History lessons - movement and stasis, time as a paradox. Maybe less overtly (or angirly) political as future Zhang-ke works, because it's a portrait of a specific generation and specifically being the last of it. A work about youths not understanding the past and looking to the future, only to find more hopelessness and even less agency than what they thought they lacked prior. Nostalgia is tragic, because that is all that remains. At the same time, we traverse a decade plus of enormous political change, and it is illustrated by shifts in music - shifts from culture to pop culture. Rather than giving us explanations to how things shifted, Jia uses elipsis - we understand the mentality which made…

Small town dreams fade into quotidian struggles as life slips away. In Platform, the most immediate motif is that of time. Here, time is merciless, as elliptical vignettes obscure its specificity but mark its passing. To watch this film is to feel time march on independently of characters, to see them at the whims of it.

The film starts with a young theatre troupe, they are starting to express themselves and to stand apart from an older generation. They are the youth, the future and time stretched out in front of them is an expanse of hope. As the film progresses, things start to stagnate. For a long time, we feel constricted in a home town, the rhythms of it…

This stunning portrayal of a small Chinese town during a time of change neatly captures the world in a way that is reminiscent of nostalgic films portraying America in the sixties, focusing as it does on lost and emerging young artists. It contrasts them with the older generations, who don't get the new fashions, who hold tight to old ways that get in the way of love and the encroaching pop culture.

While it has a strong sense of place (it would be hard not to know this took place in 1980s China), it touches on so many universal characteristics of small towns that you never once feel like an outsider to this beautiful and somewhat sad setting. There is…

Still stands as Jia Zhangke's towering masterpiece, his thoroughgoing epic about post-socialist China. He drops the more hectic formal choices from Xiao Wu and settles in to the all-encompassing eye of a still, wide frame, retaining a collectivist and politicized outlook in spite of China's gradual move towards the opposite. The train used to be a symbol of Mao's combined program of national development and revolutionary struggle, the means by which red youth traveled the country for free, gaining a sense of the vast land they are about to transform, the very subject of an acting troupe's stage performance. But the train itself will always be out of their reach, something that they can only chase from afar.

The world…

Jia Zhangke seems to film in a largely wordless manner. Instead he focuses on landscapes and background noise, preferring to have those speak for themselves. Characters are kept at a distance and we rarely get any close-ups, and so their sparse dialogue becomes more important in understanding who they are.

Platform is set in 1980's China, when the shift from Mao's Communist reforms start to transition into a much more westernized society. At the start we begin with a theater troupe of kids, all obligated to perform state-approved material. They complain about this and pine for more trendy things, such as bell-bottom jeans and rock 'n roll music. They clash with their parents on these matters, the same parents they…