The Favorites - Platform (#87)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Platform (2000/China/dir. Jia Zhangke) appeared at #87 on my original list.

What it is • When the film begins in 1979, the characters are all part of a traveling performance group. They dress similarly in baggy tunics and shapeless slacks, and their songs are all revolutionary odes to the wonders of the recently-deceased Chairman Mao. Their hometown of Fenyang is shown in wintry isolation, a rural hamlet in the middle of nowhere characterized by barren streets and homes with few modern amenities. Parents, police, and the elder troop leader scold these restless young performers when they step out of line and portraits of Lenin and Stalin adorn the walls of theaters whose most risque offerings are thirty-year-old Indian entertainments. When the film ends in 1990, the characters have split off from one another: some finally settle down after years on the road, others disappear from the town and/or narrative without explanation. The performance group, last we see of it anyway, has turned into a mixture of rock guitarists and go-go dancers. Fenyang is under constant construction and televisions play soap operas while tape players boom pop songs from every household; when we visit a movie theater near the end of the film, it's showing animated sex. The older generation is absent either literally (one character's father opens a shop and sleeps there with a mistress, never returning home) or figuratively. We experience these incremental changes as circumstantial details, just as the characters would: background color to a love affair, diversion during a long tedious drive through the desert, decoration to a scene of domestic dissolution. There isn't exactly a "story" here. Instead the film unfolds like life, with long takes (there is almost no cutting within scenes and the camera tends to stand still) capturing individual incidents, sometimes years apart, which coalesce to form an overpowering whole. Personal and cultural history intertwine into a palpable experience that can only be felt, rather than than explained.

Why I like it •

Platform

#74 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.

The films of Zhang Ke Jia are like time-lapse images transforming both slowly and rapidly before your eyes. Finally what you're seeing at the end (of a shot or, particularly in this case, of the movie) bears little resemblance to what you saw at the beginning, though the route of this change is not easily re-traceable ("how did we get here?" could be the epitaph to each of Jia's films). This transformation is slow because Jia's camera takes its time. In Platform there are no reverse shots, no close-ups, and almost no cuts during scenes (I can think of at least one exception: the provincial theatrical touring group rushes up to an elevated railway in a desolate landscape; suddenly we are on the tracks ourselves, facing away from the train which is rushing off behind the camera, while we stare into the cast's faces as they grin and wave, exhausted). The transformation is also rapid, however, because so much happens within a fixed time frame or spatial plane: a building dissolves into dust (or takes off like a space rocket) in Still Life, a mini-universe is revealed by the ascension of an elevator in The World (a film less defined by fluid long takes than Platform or Still Life, though they are still a part of the texture), in Platform hearts are broken and futures fixed in a lovers' discussion which ends with one character proclaiming (ever time-conscious) "You're too late" and walking away. If that last transformation seems less dramatic than the previous one, don't be fooled. Within each shot, in itself a miniature movie, Platform fixes its gaze on a moment, albeit one always in flux (as moments always are). But over the movie as a whole, there is a more rapid physical and spiritual transformation than anything in either Still Life or The World. That's because Platform takes as its subject the still-bizarre mutation of China from a totalitarian communist workers' state to a semi-capitalist ultra-modern society in the 1980s. An obsession with transformation and mutation are not only aesthetic strategies in Platform, they are the very meat of the film, its text, context, and subtext. Here, form and content fit together perfectly as hand in glove, which is good, because nothing else in the film is so easily malleable.

Cities of the Imagination

"Dread of what?" Carl Jung wrote in his memoirs. Reflecting upon his youth, and his fellow students' incapacity to "admit unconventional possibilities," Jung continued, "After all, there was nothing preposterous or world-shaking in the idea that there might be events which overstepped the limited categories of space, time, and causality. Animals were known to sense beforehand storms and earthquakes. There were dreams which foresaw the death of certain persons, clocks which stopped at the moment of death, glasses which shattered at the critical moment. All these things had been taken for granted in the world of my childhood. And now I was apparently the only person who had ever heard of them. In all earnestness I asked myself what kind of world I had stumbled into. Plainly the urban world knew nothing about the country world, the real world of mountains, woods, and rivers, of animals and 'God's thoughts' (plants and crystals). I found this explanation comforting. At all events, it bolstered my self-esteem, for I realized that for all its wealth of learning the urban world was mentally rather limited."

But if the city represented cold, hard, narrow realism to rural mystics, a scientific rationalism which was blind to the stream of rich unconsciousness imbuing everything, it could also be invested with a kind of alchemical magick, a dream-projection of civilization taking the same subversive approach to the functional architecture of the metropolis that urban minds took towards the natural wonders of the countryside. The utilitarian skyline could be transformed into an oneiric dreamscape, a mental correspondence to the byzantine mazes of the imagination. This post, using images from Zhang Ke Jia's film The World (reviewed last week) and Michel Gondry's music videos alongside quotations and my own thoughts, will offer a brief reflection upon this perennial theme.

The World

#70 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series counting down the most acclaimed films of the previous decade.

"It's a small world after all, it's a small world after all, it's a small world after all, it's a small, small, small, small world..."

"The world" of this film’s title is a theme park which combines a lushly wooded landscape with reproductions of international monuments: a towering yet smaller-than-normal Eiffel Tower which looms over the whole park like a panopticon, a small set of the New York skyline which still includes the World Trade Center, a bite-size Leaning Tower of Pisa which perpetually invites tourists to stand twenty feet in front of it with their hand out so that photographic "tricks" can make them appear to be holding it up. (Director Zhang Ke Jia always shoots these particular tourists from the side, so that the absurd artificiality of their gesture is highlighted.) This demi-monde, further dislocated by being placed in Beijing instead of the American setting (say, World Showcase in Disney World, or else any number of miniature golf courses) where we might expect it, is fascinating enough to sustain the film even if there isn’t a plot. Which, at first glance, there isn’t, really. Still, a story of sorts develops over the course of the film, or rather several stories, glimpses into characters' lives which remind us how vast and implacable is the real world outside the bounds of our dreamlike global village.

Still Life

First things first, it’s very hard to capture the life of Still Life in a still. There were numerous images that caught my eye while watching the movie, and when it was over I tried to go back and pause certain moments to create a screen-capture on my computer. No dice, though I finally settled on the enticing image seen above. The problem was that all of these impressive visuals contained the essential value of movement, either of the camera, within the frame, or both. One particular sequence seemed ripe for pictures: a quiet scene in which characters dance on a rooftop at dusk, with the half-constructed metropolis blazing in the background and a yawning, unilluminated bridge stretching towards the hilly horizon. Yet each time I paused the simple panning motion, the still did not capture that visceral pull of the visuals, the interruption of a simple sweep somehow stripping the shot of its power.