Post Industrial City Research Papers (original) (raw)

Cinema can capture the real. Its images can document the zeitgeist of contemporary China, its huge transformation in the last decades. Contrary to the Fifth Generation’s films –Zhang Yimou’s and Chen Kaigé’s historical and rural dramas–, the new generation of Chinese filmmakers return to the urban space,
showing the edges of the new capitalist cities. The usual landscapes of their films are shantytowns, building sites and no-man’s lands where the main characters live or work. Immigrants, bohemians, taxi drivers, pickpockets and other criminals
star in fictions that are very close to the documentary mode. Sixth Generation filmmakers such as Jia Zhang-ke, Wang Bing, Li Yang, Wang Xiaoshuai and Lou Ye, show interest in the urban conflicts of this time, and that’s the reason to also call them the Urban Generation.
In the last years two films have stood out among them. Firstly, in the documentary field, 'Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks' (Wang Bing, People’s Republic of China, 2003), an ambitious chronicle about the decline of an old industrial district in Shenyang. Director Wang Bing worked solo shooting with a digital camera for a year and a half to get almost a monument-film: nine hours divided in three parts ('Rust', 'Remnants' and 'Rails'), the visual memory of a territory. “Film this place. Soon here nothing remains”, a worker requested him directly at the beginning of the film. So now we can use those images to know what that place was like and, above all, how it was destroyed.
The other key film of the Sixth Generation could be 'Sanxia haoren' [Still Life] (Jia Zhang-ke, People’s Republic of China, 2006), a feature film shot in a real place also doomed to extinction: the town of Fengjie during its last days, before
it disappeared after being first demolished and later submerged under the waters of the Three Gorges Dam. Still Life shows different stories and characters in that setting, rescuing its last images and opening a visual reflection about the transformations
in present China.
Two years after this experience, another Jia Zhang-ke film, 'Er shi si cheng ji' [24 Hours City] (Jia Zhang-ke, People’s Republic of China, 2008), mixed fiction and documentary conventions to explain how an old weapon factory left its site to new luxury buildings. That factory summarized the Communist period, so in this film Jia recorded testimonies from the real workers, edited together with stories of fictional characters played by professional actresses. Its theme is very close to Wang Bing’s 'Tie Xi Qu', but it uses a different mise-en-scène.
All these films take a look at Chinese cities by paying attention to their conflicts and contradictions, and we can use them in order to analyse both the cities’ urban and economic transformations and also their film representation.