Jia Zhangke: Withdraw away and gain new knowledge through indiscriminately

At the Second One-Way Street Bookstore Literature Awards Ceremony, Jia Zhangke delivered a keynote speech titled "Distance, Angle and Location-Obtaining New Knowledge through Indiscrimination." He mentioned,"I feel that I should get away. I want to establish new relationships and adjust distances. It's like when we climb one mountain and see another mountain. We need to gain a new perspective and a new sense of distance."

Original title Jia Zhangke: I should get out and build a new relationship

. At the Second One-Way Street Bookstore Literature Awards Ceremony, Jia Zhangke delivered a speech titled "Distance, Angle and Location-Gain New Knowledge through Indiscrimination". Keynote speech.

The following content is compiled based on Jia Zhangke's speech record. Published in Jia Zhangke's first person.

A week ago, Xu Zhiyuan and I had a long conversation all day. I had said it quickly that day, but I still have to say it now. Zhiyuan is one of the few people who has come to see me in the year since I returned to my hometown in Shanxi. It's not that I don't have friends in my hometown. I have all kinds of friends in my hometown, but writers like Xu Zhiyuan often call up articles from their mobile phones, and I stay away from people who often quote classics. That day in the village of Fenyang, I took him to worship Guan Gong, shot an air gun together, rode a Trojan horse together, and rode a snowmobile together, followed by a long talk.

I want to show my friends what my life is now. I have come to Beijing to study, study films, and make films since 1993. I have gone from a film student to a director who has been engaged in creation for a long time. In recent years, I have discovered that there is not only a general sense of anxiety as mentioned by the previous guests, but also a feeling of exhaustion and weakness. This sense of powerlessness reached its peak when my last movie,"The Old Man of Mountains and Rivers" was released. Because when the film was released last time, I went to more than a dozen cities in more than 20 days. Every place I visited, I did various interviews and discussions. I found that more than 20 years have passed, and the issues we discussed have not changed, especially the topics in the film field. For example, we have been discussing how to balance box office and art, and also involve the decline of print media and how to view new media. Of course, we have been talking about smog for several years.

Jia Zhangke's

various questions are actually what we have been repeating: we have been answering them repeatedly and discussing them repeatedly.

In such a process of repeated questions and answers and discussions, time flew by quickly. More importantly, I found that we all have a subconscious desire to form a consensus, and the time we spend forming a consensus is too long for the creator. Because of this, it seems that our thoughts are a little stagnant, because we have been fighting internally and trying to persuade each other for the formation of the so-called consensus. This process is like getting into a swamp or a ghost building a wall. We stop moving forward, forgetting to think about new issues, and looking for new discoveries based on one discovery. To put it at the extreme, I am not interested in forming consensus right now, which may itself be a form of dictatorship. Consensus needs to be formed through time, practice and education. For thinkers, what is more important than moving forward. What Buddhism says about "indiscrimination" means not entangling and gaining new knowledge.

With this idea in mind, I felt that my change would start by adjusting my life. I decided to move back to my hometown in Shanxi, not because I had lost contact with the real world. I was in the real world every day. But as a screenwriter, as a director, and as someone who still writes articles, I feel that I am completely occupied by ideological work-writing, filming, arguing, and explaining. It's not that I am far away from worldly life, but that I am too close to ideological life. I must change this relationship.

So I think I should get out, establish new relationships and adjust distance, just like when we climb one mountain and see another mountain, we need to gain a new perspective and a new sense of distance. Many new understandings, including open-mindedness when facing problems, are brought about by such a suitable sense of distance.

I myself have always felt that the attention of our times and the setting of our topics have always been based on the judgment that China is a country undergoing rapid changes. This judgment refers to the fact that the reform and opening up began in the late 1970s, and political and economic changes brought about changes in personal life and culture, and believes that such changes are still ongoing. We have been facing, discussing, and understanding this process of change, and trying to judge its final outcome. However, in fact, I think there is a huge error, because for me, this change has been over for more than ten years.

What we urgently need to face is the relatively solid result after this change, which currently seems to have no possibility of renewal. However, we have always observed China society in the context of changing dynamics, so our understanding and observation are not in tune with the current reality. This can also understand why we read, write, and make movies increasingly away from our readers and audiences.

