NYFF. 24 City.

"At a time when the other leading figures of Chinese-language cinema, including Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-liang, seem fully committed to (or, in a few cases, trapped by) the styles and themes that made them famous, with each new film [Jia Zhangke] is adding new tools to his art in order to renegotiate his relationship to realism, and to make the quest for personal and national truth ever-renewing rather than predictable and monolithic," writes Andrew Chan in Reverse Shot. "His latest, 24 City, is a blend of documentary and fiction that omits some of the main tropes we associate with those genres, aspiring to neither vérité nor conventional plotting.... [W]hat begins as a straightforward oral-history project results in a rocky marriage between seemingly irreconcilable impulses, and a disorienting provocation on the sacredness of truth in the documentary form."

Compare this with Michael Sicinski's take: "Like advanced modern music or poetry, the cinema of Jia has by this point started to develop into a closed set of maximal values and a continual reorganization of the constituents of that set. Or, at least that's the distinct impression I get from 24 City, a work beyond reproach in every way but an almost geometrically lateral move from Jia's masterpiece Still Life."

"[O]ne of this film's biggest problems is that the actors aren't nearly as compelling as the real people," writes Ed Champion. "Here are the problems with this postmodernist trick: (a) if one objects to it, one is assumed to not be “in on the joke” and therefore not hep to the larger game that the film purports to play, (b) if one chooses to believe in it, then one is duped and the sufferings of the real people are considered trivial, and (c) if one discards it, one dispenses with a part of Jia's elaborate puzzle."

Mark Asch in the L Magazine: "[I]f Jia manufactures history so too does his country's image-conscious authoritarian government; and not only has the Chinese government rewritten history but they're also its original authors, as revealed in 24 City's tales of citizens uprooted by assignments to study, live or work in new cities (and the more subtle migratory pressure, now, of economic necessity). 24 City is a telling bit of journalism and an affecting elegy, yes, but it's also a movie about the making and remaking and ways of making things."

Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook on Jia's short, Cry Me a River: "The actors don't have much to work with and don't exactly work with it well..., but the way Jia constructs the world around them, the world they inhabit, and most importantly the world they travel through, really highlights why he is considered one of the world's best filmmakers."

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and David D'Arcy.

Update, 10/3: "In its portrait of a culture on the verge of erasure with the advent of redevelopment and gentrification, Jia Zhang-ke's 24 City shares kinship with José Luis Guerín's En Construcción, reflecting the idea of a city built from the rubble of abandoned, forgotten histories," writes Acquarello.

Update, 10/4: Kevin B Lee in Slant: "What emerges in 24 City is a moving three-fold meditation: on the many stories of a bygone era, both epic and banal, that are bound to be left untold and forgotten; the many fictions woven - whether by the media, by our ancestors, or by ourselves - into our understanding of reality; and a dying ideology's legacy on how its people tell their stories."

Update, 10/8: Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee has video from the press conference.

Posted by dwhudson at September 27, 2008 7:03 AM