Revisiting Jia Zhangke: Individuality, Subjectivity, and Autonomy in Contemporary

Chinese Independent Cinema

Victor Fan, King’s College London

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).1 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.

Being “independent,” as Jason McGrath argues, was made possible by the emergence of

the concept of zizhuquan (autonomy). Such a concept emerged out of the promise of free market

capitalism, reintroduced under state regulation with the gaige kaifang (reform and open) policy

in 1978 and exacerbated by Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in 1992. According to such a

promise, individuals are supposed to exercise their own free choices, which not only have

economic, but also sociopolitical, impacts. Individual autonomy is often set against the ongoing

policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to hexie (harmonize) contesting private opinions

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in the increasingly diversified public spaces through film and media. For McGrath, free market

capitalism deterritorializes the boundaries between the private and the public, the self and the

other.2 As Xiaobin Yang argues, for Chinese scholars, their understanding of deterritorialization

is based on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of schizophrenia: a display of a “collage of

fragmentary ruins of anarchical, heterogeneous elements.” For them, such anarchical energy

allows individuals to assume a sense of autonomy, which would gradually dismantle the state’s

paranoia: its attempt to “impose a centralized, unified system upon disparate elements.”3

Out of these tendencies, the ideas of geren (individual), zhuguanxing (subjectivity), and

zizhuquan (autonomy), terms frequently used to define Chinese independent cinema and

authorship, have yet been adequately theorized––albeit substantially discussed––in the

established creative debate and scholarship. To a certain degree, such under-theorization is not a

result of carelessness on the part of filmmakers and scholars; rather, these concepts are regarded

almost as axiomatic in the ideological infrastructure of free market economy and humanism that

their meanings are rarely scrutinized. In this chapter, I argue that understanding auteurism and

applying its terms to Jia and his works require an active rethinking of what individuality,

subjectivity, and autonomy mean both in the production and sociopolitical contexts of

independent Chinese cinema and postsocialist modernity in the past two decades. I do so by first

mapping out the intellectual and critical discourse of Chinese independent cinema. I then use

Gilbert Simondon’s theory of deindividuation and desubjectivization to reconfigure our

understanding of the forms of humanism and auteurism upon which our impression of Jia as an

auteur is founded. Finally, I examine Jia’s works, especially his most extensively discussed film

Xiao Wu (1997), and his most recent one Tian zhuding [A Touch of Sin, 2013], and propound that

his films examine how deindividuated and desubjectivized lives come to accept their own

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deindividuation and desubjectivization under free market capitalism, not as a form of liberation,

but as a potentiality that can––though not yet––offer a new way of understanding one’s condition

of existence.

Individuality, Autonomy, and Subjectivity in Chinese Independent Cinema

Concepts such as individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy were discussed among Chinese

independent filmmakers and scholars during the 1990s. The term geren dianying (personal film)

was first popularized around 1989 and 1990 to describe films that take personal views to witness,

(re)present, comment, or critique the lived realities of those who occupy socially marginalized

positions, or to offer personalized memories of traumas that allow viewers to reevaluate the

grand narratives of recent history. For example, Zhang Yuan’s Mama (1990) interweaves a

fictional account of a single mother who struggles to raise her mentally challenged child, and

documentary footage of mentally challenged children being trapped in a school that deprives

them of individual dignity. Both fictional and documentary footages were shot with a fast black

and white film stock in natural lighting, thus producing a granular texture that constantly reminds

the viewers of the materiality of the image. Such tactile quality maintains an objective distance

between the viewers and the image on the one hand, and enables the viewers to “feel” and

“touch” the coarseness and murkiness of the image as though it were their lived memory.

Meanwhile, Wu Wenguang’s Liulang Beijing: Zuihou de mengxiangzhe [Bumming Beijing: The

Last Dreamers, 1990] uses a style akin to cinéma vérité to position the viewers in the xianchang

(situatedness) of five artists from different regions, who stayed and worked in Beijing without

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residential registration after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, thus offering individual

documents of their lived realities.4

These personal films engage the viewers in a cinematographic experience in which the

self and the other, the subjective and the objective, are renegotiated. As Yingjin Zhang argues, as

soon as the term “personal film” emerged, filmmakers began to question the positionality among

themselves, the filmed characters, and the viewers. For instance, Wu calls his creative process

huidao zizhen (returning to one’s reality). For Zhang, this “new position is not an official

position (government), not a popular or folk position (minjian), not a people’s position (renmin),

not an intellectual’s position (enlightenment), not an underground position (marginality), not

even an oppositional position (rebellion), but simply an individual’s position––‘I would speak of

myself rather than my position.’”5 For example, in 1966: Wo de hongweibing shidai [1966: My

Time in the Red Guards, 1990], five cultural workers and Wu talk to the camera about their

personal memories as Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). In the film, there is

a constant negotiation among the positionality of the director, those of the cultural workers he

interviewed, those of the viewers’, and that of the grand narrative of the Cultural Revolution to

which everyone in this filmic experience inevitably relates. The zizhen (one’s reality) is therefore

not a subjective position as opposed to the other’s, but an active deconstruction of one’s

subjectival position, which is always multiply occupied by the others’.

