Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, currently in U.S. theaters after initially premiering nearly a year ago at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May 2024, is the latest entry in a feature filmography that has, alongside Mountains May Depart (2015) and Ash is Purest White (2018), settled into a structured play with time and space, the passing of eras, and the diminishing of social and familial values amidst currents of economic upheaval.
Jia’s cinema is one that may be said to occupy the bleeding edge of history. Since his earliest films, Xiao Wu (1997) and Platform (2000), an inescapable sense of the weight of the past, nightmarish anxiety of the present, and abyssal indeterminacy of the future structure his interests. Time, as it is said, takes no prisoners, and this acute temporal preoccupation assumes a deeper spatial dimension and logic through the films that would follow, from The World (2004) to A Touch of Sin (2013).
The post-2015 works serve, one may say, as dialectical epics: space and time, past and present, brought into an encounter to fashion a series of imagined futures that have incorporated as much as what has existed, been remembered, or recorded as possible. As Jia will himself note in the interview below, what is sought is a holistic reckoning and honoring of the history humanity is making. It’s an endeavor not merely thematic, but situated in the evolving codes of filmic language and technological advance, as Jia seeks to memorialize bygone film formats, sound design, and editorial rhythms through a form of resurrection that nonetheless engages the new modes of a living filmmaking.
In this sense, while the question of the director’s “best” work is a question as open as it is meaningless, it might not be so far off the mark to forward that Caught by the Tides as his most ambitious and active engagement with all of his interests, while pushing all the further into an impassioned synthesizing of an irretrievable past and present evermore defined by social and multimedia fragmentation into a future orientation marked, not by a fearful gaze or absolute disorientation, but a hard-won strength. If at one stage the viewer was given to thinking of Jia’s cinema in relation to the philosophical concept of the hyperobject, with time as precise as the objects in question, it is perhaps this latest film that takes on that status for itself and brings one to view Jia as one of the supreme artists of life — all of this life — as all events extraordinary and mundane, eras and variegated identities, technologies great and small, become avenues to be expressed and for expression, and any and every part becomes (the) whole.
Matt McCracken: Your career is marked by a particular interest in time. This could be said of any number of great directors, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien’s interest in times past and present, or Ozu’s view of time’s ambivalence. What is the concept of time and humanity’s relationship to it that informs your work?
Jia Zhangke: The way I see time has a lot to do with how I was educated in China and my upbringing there. When I was young, as a kid, a lot of what we learned about time was from the previous generations, from my father, elders and the people around me, and the view of time they shaped me with was informed by mystical legends or Buddhist teachings that depicted time in a circular way. For example, this idea of life, death, and reincarnation; that there’s a past life, which is again circular, just as you might talk about the cycles of a flower which withers and eventually blooms again the next year.
Yet, for me as a person, when I observed my reality, I didn’t really see this kind of circular time with my own eyes. What I saw was the linear time we observe in real life, through which we see time take away things from people, through, for example, the aging process, without ever witnessing any type of reincarnation. There was an inconsistency between what I was told and what I observed, and it took me a long time to reconcile what I was told, the circular way of thinking about time, and my experience of linear time; which on the one hand will give you a lot, and on the other take a lot away in the end.
Struggling with this and trying to reconcile these inconsistencies from a young age, I started painting, which I found to be something that had nothing to do with time — a very in-the-moment, two-dimensional expression — and I only came to understand that I can really do a lot with time when I had the opportunity to work with film and fully engage myself in it, as a unique artistic medium in which time is a crucial element.
MMC: Given both the structural similarity and identifiable formal uniqueness, in what ways was it hoped that Caught by the Tides would diverge from or add to the linear visions of time that are going through Mountains May Depart and Ash is Purest White?
