Petition (dir. Zhao Liang)

Today is the first day of screenings for the indomitable Zhao Liang at Anthology Film Archives, and we couldn’t be happier with the press coverage so far. Here are some choice clips from reviews by New York critics for Zhao’s films Crime and Punishment (opening tonight at 6 and 9; additional screenings Saturday and Sunday) and Petition (starting tomorrow and screening daily at 6:30 and 9:30). More reviews and directions to Anthology after the break.

EMERGING FROM ARDUOUS, dangerous, in-the-trenches work, Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang’s documentary investigations open onto the profound problems of a country often kept hidden by authorities. His interest is in the banal mechanics of systematic oppression: His remarkable debut Crime and Punishment (2007), for instance, provides a rare look into the People’s Armed Police, a branch of law enforcement similar to the military in its regimented lifestyle and coldly abusive administration of “justice.”

- Michael Joshua Rowin, ArtForum

Crime and Punishment (2007) follows the paramilitary People’s Armed Police on the beat, gaining extraordinary access to a station in the rugged, frigid Northeast, on the North Korean border. The staff of young officers—pettily prideful, swimming in their uniforms—is naive enough not to self-censor for the camera. They show as bullies, incompetent if not malicious, with their lone investigative technique a face-slap.

- Nick Pinkerton, The Village Voice

Although it has its clear literary antecedents in Kafka and Bleak House, Petition‘s look at the arbitrary and corrupt nature of authority is of a specifically Chinese variety—not to mention the authentic stuff of actuality. A case of life imitating art—or rather art documenting life imitating art—Zhao Liang’s non-fiction film continues the director’s dissection of petty Sino-officialdom begun in his first film, Crime and Punishment. While that movie recorded the power abuses of soldiers policing the Chinese-North Korean border, Zhao’s latest film moves to Beijing to document the bureaucratic nightmare known as the petition system.

- Andrew Schenker, The L Magazine

A companion piece of sorts to Zhao’s 2007 look at totalitarian law enforcement, Crime and Punishment, this guerrilla-cinema essay is more than just a look at China’s judicial morass; it’s a dispatch from the front lines of a dictatorship. Cameras smuggled into petition offices (filming inside is a no-no) capture harassment, while government-sanctioned thugs threaten violence, and in one grotesque scene, the remains of an activist are found scattered along train tracks. Yet Petition is also a portrait of a sustaining outsider community, one fueled by dissent and the refusal to give in to a corrupt system.

- David Fear, Time Out New York

Faced with absurd obstacles and delays, petitioners spend years rewriting and resubmitting their complaints, all the while living in shanties, under bridges, or in tunnels, and enduring violence at the hands of “retrievers,” government officials sent from their home villages. Despite the threat of arbitrary arrest and internment in detention centers, prisons, and punitive psychiatric hospitals, the petitioners audaciously speak out—distributing flyers in Tiananmen Square, shouting from towers, writing tracts, and holding parades, all of which result in more arrests. Zhao puts on view the sham and the shame of the 2008 Olympics, which served as an official pretext to demolish the petitioners’ settlements, and he shows that discontent with abusive one-party rule isn’t the domain solely of disaffected intellectuals but also of ordinary people who are tired of being, as one of them says, the “new slaves of socialism.”

- Richard Brody, The New Yorker

http://dgeneratefilms.com/events/zhao-liangs-petition-and-crime-and-punishment-screening-at-anthology-film-archives-next-week/

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The issue of the different reactions between Western and Chinese audiences to Chinese cinema has been with us for at least since the first appearance of Zhang Yimou’s exotic period tragedies.  But what’s striking about 24 City is how it seems to elicit different reactions across national borders by design.  The film mixes non-professional subjects with professional actors portraying civilians, and films all of them in the same talking heads interview format as they relate the history of a run-down factory complex in Chengdu.  Chinese audiences are bound to recognize the actors, while Americans are not, with the exception of Joan Chen and possibly Jia regular Zhao Tao.  This is but the tip of a wedge driven between distinctly Chinese and non-Chinese experiences of reality and fiction by this groundbreaking work.

In her review in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis pondered, “It’s hard to believe that his movies, with their lengthy takes and generous silences, will ever attract a popular audience of any nationality.”  And yet this is Jia’s most commercially successful feature in China to date, earning more than 1 million yuan in its first three days of its release.  The China Daily goes on to say, “The film received rather divided opinions from the audience.  Those identifying themselves with the lives of the main characters widely hailed it, but some cinema-goers just couldn’t follow the way the director arranged the storyline.”

For the sake of comparison, we have collected a brief sample both American print reviews of the film, and Chinese responses from various sources, from press to online audience reviews.  And, in a nod to Jia Zhangke’s playfulness, we are withholding the identities of the reviewers until the very end.  Just as Jia had Americans guessing which performances were by actors and which by non-actors, can you guess which of these reviews were written by American film critics, and which were by Chinese?  Answers at the bottom…

1. Jia Zhangke strives to incorporate artistic expressions into 24 City.  He is an ambitious person who is very concerned about the society, and this sometimes confines his experimental creation since he is always trying to accomplish something that is almost impossible to achieve, such as blending real life workers and actors as interviewees.  This daring experiment reveals the tension between art and society, and questions the relationship between representation and reality.