The multiplicity of one’s subjectivity, however, should not be mistaken as the collective.

As Chen Mo and Zhiwei Xiao argue, in the Qingnian zuopin yantao hui (Symposium on films by

young filmmakers), organized by the academic journal Dianying yishu [Film Art] in November

1999, several commentators used the term wowo zhuyi (me-me’ism) to discuss independent

films. For them, independent cinema “rejects the fifth generation’s embrace of the mainstream

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value of privileging meta-history at the expense of the individual subjectivity,” best understood

not as a form of “egocentrism, but as a defiance of the hegemony of collectivism.”6

The emergence of the self in independent cinema can be considered as a kneejerk

reaction against Maoist collectivism (1949–76). As Paul Pickowicz observes, although the

independent artists in Bumming Beijing struggle with their lives, they seem to embrace their

sense of lost and alienation as a form of capitalist decadence. Following the lead of Ci Jiwei,

who argues that the “hedonistic excesses of the present” is the “logical result of failed Maoist

asceticism,” Pickowicz argues, “many post-Mao youth consciously or unconsciously took Maoist

caricatures of global modernity at face value and embraced the caricatures as their own modern

values.”7 In this sense, although Jia critiques these caricatures of capitalist modernity in his films

including Ren xiaoyao [Unknown Pleasures, 2002], Shijie [The World, 2004], and A Touch of

Sin, the characters under scrutiny are ultimately drawn to these caricatures as they are incapable

of knowing––and because of not knowing, neither resisting nor critiquing––what these pleasures

really are, when they come face to face with the ruins of socialist modernity.8

Postsocialist Modernity

The idea that Chinese independent films foreground postsocialist subjectivity becomes the

dominant trope in the criticism of Jia Zhangke’s early works.9 In the analyses offered by Michael

Berry and Xiaopin Lin, for instance, Jia’s “Hometown Trilogy”––Xiao Wu, Zhantai [Platform,

2000], and Unknown Pleasures––are seen as metonyms of Mainland China coping with the

collapse of socialist modernity and the unknowable and irresistible pleasure and trauma of

capitalist modernity, in which individual subjectivity fails to emerge (Xiao Wu), remains

contained within the comfort of the xiaokang (moderately prosperous) family (Platform), or

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becomes powerless as individual autonomy turns out to be synonymous with money (Unknown

Pleasures).

But then, what characterizes the production conditions of the Chinese independent

filmmakers and their filmic interventions is not a simplistic enjoyment of individuality,

subjectivity, and autonomy, or a frustration of their belated arrival. Rather, the creative

trajectories of these filmmakers and their films instantiate an ongoing process in which

individuation and deindividuation, subjectivization and desubjectivization are not polar

opposites. Instead, they often come hand in hand as socialist modernity has yet completely

disappeared, while postosocialist modernity has yet to fully arrive. These films conduct such

negotiation not by grafting an individual subjectivity (e.g. of the filmmaker) onto a narrative, but

by situating the individual subjectivities of the filmmakers, alongside of the characters and the

viewers’, through the tactile presence of the camera and the distance it maintains with the reality

it captivates.

As McGrath argues, such liminal temporality between two modes of modernity––

socialist and postsocialist––is best contextualized within the sociopolitical conditions in which

concepts of individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy emerged. During the 1980s, as a result of

the reform and open policy, the reintroduction of free market capitalism in the urban areas

persuaded cultural producers and intellectuals that individuals who make free decisions in

material consumption are making sociopolitical decisions. In the wenhua re (cultural heat)

debate (1980–89), where Chinese intellectuals and the general public participated in a

widespread discussion of the impact of market economy, there was a genuine belief that

capitalism would come hand-in-hand with political democratization.10

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For McGrath, such a debate came to a halt after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, when

economic liberalization was divorced from political democratization, a direction confirmed in

1992 by Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour. As a result, while the public discourse began to be

preoccupied by the ever-expanding neoliberal economy, intellectuals started to split into two

camps. On the one hand, some scholars observe a cultural crisis, as the abandonment of socialist

ideology and the failure of introducing political democracy through economic emancipation have

left a void in the society’s hexin jiazhi (core values), zhongji jiazhi (ultimate values), or zhongji

guanhuai (ultimate concerns). These ultimate values, for Chinese intellectuals in the 1990s, can

be considered renwen jingshen (humanist spirit). Ultimate values, however, are not definable in

collective terms. Rather, individuals who believe in their existence must actively search for them.

