Jia Zhangke operates with the kind of precise and spontaneous patience of a fly on the wall of an archeological dig. Zhangke, born amid the reforms of the 1970s, came to prominence as a part of the “Sixth Generation” of directors in China’s post-socialist period; his films, often made without the permission of the Chinese government, allowed him to become a prominent figure in China’s “underground” film movement. Zhangke’s cinema oscillates from the deeply realist lived experiences of China’s working class to the surrealist imagination of UFO liftoffs, creating a necessary and damning temporal portrait. His camera seizes the sharp edge of history, distilling the dissonance between modernization and individual lives.
His latest film, Caught by the Tides, is perhaps his most overt reckoning with time itself. Spanning over twenty years, the film is a mixed-media collage of archival footage, documentary fragments, and fictionalized moments tied together in the form of a haunting love story that unfolds as much through visual memory as through narrative. A quasi-sequel to Still Life and a spiritual sibling to Platform and Ash Is Purest White, Caught by the Tides is less about the events it portrays and more about the feeling of watching footage grow old while you, and the people in it, painfully do the same. Its central figure, Qiao Qiao (Zhao Tao), moves through abandoned karaoke bars, empty streets, and blurred camera reels like a ghost trying to retrace her steps, synthesizing an irretrievable past and an even more fragmented present. If Jia’s earlier films captured a country in motion, this one asks for its pulse. It’s a culmination of Jia’s aesthetic: fluid and nonlinear, a holistic reckoning, one that honors the history and throbbing, bloody reality of humanity at its rawest.
This interview was originally conducted in Chinese and has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You’ve long explored the tension between permanence and change, especially in Caught by the Tides—the film itself being archival and reframed embodies that tension even more so. Did you find your relationship to time shifting as you constructed and worked on the film?
Specifically with Caught With The Tides, I didn’t intend for this film to take this long. The project started in 2001, and in the beginning, I thought that this would be a project for two or three years. I wanted to capture the arrival of the new millennium. I had a working title at the time: Man with a Digital Camera. After we captured the footage during the two or three-year period, I realized that it looked pretty flat. Many things had just begun to happen and hadn’t developed significance through time. There was no depth, temporally speaking. The characters I captured tended to stay in their youthful appearance, and the society itself also didn’t really have the kind of depth of change that I wanted. I continued to film this particular project on and off for many, many years. Throughout these years, of course, there were many issues, chief among them being how I was going to deal with these changes throughout the passage of time. Not only in the way we understand the people we capture and the society we capture, which might shift along with the years, but also the way that I have grown and matured, and evolved as a filmmaker. Not only do I have to think about the changes in front of the camera, but also behind the camera. In every stage of the process, we had to search for a truer self. We certainly didn’t use the concept we began shooting the film with to inform the interim. As we filmed, I would try and grasp the contemporary world and my feelings about it. Over time, I came to recognize and understand my own growth and evolution along with the images, people, and society I captured.
In reality, when we began, we were simply trying to film a romance with the male and female leads. Eventually, the actors reached an age where they should be married, and we grappled with this issue of choice. When the female lead [Zhao Tao] gave up on the romance, that was a big change. At the same time, she became a very independent and mobile woman. We didn’t necessarily anticipate this change when we were filming, but we grew with the film and society and decided to film the failed romance and the independent female lead. She becomes stronger near the end of the movie, which is reflective of our adjusting understanding of human dynamics.
As I extended the filming process into something much longer than two to three years, I realized that we all have grown—and when I say we, I mean not only the characters in the film have grown, but I, as a filmmaker, have grown as well. The second part of the film is very much about the time when people think about marriage and was the perfect opportunity for me to show the growth and evolution of the female character, Qiao Qiao. I wanted to show how she was codependent and relying on the relationship at the beginning of the film before she realized that the love is no longer there. After she became very, very proactive and also self determined, you will see the transformation of this character in the third part of the film as she has become a strong individual with grit and the strength to forge ahead.
Those two parts explain the changes I’m trying to capture with this particular film. In terms of what is constant throughout these twenty-plus years, it would be the freeform way of making this project. Starting from the beginning, using the digital camera to go into real spaces, and then using a documentary filmmaking approach to really capture the images and locations and spaces and the subjects within. Another layer is that I will also ask the actors to improvise and to somehow interact with these real spaces, almost like fictional devices that I have utilized to have this combination of different footage.
The last part, of course, was during COVID, and therefore, we had to approach the project in a more conventional way of writing a script, and then we film it in a conventional filmmaking style. Whether or not I’m doing this in terms of documentary style, using the actual reality that I have captured in my footage, or using these fictional devices to use my imagination to flesh out the kind of reality that I was dealing with, I don’t see these two processes as reality versus fiction. I see all the images I have gathered as part of the same thing, it’s one thing, which is visual histories and visual images that have been archived throughout the past twenty-plus years.
