Revisiting Jia Zhangke:Individuality, Subjectivity, and Autonomy in Contemporary Chinese Independent Cinema

摘要

Most international film festivals and their audiences treat Jia Zhangke as an auteur: a filmmaker whose body of works demonstrates a logical consistency, stylistic unity, and thematic continuity. In spite of that, film scholars in Mainland China, Europe, and North America rarely discuss him and his works in those terms. The appellation zuozhe dianying (auteurist cinema) was used in Chinese film criticism during the first half of the 1990s to discuss directors including Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, Lou Ye, and Jia Zhangke, who worked outside the state-regulated film production and distribution system. Yet it was dropped completely by 1999 as these filmmakers unanimously expressed their preference to be called duli yingren (independent filmmakers). Hence, if we discuss Jia in auteurist terms, we must understand that the idea of the cinematic auteur cannot be divorced from the meanings of being “independent” in both the production and distribution conditions of these films, and the larger sociopolitical and cultural contexts of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1989.