More on this, I hope, to come - since this is already a movie that’s deeply ingrained itself in my thoughts, and one that I already very much adore. A wonderfully creative (and innovative!) abstract masterpiece, though so much of it - primarily it's central conceit - I still struggle to articulate, yet now having seen it multiple times I've found my favorite section changing each time. Its impressionistic narrative structure consisting of documentary and not, deleted scenes from old films and brand new footage feels less like a straight line than a collection of memories structured into something I have never seen before. In fact, this is practically a remake of Ash Is Purest White, and at the same…

a talismanic film found beneath the digital trash-stratum, coordinated somewhere between a chopped & screwed wang bing doc, a late-godard domestic remix, and an arthur lipsett pop music video -- which is to say it's another masterwork from one of cinema's brightest souls, essential viewing for what the medium must become, hell or high water -- no exaggeration, no hyperbole needed: if you're not on this wavelength, you're simply doing yourself a disservice.

a silent zhao tao chases after li zhubin's brother bin, who comes to be an architect of china's 21st century modernity, a sort of inverse doppelgänger to ash is purest white's brother bin, not a masculine gangster out of time, but a man thinking he's keeping up with…

A searching and scattershot portrait of displacement that’s as likely to resonate with Jia Zhang-ke devotees as it is to mystify those who are new to his work, “Caught by the Tides” finds the Chinese auteur returning the most pivotal characters and locations that have defined his movies over the last two decades. Then again, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never left them.

Tracing the faintest contours of a scripted love story around the scaffolding of some documentary footage that Jia has collected over the course of 22 years, this elusive chimera of a film strains to literalize the delicate relationship between time and memory — a theme that has become increasingly central to the…

The subject position of Communist youth was not gender specific. Clinging to this position, young women like me sensed few gender constraints in our devotion to the revolution. Numerous young female leaders emerged on this island with eight farms. This cohort never believed in female inferiority and were free from social expectations of the roles of wife and mother. Femininity was not defined as performing the traditional roles of wife and mother. To be a good female youth was to devote herself heart and soul to the revolution...In those intoxicating moments with many young likeminded dreamers, I was a revolutionary youth, a Communist Party member. My gender was irrelevant.

- Wang Zheng

Follows the general contour of a Jia Zhangke…

“I was twenty-three years old when I enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy. Most of my classmates were teenagers who had just graduated from high school, and I was five years older. Unlike them, I had no time to lose. For me, it was the end of being carefree. For them, life still had all its freshness but I already felt old. In the evening, my favorite place to be was the study room where we could smoke. I would bring green graph paper and a pen, sit down, light a cigarette, and start to write. There wouldn’t be many people there, and everyone seemed sad. We were a handful of intellectuals experiencing hardship.

“My cheap pen would make its…

‎Saw this while flying to China, and it felt like the right film for this moment. Jia Zhangke takes me on almost two hours of an introspective journey through his cinematic work, reflecting on love, loss, and the impermanence of relationships. At the center is a failed romance, but the film also opens a window into China in rapid transformation, showing how people navigate personal grief alongside social change.
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‎China is one of the countries that has changed fastest in the 21st century, and Jia Zhangke, through his previous works, has captured that change better than anyone else. This film feels like the result of all Jia Zhangke’s efforts to show how time wears down people and places. It…

Practically impossible to want to write on this again (not that I nailed it the first time) without wanting to be deliberately a bit obtuse, or at least a bit abstract. This is essentially "Historical Determinism: The Movie," and yet its poignancy is overwhelming - almost unbearably so. This is 21st Century cinema: a logical structure, even narrative storytelling, by way of aesthetic and intellectual bricolage. And montage in 2024 that takes us back to the silent era. That's not to say it's "pure vibes" - the middle section in particular and the way Jia connects the community displacement from the Three Gorges disaster with the emergence of privatized business as well as Western investment - including religion - is…