Jia Zhangke season at BFI Southbank

A new season of films by Jia Zhangke highlights the talent of the self-funding Chinese director to record a world in flux, says David Jenkins

The intricacies of globalisation have seldom been captured on film with such lyricism and quiet malice than in the films of Chinese director Jia Zhangke, the latest in a line of startlingly original Asian auteurs to receive a month-long retrospective at BFI Southbank. Combining defiantly static, meditative camerawork with piecemeal narratives and bustling sound designs, he creates understated realist fables that offer a surgically precise evaluation of China, its growth, its people, its past, its future.

Born in the midst of the cultural revolution, it is clear from his work that Jia has first-hand experience of a society that doesn’t quite understand how it arrived at where it is now. His films present a world in constant flux: politics, construction, family, childhood, work, art and love. Centralised town planning has supplied China with the ethereal backdrops to much of his work, from an unusual Beijing theme park filled with scaled-down versions of major world attractions for 2004’s ‘The World’, to the crumbling, statuesque remnants of Fengjie, the nightmare-slum-cum-dream-film set. Fengjie is currently being demolished after flooding from the Three Gorges dam project and is the focus of his dreamy Venice winner, ‘Still Life' and its gorgeous companion doc, ‘Dong’.

The characters in Jia’s films are a reflection of these odd locations: all struggle to survive in uncertain climes and more often than not are met with humiliation and loss. Though Jia has cited Ozu, Bresson, Fellini and De Sica as influences, perhaps a more contemporary connection can be made with the work of the Dardenne brothers, whose brutal portraits of society’s flotsam offer us sympathetic individuals whose irrational actions and dire social situations are often the product of government institutions whose meddling hands linger off-screen.

Jia’s sublime 1997 debut, ‘Xiao Wu’, centres on the languid existence of an introspective pickpocket (goggle-eyed Jia regular, Wang Hongwei) whose criminal intent is further stoked by a botched romance at a local karaoke bar, rejection from his unloving parents and ‘rehabilitated’ associates who have moved into cigarette smuggling. ‘Platform’ (2000) – arguably Jia’s richest work to date – takes social alienation further. It charts the wavering group dynamics of an idealistic musical theatre troupe whose state-sponsored Peasant Culture Group of Fengyang
is forced to roll with the punches of 1980s capitalist reform, leading to their subsequent rebranding as the eminently cheesy All-Star Rock ’n’ Breakdance Electronic Band. ‘Unknown Pleasures’ (2002) sees two Fengjie teens trying to rise above their respective stations, enraptured by celebrity, television and Western pop culture (especially ‘Pulp Fiction’), but ultimately without the means to secure a solid future.

Like many of his ‘sixth generation’ cinematic peers, such as Lou Ye (‘Summer Palace’) and Wang Xiaoshuai (‘Shanghai Dreams’), Jia funds and produces his films outside of China’s studio system and, as such, much of his fanbase exists in foreign territories. Always one to take the absurdities of state censorship with a wry smile, there is even a scene in ‘Unknown Pleasures’ where one of the protagonists is looking for pirate DVD copies of ‘Platform’ and ‘Xiao Wu’, eventually berating the illegal vendor for not having any decent arthouse titles to offer.

Luckily for us, this retrospective has got the lot, from the director’s little-seen debut ‘Xiao Shan Going Home’, made in 1995 while studying film theory at the Beijing Film Academy, to his most recent documentary, ‘Wu Yong’ (‘Useless’), a profile of fashion designer Ma Ke. But if we look beyond the forlorn characters and acres of social critique, the message at the heart of these films is that the Chinese are living in strange times, and at least for the sake of this perceptive and deeply poetic filmmaker, we can only hope they never end.

The Jia Zhangke season begins at BFI Southbank on Feb 1