For these scholars, one’s desire to seek and one’s faith in such core values instantiate the

humanist spirit. On the other hand, those who disagree with the humanist spirit camp, led by

writer Wang Shuo, insist that as one exercises free choices in a market economy, one also makes

a moral decision that contribute to the larger social fabric. For them, there are neither ultimate

values nor humanist spirit underlying these individual choices.11

Both the humanist camp and the Wang Shuo camp share a common underlying

assumption, that the current sociopolitical conditions are characterized by a “spiritual” absence.

Such an absence is certainly left by the broken promise of the Maoist era to deliver socialist

modernity. However, it is indeed part and parcel of the mechanism of modernity itself: the desire

to consume and the illusion of free choices always circulate around an absence, a void the

consumers and free individuals aim to pursue in the first place. In fact, the active pursuit of this

absence motivates consumption and consolidates one’s faith in the free market economy and its

political impact.12 McGrath calls this “postsocialist modernity,” as it is a form of global

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modernity that takes place after the collapse of socialist modernity, yet it occupies a temporality

between a socialist modernity that is both “not yet” and “has already failed,” and a modernity

that has yet to be materialized and cannot possibly “be”––as it is ultimately, a void.13

McGrath’s understanding of the sociopolitical conditions of Mainland China since the

1990s help us understand a difference between the reception of Jia’s cinema in Euro-American

scholarship and their Chinese counterpart. As Michael Berry and Lin argue respectively, Jia’s

work is characterized by an ennui as individuals left behind by material modernity find

themselves trapped in the postindustrial xiancheng (county towns). This can be understood as a

frustration of one’s desire to catch up with capitalist modernity that has, supposedly, already

arrived in the urban regions, and a perpetual sense of haunting from the Maoist past over one’s

living conditions. Supposedly, such ennui is caused by the incommensurability between a rapidly

disappearing socialist modernity and the belated arrival of capitalist modernity in these regions,

as though full economic liberalization would deliver an ultimate reconciliation. For these

scholars, Jia seems to suggest that values such as individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy

should be privileged, a position that stands against state intervention. For that reason, Jia is often

received by Euro-American film scholars and festival audiences as a politically oppositional

filmmaker.

Chinese film critics, however, reads the works of Jia and his cohorts almost in the

opposite manner. For them, their works are symptomatic of China’s cultural crisis, and they offer

a humanist solution to existing social problems. Rather than standing in opposition against the

government, these films conform to a populist imagination of how the excesses of capitalism

should be addressed. For example, Jin Yan argues that Jia’s films are fundamentally modernist in

their jingshen suqiu (spiritual quest), yet anti-modern in their social values. For her, Jia’s works

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demonstrate a “quest for geti jiazhi (individual values), promulgate gexing jingshen (personal

spirit), and desire for freedom and independence.” These are best considered the core values of

lixiang zhuyi (idealism) and rendao zhuyi (humanism). For Jin, Jia’s films exemplify how

contemporary cinema can locate the ultimate concerns of humanism and the government’s notion

of xiaokang economy by making available those contingencies where humanity is captured,

corporeally sensed, and experienced.14

Meanwhile, for Dai Jinhua, Chinese independent cinema deconstructs the grand

narratives of the socialist past without any new political agenda.

Complex as eighties Chinese culture is, it is still subject to integration into “modernity,”

on the basis of a common desire for progress, social democracy, and national prosperity,

and by virtue of its resistance to historical inertia and the stronghold of mainstream

ideology. In the nineties, however, the following elements feed a different sociocultural

situation: the ambiguous ideology of the post-Cold War era; the implosion and diffusion

of mainstream ideology; global capitalism’s tidal force and the resistance of nationalisms

and nativisms; the penetration and impact of global capital on local cultural industries;

cultures’ increasing commercialization in global and local culture markets; and the active

role local intellectuals, besieged by postmodern and postcolonial discourse, have

undertaken in their writing. Nineties Chinese culture is in fact becoming a unique space,

open to crisscrossing perspectives: it is a city of mirrors.15

For Dai, these “mirrors,” in one register, reflect those problems located in the

intersections of these intersecting political perspectives and social conditions. But in another

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register, these problems, filtered through the filmmakers’ individual subjectivities, become

merely their own narcissistic images. In the end, what these filmmakers claim to be objective

realities are merely their own self-images, and what they claim to be their selves are the mere

reflections of the social problems they claim to suffer.16

Deindividuation and Desubjectivization: Autonomy in Posocialist Modernity

It is true that in the endings of many Jia’s films, the protagonists are either reined in by the law

(Xiao Wu and Unknown Pleasures), or settle down with some forms of petit bourgeois life (Xiao

Shan huijia or Xiao Shan Going Home, 1995; Platform; and Ershisi cheng or 24 City, 2008).

