An essay written for the Cinema Guild’s DVD, released in 2009. — J.R.
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 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 a 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 open-ended as China itself.
