Primer is The A.V. Club‘s ongoing series of beginners’ guides to pop culture’s most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you.
Jia Zhangke has become the pre-eminent director of what’s known as the “Sixth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers. The Sixth Generation immediately separated themselves from their aging counterparts in the ’90s. As the Fifth Generation was reaching its peak, it was often looking back: Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, Tian Zhuangzhuang’s The Blue Kite, and Zhang Yimou’s To Live all examined China’s 20th century on the scale of decades of change, with the principal interest being the Cultural Revolution. These films, too, presented themselves aesthetically beautifully, taking the language of “classical” epic filmmaking, priming them for Oscar nominations and distribution by Miramax. The Sixth Generation, however, was looking to the future—both in their narratives, following emerging youth cultures, and their eventual embrace of digital, as rough as it was at the time.
In 2025, digital cinema is now as clean and neatly polished as China itself. Both the technology and the country no longer seem to be developing towards something so much as they have arrived at a point, with no filmmaking exemplifying this arrival more than that of Jia. His latest film, Caught By The Tides, is arguably his masterpiece concerning this. It is a decades-spanning film, starting in 2001 and continuing through the present day. Caught By The Tides is often abstract, especially in its early sequences set in 2001, constantly flowing between both used and unused footage from his film Unknown Pleasures—some of which are documentary images captured at the time of filming—as well as repurposed scenes made for Mountains May Depart and especially Ash Is Purest White. This is strung together to make an incredibly loose narrative and a new riff on Zhao Tao’s characters from those films, tied together into one person and a whole new movie, all before we get to the sequences shot specifically for Caught By The Tides set in the present day. This iterative and reiterative filmmaking that Jia is engaging in can be “daunting for a newcomer,” as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky wrote in his A.V. Club review, so let’s unpack the important milestones in Jia’s fiction films that led him to arrive at Caught By The Tides.
Jia Zhangke 101: New Money and New Crime
While the works from the Fifth Generation take on an air of historicity, Jia’s cinema is always focused on the present tense. None is a better gateway into this than his 2013 film A Touch Of Sin, a sleek, four-part, slow-burning crime film, with its chapters loosely linked together through sudden and shocking acts of violence. All loosely based on actual news stories, A Touch Of Sin attempts to capture moments of social collapse under the weight of the new world that China is creating for itself in the 21st century.
This focus on the present-tense is not to say that Jia’s films are never set in the past, quite the opposite in fact, as the majority of his works sprawl over decades. However, when Jia goes into the past, it is never framed with nostalgia or idealization; instead the times are examined for their emerging present. Two of the best films which demonstrate this are also a pair of his most accessible (and make up a loose trilogy with Caught By The Tides). Mountains May Depart and Ash Is Purest White are both three-chapter stories moving from the turn of the “Chinese Century” into the 2010s. Those two features are rather straightforward: the former is a romance drama and the latter is a crime film, and Jia’s most commercial work to date.
A new-money conflict plays front and center in Mountains May Depart, Jia’s 2015 film which returns to his native Fenyang. Mountains May Depart is a love triangle triptych, set in the past (1999), the present (2014), and the future (2025). Zhao Tao plays Tao, who is torn between loving the coal miner Liangzi (Liang Jingdong) and the petit bourgeois Jingsheng (Zhang Yi). Tao eventually ends up with Jingsheng, and they have a son named Dollar (Dong Zijian). In the present-day sequence, Jingsheng has become incredibly wealthy from investing, but he and Tao have gotten divorced. Jingsheng, fed up with the lack of freedoms and further opportunities in China, takes Dollar to be raised in Australia. Mountains May Depart, Jia’s first film from the era of Xi Jinping’s preeminence in China, finds expatriation in the country’s future—an irreversible Westernization that is both funnily and tenderly symbolized through the film’s use of “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys.
2018’s Ash Is Purest White takes Jia’s multi-decade exploration into an even more interesting direction: taking the fabric of the earlier films featuring characters named Qiao and Bin, and turning it into a new mosaic. Ash Is Purest White is a crime film set first in the world of Unknown Pleasures, with a newly worked story of Zhao Qiao (Zhao Tao) and Guo Bin (now played by Liao Fan). Their romance takes them from “YMCA”-thumping dance floors to violent encounters, one leading to Qiao’s arrest. When she’s released some years later, she, much like Shen Hong in Jia’s earlier Still Life (and with the same yellow shirt), goes looking for Bin around Fengjie. When they fail to connect, she returns to Datong. Over a decade later, she gets a call from Bin that he is back in town, crippled from a stroke and still humiliated from his youthful falling-outs in the criminal world. As she takes him into town for the first time since the turn of the new century, the two soak in how much has really changed in their provincial city—how much China has changed, and how much they might not have a place in this strange new world that once seemed rife with (a certain kind of) opportunity in its more seedy transitional days.
It’s worth noting that at the start of this trilogy of triptychs with Mountains May Depart, Jia was speculating about China’s next decade, seeing a world where China was still just an odd corner within globalization, one stuck between its old ways and the future. Now in 2025, the year in which the final chapter of Mountains May Depart plays out, it seems that the world is instead looking to China. And indeed, Jia’s camera reflects this as well: Caught By The Tides is a film about China, maybe even more than anything he’s ever made before.
