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IS YOUR CHILD STILL TEXTING ABOUT COMMUNISM?

STFU - The Factory Union
SMH - Sexy Marxist Hottie
LOL - Lenin Or Leave
IDC - Interesting Debate, Comrade
BTW - Breaking Through Wage-slavery
EDKH - Epstein Didn't Kill Himself
FML - Feeling Marx's Love
GTG - Going To Gulag
LMAO - Love Mao

1

History lessons - movement and stasis, time as a paradox. Maybe less overtly (or angirly) political as future Zhang-ke works, because it's a portrait of a specific generation and specifically being the last of it. A work about youths not understanding the past and looking to the future, only to find more hopelessness and even less agency than what they thought they lacked prior. Nostalgia is tragic, because that is all that remains. At the same time, we traverse a decade plus of enormous political change, and it is illustrated by shifts in music - shifts from culture to pop culture. Rather than giving us explanations to how things shifted, Jia uses elipsis - we understand the mentality which made…

1

It's funny - I get this movie more and more as I get older...it used to be the Jia film I found most difficult. It's *rougher,* it's not as pointedly schematic as later Jia would get. Sure, the elements that Jia will end up spending his career building on are here..but this doesn't seem like a start, it's its own film. We only touch on the ideas, the concepts, et cetra. What matters more here is something like having nostalgia for your own present because life is moving so fast. It's about being a wayward generation in a world in transition. But "abouts" don't really cut it for a movie like this. What matters is that these emotions are real, and I felt everything.

2

Small town dreams fade into quotidian struggles as life slips away. In Platform, the most immediate motif is that of time. Here, time is merciless, as elliptical vignettes obscure its specificity but mark its ing. To watch this film is to feel time march on independently of characters, to see them at the whims of it.

The film starts with a young theatre troupe, they are starting to express themselves and to stand apart from an older generation. They are the youth, the future and time stretched out in front of them is an expanse of hope. As the film progresses, things start to stagnate. For a long time, we feel constricted in a home town, the rhythms of it…

1

This stunning portrayal of a small Chinese town during a time of change neatly captures the world in a way that is reminiscent of nostalgic films portraying America in the sixties, focusing as it does on lost and emerging young artists. It contrasts them with the older generations, who don't get the new fashions, who hold tight to old ways that get in the way of love and the encroaching pop culture.

While it has a strong sense of place (it would be hard not to know this took place in 1980s China), it touches on so many universal characteristics of small towns that you never once feel like an outsider to this beautiful and somewhat sad setting. There is…

Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ Liked

"An interminable railway platform, an endless wait,
An interminable convoy, carries away my endless love."

Few people working today are as skilled at visually depicting a complex generational/political handover purgatory as Jia, whose interest in observing the weary and lonely divide between aging adults who care about collective cultural traditions and the harsh reality of labor vs. the kids who care more about individually expressing themselves through fashion trends and the romantic yearning of pop music could come across as trite but in execution never feels anything less than tragic. Some of the greatest static durational docufiction working-class China location photography you'll ever see interspersed with long plotless shots of people smoking and dancing while time es them by, the promise of modern progress invading all these old, crumbling spaces. Is there an escape or are we doomed to repeat this process?

Review by Will Sloan Liked

Too big a mountain to attempt to scale right now, but I’ll start by saying: “Progress” is not always a straight line.

13

Culture and how it relates to the ing of time in an extremely specific context rendered universal, departing from politics and arriving at an existential axiom: the smallest collective is the individual. Arguably the most precise work on composition since Mizoguchi’s ing, by the way.

2

A country learning to become “normal,” for better or for worse, approaching slowly then arriving all at once with a single cut. Only Jia Zhangke has captured the specific hue of sunlight that I from my afternoons as a teenager in Beijing.

Seen at IFC Center in New York City in 35mm

3

Jia Zhangke seems to film in a largely wordless manner. Instead he focuses on landscapes and background noise, preferring to have those speak for themselves. Characters are kept at a distance and we rarely get any close-ups, and so their sparse dialogue becomes more important in understanding who they are.

Platform is set in 1980's China, when the shift from Mao's Communist reforms start to transition into a much more westernized society. At the start we begin with a theater troupe of kids, all obligated to perform state-approved material. They complain about this and pine for more trendy things, such as bell-bottom jeans and rock 'n roll music. They clash with their parents on these matters, the same parents they…

Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ Liked

jia is one of the great masters, the definition of a total filmmaker who is able to express ideas beyond the current political and aesthetic boundaries; he reaches into the infinite possibilities of cinema itself, the purity of an emergent language speaking for the first time.

me and my friend avalyn recorded a full-length audio commentary on this masterpiece, which you can check out here.

4

Watchlist 2019

I know these people, I know these places and sights, I know the dirty mattresses and the creaky folk songs, the crackling AM radio signals, the shitty dirt roads and decrepit hallways, the dialect so familiar because it's my mother tongue, and my mother's tongue. I know the classrooms and the windows and the street markets and the baskets, I know the gaudy posters and the long bus rides and the tables in the corners of restaurants where entire families will gather to eat.

I know them because I've seen them all before. I know them because I've lived in them.

I have a complicated set of feelings about China, having emigrated at a young age and grown…