24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008)
On 35mm at the IFC Center with Lucía and John on 10 June 2009 at 21:50.
I think I have to see this film over again, although it’s pretty painfully slow and not very visually appealing. I spent the first half struggling to stay awake, and by the time I figured out what the film was about, I’d already missed most of what had been talked about already.
The film is about the closing of Factory 420 in order to build 24 City, a modern apartment complex. The entire story is told through interviews, in between which there are some mostly dialogueless scenes of the factory, its demolition, and various areas around the factory. Each interview captures, through the interviewee’s personal narrative, some essence of both the history of Factory 420 and the generational changes in China as a whole from just after the Cultural Revolution to the present day.
I remembered, luckily, to sit towards the back of the theater as the movie is shot on consumer video. Unlike Still Life, which has a pleasing aesthetic sensibility that makes the camera seem to be wistfully pondering the last days of a soon-to-be-flooded world of life, 24 City has a sort of anti-aesthetic that makes the film all the harder to watch. There are a few nice scenes in the vacant areas of the factory, and Jia Zhangke captures certain details that lend a certain mood to the film (rain hitting a pane of glass sitting on a windowsill).
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