Specificity and Universalism in Jia Zhangke’s Platform

      In approaching the films of Jia Zhangke one is already faced with the myriad labels already attached to the young filmmaker. We are told he as at the forefront of “sixth generation” or “underground” Chinese cinema and speaks for his generation. Or that, because he is a favorite of the international film festival circuit and Western film critics, his films exploit a current vogue for Mainlaind Chinese cinema. The problem is that none of these descriptors adequately speaks to Jia’s achievement. As Kent Jones writes:

“Many people still tend to see Eastern films as reports or snapshots from foreign lands before they are anything else. But Jia’s films are too good, too exciting and too on the money to be denied their rightful status as supreme expressions of the way many of us live”¹.

Jones, however, is only half right. Jia’s films have valuable things to say about contemporary social and economic conditions shared throughout the world, but Jones is glossing over some of the specifically-Chinese contexts that contribute to the cultural, political and aesthetic importance of those films.

      Part of the problem is that the fragmentation of national, international and cinematic cultural identity over the last thirty years is a central current that runs throughout Jia’s work. What makes these films so remarkable is that Jia is able to intelligently grapple with such broad and urgent subject matter while, at the same, centering his narratives around characters (or groups of characters) who live and breathe as recognizable human beings. Maintaining the viewpoint that so-called “personal” and “political” concerns are inextricable is not so radical (at least outside of the United States), but to continually prove this position over the course of four films without resorting to didactic narratives and hollow character types has proven tricky for even marginally less astute filmmakers. I believe that Jia is able to clear this hurdle so effortlessly because he is, first and foremost, a personal filmmaker, perhaps just not in the manner in which that term is traditionally conceived. From 1998’s Xiao Wu to 2004’s The World, Jia has broached such extensive issues as Deng Xiaoping’s Era of Reform to the theme park-ization of East Asia (and the rest of the world) by using his own specific experiences as his “point-of-departure”². Taken by itself, this approach appears to address every artist’s method (and to Jia, this is the only way one can operate: “My opinion is that there’s no such thing as the so-called “world”. People can only see their own lives, and they can only observe life from the standpoint of their own life experiences…our impressions of the world are just our impressions of the environment we live in.”³) but Jia is inimitable in the remarkable clarity of his understanding of himself, his background—Shanxi province in particular, China broadly and the world even more broadly—and the historical and political conditions that produced both. This understanding is matched by a distinctive attitude toward narrative structure and film form that allows him to make his ideas and emotions tangible on the screen. All of Jia’s characters are incapable of adequately expressing themselves, but Jia’s movies are unfaltering in their depiction of the spaces these characters occupy and the problems they face. For the purposes of this paper I will use Platform, Jia’s second film and, to my mind, his best, to illustrate Jia’s complexity as a personal filmmaker.

      Platform begins and ends with a high-pitched, inharmonious sound. At the beginning it is the screeching of the Fenyang Peasant Culture Group tuning their instruments before a performance. At the end, it is the whistle of a tea kettle, driving home the jarring domesticity of the scene, which sees the now apparently married protagonists—Cui Minliang and Yin Ruijuan—on a weekend afternoon. He naps on the couch, she plays with the baby. The scene is one shot and, as the conclusion to a 160-minute film that has charted the changing hopes and dreams of a group of young performers throughout the 1980s, it provokes a substantial melancholy with remarkable economy. After ten years, Kent Jones notes, “they’re still together and still apart. She has a child to keep her company; he has no one. That whistling kettle is a signal: time is still moving forward”.⁴

      Platform unfolds elliptically and in tableaux. The film covers ten years—between 1979 and 1990—in the lives of a consistent cast of characters. While there is a coherent narrative, the viewer is required to fill in some blanks. Jia’s movie is formally austere—at least half of Platform’s scenes are long-takes, shot with an unmoving frontal camera set-up. Jia’s rare mobile framings are almost always slow pans that take care to establish a human temporal relationship with surrounding landscape. Characters wander in and out of the frame, their location is foregrounded. The edits seem reluctant—Jia rarely cuts away from a scene or to a different angle until all the characters have vacated the frame or have exhausted conversation. The film is set in Fenyang, a small town in the Shanxi Province where Jia himself grew up. That the film spans the 1980s is significant, for the ‘80s was the decade in which Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, which provided for the creation of a free market in China, first took hold. The film follows the transformation of the Fenyang Peasant Culture Group, which performs Maoist agit-prop like “Train Headed For Shaoshen”, to the ‘privatized’ All Star Electric Rock ‘n’ Breakdance Band, which performs pop music learned from Taiwanese and Hong Kong radio broadcasts. Platform focuses on four members of the group—Cui Minliang, Yin Ruijuan, Zhong Ping and Zhang Jun. Through Jia is conscious to avoid dramatizing his psychology, Cui is clearly the film’s protagonist. He’s the only character we see at home with his family. And the film pays more attention to his romantic involvement with Yin that it does to Zhong and Zhang’s more sustained relationship. This involvement, which is so central to the film’s conclusion, is shown in only a few scenes. Early in the film, Cui and Yin walk near the city walls, cautiously chatting—it is clear to the viewer that the two share some sort of romantic interest but the issue is never specifically addressed. Later in the film, the two walk aimlessly on the same city walls. They stop to talk and Cui asks, in the most indirect manner possible, if Yin considers herself his girlfriend. She tells him she doesn’t know. The scene, like the final one, is a long take and Yin and Cui wander in an out of frame, obscured by an angle in the walls. The pair’s indirection is clear not only from their conversation, but from their absence in the frame. The audience’s relationship with these characters is just as tentative as their relationship to each other—though the film details their historical and cultural circumstances; we learn little about them as individuals. Later, Yin tells Cui that she’s decided they aren’t right for each other. When the group privatized, Cui goes on tour and Yin stays in Fenyang as a tax collector. The two reunite toward the end for an awkward cup of coffee. The next scene is the conclusion of the film described above.

