Jia Zhangke’s Empathetic Eye

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2019

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For much of his career, Jia Zhangke’s films were officially banned in his home country, China. But through austere, realist movies like Still Life, Platform, and The World, Jia became one of the most celebrated directors on the international arthouse circuit.

His latest film, Ash Is Purest White, appears at first to be a conventional mob epic, focused on a “gangster’s moll” character played magnificently by Zhao Tao. But with a story beginning in 2001 and spanning 17 years, the movie is just as much about the effects of the rapid growth of China’s economy on its society. The dramatic changes led some working-class Chinese to form criminal brotherhoods for support.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	from PRX.
0:07.0	This is Studio 360.
0:08.8	I'm Kurti Anderson.
0:15.1	On today's podcast, I have a conversation with the great Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhengk.
0:23.2	He is at 48, one of the most celebrated Chinese directors today.
0:28.4	Even though for a lot of his career, his movies couldn't be shown in his country.
0:34.7	Films like Platform and Still Life and The World, austere, subtle, realistic
0:41.4	depictions of the lives of working people that were discovered and cultivated by movie
0:47.5	cognoscenti all over the world.
0:49.2	This year's Carostore is given to Jason Kehoe, who is really the artist who know how to depict the very details of the crisis of the era that we go through,
1:00.2	and we want to thank him for his unequivable work.
1:05.7	At the start of his new movie, Ash is Pyrist White, this woman and man raise a toast saluting their
1:14.9	brotherhood, which is this organization of small-time gangsters in provincial China in the early
1:21.4	odds.
1:21.7	Let, you know, wu-sihai this newthi.
1:28.3	Gantanthi shan chan-dong-tau-do. The movie's The movie's Chinese The movie's Chinese title The Songheng Thou
1:29.3	Geng Thou
1:30.3	The movie's Chinese title
1:34.3	literally translated is something like
1:36.3	Sons and Daughter of the Jianghu
1:39.3	That word Jianghu is hard to translate
1:42.3	and can mean a lot of different things.
	...

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