Intermediate Studies: Arthouse Sprawl
From early in Jia Zhangke’s career, he’s been interested in examining China’s development and its arrival into its strange new reality, from his sophomore feature in 1999 (set again in his hometown of Fenyang), Platform, to his most epic film, 24 City, which tracks the Sichuan megalopolis of Chengdu from the 1950s to the then-present of 2008. What Jia often finds in the contemporary world is a sense of listlessness, which is most obvious in his films set entirely in the present, like his student film Xiao Shan Going Home or his first feature film Xiao Wu. The latter film, about a wandering small-time criminal in Fenyang, sets in motion Jia’s portraitures of youth that his early works would be so defined by, and lays out his adoption of the cinematic modernism of Michelangelo Antonioni and Robert Bresson (the alternate title to Xiao Wu, Pickpocket, could be seen as referential to that French master).
Jia’s third feature, Unknown Pleasures, was the first of his films to play in competition at Cannes, competing for the Palme d’Or at the festival in 2002. It is also the second collaboration between him and his future wife, Zhao Tao, who would go on to be an essential part to almost all of his subsequent cinema. Like Jia’s first two features—Xiao Wu and Platform—Unknown Pleasures was filmed in Shanxi province. Although, instead of being set in Jia’s hometown of Fenyang like those earlier works, Unknown Pleasures takes place in the largest city in the north of the province, Datong. Taking place at the tail end of Jiang Zemin’s leadership of the People’s Republic of China—an era marked by a massive expansion in privatization of the economy—Unknown Pleasures follows the new, more free, and Westernized generation of Chinese young people as they navigate this liberated and listless time; it’s a film about people as messy as the digital aesthetics their stories are rendered in. While never quite the same character (although always with a fondness for dancing—after all, Jia first recruited Zhao for Platform because he needed an actress that was also a dancer), Unknown Pleasures is the first time Zhao Tao plays a woman named “Qiao Qiao,” a name that will come back in part in Ash Is Purest White and in full in Caught By The Tides.
His next two features, too, concern themselves specifically with modern China, one which is increasingly alien and surreal in its terraforming of the landscape. The World is easily the most surreal of his works, filming in and around Beijing World Park, which puts famous monuments from all over Earth—the Taj Mahal, the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Statue of Liberty—in miniature right outside of Beijing. Like many of Jia’s works, The World uses its setting for a languid love story, this time set in a metaphor for a China which now contains the whole globe inside its reach, albeit an ersatz and kitschy one.
A couple years later, Jia turned his eye on one of the more practical marvels of modern China: the Three Gorges Dam. Although not yet complete, it is increasingly flooding the Yangtze River behind it, forcing cities in its rising path to be torn down. In Still Life, Jia sets the plot forth with two disparate love stories in Fengjie during its deconstruction. Two people from Shanxi come to the town in search of lost loves, a coal miner, Han Sanming (playing himself), and a nurse Shen Hong (Zhao). Hong is looking for her husband Guo Bin, who left with little contact to become a successful businessman on his own. Bin is played by Li Zhubin, who portrayed Qiao Qiao’s abusive gangster boyfriend in Unknown Pleasures, Qiao San. Interestingly, there is a character in Unknown Pleasure also named Bin Bin, who becomes enamored with Zhao’s character in that film, suggesting a warping continuity between the films—an evolving, plastic idea that Jia began playing with decades before Caught By The Tides. Still Life reflects the new China through its landscape, which is being literally swallowed by progress, and old relationships being mired by new class divides created from the country’s emerging wealth.
Advanced Studies: Self-Reference
Caught By The Tides is the culmination of all these previous projects, and one not just built for itself, but seemingly constructed from all the raw material of Jia’s career. While the filmmaker is no stranger to incorporating documentary footage into his fiction films, Caught By The Tides takes this further than he’s ever gone, willingly diving in and out of non sequitur doc and narrative footage, especially in the initial chapter set in Unknown Pleasures‘ 2001 Datong. Caught By The Tides opens with a group of women singing for each other in a cold shack, clearly shot on DV at the same time as Unknown Pleasures. Jia’s camera cuts in out the window, to a statue of a spaceman. We then see Zhao once again as Qiao Qiao, although one we will get to know very differently from before. The film cuts from its boxy 4:3 aspect ratio to strikingly high-definition footage in 1.85:1 of old mining men sitting on a government building’s steps waiting to have their group portrait taken. In a sequence apparently shot for Mountains May Depart, the camera lingers and glides between their rugged faces.
Whereas Ash Is Purest White shoots Datong all over again to maintain aesthetic continuity (albeit with a couple interjections), Caught By The Tides leans into its hybridity. Early on, there is a scene between Qiao Qiao and Bin (played by Li Zhubin again, first repurposed from his performance as Qiao San in Unknown Pleasures, then with new performances as an old man filmed for this new feature) which is ripped from a scene in Unknown Pleasures, but cut together with a sequence in that same club filmed a decade-and-a-half later for Ash Is Purest White, where a group of older women sing for the crowd and ask for money. Crucially, this sequence serves only as a backdrop in Ash Is Purest White, where the singing is mostly heard through the walls and the real story is happening in the Mahjong-playing backrooms. Caught By The Tides instead forefronts the working women, creating a focused feminist lens to have Qiao Qiao’s life unfold for.
As Qiao Qiao gradually abstains from vocal communication as the film progresses, the world too becomes lonelier, more alienated. China becomes more modern, even with the real country itself appearing to be some kind of science-fiction environment that can only be navigated digitally, one inhabited by robots that can tell if you’re lonely or not. But as the film arrives at its contemporary conclusions, it loses that digital grit of the earlier sequences, which had life bursting out of their few pixels. Now everything is high definition, and Jia’s style has become cleaner, more professional, perhaps matching the artificial coldness of the new world, one where people never seemed to relearn to touch after the pandemic, where they stand in empty squares on cold nights to watch a guitarist from far away, rather than sweat together in the close confines of the dance floor.
