“Heart Rain” is heard several times, mostly in the film’s middle section, where it’s a karaoke staple. Music structures and defines Xiao Wu’s world: it is everywhere and it means everything. But most of all we hear music, snippets here and there, but sometimes longer bits. Sounds of construction and street noise, overheard conversations and arguments and business deals, dominate Xiao Wu’s world, hemming the young man inside a wall of sound. The soundscape of the movie is relentless: constantly we hear the noise of a town undergoing a massive transformation. Jia’s 1997 debut feature (not counting the hour-long Xiao Shan Going Home he completed while still a student in 1995) is about a young pickpocket who finds himself wandering the streets of his (and Jia’s) hometown of Fenyang, increasingly estranged from his old friends and family. “Heart Rain” by Yang Yuying & Mao Ning in Xiao Wu Lim Giong, who composed the music for all but one of Jia’s films between The World in 2004 and Ash is Purest White, is probably best known for his work with Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, starring in his The Puppetmaster, Goodbye South Goodbye, and Good Men Good Women as well as composing the scores for many of Hou’s movies, including Millennium Mambo, Three Times, and The Assassin. The World, set in a Beijing amusement park that offers scale models of various landmarks from around the world (the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Eiffel Tower, the World Trade Center, the Taj Mahal) along with musical and dance performances in various cultural styles, was based on Zhao’s stories of dancer friends she’d had who worked at the park. You can hear a lovely full version of the song here, by the band Smile (Ineemseglel). The song also gives a section of that film its title, and Zhao Tao even sings it at one point as well. This is a traditional Mongolian folk song adapted by composer Lim Giong in one of The World ’s more tender moments. “Nights of Ulan Bator” arranged by Lim Giong in The WorldĪ scene from the film ‘The World’ (2004) by Joa Zhangke. She’s starred in every one of his fiction features (and a few of his documentaries) ever since and the two were married in 2012. Apparently Jia asked to observe one of her classes as part of the casting process and ended up giving her the role instead. Zhao herself was a dancer and was working as a dance teacher when she got the part in Platform. Late one night, working alone, she hears this song on the radio and is swept away, performing a lovely ballet to it, an expression of the artistic soul still lurking under her now respectable profession. About two-thirds of the way through the film, the dancer played by Zhao Tao has left the troupe and is working in an office. Jia’s 2000 film Platformis about a decade in the life of a small provincial performing arts troupe as they grow up and apart in the 1980s, the period between the end of the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square. “Shi Fou (Whether or Not)” by Julie Su in PlatformĪ scene form the film ‘Platform’ (2000) by Jia Zhangke. The following are some of my favorite uses of music in Jia Zhangke movies. Jia’s musical choices are always associational, they are meant to remind the viewer of the time and place they first heard them, whether on a cheap radio in the first days after the Cultural Revolution or on a bootleg VCD of an imported Hong Kong blockbuster, or on a pair of iPod headphones shared with your mom. A source of pure aesthetic joy in often dreary and lonely landscapes, music in Jia’s movies is aspirational, a dream of freedom and cosmopolitan wonder, a balm against the harsh realities of modern capitalism. Throughout his work, from his debut feature Xiao Wu in 1997 though his latest, Ash is Purest White, music has been integral to his characters’ lives, not just their feelings but their visions of themselves and in turn the ways we in the audience perceive them. One of the most interesting things about Jia Zhangke as a director is his use of popular music not just as an ornament, a signifier of time and place or a shorthand vehicle for emotional clarity, but as a structuring element.
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