That’s fascinating. So would you consider yourself more of an archivist or a storyteller? And do you see any difference between the two?
With different films, I have different focuses. With Caught By The Tides, it underwent a massive evolution in the editing process. For the first edit version I have for this project, I used pretty much a conventional narrative structure and narrative arc to structure the film. There was a particular plot point and narrative arc based on the protagonist, the two characters, the love story, and then you just see what happens to them. I realized after the first edit version that the film did not go well with what I have done for the past twenty years because of the fact that if I do want to use a conventional narrative to capture the storylines, why didn’t I do what I did with Mountains May Depart and Ash is Purest White and take just two or three months of production time to tell that story?
I wanted to have a different focus on this particular film. We’re here to use them as a vehicle to go on a journey together, to see what we have experienced for the past twenty-plus years, and what kind of collective memories we had and we shared. What’s important to this film is not the story of this romance, but to use these two people to represent our collective lives, feelings, and memories. By changing the focus of where I want to pay more attention to, it doesn’t mean that I’m not going to pay any attention to the narrative. It’s just a very different way to tell a story. For this particular film, the internal narrative is not what’s pushing the film forward. Rather, it is the manifestations of the evolving conditions in which the story takes place.
As a director, you have to weave together these elements and techniques to continue and complicate this story. Obviously, I utilized montage heavily in this film, but I had to think about how I was going to somehow integrate and fuse all the different types of footage I had captured using different cameras and different generations of digital technologies. How am I going to keep their original states and textures and uniqueness, and then create this type of montage to really push the quote unquote narrative? It’s another level of thinking, not only as a storyteller for the narrative, but also as a visual artist.
In 2015, you were awarded the lifetime achievement at Cannes. I’m curious, as a filmmaker, how did you kind of reconcile with that moment of international recognition? As someone who often chronicles the lives of people unseen by global audiences, did that moment feel like a culmination of your work or a new beginning?
I definitely think that was such a great recognition. It is such a lonely journey you take as a filmmaker in this industry, so I really felt very encouraged. Also, winning makes my filmmaking much easier in terms of resources and opportunities. Even with the success that I enjoy, just like all the other well-established filmmakers before me, every single project is a new challenge, and you have to really face those challenges head-on. I compare writing a script to being like a lonely marathon runner, being that you have to work, word by word, to build the story that you want to tell. As long as you want to make a film very sincerely and really be true to yourself, every single project is a new project. Every single project you will face just as many challenges, if not more, in spite of the success that you enjoy.
One of my favorite things about your films is the use of music and dance. I’m curious, what role does choreography and physical expression play in your storytelling?
I started using lots of music and dance even with my first feature film, Xiaowu. Music and dance had a lot to do with the personality of Chinese people. In China, most people tend to internalize their emotions, and it isn’t easy to express emotions, especially in public. It’s not until the later part of the 1990s and the 00s that you see things like karaoke and discos. I realized it became an opportunity to externalize them in such a public way. Men and women know only a few words; you need to utilize music and dance to really see the internal emotional landscape.
I do think that things have changed for people in China, especially for the younger generation. It’s certainly for the better that younger people are able to more sincerely express themselves. But for earlier generations, music and dance allowed us to visualize this change within silent, reserved, and introverted people. By filming people, through the singing and the dancing that they did at the time, it captures the celebration of this new era through self-liberation.
During the era at the beginning of Caught By The Tides, around 2001, music and dance were an exercise in individual freedom to me. Singing, dancing, and expressing yourself. I always felt like I worked squarely during the era of China’s rapid modernization. But slowly, I realized that the modernization of the individual was also very important. Modernization is not just about your cities or your technology. It’s also about how to become a modern man or a modern woman among individuals and people. This sense of independence, this sense of freedom, is very much on everyone’s mind to try to strive for, and that’s the reason why I think it was so important for me to document and archive the footage of them dancing and singing at the time.
The feeling that I get from your films, especially Caught by the Tides, is a feeling of being adrift and lonely. Do you think that, along with the idea of making the modern man or the modern woman through film, cinema itself can make that loneliness a shared experience?
There are always two sides to every story or every movement that we experience, including modernization and urbanization. This film deals with different realities that each person faced during this process. It’s more important to me as a filmmaker to capture the real state of people’s experience—whether positive or negative—of those movements. People tend to think that I’m being so nostalgic about the chaotic energies that I captured around the turn of the century. But if you really ask me about whether or not I want to live now the exact same way that I lived before, my answer is no! We have made progress, but at the same time, these are not two mutually exclusive things that we can share. People lived through urbanization or modernization without having to make a choice about which one is better and which life they would rather live. To make a film for 20 plus years, it’s not to think about whether or not we should return to where we started, but to revisit where we came from, how we started the journey, so that we can learn from the experience as we forge ahead.