The test of time – on Wildfires by Jia Zhangke

At the turn of the 21st century, and thanks to unprecedented filming flexibility made possible by the development of digital cameras, two major events shook up contemporary Chinese auteur cinema: the production, by Wang Bing, of the immense documentary fresco West of the tracks and the dazzling appearance, in the emerging cinema of Jia Zhangke, of a key actress, Zhao Tao, who would subsequently inhabit the majority of his films, of Platform (2000) Wild fires (2025) via Still Life (2006) or even Beyond the mountains (2015).

As if it were a question of countering today's headlong rush by China with a big rewind, Wild Fires is a retrospective film made up of images shot from 2001 to 2022, but also (and above all) a profoundly hybrid and composite object. Difficult, at first, to identify what is made of Wild Fires (titre international : Caught by the Tidesliterally “Caught up by the tides”), if not a set of interwoven archives on the mining town of Datong, from which Jia Zhangke shapes an urban symphony in the wake of The Man with the Camera (1929) by Dziga Vertov, whose inspiration he claims[1].

Shots of crowds gathered around a fashion show or at a concert, side tracking shots filming onlookers on the side of the road, slow-motion circular pans in the middle of an assembly of young Chinese dancing to techno… Wild Fires reveals in its first part (the film has three, divided by significant ellipses) a world bubbling and teeming with life, over which the filmmaker would however have cast a nostalgic and melancholy veil, haunted by the economic mutation of contemporary China and the transformations of a landscape in permanent recomposition.

Despite the abstraction of a loose and a priori without an obvious direction, we find here the favorite visions and themes of a filmmaker who has become, over the years, one of the most eminent portraitists of the devastating liberalization of his country. For thirty years, Jia Zhangke has continued to capture the sadness that invades people overwhelmed by immense construction sites, between population displacements following the installation of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, the construction of gigantic amusement parks or the closure of mines in Hebei province.

Wild Fires continues this great fresco that the filmmaker paints about his country, but has the particularity of bringing a slight inflection to his narrative habits. His cinema has, in fact, often oscillated between a documentary approach, marked by filming very anchored from a territorial and geographical point of view, and a romantic dimension, with intrigues centered around characters with dramatic or even tragic destinies. The first pole here gains ascendancy over the second, without however completely abandoning it.

The texture of the world filmed by the filmmaker over twenty years evolves with changes in the texture of the images themselves.

Between the nets of an urban and poetic symphony (with for example a multitude of superimpositions and collages of heterogeneous images – panoramas, portraits, advertising clips, even video games), emerges throughout the editing a semblance of melodrama close to both latest fictions by Jia Zhangke, also divided into three periods, Beyond the mountains et The Eternals (2019). Without saying a word or almost, a woman (Qiao) and a man (Bin) cross the scene here then separate over the years, before meeting again years later.

This is a skeleton of melodrama, at first glance minimalist, even frankly stunted, but which little by little turns out to be pure melodrama, in the first sense of the term: a dramatic heartbreak exacerbated by significant musical tracks. Jia Zhangke even returns to the origins of the emblematic genre of silent cinema by filming scenes that are stingy with words and lines, to the point of making the character of Qiao, played by Zhao Tao, a mute figure.

If Qiao does not speak, and Bin also limits himself to a handful of speeches, the editing is quite eloquent. He figures and takes charge of the vagaries of their love story by marking, through the multiplication of dissolves or, conversely, clean cuts (connecting close-ups and long shots on immense landscapes, with variations (which Jia Zhangke is accustomed to), the escapes, the moments of research and then their reunions. In the silent tradition, intertitles sometimes also replace any words by showing, on the screen, the text messages sent by Qiao to Bin – most of which were left unanswered.

The emotion produced by this confusing device, semi-fictional and semi-silent, obviously has a lot to do with the relationship that we can have with Jia Zhangke's past films, of which we recognize certain images and even certain scenes on many occasions. . The matrix Unknown pleasures (2002), already the scene of a separation between a certain Bin and a certain Qiao, guides the first part of the story while the plot of Still Lifeperhaps one of the filmmaker's greatest films, forms the backbone of its central segment, where Qiao searches for the trace of his former companion through the decrepit streets of Fengjie.

