SPEAKING ON THE CLIMAX of his 1984 period piece Shanghai Blues, which ends on a Hong Kong–bound train from Shanghai, the Saigon-born, Hong Kong–based filmmaker Tsui Hark offered that the Chinese “are caught in something like a migrating curse, moving from one place to another.”On the face of it, Tsui’s cinema, with its staccato editing and pop sensibility, might seem to have little to do with that of Jia Zhangke, who has been the most prominent Mainland Chinese filmmaker on the festival circuit since his first feature, Pickpocket, played the Berlin International Film Festival in 1998 the title
Chinese director Jia Zhangke can be understood as a documentarian even when he’s making fiction films. His recent features on the rapid social and related ethical/moral changes in certain regions of mainland China have a keen grounding in reality, even when they branch off from the present day and speculate on the future, as his 2015 “Mountains May Depart” does.
Interestingly, though, while his fictional films have become more directly linear and concerned with narrative momentum than his early work, his actual documentary work maintains a complexly textured and sometimes elliptical feel. “Swimming Out Till The Sea Turns Blue,” Jia’s first documentary feature in about ten years (the last was 2010’s “I Wish I Knew”) lays itself out in 18 “chapters,” some running less than three minutes, each one on a theme or person, and the filmmaker has said these chapters were conceived to feel like clouds of different shapes and sizes.
âSwimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blueâ Review: China Through Writersâ Eyes
Jia Zhangkeâs documentary illuminates a vast and complicated history in a series of intimate conversations.
The writer Liang Hong in a scene from âSwimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue,â a documentary by Jia Zhangke.Credit.Cinema Guild
Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
Directed by Zhangke Jia
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The films of Jia Zhangke, documentary and fictional, zoom in on the granular details of individual lives. At the same time, they are chapters in the single, unimaginably complicated story of Chinaâs transformation in the decades since the 1949 revolution. Jia, who was born in 1970, tends to dwell in the recent past, and to circle back to Shanxi, the part of northern China where he grew up, but heâs also attentive to the continuities of history and geography, the c