JZ: Since 2015, I have made three films, including Mountains May Depart, Ash is Purest White and, of course, Caught by the Tides, and these three films all have something in common, which is this scope or span of more than 10-20 years. The reason why I decided to use such a long period to observe the characters is because what happened in reality during these decades was a major fragmentation of all the information we receive on a daily basis, and to counter this fragmentized world I have tried to create a more holistic narrative that possesses the sense of history you see in these three most recent films.
Despite each dealing with the same epochal shifts, I do think there is a major difference between Mountains May Depart, Ash is Purest White, and Caught by the Tides. The reason for it is because, with the first two, we filmed each of them over the course of two to three months of production time, restaging and recreating time’s passing through set design, art direction, performance, and props. This is all very different when compared to the footage I gathered over the past 20 plus years and used to compose Caught by the Tides, as every single image I captured is an image that I captured in real time, in real spaces. None of it was restaged or recreated.
A further difference between Caught by the Tides and the other films in this “long time span trilogy” is in terms of the narrative, in that the previous two films tended to focus on two characters and what happened to them. In each, the approach to narrative structure is very conventional, and my initial edit of Caught by the Tides used the same conventional style, and I found it unsatisfactory as it didn’t match the emotions and feelings I had for this one. I concluded a different, more unconventional narrative approach was needed that — instead of focusing on what happened to the two principal characters, conventionally speaking — paid more attention to the lives that we all share, collectively, the collective memory that we all share throughout each of our journeys over the course of the last 20-plus years. It is the world beyond the two characters that became my focus, ultimately, in Caught by the Tides.
MMC: You previously mentioned painting as part of your upbringing. To what extent might an artistic movement such as Cubism have informed the unique, rapid, energetic editing strategy we see given to the many little fragments or pockets of history in the film’s opening passages? Alongside this, in a contemporary sense, with the prevalence of apps such as Douyin (TikTok) and Xiaohongshu (RedNote) and the ways each record and manipulate time’s capture, were either of these also at play in arranging the first couple of acts?
JZ: This type of visual experience is also one I encounter in real life and did have a huge impact on how I structured and edited Caught by the Tides. I do think that the TikTok format, with its verticality and highly fragmented images, were elements that I thought could be an inspiration and inform the way I edited parts, such as the ruin and the teahouse sequences. This is all some something that is very unique in the contemporary way of seeing the world and can, perhaps, somehow sensitize us to pay more attention to certain things; as well as being something which I hoped I could use to draw the audience into giving focus to certain things I wanted them to pay more attention to and to create certain atmospheres or emotional states. I think these applications were very beneficial and helpful in achieving that through the new visual experience we all share on account of them.
In the same way that Godard used TV language as part of an inspiration for the filmic language that he developed, I also tried to experiment with the visual grammar of TikTok while never simply aiming to directly incorporate it into my film. Rather, I aimed to figure out some way to make that kind of language one of the many vocabularies or grammatical elements of my filmic language. Filmic language, as a language, evolves with technological evolutions and advancements, and I think it should be a language capable of being inclusive of and able to embrace language from other media.
I thought a lot about abstract painting and the abstract more generally for Caught by the Tides too, in such a way that, for this film particularly, I do think that may be the best register for the audience to resonate with the emotions that I really want to evoke.
MMC: Among many things, the film is also capturing the experience of lockdown that Chinese audiences endured. What is it that you hope for people to walk away from the film feeling, particularly regarding Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) as the prism you selected for audiences to encounter the story the film presents?
JZ: I created the character of Qiaoqiao as someone who has experienced a lot over the course of the film’s 20-year timespan, going from a young woman in her 20s all the way through to middle-age. The feeling or concept that I most wanted to leave audiences with through this character was a sense of rebirth, as you watch how she has evolves past a life and love that are in ruins to, towards the end of the film, seeing her still live on and with grit and strength. That is the feeling I want people to really leave the film with, as if we might say “Yes, I need to forge ahead,” even though we have to live through disasters outside of our control there can be this recognition that as long as we continue to live on with dignity, we will experience this final sense of rebirth at the end.
Comments are closed.