However, I would not go so far as to say that Jia’s sociopolitical view is in line with the

government’s policy or narcissistic. What many of Jia’s characters negotiate is the intricate

relationship between individuation and deindividuation, subjectivization and desubjectivization.

In one register, these individuals become aware of their subjectivities, yet they find themselves

unable to make any personal decisions (autonomy). In another register, before one can imagine a

way to exercise autonomy, one must come to realization that individuation is a form of

preindividuation and subjectivization is a form of desubjectivization.

The “individual” is so fundamental in humanism and the discourse of cinematic

auteurism that it is often treated as the point de départ of one’s argument. In Du mode

d’existence des objets techniques (1958), Gilbert Simondon argues that the philosophical notion

of being assumes that existence is already individuated. This common underlying assumption

falls short of asking how being comes to be individuated, and if the process of individuation has

ever come to and end. For Simondon, if individuation is indeed an ongoing process, there is no

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being, but only a process of becoming. Each stage of individuation is in itself a potentiality for

deindividuation, as ontogenetically connected energies (e.g. generated by substances, members

of a society, animals, or objects) produce a set of critical points––irregularities that set

themselves apart from the “norm.” In this sense, “I” come to identify myself, or become

subjectivized, as the critical points that constitute “I” individuate themselves from other

ontogenetically connected energies. Yet this process of individuation and subjectivization does

not sever myself from other ontogentically connected “beings”; rather, it produces other

possibilities by which I relate to them, possibilities that can only be actualized through a process

of deindividuation and desubjectivization.17

Simondon’s theory forms the basis of Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. For

Foucault, modern state power convinces us that we are individual subjects. Yet it does so by

directly managing, regulating, and executing our biological lives as deindividuated and

desubjectivized objects.18 Likewise, Simondon’s ideas also form the basis of Giorgio Agamben’s

juridical theory. On one level, sovereign authority is vested in a desubjectivized figure (homo

sacer, a sacred or severed man), which exercises “the power [outside the law] to take life or let

live.”19 On another level, those who are managed by the sovereign are desubjectivized as

homines sacri, i.e. deindividuated bare lives that can be ostracized from the political community

and killed outside the law.20 Yet, for Agamben, before individuals can take control of the process

of desubjectivization, they must actively denounce their own political (de)subjectivity and

become animals in their own terms. The result is a suspension of the difference between

subjectivization and desubjectivization, which renders the state’s power to desubjectivize lives

meaningless.21

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In cinema studies, as André Bazin and Jean-Louis Comolli argue respectively, auteurist

film theory holds two contradictory assumptions. First, an individual is taken as a starting point

of criticism, whose status transcends their works and the social, political, economic, and

industrial conditions in which they are situated. In this sense, an individual work is measured

against this idealized individual and their supposedly unified and coherent body of works.

Second, this idealized individual, understood as a genius that exceeds the summation of their

works, is nonetheless constructed by film critics based on the films they have made.22 For Bazin,

an auteur is made out of a network of sociopolitical discourses and practices, as a filmmaker

individuates themselves throughout the course of their career. From a historical perspective, the

construction of an auteur as a personification of their works and their time is in fact symptomatic

of the society’s desire to project its own image onto a transcendental figure. By individuating this

figure, we assert a filmmaker’s subjectivity and autonomy, yet such an act of assertion

desubjectivizes us as individuals by letting the auteur speak for our collective vision.

The process of individuation and deindividuation is often featured in Jia’s interviews. In a

discussion with Michael Berry, for instance, Jia attributes the oppressive elements in his films to

a sense of loneliness as many people began to pay attention to their personal desires after 1978:

I have no doubt that in the 1960s and 1970s the Chinese people were often very lonely,

but at the time they didn’t know what loneliness meant. People then also had feelings of

loneliness and desperation but they would never feel that those were natural human

emotions. Only once our minds were liberated and we started paying attention to

ourselves as individuals and began to read Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and other

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forms of western thought and philosophy did we begin to understand ourselves, and with

that came a kind of loneliness and desperation.23

It would be too simplistic to argue that the reintroduction of European philosophy during

the reform and open era liberated the minds of the Chinese intellectuals. Rather, the transition

from socialism to free market capitalism activated an awareness of one’s subjectivity, as the state

or party no longer plays the role of its symbolic substitute (for an individual’s lack). The

disappearance of the old symbolic substitute requires an individuated subject to rethink its

positionality in relation to other members of the society, and seek new symbolic substitutes (e.g.

financial power or material pleasure). For the young intellectuals, European philosophy provided

the vocabulary to articulate this “new” lack. The point is that socialist modernity and

postsocialist modernity maintain one common strand within their respective mechanisms:

political desubjectivization.

