box office return. Therefore they have to make films the Film Bureau can approve.”

Mr. Kraicer added that while many of Mr. Jia’s peers have had to compromise on the path to legitimacy, he has made the transition with credibility intact. His early unsanctioned films remain banned in China, but the state-run Shanghai Film Studio was a co-producer of “The World” and “Still Life.” “Still Life” in particular is openly critical of official policies and even alludes to the corruption that plagued the Three Gorges project. Speculating on why the film went into release untouched, Mr. Jia said: “The impact of the Three Gorges project is phenomenal. It’s not something the government can cover up.”

The censors’ rules are by no means straightforward. Consider the case of the director Lou Ye, whose “Summer Palace” also opened in New York Friday. The film contains nudity and partly concerns the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, a touchstone event for many sixth-generation directors. After “Summer Palace” played at Cannes in 2006, Mr. Lou was slapped with a five-year ban from filmmaking. Initial reports attributed this to his failure to obtain permission to screen the film abroad, but Mr. Lou, speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2006, said the Film Bureau’s official reason was the movie’s poor sound and picture quality.

Reached by e-mail recently Mr. Lou confirmed that the ban was still in effect and said he was planning another project. “Working on a new film is the most interesting response to the ban,” he said. This month Mr. Lou’s producer, Fang Li, received a two-year ban for producing Li Yu’s sexually candid drama “Lost in Beijing” (opening in New York on Friday).

Mr. Jia’s standing at home is catching up with his reputation among Western cinephiles and critics, Mr. Kraicer said, helped in part by the Venice prize. Now a prominent media figure, he has been outspoken about what he deems the bloated commercialization afflicting Chinese cinema. In a gesture of defiance Mr. Jia chose to open “Still Life” on the same day as Zhang Yimou’s gaudy period blockbuster “Curse of the Golden Flower,” the most expensive Chinese film of all time. (“Still Life” had only a brief theatrical run but sold well — and was widely bootlegged — on DVD.)

Mr. Jia is working on a short film for an omnibus tied to the Beijing Olympics and a feature about factory workers that spans the last five decades. For now he has somehow carved out a special position in Chinese film.

“Chinese artists have always been engaged in careful balancing acts,” Mr. Kraicer said. “But Jia seems to span the two contradictory poles of cultural production. His work continues to be essentially uncompromising, but he has created a space in the public realm for it to exist.”

Still, the taming of official authority is only part of the battle. “Finding a paying audience is a completely different matter,” Mr. Kraicer said. “The fierce censorship of the Chinese market may be a hurdle that even someone like Jia can’t surmount.”