      While the Cui/Yin storyline is certainly important to Platform—it’s the film’s emotional core—it is far from the only story being told. I emphasize their portion of the story, and the manner in which it is told, as means to illustrate Jia’s narrative approach throughout Platform—there is too much suggested by too little on the screen to adequately summarize the whole film.

      There are many tableaux in the film shot like the Cui/Yin city walls scene. Long-takes are a favorite of Jia’s and he rarely moves his camera to accommodate the characters on screen. Jia situates his characters in larger landscapes, his camera finds the emotions evoked by his characters’ surrounds because they are unable to express themselves.

      Tony Rayns, who taught at the Beijing Film Academy where Jia himself studied film theory, describes the story arc of Xiao Wu, Jia’s first film, as the “stripping away layer after layer of his loser’s armor until he’s left as “naked” as a person can be”.⁵ Rayns’ interpretation applies equally to Platform and perhaps all of Jia’s films. Each of his four features presents a character or group of characters lashing out at a repressive system and failing, cast out from society or assimilated in to it at the expense of personal values —in Xiao Wu, it’s the amoral logic of capitalism. In Unknown Pleasures, it’s the injustice of American cultural and political dominance. In The World, it’s the impossibility of genuine human communication in a market-dominated culture. On a basic level, Platform’s narrative suggests the inevitable death of youth’s ambitions and rebellion to the comfort of banal adulthood. Jia sees the film this way himself: “I wanted to arrange an ending where [the characters] return to a state very close to most other Chinese. They were once rebellious, they once pursued their ideals and dreams, but in the end they returned to the pace of everyday life—which is where most young people eventually end up.” ⁶

      This is only a superficial reading of Platform, however. To deny Platform the context it demands, in the interest of the universalism Kent Jones underscores, is to deny the political import inherent to Jia’s project. Platform deals with the failure of dreams that arose from a specific historical context--Deng Xiaoping’s Era of Reform— it’s not easy to ignore that it’s these dreams that wither.

      The third scene in Platform nicely suggests the multiple planes on which the film works. The scene opens with a shot of Cui Minliang’s mother copying a pair of Zhang Jun’s bellbottoms for her son. She brings the pants to the boys and berates them for being trendy—Zhang Jun’s aunt bought the bellbottoms for him in the south, a region impacted earlier by Deng’s reforms. Cui tells his mother that she should “liberate her thoughts”, to which she responds “you should try self-criticism”. Cui’s father arrives and asks the boys to help unload firewood. Afterwards, he calls his son over and questions him about his pants. He tells his son to squat and asks if “people can work in those pants”. Cui responds “I can’t talk to you” and walks away. The shot lingers on Cui’s father, dressed in the plain, blue clothing typical of a Shanxi peasant, standing alone in a vast, snowy landscape.

      The scene, of course, works on a universal level. Generational conflict is hardly specific to China and the scene is evocative of my own experiences with parental bewilderment at popular youth fashions. But it is unquestionably situated in a Chinese peasant community of the early 1980s. Despite the cultural changes already afoot, Cui argues with his parents in the language of PRC propaganda—“liberate your thoughts”, “try self-criticism”—and his father’s concern that his trendy pants allow for manual labor, though certainly not limited to China, speaks to the Chinese milieu of the era—which critic and filmmaker Kevin Lee, writing on the same scene, describes as the “state of incomprehension, of being unprepared to deal with cultural reforms and the new rules they require”.⁷  Not only is this context essential to the way the scene itself functions, but to ignore it is to strip the scene of its politics (not to mention, its personality)—the portrayal of generational conflict related to a piece of stylish clothing could appear in almost any movie that deals with young adults, but as carried out in the manner described above, it could only happen in Platform.

      Jia dedicates Platform to his father. In an video interview with Frederic Bonnaud, Jia discloses that he made the film as a means to communicate his experiences to his father, from whom he feels emotionally detached. “I’m not very good at expressing my feelings”, Jia admits, “so I used a stupid and traditional way and a made a movie to express my feelings to him”.⁸  Jia is not merely addressing the idea of parental misunderstanding, but working from specific experience. Much of Platform is derived directly from Jia’s sister’s tenure in a peasant culture group and Jia’s own experiences as a professional breakdancer. One can understand that Platform is deeply felt without knowing a thing about China, but in order to grasp how Jia is using these feelings, one must engage the context from which they emerged.

