Since his feature debut Pickpocket in 1997, director Jia Zhangke has been steadily making films for more than 25 years, telling deeply human stories about love, loss and the constant, indiscriminate march of time. 2000’s Platform was Zhangke’s first foray into tracking the age of time, depicting the societal changes within a small city in China from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

A year later, the director began work on a project that would eventually evolve into Caught by the Tides, an emotional epic that quietly highlights the vast cultural shifts that began in the new millennium and ended during the global Covid-19 pandemic that put the world on pause. Between globalization and Covid, Zhangke became one of China’s most prolific and celebrated filmmakers, with a body of work focusing on the small details of life in the modern world.

Caught by the Tides is innovative and unassuming, both new and familiar, even using footage from Zhangke’s previous films Unknown Pleasures and Still Life. It’s the culmination of the director’s narrative and philosophical sensibilities, all wrapped up in an ill-fated love story. I spoke with Zhangke about his latest feature, working with his wife, lead actress Zhao Tao, and facing the unknown.

What gave you the idea to make Caught by the Tides? Did you have a plan in place when you began?
Jia Zhangke: It was an ever-evolving and changing process. I’ll start from the beginning. In 2001, turn of the century, China was going through dramatic economic transformations, and the entire society was full of energy, full of momentum. So you see people trying to move around, whether it’s domestically to other cities or internationally, trying to make a better life for themselves. I really was attracted to this kind of momentum and energy, and wanted to document the people within this very lively and robust environment.

At the same time, it just so happened to coincide with the introduction of this new technology called “digital filmmaking”. It’s so lightweight and cheap that I, as a filmmaker, could bring a small group of actors and DPs and just go to all the real spaces that moved me. I wanted to capture everything on film without a plan, and then, based on the footage, I could decide how to structure the film.

 So, with the working title of Man with a Digital Camera, I started to film. But after about two or three years, I realized that if I just made the film right then, it wouldn’t have the kind of breadth and depth that I wanted to capture. I continued to capture these images on and off for a while, to the point that I forgot about this project for about five or six years. Not until the year 2020, during the pandemic, did I realize it was a perfect juncture historically for me to bring this film to fruition.

At the time during Covid, of course, we were trapped in our own homes. There were no flights domestically or internationally. The isolation of quarantine created a sharp contrast with the kind of energy and momentum that I witnessed in 2001. It was the end of the globalization era, and now you see these dramatic changes politically, economically, and in regards to technology. For me, this was a time for us to look back and retrace this journey of the past twenty years.

Since then, she has been part of the collaboration process, whether it’s the script or any type of narrative art in my subsequent films, especially bringing that kind of female sensitivity and perspective to the work. So if you look at the character of Qiao Qiao in Caught by the Tides, it’s actually a perfect embodiment of this kind of transformation, evolution and growth of not only Zhao Tao as a performer but also myself as a filmmaker in real life.

In the film, Qiao is so dependent on this traumatic, very challenging romantic relationship that she had with Brother Bin. And later on you see this character progress and evolve to someone who actually could think for herself and make her own decision to break up with Brother Bin and then to later on become this very strong individual. That is a reflection of how I see Zhao’s performance as an actor and how this character has transformed with my collaboration with her throughout the years.

In a lot of your films, you tend to revisit and remix images. I don’t know if “remix” is the right word, but that’s the word that I’m going with. When I was watching Caught by the Tides, and especially rewatching it, I thought a lot about Ash Is Purest White and the parallels between the two films. Is that intentional?
This remix of images all happens during the editing process because it is a process of contemplation, reflection and deep thought. So I suddenly realized that all the images captured through the Man with a Digital Camera project and the films I made in the past are so closely connected to my own life. With that realization, I decided to incorporate certain shots and scenes from my previous films. There are about seven or eight instances that I used footage from either Unknown Pleasures or Still Life in Caught by the Tides. For me to revisit this footage gathered in the past twenty-something years, I think it’s part of the process of reimagination and reinterpreting the lives that I have gone through, finding a new way to think about where I’ve been and what’s to come.

There’s a part in the film where you see a computer, and there’s a game that’s playing and you hear sounds, which I think are from another game, but I wanted to know, what game was the character playing?
I wanted to find something that could signal the beginning of the turn of the century, and what was going on in China at the time. That was the time for our collective memories to experience something called the internet. The internet cafe became very popular at the time, and within that, there was also a particular app or program called Flash Animation that was very, very popular in China. A lot of young people would create flash animations, and then they would share them with the people they know or don’t know through the internet.

That became this new way of interacting with other people, this new particular space called the Virtual World. That’s also the time that people start playing video games in these internet cafes, and that’s why you could listen to the background and you will hear a lot of different video games being played. There was this sort of commercialization and consumerism being introduced. There is also the idea of globalization being introduced, which you can see from a lot of the images that are within this animation, such as McDonald’s and other major international brands. When I filmed this particular sequence, which was in 2001, that was a perfect representation of the zeitgeist of the era.

The second way music is used in the film is through the original score composed by Taiwanese musician Lim Giong. The third way I use music in the film is during the editing process where I’m trying to interject my very subjective viewpoint on certain scenes or certain eras, and I’m using rock music from different eras, different singers and different groups as a way to express the internal emotions and feelings and zeitgeist of the era. Early on, there’s also this particular song, ‘Who Killed the Person from Shijiazhuang?’, which is by a group called the Omnipotent Youth Society. This is very much talking about the people in the industrial areas dealing with disillusionment and the same frustrations that I have experienced.

The music that plays at the end of the film is by the rock artist Cui Jian, and the song is called ‘Go On’. That particular song was written and composed during Covid time, and speaks to the feeling that we must live to survive and to thrive going forward. And we want to do it standing up rather than kneeling down. In the Chinese context, when you live standing upright instead of kneeling down, it is about dignity.

What is the relationship between Caught by the Tides and nostalgia? Are you nostalgic for 2001?
Instead of focusing on this concept or feeling called nostalgia, I think that Caught by the Tides is a film more about saying farewell to that era as we enter into a new way of living. Whether or not you enjoy or don’t enjoy what’s going on right now, we have to go on, we have to move on. We have no choice but to continue to live. There’s this sense of helplessness, very much represented by the title of the film, Caught by the Tides. But regardless of what will happen or how much control we have, we still must forge ahead. It’s very similar to the ending, when Qiao Qiao just starts running, going forward with her life. We still need to live. And then by living, we will hopefully get the chance to have a kind of rebirth.