This article appeared in the October 4, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Caught by the Tides (Jia Zhangke, 2024)

Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke’s first fiction feature in six years, is among the 54-year-old Chinese director’s most radical and comprehensively conceived works to date. Since 2001, Jia has been shooting documentary-style footage during the making of his films, capturing the everyday bustle of his actors and locations with fly-on-the-wall spontaneity. Told in three parts, Caught by the Tides comprises material shot amid the production of Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Still Life (2006), two films starring Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin as volatile romantic partners, as well as new sequences featuring both performers in the present day. Beginning in Datong, the setting of Unknown Pleasures, Jia’s latest follows Qiaoqiao, Zhao’s character from the earlier film, as she sets out in search of Bin (played by Li), who, as in Still Life, has left the city to earn a living in another province. Qiaoqiao travels across the country, along the stretch of the Yangtze River where Still Life was shot during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam—a project that destroyed thousands of villages and displaced millions of people. On her journey, she silently bears witness to the changing face of modern China, its social and economic crosscurrents captured in Jia’s rough-hewn images of life across a spectrum of public and private activity.

Based on the film’s enthusiastic reception at this year’s Cannes, none of this contextual information is needed to appreciate the star-crossed romance at its center. Jia’s collage-like assemblage of the older digital footage, which varies in quality according to the available technology, is abstract to the point of occasionally appearing to be free-form (at times evoking Chris Marker’s essayistic travelogues). But there’s an emotional undertow to the material—heightened by the use of diegetic music and the pop iconography of the era—that guides the viewer into the film’s more narrative-driven final third, which sees a middle-aged Qiaoqiao and Bin reunited in Datong. Here, Jia turns the depopulated streets and sanitized interiors of the city during the pandemic into a vaguely futuristic space pregnant with possibility—one where this estranged couple can finally reconvene, if only to realize that the world, and their relationship to it, is much different now. With nary a word spoken, their journey—and the film’s poignant denouement—communicates something central to Jia’s cinema: while you can’t outrun the past, there’s beauty to be found in the passing of time and the moments that mark its progression.

Shortly after the Cannes premiere of Caught by the Tides, Jia and I spoke about the film’s unique form, how its narrative devices allow the characters to say more with less, and his performance as the leader of a group of canine wranglers in Black Dog, a film by his fellow Chinese director Guan Hu that also debuted at Cannes.

How long have you been shooting the kind of documentary footage we see in the first two parts of Caught by the Tides? Is this something you do during every production?

It’s something I’ve done continuously for the past twenty-some years, starting in 2001, when DV technology became available and began making filmmaking so much easier. Coincidentally, during this same time, China was going through major transformations: we joined the World Trade Organization that year, and also won the bid for the 2008 Olympics. People were very hopeful and excited about what was to come.

I had a working title at the time for a project to be made from this footage called A Man with a Digital Camera, paying homage to [Dziga] Vertov. As you can tell, I didn’t have a concrete idea of what the film would be, but I knew I wanted to keep using the digital camera to start gathering materials and footage—documentary-like moments of my actors and actresses interacting with the spaces and cities I’m making films in. It’s become a habit of mine to use this continuously to interact with the spaces I’m in. I feel very privileged to interact with particular spaces, and I often think it’s unlikely that I’ll return to certain locations, scenarios, or environments, so I want to capture as much as I can, in addition to the film I’m making.

I didn’t know when this gathering process would end because I wanted it to be large-scale, nonlinear, impressionistic. It wasn’t until COVID-19 hit that I had to put everything on hold, and I began to think about closing the curtain on this era and preparing for the second act of my career. That’s when I revisited the footage and the materials I had gathered over the past 20 years, and began to think about a way to edit it so that it would be coherent, and serve a narrative purpose alongside a newly scripted last third of a film.

How did you come to this particular love story? Were there other characters or narrative possibilities in the material that you considered pursuing? Is there another film to be made from this footage?

I have so much material that it is very likely I would be able to create another story. But if I were to do that, I’d have to find the right moment, emotionally, for me as a filmmaker.