These processes are exemplified in Jia’s films on two levels: representational and

affective. For example, the film Xiao Wu is about Xiaowu (Wang Hongwei), a pickpocket who

returns to his hometown Fenyang (which happens to be Jia’s hometown) and realizes that his

buddy of the same trade from the 1980s, Jin Xiaoyong (Hao Hongjian) has become a model

businessman. Being a local celebrity, Xiaoyong distances himself from Xiaowu and their shared

criminal past, although Xiaoyong’s “legitimate” businesses are in fact karaoke bars that offer

sexual services. Shortly after the film begins, Xiaowu realizes that he is not invited to

Xiaoyong’s wedding. Feeling rejected, Xiaowu seeks refuge in a romantic relationship with a bar

hostess under Xiaoyong’s employment, Meimei (Zuo Baitao). In the end, Xiaoyong refuses to

accept Xiaowu’s wedding gift as a gesture to break up their friendship, Meimei leaves Xiaowu in

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order to marry a wealthy businessman in the neighboring city Taiyuan, and even Xiaowu’s father

disowns him. Eventually, Xiaowu is arrested, and in the memorable ending scene, Xiaowu is

being cuffed to a pole and forced to squat down on the street. As the camera observes his

undignified position in a long shot, passersby gather around him and watch him––and by

extension, the spectators––like an animal (see Figure 17.1).

Figure 17.1: The camera relays the passersby’s gaze at Xiao Wu to the spectators.

For Michael Berry, Xiaowu exemplifies the generation of young people who grew up

immediately after the Cultural Revolution with a belief in collective values and camaraderie. For

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example, a tattoo on Xiaowu’s forearm bears the second half of a couplet you nan tongdang or

[brothers] bear their hardship together, whereas Xiaoyong bears the first half you fu tongxiang or

[brothers] share their good fortune with each other––a maxim he fails to follow. After spending a

decade as a petty thief in the 1980s, Xiaowu finds himself incapable of surviving the advent of

high capitalism in the 1990s, alienated by a society mediated by popular media (television and

popular music), and abandoned by his friend, lover, parents, and eventually, the whole town that

is rapidly demolished and rebuilt.24 In fact, when Xiaowu is detained in the police station, the

officer turns on the television. In the news, the townspeople, having learned about Xiaowu’s

arrest, unanimously denounce him as a pest of the community.

Lin argues that this process of alienation and abandonment takes place via a gift-

exchange economy. As sworn brothers, Xiaowu once promised Xiaoyong a wedding gift (a pile

of one-hundred-dollar bills). After Xiaowu learned that he was not invited to the wedding, he

steals a large number of wallets at the risk of alarming the local police (which he does) in order

to put together a pile of one-hundred-dollar bills for Xiaoyong. Xiaowu visits Xiaoyong in order

to deliver him the wedding gift. In an uncomfortably long take in which Xiaowu and Xiaoyong

have a smoke, Xiaowu gives Xiaoyong his wedding gift, only to be rejected (see Figure 17.2).

Xiaowu understands that Xiaoyong now considers him a shame, and by the end of the scene, he

leaves the gift on Xiaoyong’s table, and reminds Xiaoyong of his own tattoo––the promise to

share their hardship and wealth together.

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Figure 17.2: Xiao Wu brings Jin a gift, only to be rejected.

This rejected gift is then symbolically transferred and displaced. In the scene that follows,

we realize that Xiaowu has stolen from Xiaoyong a lighter that plays an electronic version of

Beethoven’s “Für Elise” as a keepsake of their broken friendship. Later on, Xiaowu offers

Meimei a hot water bottle as he visits her on the day she has a stomach cramp. In order to thank

him, Meimei sings a song called “Xinyu” [Raining heart] for him. As she asks him to sing for her

in return, Xiaowu simply takes out the lighter and plays “Für Elise.” After that, Xiaowu visits a

public bath, where he sings “Raining Heart” in the middle of an empty pool, followed by a scene

in a karaoke in which Xiaowu finally sings with Meimei. Meimei’s gift of singing (first singing

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for Xiaowu, and then enabling Xiaowu to sing––which signifies his self-certainty and imaginary

autonomy) is then further transferred as Xiaowu purchases a ring for her. Yet this gift is rejected

as Meimei abandons Xiaowu and elopes with her client. Eventually, Xiaowu gives the ring to his

mother, only to find out the next day that his mother has given the ring to Xiaowu’s sister-in-law.