      Jia’s use of music is also important here. Pop music plays a central role in all of Jia’s features, but in Platform it is foregrounded. The moment that Cui and Zhang are able to hear Teresa Teng songs on radio broadcasts from Taiwan is the moment that reform becomes visceral. When Zhang returns from a trip to Guangzhou, the first thing he does is walk through Fenyang blasting George Lam’s “Ghengis Khan” on his new boombox. Lam’s song comprises an aural bridge to a short, awkward dance party sequence and on to a shot of Cui, Zhang and their friend Eryong riding a single bicycle together. Zhang extends his arms outward and it looks like the trio is flying, a moving signifier of the group’s “fleeting happiness”.⁹  The film’s title derives from the name of one of Cui’s favorite songs, which he is later able to perform after privatization. One of the most striking scenes in Platform occurs when we see Yin Ruijuan, who at this point has quit the group to become a tax collector like her father, alone in her dreary office. The radio is on and when a song begins playing, Yin slowly stands up and begins dancing alone.  
 Pop music is, of course, a means by which youths all over the world forge their individual and group identities. Furthermore, as Austrian critic and programmer Alexander Horwath notes in a different context, popular music “is an essential component in characterizing contemporary storytelling in film”. ¹⁰ This is apparent in the films of such diverse filmmakers as Wes Anderson, Atom Egoyan, Claire Denis, Wong Kar-wai, Quentin Tarantino and Tsai Ming-liang, to name only a few. The libidinal force of pop music is perhaps one the most significant means of cross-cultural communication available to filmmakers. One need not be familiar with George Lam to instinctively understand what his music means to Platform’s characters.

      The rise of popular music and the establishing of a popular culture in China, however, is one of the main legacies of the era of reform. Nimrod Baranovitch, who wrote a book-length study on the growth of pop music in China, writes:

“The tight control that the Chinese Communist Party practiced over the content and style of public culture during large portions of the Maoist era and its ability to create, at least for a while, one national public culture that was relatively homogenous, transcending the diversity of the population, were closely linked to its control over the production and dissemination of culture. Similarly, the polyphonic nature of popular music culture in China in the last two decades is closely connected with important transformations in the domain of culture production and dissemination.”¹¹ 

The availability of popular music—both on the radio and on cassette—was the first form of entertainment manufactured outside the CCP’s control. It allowed for the construction of individual fantasies and aspirations in a manner unimaginable in the Maoist era. Jia’s soundtrack throughout Platform is busy and layered—military drills and public announcements from the party drown out conversation—but music commands a prominence not afforded other sounds. Significantly, Jia utilizes the massive cultural shift the accessibility of popular culture indicated in the 1980s without resorting to obvious choices Baranovitch covers in his academic survey—he doesn’t indulge in the kind of cheap nostalgia exploited by Robert Zemeckis’s for his music selection in Forest Gump, a cavalcade of 60s and 70s hits now understood to characterize those generations. The pop songs heard in Richard Linklatter’s Dazed and Confused form an American analogue to Jia’s Platform selections. Linklatter uses moderately well-known 70s rock to convey a feeling for the era, but he makes no attempt to make a comprehensive statement on the decade. The songs work as signifiers of the 70s but are also allowed to take on their own meanings within the film. In Platform and in the rest of his features (karaoke plays a major role in both Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures and Lim Giong’s score for The World offers a more direct means of emotional communication than is found in the film’s images or stories), Jia uses the songs that impacted him the most—he asserts: “every song [in Platform] was a memory from my youth”¹²—to speak to the specific experiences of other Chinese people who lived through the 1980s and to the universal experiences of finding liberation or identity through pop music as an adolescent.

           My insistence on contextualizing Jia’s films is not merely pedantic. Jia takes great pains to emphasize time and location. Notions of memory and collective historical memory are essential to understanding how Platform functions, on its own and alongside other Jia films. Though I have stressed the melancholy fostered by the film’s conclusion, the bulk of Platform is underlined by a confused exhilaration. The film takes place during a moment in Chinese history that allowed for the creation of unique Chinese pop-cultural idioms. The force these idioms—seen here in the form of pop music—exert over those who respond to and participate in them is crucial. While Xiao Wu, Unknown Pleasures and The World all deal, in some way, with performance and culture, the experience is much more negative. In Unknown Pleasures, in particular, we glimpse the existential anxiety produced by the Americanization of Chinese pop culture—American movies and television have replaced Chinese music as dominant social forces, resulting in an irreconcilable alienation between the fantasies they produce and the options available to those who consume them. While Platform’s ending suggests a theme similar to those of his other movies, the bulk of the film is concerned with charting the creation and evolution of pop culture fantasies and representing attempts to live them. Without allowing for the importance of this historical moment as Platform’s undeniable context, one risks losing many of the film’s universal pleasures. So much of what is meaningful in Jia’s films is a product of ability to use his own life as a template for the exploration of larger questions of identity. To fully appreciate the intelligence with which Jia grapples with these questions, one must make room for the political and historical contexts in which he is asking them.