With the exception of the third contemporary part, shot in 2022 by Jia Zhangke at the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, most of the images leave a disturbing feeling of déjà vu. Between shots directly taken (that of a woman trapped in a stopped bus, violently pushed back into a ball on her seat) or rushes not used but which evoke emblematic scenes (Zhao Tao, yellow t-shirt and bottle of water in hand, wandering near the Yangtze River), Wild Fires offers a sort of archeology of his filmography.

Archival melodrama, Wild Fires is therefore also a film of ghosts, inhabited and pursued by the specters of a transformed country and, by extension, of a work which never really wanted to separate itself from its own past, obsessively repeating the same situations or retracing the same settings, to better measure their upheavals over time. This is the meaning of the international title of the film – Caught by the Tides – than rushing into this nostalgia, with past scenes and figures returning, like the surf of the waves, disappearing on the shores of the present.

Wild Fires therefore acts as a quasi-archaeological enterprise, primarily around Zhao Tao, main actress and companion of the filmmaker. The film documents what has changed about her, down to the wrinkles revealed after she removes her surgical mask in front of a mirror at her workplace. But also what has remained a constant between two decades: his erect posture, his closed face, his gaze piercing the horizon. “You look sad,” a robot with formatted and precalculated expressions will tell him in a shopping center.

Jia Zhangke examines the surface of his actress in this way to better attempt to probe her inaccessible interiority, just as he studies the plastic surface of his own film archives. In a certain way, the film is indirectly part of a research process close to that of media archaeology, by juxtaposing through editing different image regimes, from the first digital cameras that appeared at the dawn of the 2000s. to the algorithmic and automated gaze of a 360° camera in the last segment.

This is the real common thread of the film, which takes stock of the formal evolutions of a cinema born, as mentioned previously, with the democratization of tools and technical supports having made it possible to document on the spot the mutations of contemporary China. Shots filmed on DV cameras, but also in 16 mm, in 32 mm, then finally in high definition: the texture of the world filmed by the filmmaker over twenty years evolves according to changes in the texture of the images themselves, including variations tell of a sort of purification, synonymous at the time of the health crisis with a growing aesthetic hygienism.

In the visual change that it makes compared to the first two segments, the third and final part of the film, shot with an HD camera with a soft plasticity, is the most striking in this respect. Gradually, the images became cleaner, freed from the grain of the film or the imperfections of the digital signal from the early 2000s, whose rough edges only persist through a video surveillance shot of a fruit display. and vegetables. The dust of a universe under construction and the malfunctions of cheap video have disappeared, accentuating the melodramatic feeling of a forced passage to an era conducive to the repression of the past.

Faces have changed, images have mutated and landscapes have been transformed: they are now smoothed, plasticized, disinfected. The urban chaos specific to the era of Chinese economic development, documented at the very beginning of the film, contrasts for example with the very controlled choreography on which the collective race staged in the last shot of the Wild fireswhere Zhao Tao blends into the crowd to walk at the same pace as passers-by, all wearing fluorescent bracelets to be seen at night.

If the film is often upsetting, it is also because it makes a rather bitter observation regarding what Jia Zhangke's cinema can still film in the digital dictatorship within which engulfed his country. The modernity demonstrated by his first films, depicting with noise and noise the wandering of marginalized people with a troubled and uncertain future, appears in fact to be an almost anachronistic project. The disillusionment that the filmmaker captures in the eyes of his former lovers, profoundly out of step with their time and their environment (whether it is Qiao or Bin, returned to Datong after a long exile: the observation is similar), is also that which he draws on his own cinema.

Six years separate in fact Wild Fires from his latest fiction, The Eternalswhose title resonated in a paradoxical way: already, in the city of Datong, a dancer named Qiao and a gangster named Bin separated then found each other again, bitter to see their relationship having vanished over the irreversible transformation of an entire country. What Jia Zhangke's cinema showed has similarly dissipated before our eyes, as if the beauty of his work resided precisely in its propensity to document the gradual disappearance of its subject (the capitalist transition) and of its form (the digital transition), measuring film after film its own ending.

This is perhaps the tragic heart of his filmography, which threatens it a little more with each new retrospective fresco: measuring the growing impossibility of freezing time, to see the contemporary slipping away a little more each time. we think we will immortalize it on the screen. In Wild Firesmelodrama according to Jia Zhangke is also a Bazinian heartbreak: the “mummy of change”[2] is ultimately still just a mummy – in this case the corpse of a decidedly bygone era.

Wild Fires by Jia Zhangke, in theaters January 8.