Been on a bit of a Jia Zhangke bender at the moment. You can find his films scattered between MUBI and the BFI Player, if you’re in the UK.
— Layabout/drifter as archetype. Rubbing slouched shoulders against the machine of the world. They are a perfect mirror of the cinemagoer; equally slouched, ‘debasing’ themselves in unproductive activity. Jia Zhangke’s Pickpocket (in Mandarin, its title is that of the protagonist, Xiao Wu) concerns itself with the anomie of such a drifter - not so much brooding as diffident (and shy). Quickly, he (Xiao Wu) will come to be crushed/obliterated beneath the accelerating pace of capital and industrialization. Quite literally, he buys a pager in order to woo a potential girlfriend (she works in a karaoke bar), the bleep of which goes off just as he is in the act of stealing; alerting his victim (and the police) to his presence. He is arrested; shackled to a telephone mast while the chief of police stops off to do some shopping. Technology becomes the albatross around his neck (and wrist). It is not unsubtle.
— I actually want to talk about sound, because Zhangke’s Pickpocket is really all about its mix. It might actually be the most interestingly mixed film I’ve ever seen (or listened to, actually). The rumble of traffic is a perpetual drone. When Xiao Wu visits the (poorly) Mei Mei, he lowers his guard; breaking out into a popular love song (albeit asking her to shut her eyes). During this deeply felt moment, the roar of cars almost drowns him out. There is the dissonant beep of his pager. In fact, the telltale ring that led to his arrest turns out to be nothing more than an automated weather report (he was hoping for a message from Mei Mei, who has now ghosted him). I.e., your destruction will be anonymous, indifferent. She makes off with somebody in a car (conversely, Xiao Wu walks almost everywhere). He is a relic, even for his young age (I guess he’s supposed to be in his 20s). Music and audio continually click and pop and vibrate throughout the film, enjambed across scenes; suddenly deafening where before it was subdued.
— Karaoke is a constant. Popular melodies are pumped out on boxy CRT televisions, the flaring of blown-out colours and stuttering zebra stripes evoke a kind of poverty of the image that Hito Steyerl would later embrace as “a ghost [...] a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea [...] squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced”, Etc. This is the detritus-surf of the modern age, a coming flood/tide of erratic, low-fidelity images and compressed/crushed fragments of audio. He (Xiao Wu) is undone by these things - abstract, anonymous. Feedback, mic popping. The mix is murky, protruding with arhythmic jolts. An erratic dissonance. Mei Mei calls her mother from a telephone booth, lying that she is actually in Beijing rather than toiling away in a remote metropolis as a sex worker. Technology spans terrains and territories, only to deceive.
— Xiao Wu hides his expression behind thick glasses and slow shrugs, pouting and turning his face away (we only ever see his hands in closeup). Objects that generate or mediate sound (e.g., a ‘singing’ lighter and a percussive boombox) provide the centre of gravity for almost all of the film’s scenes. In rare moments, Xiao Wu seeks refuge from the onslaught/glut of this technologized modernity - swinging idly from a metal bar on a dusty side road, singing to himself in a cavernous bathing hall. Even here, the song is one he recently heard performed by two duetting karaoke singers (again, facing not each other but the striated bands of a cheap television set). News media also plays a role. There is a TV presenter and her camera crew (they come and go). There are speakers through which the local authorities pronounce new criminal laws. Finally, there is the TV in the police station where Xiao Wu watches the report of his own arrest (curious onlookers peer through the window, faces pressed to the glass; they perceive both the real body of Xiao Wu and the news report describing his capture).
— The old is being flushed away. Xiao Wu’s shop-keeper friend finds out that his store has been condemned and will be demolished within days. Much anguish is shared about the loss of identity cards. Xiao Wu, who steals wallets for a living, returns these cards to the local police in paper envelopes. This act of homebrew ethics (he is the honourable thief) further tips the scales against him. Your conscience will destroy you.
— Of course, Jia Zhangke—rightly, I think—demurs from establishing a rock-hard dichotomy between the old (manual; labouring; corporeal) and the new (industrial; mechanical; abstract), never quite attaching totalities to them. The mask of the ‘whole’ of technology is complicated and slipping. It affords benefits. Others take to the new technology and enjoy its fruits. Xiao Wu is a kind of irritant, a criminal, causing upset and misery to the people that he plagues. The ‘old’ world (most obviously embodied by his parents; both of whom are poor farmers) isn’t exactly held up as a symbol of goodness and purity. Quite literally, he is chased away by his stick-wielding father who beseeches him never to darken their doorstep again. Jia Zhangke’s film is nuanced, and there is something much more alluringly existential about Xiao Wu’s decline and fall. He is as much an outcast from society as a victim of technology. Technology—as it were—is merely the herald of his undoing.
