The labour of love that took Jia Zhangke more than 20 years to finish: “I didn’t know when this process would end”
One of modern neorealism’s foremost auteurs, Jia Zhangke, isn’t what anyone would call the most prolific of filmmakers, but each new feature from the Chinese great tends to be worth the wait.
Since making his debut in 1997’s intimate drama Xiao Wu, Zhangke has gone on to helm another nine features. Ten films in three decades isn’t a bad return, but the focus has always remained on quality over quantity. On that front, it’s hard to say there are many better at maintaining the highest level of consistency across their entire back catalogue.
The auteur’s hallmarks include minimalistic dialogue, the casting of non-professional and unknown actors to deepen the sense of realism and authenticity that permeates his work, and a focus on shooting on location to assist in creating an accurate and unflinching depiction of the hardships that affect many modern Chinese citizens, particularly those left on the fringes of society.
2024’s Caught by the Tides marked Zhanke’s first new feature in six years, and it was his most self-referential yet. An elegiac and impressionistic hybrid of fiction and reality, it borders on the metatextual after the director used footage he’d shot behind the scenes of his own productions dating back more than 20 years to inform the narrative.
By incorporating genuine documentary-style footage into a story told in three parts that combines elements of his previous efforts, Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, into a new tale that – much like the other two – stars Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin as romantic interests who deal with the trials and tribulations of their relationship under a setting that deftly blurs the lines between the personal and poignant.
“It’s something I’ve done continuously for the past 20-some years, starting in 2001, when DV technology became available and began making filmmaking so much easier,” Zhangke explained to Film Comment of how his fly-on-the-wall footage eventually served as the backbone to an entire movie.
“I didn’t know when this gathering process would end because I wanted it to be large-scale, nonlinear, impressionistic,” he admitted, and it wasn’t until after the pandemic hit that his vision began to take shape. “That’s when I revisited the footage and the materials I had gathered over the past 20 years and began to think about a way to edit it so that it would be coherent and serve a narrative purpose alongside a newly scripted last third of a film.”
In what’s become a signature for Zhangke, Caught by the Tides was ambitious and unfussy, combining his own footage with a freshly created storyline to offer the best of both worlds. It was a labour of love that was more than two decades in the making, allowing the filmmaker to share his documentarian side with the captive audience who were already eager to devour his latest work.