What made this particular project so daunting is the options the footage afforded. It’s almost like the clouds in the sky: you can move vertically or horizontally. It gave me a lot to think about, especially in terms of how I should structure it: whether spatially, depending on the different locations and cities, or temporally, narrowing in on one particular era, or even the changes that occurred during those periods.

I eventually decided to use Zhao Tao as a vehicle to take us, as an audience, on an emotional journey. Through her perspective, we get to see not only how [Qiaoqiao] experiences the country’s changes as an individual, but we can also see, as viewers, the changes in the backdrop as she traverses the different locations, at different ages, from young to older. That’s the intention: to tease out what I want the audience to pay more attention to, which are the historical and contextual cues of the changes that China experienced in the past two decades.

You worked on this film with Wan Jiahuan, the same co-writer who worked with you on Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020), a portrait of rural China told through the lives of four authors. Can you tell me a little about that collaboration, and how it may have differed between the two films?

Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue is, of course, a documentary. We had narrowed in on the subjects very early on. Based on the publicly accessible information, we also knew how we wanted to structure the film and the subjects we wanted to showcase. Through the personal narratives of these subjects, we were able to put the film together in the relatively conventional way of making a documentary.

Caught by the Tides, by comparison, is a very unconventional project. The process of thinking about the narrative began with the visual components—the old footage—and because of this, the first two-thirds of the film took shape in the editing room. The way we thought about how to narrow into Zhao Tao’s character and her narrative arc very much happened after we examined the wealth of footage that we had. After we teased out that character, I then had to make a decision about what would be kept in to serve the narrative. Based on that, we finished the first two-thirds of the film. The last third had us going back to the traditional way of writing a script to fit the purpose of a narrative arc. So it was a combination of a conventional and unconventional script-writing process.

Can you talk about the idea to keep Zhao Tao’s character silent for the majority of the film, but also about some of the devices you use in lieu of dialogue, such as music and intertitles, to push the narrative forward?

The inspiration to keep the character silent came from a particular moment I captured in the old footage, when Zhao Tao is on the boat in the Three Gorges, trying to purchase a lunch box. It’s very common for the engine room on these boats to serve as a place for vendors to sell lunch boxes. Usually it’s very noisy, because it’s an engine room, and people will be howling at the top of their lungs to have their orders heard. Zhao Tao approached me while I was shooting that footage and asked me why she needed to shout to purchase a lunch box when she could do it with her eyes, without saying a word. As I watched the footage, I also noticed that she is initially suspicious that the vendor shortchanged her and gave her only rice, but when she begins to eat, she suddenly smiles and realizes that she misjudged the vendor. It’s just so beautiful. I thought that that’s something I wanted to capture and express for the rest of the film. It was a good way to showcase the fact that, in Chinese society, there is a type of person of few words. It’s not because they have nothing to say, but because they have so much to say they don’t know where to start. That is the feeling I wanted to capture—that she has so much to say, that she’s experienced so much, but she keeps it to herself. I wanted that to be a device for the audience, so they don’t have to rely on words, which often make things too concrete. Instead, I wanted them to pay attention to the visual and audio cues captured in the footage—to pay more attention to the things not said.

In terms of the use of music, the footage covers such a long span of time, and because of that, it has very different qualities, textures, and aspect ratios. Similarly, the footage features very different types of sound, from mono to surround. So I tried to use music to create a seamless transition between these audio and visual components. Music also serves the purpose of giving the footage a sense of time and place.

You have a supporting role in another film here at Cannes, Black Dog, and you’re increasingly appearing in films by young Chinese directors. How do you feel about the state of personal filmmaking in China, particularly for young directors taking after you and Guan Hu? 

Because of COVID-19 and the economy not doing well, young filmmakers in China are struggling to find financing and investors for their films. So I try to do my best to help out, not only with financing but also by playing small roles in their films. I do think that this is something that is hopefully temporary, and we will be able to have an established and mature production system going forward. But investment and financing issues are something we have to struggle through right now.

Jordan Cronk is a film critic and the founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series in Los Angeles. In addition to his work for Film Comment, he is a regular contributor to Artforum, MUBI Notebook, Reverse Shot, Sight and Sound, and more. He is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.