For Lin, the repeated failure of the gift economy signals the failure of the old socialist gift

economy based on humanistic values, and the failure of Xiaowu to grasp a new gift economy

based on monetary power.25

To push Lin’s argument further, the transition from socialist modernity to postsocialist

modernity is initially accompanied by the characters’ belief that they have individuality,

subjectivity, and autonomy. In the opening sequence, for example, Xiaowu boards a bus. As the

conductor asks him to buy a ticket, Xiaowu claims that he is a police officer (thus, he can ride a

bus for free). After the conductor leaves him, the camera stays on a medium close-up of Xiaowu

with a self-satisfied smirk. After a brief cutaway shot of the bus’ exterior back mirror, the camera

cuts to a close-up of Xiaowu’s hand picking the pocket of the passenger beside him. Such self-

congratulatory sense of victory and act of confidence are performed, interestingly, under the gaze

of a miniature portrait of Mao hung around the bus’ back mirror, thus suggesting that Xiaowu’s

sense of individuality and subjectivity is made possible by the death and embalmment of

socialism, at a time when the emblem of the socialist past is transformed into a kitsch object.

Yet, this sense of individuality and subjectivity do not guarantee autonomy. In the

contrary, they are immediately threatened by the advent of postsocialist modernity. As Xiaowu

wanders through the city, one hears public announcements of the county’s new policy of

reviving the criminal law––as required by the new capitalist wenming or civilized social order––

which reminds us that under postsocialist modernity, Xiaowu is once again deindividuated and

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desubjectivized under state power. In the 1980s, socialism deindividuated and desubjectivized

people like Xiaowu and Xiaoyong with the potentiality for reindividuation and resubjectivization

through larger sociopolitical changes (e.g. reform and open), and through friendship and

camaraderie––arguably, remnants of socialist modernity. In the 1990s, postsocialist modernity in

the 1990s maintains their state of deindividuation and desubjectivization, first by dismantling the

illusion of friendship and camaraderie, then by rendering Xiaowu incapable of forming a

romantic relationship with Meimei, and eventually by severing him for all forms of connection

with his family and community.

On the affective level, Chris Berry argues that the film’s use of long takes shifts the

viewers’ attention from movement to the subjective experience of time-itself (durée), thus

achieving close to what Gilles Deleuze would call a time-image.26 Jia’s time-image, I argue,

allows the spectators to approach an affective reality. On the one hand, these long takes,

conducted primarily in long shots, position the viewers at a distance from the physical reality it

represents. On the other hand, by allowing the viewers to experience time in its pure immanence,

the image actively engages the viewers by generating an affective response from this embodied

experience of time––as though the passage of time and one’s subjectivity are both suspended in

the spectator’s act of contemplation.27

After Xiaowu’s visit to Meimei’s living quarter, for instance, Xiaowu visits a public bath.

In a long take, we see Xiao Wu, stark naked, enters the pool area. He walks back and forth

among three pools to test the temperatures of their water, and eventually climbs into the one in

the middle. After splashing some water onto his legs, he walks towards the right of frame. The

camera pans right to follow Xiaowu until he reaches the other end of the pool. Then, he turns

around and settles down in the middle of the pool. As he soaks himself in the pool, he sings

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“Raining Heart.” His voice resonates around the room, and then the camera pans up and reveals a

high concrete wall. It eventually settles down on a long shot of the wall with a window on the

right-of-frame. The light from the outside highlights the steam that rises from the pool, as though

it carries his voice outside the window (see Figure 17.3). This long take conveys neither

enjoyment nor frustration. Rather, one experiences the passage of time until one loses oneself in

the depth of time where the viewing subject and the viewed object become one. For filmmaker

and scholar Zhang Xianmin, what the viewers witness is Xiaowu as a pure animal,

deindividuated, and desubjectivized body, which sends a shock to the viewers’ sensoria at first,

but gradually allows them to experience and come to sense their own desubjectivized and animal

state of existence through an affective resonance between the viewers and the image.28 In fact, Jia

argues that in Xiao Wu, his main concern is the “affect brought about by the human biological

life.”29 The ending of the film, in which Xiaowu––and by extension––the spectators––is being

watched liked an animal, serves as a reminder of one’s deindividuated and desubjectivized

condition under postsocialist modernity.

