In the space of a quarter of a century, Jia Zhang-ke has risen from the underground to become a figurehead of Chinese auteur cinema, and one of the most important filmmakers of his generation (the sixth, according to the official classification). He has filmed nothing less than China's entry into the new millennium, from the collapse of old working-class structures to the horizon of posthuman technology. His film, Caught by the Tides, presented in competition at Cannes in May 2024, is a striking collage of images pulled from his filmmaking archives, tracing the genealogy of present times.
That was at the beginning of the 21st century. I had a considerable amount of material at my disposal. Rushes [raw footage], some of which came from my previous films, such as Unknown Pleasures [2002] and Still Life [2006], and had never been used. And, for another, on a project I'd been working on continuously since 2001, called "A Man with a Digital Camera," which involved filming all sorts of things on the fly with a small documentary crew. One day, as I was tidying up, I immersed myself in these images, and became aware of the period they embraced. A new film could take shape, which would be like a return to my filmography.
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