Piecing Together the New Millennium: Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides
Critics Campus 2024 participant Daniel Tune investigates Caught by the Tides, a collage-like work that travels through its director’s films and personal archival material to tell a story of separated lovers, lost worlds and out-of-control technological change.
Tracing the upheavals of ordinary Chinese people at the invisible hands of global capital, the work of Jia Zhang-ke stands as an archive of China’s tumble over the precipice of the 21st century. Recently, Jia has foregrounded this historicising instinct in a cycle of decades-spanning dramas: Mountains May Depart (2015), Ash Is Purest White (2018) and his latest film, Caught by the Tides, form a loose trilogy about working-class alienation under the rapid reformation of the past 25 years.
There is much in this new film that feels familiar for Jia. Like many of his works, it is an oblique relationship drama. Caught by the Tides follows Qiaoqiao and Bin (respectively played by Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin, both regular collaborators), impoverished protagonists leading bleak lives in the north-eastern city of Datong. Qiaoqiao is a struggling dancer, while Bin is some kind of mob-world associate (parts that both actors have played in the past); both lead largely unsatisfying lives dictated by forces so arbitrary they may as well be cosmic.
Jia has never been a filmmaker to emphasise plot, and the relationship between Qiaoqiao and Bin feels especially peripheral in the opening section, which takes place throughout the early 2000s. For minutes at a time, the protagonists are completely sidelined in lieu of documentary footage of ordinary people working, dancing and living in the kinds of decaying community spaces that have long been a fixation of Jia’s.
Caught by the Tides also marks a departure for the director, however. Produced during China’s COVID lockdowns, the film is, unlike his earlier work, largely constructed from production footage and recycled scenes from the director’s previous features, along with a large amount of material drawn from his personal archives. Jia calls attention to this collage-like construction, freely shifting between shooting formats, aspect ratios and perspectives.
The opening sequence throws viewers into the deep end of this approach, moving freely from a carefully staged widescreen narrative prologue to scratchy archival TV material and an extended sequence depicting female workers sitting and singing. This aesthetic strategy, which continues through much of the opening act, is wildly discordant, especially as more obviously reused material from older features enters the frame. This is most apparent in scenes wherein the flat digital images of Jia’s early masterpiece Unknown Pleasures (2002) are directly contrasted with the rich colours of Ash Is Purest White – a choice made even more disorientating by the fact that the two films are theoretically meant to occupy the same narrative and temporal moment.
Caught by the Tides’ total rejection of aesthetic coherence is initially bracing, in that it defamiliarises and seemingly breaks the film’s flow. However, once adjusted and surrendered to, this eccentric working method gives way to a sensual and emotional experience that is unlike any other in Jia’s work, his typical formal assurance discarded for something shockingly intimate.
Caught by the Tides
Beyond the sheer rawness of the patchwork-quilt form, some of the documentary material feels as if it may be taken from the director’s own home-movie recordings; this is most apparent in a party sequence shot with a shaking, possibly drunkenly operated handheld camcorder in which Li makes a brief appearance. The power of these sequences comes not from their formal qualities, but rather from the collapse of distance between film and filmmaker – a proximity that makes the fleeting appearances of Zhao in this section almost unbearably touching. Zhao, who is Jia’s wife, has always been a fixture in his work; but, in Caught by the Tides’ mind’s-eye, intuitive mode, she registers less as an actor in a film than as one partner being seen through another’s loving gaze.
As the runtime progresses, this impressionistic approach recedes, and the reused narrative footage becomes increasingly prominent. The wisp of a plot begins to assert itself as Qiaoqiao sets out to find Bin, who unceremoniously abandons Datong in search of a legitimate job in finance. More familiar forms of pathos for admirers of the director abound in these sequences. In one scene, an unsettlingly placid Bin looks at a Western-style advertisement playing on an endless loop in a partly collapsed building – an image that might as well be a metonym for the director’s entire filmography. There is much material like this in the second section; and while there is no shortage of feeling to any of it, the excitement of the radical opening is much less palpable.
This is no more apparent than in the scenes set around Fengjie – a county condemned to a watery grave by the installation of the Three Gorges Dam – which seem to have mostly been lifted from Jia’s 2006 feature Still Life without much elaboration. In these sequences, Caught by the Tides feels beholden to its constrained production circumstances. Yet there is a poignancy in returning to things already seen: these moments suggest that Jia (and, perhaps, Chinese culture at large) is incapable of relinquishing a place and a time that have both vanished under the proverbial tides. In the context of the pandemic’s erosion or outright destruction of much of the culture that once provided solace from life’s essential harshness, this recycled footage seems to speak to a world with no refuge beyond its rapidly fading past.
The film’s final sequences bring this subtext violently to the forefront. Featuring some of the only new footage shot for the project, the final section is set in 2022, where the many absurdities of contemporary life that the pandemic accelerated are on full display. Health protocols anonymise and isolate vast swathes of people in grey consumer spaces, while online economies of hollow distraction bloom from the absence of any other spiritual sustenance. Jia has some fun with the inventive use of a 360-degree surveillance camera, which flattens and distorts the image in ways both comical and vaguely terrifying – appropriate for such a tragicomic world. This kind of formal risk-taking in some ways mirrors the total freedom of the opening sequences. But there is an inhumanity to the technology’s inherent distortions, and buried within the use of these images is the sense that we are conceding to an essentially unlivable social order.
Jia is still in his 50s, a point at which many filmmakers have only just reached their artistic prime. Yet Caught by the Tides, in its cumulative nature and its devastatingly resigned last moments, feels almost final. Hopefully, that is only a feeling.