— Like with the best essays on the outcast, Xiao Wu’s hometown of Fenyang is a remote nowheresville - a northern backwater where, it’s implied, modernity’s advance only glacially washes up. Jia Zhangke tilts his frame frequently away from Xiao Wu. Pickpocket has a documentary feel - of medium and closeup shots that capture everyday life in this fringe-space of China. Market sellers, police officials, hairdressers, karaoke performers, bicycle riders, manual labourers - Jia Zhangke sets his camera up to capture their activities and glances, as if he is documenting a moment in time that will soon be washed away. Film itself (an instrument of modernity) functions as a kind of salve or protective amulet that liberates these people (and their lives) from the abyss of forgetting. It also, of course, cannot halt the process. Technology is rendered both passive and obliterating. What’s more (this is important), Jia Zhangke’s entire cast is made up of non-professionals and non-actors. It feels like a documentary. Fiction and actuality (like Mei Mei’s lie) are further muddied.
— The mix is echoing and warped, the decay-derangement of its audio giving yet further weight to its aesthetic poverty. Xiao Wu steals a singing lighter from his former partner in crime, its janky rendition of Fur Elise creating a haunting leitmotif that is both funny and sad. Xiao Wu holds the flame and lets the tune relentlessly play, contributing – with this indifferent act – to the wall of sound that otherwise fills the mix. The screen, here, fades into a murky black, the sound of the music bending and decaying as the lighter’s battery begins to die. It’s an extraordinary moment of auditory pathos; a reminder of how cheap (and cheapening) these throwaway electronic goods really are. But it’s also just very moving, his own gloomy swan song.
— Jia Zhangke’s aesthetic coup is his ability to squeeze the juice of beauty out of all these frayed, decaying, deteriorating tendrils of sound. The chirpy rendition of Fur Elise, the low-resolution karaoke videos, the tinny echo of pop songs and synths, Zhangke arranges them not only as a kind of sonic vibe, but invests them with a modicum of sublimity. Snatches of song, warped and mangled sound, these things are found to be filled with a kind of existential potential. Just as they lead to Xiao Wu’s demise, they also help him—however awkwardly—to navigate his way down. This is my impression, at least; one that questions any totalizingly anti-technological reading of Zhangke’s film. Like it or lump it, what we are bearing witness to is a new phenomenology - of a world in which technology is elevated beyond the status of a dumb device, becoming rather an ambivalently integrated part of being. Xiao Wu cannot extricate himself from the condition of living with technology, just as the film’s structure is wrapped entirely around the electrical register of speakers, TVs, pagers, radios and devices, where these things frequently slip between layers of diegesis. During one memorably protracted scene, Xiao Wu wanders the always-under-construction city accompanied by a synthy diegetic ballad. Eventually, he arrives at a street stall whose proprietor is selling stereos. When they flip the station, the non-diegetic music slips inside the speakers before it is washed into (diegetic) static. The medium is the message, transmitted (and transmuted) between spectator and subject.
— Let’s actually return to Xiao Wu’s moment of liberation - his echoing song in the empty bathhouse. Unobserved, and for the first time blanketed by silence, his song is not weak but profound and free. Panning up, the camera tracks the intangible echoes of his voice as it reverberates into the vast ceiling of the baths. Here the camera lingers (stone, light) - we are looking at Xiao Wu’s intangible song. It is insubstantial (I mean this literally, it has no material substance), but it is also—I suppose this is metaphorically important—trapped against the ceiling. It cannot echo into the world beyond. Longing. Longing and unease permeate everything. He can just about frame these (diaphanous) feelings in the language of a popular song.
— By the film’s conclusion, we bear witness to something that is (structurally) both open and enclosed. Xiao Wu’s fate is sealed, and his way of life shut off. His story ends here, even though it doesn’t exactly end here (he will likely go to prison, Etc). But the accelerating modernity that has begun to aggressively shake up society in Fenyang? This presents a series of political and social relationships that’ll be projected far into the future, simply because the future has a future. The Fenyang of 1998 seems almost quaint, seen from today; poised on the cusp of a modernity that we are living and breathing, here in 2022. Even the CRT televisions, the pagers, the FM radios. These things too have been ground into dust, just as the 16mm stock on which Zhangke shot his film has been abandoned to the past.
— Here’s a kind of addendum. Watched A Touch of Sin, Jia Zhangke’s anthology film of 2013. It shares many of the themes of Pickpocket (drifters, outcasts, ruination, modernity). Its sound mix is a bit more ‘ordinary’, much cleaner. Except for the intrusion of cheap, quirky electronic bleeps in the film’s fourth (and final) segment, where Xiaohui—working at a Dongguan tech factory—is pushed toward suicide. These bleeps and jolts enter the mix without source or context. They clutter and swirl around, a kind of inescapable white noise that presages his doom. It only falls silent once his body collides with the pavement beneath his living quarters. Fin.
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