Space-related Anxieties And Daily-Life Narration

In this article we attempt an in-depth analysis of the unique aesthetics and the intellectual substance of Jia Zhangke’s films, concluding that the films have space-related anxieties as their central theme, and daily-life narrations as their most prominent stylistic feature.This article has three chapters:Chapter1, An Overview of Jia Zhangke’s Films and Existing Studies Devoted to Them.Chapter2, Space-Related Anxieties, the Theme of Jia Zhangke’s Films:Space-related anxieties, or a sharp consciousness of the space between man and his surroundings, serve as the most significant theme of Jia’s films.1.Through rediscovering and "aiming at" unexplored real-world spaces, such as disorderly rural towns and ruins of old buildings demolished to make room for new constructions. Jia’s films exemplify the ultimate purpose and true courage of the realism movement.2. In this analysis we do not limit ourselves to the aesthetic perspective in which the space is an inherent characteristic of the film language, but also examine the topic from a higher perspective of the cultural viewpoint, and discuss the relationships in Jia’s films between man and the space he exists in-the space of social surroundings and the space of memories and history—during the cataclysm of modernization.Chapter3, Daily-Life Narrations, the Stylistic Feature of Jia Zhangke’s Films:The prominent stylistic characteristic of Jia’s films is the adherence to a daily-life narrative style.1. The choice of a daily-life style over a dramatic one does not remove dramatics from the narrative. Instead, the tension and conflicts are only thinly concealed behind the scene. Through the seemingly trivial and senseless daily-life lethargy, sorrow, and violence, inextricable conflicts, confusions, and pains of being are clearly shown.2. The significance of daily-life narrations:the surface and the depths of the streams of daily life.Jia’s films are composed of a multitude of streams of daily life. Art. however, is not synonymous to life, such that the composition of films from streams of life is all the more an art of choice, and the key to elevating the art above life lies in slicing off the right moments from the daily life streams. By adopting a framework combining snapshot sketches and group portraits, and such narrative principles as relinquishment of causality and keeping the films open-ended, Jia’s films uncover a new dimension of the daily life.3. It is through such anti-climactic and two-dimensional daily-life narrations that Jia’s films capture, as well as construct, the experience in a China undergoing modernization, and achieve a unique aesthetic value characterized by a familiar strangeness, a comic sorrow, and a poetic ambiguity and uncertainty. It is through such common-place charms in their daily-life narrations that Jia’s films transcend their subject matter of social criticism, and reach the higher sphere of aestheticism.If Yasujiro Ozu of Japan and Hou Hsiao-Hsien of Taiwan are the Asian masters of the daily-life style, Jia Zhangke is undoubtedly an accomplished practitioner of the style in mainland China. In a sense, Jia Zhangke revives the "respect for lives in a mundane world" in Chinese films of the1930’s and1940’s.