Another challenge is the visual style of the film.  The use of staged stills and the capture of the unnatural expression on the subjects’ face in front of the camera are borrowed from contemporary photography language, which emphasizes the staged aspects of photographs.

2. The people in 24 City are actually living around us.  They are our parents, they are ourselves.  The films touches the our inmost feeling, and makes us burst into tears.  We respect it, we understand it, we feel regretted, and overwhelmed by a sentiment that cannot be put into words.

24 City is more than a film.  It is a poem, a painting, a language.  Only people who have the same experience can understand it.  It is like feeling a pain.  You can never understand it from a dictionary.

24 City touches us so deeply because it brings the people who are forgotten by the rapidly developing society back into light.  It is an important witness of reality.  What has disappeared cannot make us proud.  We are utterly helpless and lonely.

3. The experience of watching this back and forth between the real and the imagined, and between people and places, is at once immersive and distancing…  There’s something slightly disorienting about a work that doesn’t have the usual markers that assure you that now you’re watching a fiction, now you’re watching a documentary, which, as I realized on second viewing, can work beautifully for a movie about profound dislocation.

Of course an actor is also a real person in real time and real space even if he or she is pantomiming in front of a special-effects green screen. This isn’t semantics: it’s just one of the complexities of representation.  This blurring is interesting in purely formal terms, but it’s also dramatically potent.  The actors in 24 City bring their own existential realities to their short, touching performances.

4. Impressive acting from Lu Liping, Chen Jianbin and Joan Chen deserves even more credit than Jia’s poignant narration.  They are utterly believable as factory workers struggling to find their identities within a rapidly evolving society.  The film has been criticized – not unjustifiably – for not targeting the domestic market, but 24 City is definitely one to watch.

5. In what sounds like a bolder experiment than it turns out to be, 24 City confuses the line between fiction and documentary, framing the factory closing around interviews with eight subjects—five workers sharing their real-life experiences, and three professional actresses (Joan Chen, Lu Liping, and Zhao Tao) telling other women’s stories as if they were their own.  The difference between the two parties is jarring without necessarily being illuminating: There isn’t much continuity between the real people and the actors, and Jia’s intended purpose, to represent history as “a blend of facts and imagination,” is only made clear through his official statement.  Mostly, 24 City falls into the same Jia trap of inadvertently drawing the viewers’ gaze past his human subjects and to the poetic images of a country in painful metamorphosis.

6. Both Platform and 24 City depict the historical trajectory of a certain group of people.  Platform is a journey, while 24 City is retrospective. The former is about experience, and the later invites people to contemplate.  Although 24 City has received lots of criticism for using professional actors and its fake documentation, I believe that narrated stories sometimes can be more powerful and real than “reality”.  As far as I know, most overseas audiences think the film is believable.  I think their judgment is more objective since they are not familiar with the actors.

7. Although Jia Zhangke says, “The fusion of documentary and fiction is a fusion of reality and imagination,” this fusion largely weakens the impact of the film.  The documentary style requires the stars to perform with a mask.  Truth is concealed rather than revealed.  The professional actors can never escape from being recognized, and their stardom becomes a vital disadvantage in performing their roles.

8. Despite his deliberate mise-en-scène and the hyper-clarity of the high-definition images, it’s not an easy movie to read.  Is the filmmaker bemused or amused by a factory bureaucrat’s earnest remark that “our offices will become a five-star hotel”?  And what is one to make of the casually revealed information that the movie itself was partially financed by 24 City‘s developer?  Have we been watching a kind of infomercial?  Is there irony or pathos in the juxtaposition of retired workers enthusiastically singing “The International” as their factory collapses?

9. Purists may be put off by this hybrid approach, but there’s nothing more impure than a documentary that claims to be objective while selling a subtle agenda.  24 City has no agenda, despite critics who see it as an apologia for harsh policies of the past, or a celebration of China’s new industrial prowess and unbridled consumerism.  Mr. Jia is an artist, one of the most interesting filmmakers working anywhere in the world, and he made his film to bear witness to a way of life while witnesses could still be found.

ANSWERS:

1. Chinese.  Xu Bing, the renowned Chinese artist; 2. Chinese.  Zhang Laotui, doubtan.com; 3.  American.  Manohla Dargis, The New York Times; 4. Chinese.  Wang Ge, The Beijinger; 5. American.  Scott Tobias, The A/V Club ; 6. Chinese.  soldier4ai, douban.com; 7. Chinese.  Grey Wolf, The Wayward Cloud ; 8. American.  J. Hoberman, The Village Voice;  9. American.  Joe Morgenstern, The Wall St. Journal.

For more reviews in English, visit the IFC Daily.

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