19

Figure 17.3: Xiao Wu’s voice is carried by the steam out to the “world.”

Jia is in fact fascinated with human beings’ deindividuated and desubjectivized state

throughout his career. And in A Touch of Sin, Jia’s characters seem to take one step further by

initiating what Walter Benjamin would call “divine violence”: an act of violence that suspends

and puts into question the existing juridical order, enacted by someone who fully recognizes their

own mere existence (or aniamlity) under the violence of the law, in order to restore divine

justice.30 The term “divine” is best understood in Greco-Judaic terms, that a pure life, unbound

by any words of law, stands face-to-face against nature.

20

A Touch of Sin is composed of four stories based on real incidents where individuals,

frustrated by social marginalization and hopelessness in their respective conditions, commit

homicide or suicide as protests against the law. These include Dahai (Jiang Wu), a coalminer in

Shanxi who is discontent with the corruption of his boss Shengli and all those villagers who

work for him, commits a mass killing of the entire corporate management. Like Xiaowu and

Xiaoyong in Xioa Wu, Dahai and Shengli were classmates during the Cultural Revolution, but

while Dahai remained a coalminer, Shengli bought the coalmine from the state inexpensively and

developed it into a multi-million venture. The second story is about a young man (Wang

Baoqiang) who robs and kills rich people with a sense that he is taking back what he deserves.

The third story is about Xiaoyu (Zhao Tao), a receptionist in a sauna in Yichang and a mistress

of factory owner Zhang Youliang. She kills two corrupt county officials after being sexually

assaulted by them. And the final story is about Xiaohui (Luo Lanshan), a young migrant worker

from Hunan who keeps changing jobs in Dongguan. Having seen his love, a nightclub hostess,

offering sexual services to her client in front of him, and being abandoned by his friend and

family, Xiaohui commits suicide by jumping off his dormitory building.

The story of Xiaoyu is the centerpiece of the entire film, from which both the Chinese

and English titles are derived. The English title of the film A Touch of Sin is taken from King

Hu’s wuxia classic Xianü [A Touch of Zen, 1969], yet the Chinese title of the film is Tian

zhuding (fate determined by heaven), a phrase we hear as Xiaoyu walks on a deserted street in a

suburb of Yichang, towards the sauna where she works. There, a van with gaudy décor is parked

in an empty lot, and a man standing next to it cries out, “Come and see the snake lady and ask

her anything. Fate is determined by heaven.” Regarding the King Hu reference, this entire

segment indeed portrays Xiaoyu as a xianü (female warrior). In the beginning, Xiaoyu meets

21

Youliang at a highway rest stop. As she realizes that Youliang failed to break up with his wife,

Xiaoyu gives him an ultimatum, proclaiming that she must determine her own future. After she

saw Youliang off at the train station, the film cuts to a sequence of long shots with shallow focus,

framing Xiaoyu with her backpack in a medium-shot distance in the foreground against an out-

of-focus background, thus alluding her to a self-determined female warrior who walks from

place to place in search for justice (see Figure 17.4). When Xiaoyu is assaulted by one of the

county officials, the film cuts to a close-up of her hand holding a penknife. It then pans left as

she slashes the official’s stomach. Then, the camera pans right to frame her face in a close-up,

with her arm stretched out to the left-of-frame in a style akin to that of the female warrior films

in the 1960s and 1970s (Figure see 17.5).

Figure 17.5: Xiaoyu is represented as a female warrior in A Touch of Sin.

22

Figure 17.6: Xioayu’s killing is shot in a style akin to the female warrior films.

Like King Hu’s xianü, Xiaoyu commits homicide not simply for “restoring” justice. By

the end of the film, after the Xiaohui sequence, Xiaoyu appears in Shanxi, the hometown of

Daihai, and seeks a job in Shengli’s factory. Before the credit sequence, the film shows Xiaoyu

watching a street performance of a Shanxi opera Extradition of Su San, in which the judge asks

Su San, “Ni ke zhi zui?” (Do you understand your zui?). The film then cuts to a close-up of

Xiaoyu lowering her head, as though she were the accused. The word zui, in compliance to the

film’s English title, is translated as “sin,” yet it is closer to the meaning of “guilt,” defined in

Buddhist terms not as a violation of the law, but a responsibility one must bear as a result of what

one did in one’s past, or one’s previous incarnation. The tragic dimension of the concept of zui is

that one could have done nothing in one’s lifetime to deserve an accusation or punishment. In

this sense, one bears one’s guilt as one stands face-to-face against one’s karmic past, or a larger

social or cosmological order. By seeing Xiaoyu being questioned by the judge, a spectator who is

aware of the meaning of zui is prompted to ask “He zui zhi you?” (What guilt does she/do I

have?). The film then cuts to a long shot of the crowd looking directly into the camera lens (see

23

Figure 17.6), as though each desubjectivized individual is questioning the spectator as the

bearing of the gaze (the authority that desubjectivizes and deindividuates them) with the same

retort: “What guilt do I have?” And by extension, one needs to ask, “By whose authority one is

judged guilty?”

