Art Manifestation Of The Living Conditions Of The Grassroots

With his strong native complex, valuable populace consciousness and special realistic aesthetics style, Jia Zhangke, one of the Chinese new generation directors, has directed since 1994 twelve films including seven feature films and five documentary films. His film creation saw three stages: Beijing Youth Film Experimental Group creation stage, underground film creation stage and a new creation stage thenceforward. Based on his own personal experience and acute sense of life, Jia's films reflect the life of the grassroots young in China's small towns since the reform and opening. They also reflect the painful process of their losing other people's love, their own lives and houses during the social changing period and display their changing attitudes from passive to active.In my opinion, Jia's films have high artistic, social and documentary values. His film style is greatly affected by Italian neorealism, French New Wave films, Japanese director Ozu Yasujiro and Taiwan director Hou Xiaoxian. In addition, Shen Congwen and Borges inspired Jia's film creation. With an honest creation attitude, Jia uses non-professional actors in his films and adopts anti-traditional narrative techniques. Characterized by subjective camera language, a proper distance created between camera and characters and the use of diversified and real art of sounds, Jia's films have created many grassroots figures such as thieves, vagrants, unemployed young, construction workers, miners, immigrants, etc. and have shown his sympathy to these weak groups. His films fill the blanks of town films by paying adequate heed to the grassroots. His films received many awards at foreign film festivals and serve as a window through which the world could see the real China. Many foreign film critics claim that Jia's films have shown the universal life experience of human being.After a general study of all Jia's films, this thesis tries to summarize the realistic aesthetics style of his films, analyze how his film creation ideas formed and how they were applied to the films. This thesis also tries to analyze Jia's film style, its formation process and the groundbreaking innovation of his film style. With the development of contemporary Chinese films, this thesis tries to explore the artistic, social and documentary values of Jia's films, study the innovations and weaknesses in his films, look ahead to the prospects of his coming films. It is my intention that an increasing number of people pay attention to Jia's films and the grassroots figures in them, show their sympathy to the weak groups, and reflect their own living situations. All of these together will work out solutions for the production and distribution difficulties facing domestic small mass films now.