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站台 (2000) - 贾樟柯
Platform (2000) - Jia Zhangke
Jia Zhangke's Platform is an extraordinary film. I loved it the first time I saw it before I knew anything about the history of China in the 20th century. But it has only become more of a spectacular piece once I've come to understand its historical and political poignancy. But even here, Jia's film is ultimately set at the "ground level." It is concerned with individual people and their very human joys, struggles, dreams, diversions, and so on. Anyone interested in understanding modern China should see it, but really so should anyone who just likes excellent films in general.
I would like to eventually make a large lecture for this site which gives a full history of the Chinese Revolution and reign of Mao Zedong. It is fascinating as it is grim. And it gives a lot of context for understanding China in the modern day as well as the dangers of populist personality cults. I think it's a period of history that deserves a lot more attention. And I do worry about attempts to rewrite and whitewash it under the current Chinese regime.
Platform is set over a period of 10 years or so, roughly covering the years 1979-1989 in Fenyang. Fenyang, the hometown of director Jia Zhangke, is an average- sized town in Shanxi Province which stands in well as a kind of Chinese everywhere. Platform is concretely about a theater troupe of many young performers. At the beginning of the film, they are state-supported and perform dull state propaganda in Mao suits. At the end of the film, their troupe has become privately owned and they play western-style rock and pop music in flashy costumes. Changes that are just as dramatic occur in the China around them as the Deng-era liberalization policies transform the country. To paraphrase Philip Short's Mao: A Life, it was in a remarkably short amount of time that China transformed from a repressive dictatorship run by a decentralized, fanatical gestapo of Red Guards to a neoliberal powerhouse that had most of the problems (and many of the joys and freedoms) of any western country.
Platform runs 154 minutes. If you compare the China at the beginning of the film to that at the end, the dramatic shift is apparent. But the film is long, slow, and minimal to the point that these changes are only apparent at a broad level. We see hints of a shifting China only as they emerge in the lived, involved world of its protagonists. The opening scene after the credits prologue shows one of the main figures, Cui, who has just started wearing western-style bellbottom jeans. His mother thinks they are ridiculous and warns him that they'll bring the wrong kind of attention. A neighbor mocks them, saying he won't be able to do any manual labor in them. Slowly other small changes follow: Girls getting perms in their hair, western movies being shown at a theater, more public restaurants opening in the town, TVs in homes, and so on.
Platform begins three years after the death of Mao. The chaos and turmoil of the Cultural Revolution is long over. But the Revolution casts a shadow over the entire film. I can best compare the mood of the film at the beginning to the morning after a massive typhoon has wiped an entire town away. The characters in Platform wander around what seems like a purgatory, a country whose culture has been wiped clean. And indeed, the Cultural Revolution explicitly aimed to wipe out the "Four Olds" of "old ideas," "old culture," "old customs," and "old habits." It was this which resulted in all the destruction of cultural heritage sites and ancient documents in China. But nothing was put in place. The Red Guards failed to realize that with no past, a country can have no future. And their vision for China brought forth nothing but repression, pain, and the severing of a people from their history. A history which is one of the richest and most ancient on planet earth, at that.
This leads to some rather interesting dynamics in the film. Most of the film focuses on its young protagonists. They don't really have their ages explicitly revealed, but most of them seem to be in their late teens or early 20s at the beginning of the film and in their late 20s or early 30s by the end. As such, many scenes feature them "rebelling" against their parents in small, understated ways like wearing western clothes, being open with their romantic involvements, and the like. Their parents still hold a lot of weight and they are quite concerned about positive relations with them. Even the Cultural Revolution could not fully wipe out the Confucian doctrine of filial piety in China.
But what is so unusual about this time period is that the "old fogeys" or "establishment" represented by their parents is the Maoist party line. It is an opposition to western movies, fashions, etc. But these Maoist ideas are by no means "ancient" to China. These parents who now represent the 50-year "establishment" of Mao and Lenin probably grew up in families who believed in the 2000-year "establishment" of Confucius and the Buddha. It is a country where even the "conservatives" can't do much more than act out the form of conservatism. How do you "rebel" in a country where "rebellion" is the establishment? Such is the strange environment of a country where the typhoon of the Cultural Revolution has wiped the slate clean in such tragic ways. Filial piety remains as a traditional "reflex," but the ideological content of that tradition has been cleanly severed.