Figure 17.6: Are you aware of your guilt?

Conclusion

Applying the concept of auteurism to Jia Zhangke and his work, therefore, requires an

active rethinking of what individuality, subjectivity, and autonomy mean in the sociopolitical

conditions of postsocialist China since 1989. From a critical perspective, Jia continues to

individuate himself as an auteur by offering his viewers new perspectives on our desubjectivized

and deindividuated states under global postsocialist modernity, and he does so by suggesting that

autonomy does not come from larger social changes. However, as a desubjectivized life

determines to actively suspend the difference between subjectivity and desubjectivity,

24

individuality and deindividuality, the state’s power to desubjectivize and deindividuate life is put

into question (he zui zhi you?). In this sense, Jia’s films do not challenge the boundary between

subjectivity and desubjectivity, or offer any hope or solution. Rather, it suggests a possible way

by which one begins to render the state’s power to desubjectivize and deindividuate lives

questionable, and from which a new potentiality can be––even though not yet––imagined. As he

claims in a Beijing subway billboard: “Ten years ago, I tried to use cinema to change the world;

now I use the world to change the cinema.”31 On the one hand, one might regard his statement as

a creative sellout, as he no longer believes that cinema has the power to change human lives. On

the other hand, his statement indicates that perhaps a fully individuated auteur is one who stops

believing that they can change the world in order to assert their own individuality, subjectivity,

and autonomy. Rather, they can take their own deindividuation in their own hands, and as a

cinematic auteur, he can rethink and his positionality with the larger cinematic apparatus and the

(de)individuating praxes that instantiates it. In this sense, Jia is best understood not as an author

in the classical Euro-American sense of the word, but as an individual among many others, who

puts into question the positionality of a film’s authorship by making visible the plurality and

multiplicity of authorship and authority.

25

1Notes

Mo and Xiao, “Chinese Underground Films,” 147–48.

2 McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 34 and 48.

3 Yang, “Whence and Whither the Postmodern/Post-Mao-Deng,” 397 n. 21.

4 See Robinson, Independent Chinese Documentary, 34–35 and 84–91.

5 Zhang, “My Camera Doesn’t Lie?,” 33; Lü, Jilu Zhongguo, 9, 11, and 31.

6 Mo and Xiao, “Chinese Underground Films,” 148; Qu, “Dianying wenxian jiazhi yu yishu

pinwei,” 192.

7 Pickowicz, “Social and Political Dynamics of Underground Filmmaking in China,” 18–19;

Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution.

8 Berry, Xiao Wu • Platform • Unknown Pleasures, 103–04.

9 See, for example, Berry, Xiao Wu • Platform • Unknown Pleasures; see also, Lin, “Jia

Zhangke’s Cinematic Trilogy,” 186–209.

10 McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity, 25–28.

11 Ibid., 28–55.

12 See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View; Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

13 McGrath, 13–15 and 55–58.

14 Jin, “‘Diliudai’ yu ‘diliudai’ zhihou,” 173 and 175.

15 Dai, “A Scene in the Fog,” 71–72.

16 Ibid., 95.

17 Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques, 75–81; Combes, Gilbert Simondon

and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, 1–24.

18 Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1, 177–79.

19 Ibid., 178, Foucault’s emphasis.

20 Agamben, Homo Sacer.

21 Vacarme, “‘I am Sure You are More Pessimistic Than I am …’,” 115–24.

22 Bazin, “On the Politique des auteurs,” 248–58; Comolli, Fieschi, Guégan, Mardore,

Ollier, and Téchiné, “Twenty Years On,” 198.

23 Berry, Xiao Wu • Platform • Unknown Pleasures, 126–27.

24 Ibid., 30–39.

25 Lin, “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Trilogy,” 191–97.

26 Berry, “Xiao Wu,” 252–53.

27 For the concept of approaching reality, see Fan, Cinema Approaching Reality.

28 Zhang, Kanbujian de yingxiang, 40–43.

29 Jia and Hou, “Jia Zhangke duitan Hou Xiaoxiang,” 1.

30 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 277–300.

31 I thank John Berra for this information.

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