Jia Zhang-Ke’s latest film 24 City (二十四成) offers a eulogy for Chinese socialism. The context of the film is the destruction of Factory 420, an aeronautics plant constructed in Chengdu, Sichuan during the Third Wave (when the PRC decided to move vital industries to the country’s interior to protect them from potential air raids). In its place, a modern living community called ‘24 City’ will be constructed. Nonetheless, the eulogy is a strange one – the people it eulogizes are still living. What is being eulogized is a form of life rather than the actual life and death of a particular human being. As a result, the factory and its antiquated machinery are also eulogized, alongside the people whose life-worlds are decomposing around them. It is a eulogy that neither nostalgiacally praises the substantial achievements of the Chinese Revolution, nor grieves over its traumas; rather, Jia Zhang-Ke records history as it is inscribed on the faces and bodies of people impacted by China’s economic modernization.
These relics of socialism become spectral remnants that ‘float’ throughout the unfolding of the film. We witness parts of the dismantled factory being dispersed through the city; the camera lingers on people gazing directly into its lens, without further explaining their personal history or purpose; the film is interspersed with both traditional Revolutionary songs and modern love songs, providing a sonorous layering of history on top of the narrative histories recounted by individuals and the visual histories revealed by the camera.
Below the dense materiality of the factory and the surfaces of faces, the city is comprised of people’s fantasies and desires. While most of the film is a documentary, I suggest that Jia Zhang-Ke employs fictional actors and actresses, such as Joan Chen and Zhao Tao, in order to explore this dimension of intimate fantasy. Joan Chen plays a character nicknamed Xiao Hua (“Little Flower”) who recalls that in her youth everyone told her she used to resemble Joan Chen. However, Xiao Hua’s life departs significantly from the imagined life of a beauty icon and movie star – a deep sadness and loneliness pervades Xiao Hua’s narrative as she recounts a series of failed love affairs, and struggles to accept the fading of desire and desirability.
Though the film is organized around monologues of people’s personal histories and experiences of the factory, its most powerful aspect is the mute images of people staring into the camera. In these living portraits, a history is written but remains illegible. There is no accompanying voice-over monologue or text situating the images of anonymous strangers, whose haunting presences cannot be smoothly integrated within China’s narrative of economic modernization and development. They are living remnants of the past who do not fit comfortably within the ideologies of the present and promises of the future.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes described photography as an encounter with the dead. Looking at a photograph, you realize that the subject in the photograph no longer exists as he or she did in that moment of time. For Barthes, this makes photography an intrinsically elegiac medium: “it is without future (this is its pathos, its melancholy).” However, Jia Zhang-Ke does not display photographs; he films people standing motionless before his video camera as if they were being photographed. As time elapses, and we witness their subtle gestures and movements within the stilled moment, there is a sense that the people being filmed have outlived their place in the world.
In contemporary China, the socialist past has eroded without the certain contours of a capitalist present assuming its place. The new living community of ‘24 City’ is depicted only as a miniature model to be constructed – it is not yet a reality in which people can make a home. Instead, the retirees, laid-off workers, and youth Jia Zhang-Ke films exist within multiple fractures of time, impacted differently by the seismic shifts in China’s political economy.
As soon as the factory is demolished, the screen cuts to a line from a Wallace Steven’s poem translated into Chinese, eulogizing the world disappearing behind it.
我们已经做过和想过的，必然漫开渐渐淡了，象泼在石头上的牛乃
“Things we have thought and done
Must ramble and thin out
Like milk spilt upon a stone.”
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