I have heard that if you go to China today, you can still find a few peasant houses out in the deep countryside which have portraits of Mao up in the front hall. Some 50 years ago, these were probably the houses which still had portraits of gods of the hearth up in their place. History moves slowly in the countryside. It is no surprise that the word "pagan" in Latin literally means "of the countryside." People there do not give up old ways as easily, nor do they adopt the new ones as quickly.
As a theater troupe, the protagonists of Platform are often on the road. As such, we get a good sweep of two very different worlds in China at the time that nevertheless are both being rapidly built up and liberalized. One scene shows the troupe visiting a small town that is receiving stable electricity for the first time. The people there sing the praises of the CCP before turning it on. And it feels genuine, nothing like the mindless obedience tests of the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, this rural development is two-faced. Another scene shows the troupe stopping in a small town where the trees have been stripped from a mountainside. The men in the town have few options besides working in the recently-opened coal mine. Here we see the dark underside of China's economic miracle. China under Deng was put on a fast-track to become the world's second-largest economy. But that track would be the same one to make it the world's largest carbon emitter and producer of LiveLeak videos.
But trying to bridge the gap between the worlds of the city and the countryside is a perennial problem in China. It was the oppression and alienation of the country folk that led to the fall of Jiang Jieshi and success of Mao and the CCP in the first place, as Mao managed to build up his base by focusing on these rural communities. But the bridge could never be totally crossed even under Mao. No matter how many young bourgeois students were forcibly sent into the countryside and forced to "become class-conscious" through back-breaking labor, these kinds of different lifestyles and values do not so easily change. Of course, this continues to be a problem in modern China, no matter how many expensive cities are created that become dilapidated ghost towns...
There's no suspicion of Platform romanticizing the barbarism and depravity of the Mao regime. The fact that the film has still never been officially released in China should be proof enough of this. But I don't think you can call it a particularly "optimistic" film about the reign of Deng Xiaoping and direction of China under him and Jiang Zemin either. It's a film full of ambivalence. The primary mood of its characters is one of uncertainty and hesitation. The events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 are not directly shown but are palpably sensed. The institution of the one-child policy leads to a lot of families put in difficult spots. Industrialization of cities leads to them developing a very modern sense of "non-place." Jia's film is largely in his hometown's thick dialect, and we have to wonder how much this kind of regionalism will be flattened out in the future. In the end though, the film's protagonists are thrown into the forces of history. The best they can do is to try to look forward to whatever the 21st century Chinese dream will be.
Some modern Chinese might look at Platform and feel some nostalgia for a time when China was comparatively "free." Don't get me wrong. Chinese under Xi Jinping still have freedoms that could never have been imagined under Mao. But there is an air of openness with the west in this film. It is a guarded sort of openness which is still a bit skeptical and hesitant. But there is curiosity and positivity. Globalization here still appears as a liberating force, not a source of competition and grievance. But perhaps there are some unsettling hints in the industrialization shown here as well. When I look at the China of this film and China under Xi, I wonder how much of the difference comes down more to the introduction of mass-scale surveillance systems than any innovation in policy. Maybe Kaczynski was right about the technological structure of a country having a larger effect on freedom than its political structure.
Jia depicts this with a quiet, understated grace. I haven't talked very much about the "aesthetic" qualities of the film, but it is visually beautiful. Almost all scenes are single long takes with a static or mostly static camera. There are pretty much no closeups. There is no non-diagetic music. It's full of realistic, stilted dialogue punctuated by burts of friendly warmth. It is often shocking how humane and warm these people are who were children in a time of chaos, bloodshed, and strife. If you are at all interested in understanding modern China, all of Jia Zhangke's films are an excellent window into it. Platform is, in my opinion, the most outstanding of them all.