To put it further, why do elites decline? It is because the elites have not developed a new understanding and always have to persuade others on some old issues. And when you continue to move forward, when you have advanced to one or two steps forward, your new coordinates will prove your trajectory.

I live in the countryside. I don't know what the international world is like now, but there is a huge gap between our reality and our ideological state: the changes initiated in China society in the late 1970s and the changes restarted in the late 1990s. This change has in fact come to an end today, and people are suffering the results of this change. But what we focus on is still the issues in the process of change. There is an illusion in the ideological world as a whole that we are thinking about social changes, which is actually lagging behind. We are talking about old problems, new problems are ignored, and public confusion cannot be explained and inspired by the intellectual class, so they leave the elite.

I think we are currently at a stage where new ideas and new understandings are needed. In addition, we pay too much attention to the changes at the moment. In the cultural process of more than thirty years, the theme of thought has been paying attention to real changes, while ignoring another dimension of thinking, which is some old problems that seem to remain unchanged. Have we neglected our research and understanding of them?

Simply put, for example, what is life? What is the universe? This is not only a question that science needs to answer, but also a theme of philosophy and the main starting point for understanding people. On the whole, we don't pay too much attention to this part of the unchanging problems, and these unchanging problems have come from ancient times and may have been faced with such problems since the existence of human beings. We cannot leave the problems behind and still have to continue thinking about it in the contemporary era. More than a year of rural life has brought a change to me. I began to become an astrophysicist (kidding). I failed middle school physics, but everyone has the possibility of having wild thoughts.

Recently, I have been thinking, do aliens exist? I was in my hometown's restaurant, and I opened the window at night and saw a bright moon. I was wondering if the moon was really a huge alien base? Are we humans indigenous to the earth? Why are we so unadapted to the earth? We eat cooked food. We are very weak in adapting to the changes of the four seasons, cold and heat. Almost everyone can get chronic diseases. Human beings actually show great dissatisfaction with the earth. Are we from outer space? These ideas have no scientific basis. But I want a new dimension to my self-identification.

I shared this feeling with Zhi Yuan. I drove back to my hometown from Beijing and relied on Google Maps or Baidu Maps. It seemed that I couldn't go back 500 kilometers away from that map. But the ancient Mongolians traveled all the way to Eastern Europe. They watched the movements of mountains and rivers, the sun, moon, and the Big Dipper to reach their goal. At that time, every human being's relationship with celestial bodies and the universe was direct, and their connection with the universe was daily. Today, feeling the universe seems to be only Hawking's job. I don't think this is right.

My paranoid thoughts about aliens and space actually brought me back to a question about my career. Film technology has developed very rapidly in recent years and is in an active period of technology. For example, VR technology in virtual reality. When I first came into contact with it, I thought it was just a simple technical change. I personally have experienced changes from film to digital. Some old directors have experienced changes from black and white to color, and some directors who have passed away have experienced changes from silent to sound. But when I was born in the 1970s, I had to experience the emergence of VR again.

I have seen many VR examples, and I became a little scared after reaching a certain stage of research. Because I think this new technology is a bit scary, which in turn makes me wonder if humans were designed like this? Today we have bookstores, literary awards, and social connections. Are many of our things designed and manipulated by a higher civilization? Is there a VR director behind us who is designing our planet? Our film technology has developed to the point where we are imitating our designers? I think this may be a director's imagination, but it is very important to me. A different angle and a different distance can bring us new understanding and understanding.

In 2016, I saw an installation I like,"The Matter of Time". This installation is at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. It is an American artist working in a space that is slightly larger than ours. In a slightly larger space, the installation method is used to make a winding verandah, which is enclosed. When you walk in the winding verandah, you will find that the time is very long. You will find that this may be a bottomless journey. You don't know what the destination is and whether you can get out of it. It's very tortuous. As time accumulates, you will feel that the space and the road are unfathomable. But when you change an angle, pull out, and stand high to look at the device, it only occupies no more than 300 square meters of space.

I think it gave me an important inspiration, that is, we need to move, we need to adjust our relationship with thought and life. Of course, we are not disconnected from the ideological activities we love and the secular life we live on, but each of us is a small planet, and we can establish a space between the two that allows us to better observe and control the overall situation. spatial distance. So, in 2016, I was adjusting my perspective. I also think that our perception of the new era comes from our taking a step forward and taking a different angle. Thank you all!

Editor: vian