Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke’s first fiction feature in six years, is among the 54-year-old Chinese director’s most radical and comprehensively conceived works to date. Since 2001, Jia has been shooting documentary-style footage during the making of his films, capturing the everyday bustle of his actors and locations with fly-on-the-wall spontaneity. Told in three parts, Caught by the Tides comprises material shot amid the production of Unknown Pleasures (2002) and Still Life (2006), two films starring Zhao Tao and Li Zhubin as volatile romantic partners, as well as new sequences featuring both performers in the present day. Beginning in Datong, the setting of Unknown Pleasures, Jia’s latest follows Qiaoqiao, Zhao’s character from the earlier film, as she sets out in search of Bin (played by Li), who, as in Still Life, has left the city to earn a living in another province. Qiaoqiao travels across the country, along the stretch of the Yangtze River where Still Life was shot during the construction of the Three Gorges Dam—a project that destroyed thousands of villages and displaced millions of people. On her journey, she silently bears witness to the changing face of modern China, its social and economic crosscurrents captured in Jia’s rough-hewn images of life across a spectrum of public and private activity.
《风流一代》是贾樟柯六年来的首部故事长片，也是这位 54 岁的中国导演迄今为止最激进、构思最全面的作品之一。自 2001 年起，贾樟柯开始在电影制作中创造纪录片风格的镜头，以 “飞檐走壁 ”式的自发性捕捉演员以及空间的日常生活状态。《风流一代》分成三部分，包括拍摄《任逍遥》（2002 年）和《三峡好人》（2006 年）时的素材。这两部影片由赵涛和李竺彬主演，饰演一对变动中的爱侣。贾樟柯的新作以《任逍遥》中的山西省大同市为背景，讲述了赵涛饰演的巧巧开始寻找李竺彬饰演的斌哥的故事。巧巧走遍全国，沿着《还珠格格》的拍摄地——三峡大坝修建期间的长江沿岸（三峡大坝摧毁了成千上万个村庄，数百万人流离失所）。在她的旅途中，她默默见证了现代中国面貌的变化，同时贾樟柯粗粝的影像捕捉到了中国社会和经济的激变，以及内蕴其中的各种公共和个人行动。
Based on the film’s enthusiastic reception at this year’s Cannes, none of this contextual information is needed to appreciate the star-crossed romance at its center. Jia’s collage-like assemblage of the older digital footage, which varies in quality according to the available technology, is abstract to the point of occasionally appearing to be free-form (at times evoking Chris Marker’s essayistic travelogues). But there’s an emotional undertow to the material—heightened by the use of diegetic music and the pop iconography of the era—that guides the viewer into the film’s more narrative-driven final third, which sees a middle-aged Qiaoqiao and Bin reunited in Datong. Here, Jia turns the depopulated streets and sanitized interiors of the city during the pandemic into a vaguely futuristic space pregnant with possibility—one where this estranged couple can finally reconvene, if only to realize that the world, and their relationship to it, is much different now. With nary a word spoken, their journey—and the film’s poignant denouement—communicates something central to Jia’s cinema: while you can’t outrun the past, there’s beauty to be found in the passing of time and the moments that mark its progression.
从该片在今年戛纳电影节上受到热烈欢迎看来，要欣赏影片中这对荧幕情侣的爱情故事，并不需要这些背景信息。贾樟柯以拼贴画的方式将旧时的数码素材拼凑在一起，这些素材的质量因技术而异，抽象到偶尔看起来像是自由形式（有时让人联想到克里斯-马克的随笔式游记）。但是，这些素材中蕴含着一种情感——这种情感通过对音乐和那个时代流行意象的使用而变得更加强烈——它引导观众进入影片叙事性更强的后三分之一，即中年的巧巧和小斌在大同重逢。在这里，贾樟柯将疫情期间人口减少的街道和更干净的城市内部变成了一个隐约充满可能性的未来主义空间，这对分居的夫妇终于可以在这里团聚，即使只是为了认识到这个世界以及他们与这个世界的关系已经大不相同。在影片凄美的结尾，他们的旅程只字未提，却传达了贾樟柯电影的核心理念：尽管你无法逃避过去，但时间的流逝和标志着时间进程的瞬间也是一种美。
Shortly after the Cannes premiere of Caught by the Tides, Jia and I spoke about the film’s unique form, how its narrative devices allow the characters to say more with less, and his performance as the leader of a group of canine wranglers in Black Dog, a film by his fellow Chinese director Guan Hu that also debuted at Cannes.
在《潮起潮落》戛纳首映后不久，贾樟柯和我谈起了这部影片的独特形式，它的叙事手段如何让人物以更少的篇幅表达更多的内容，以及他在同为中国导演管虎的影片《黑狗》中饰演的一群牧犬人首领，这部影片也在戛纳首映。
访谈内容：
How long have you been shooting the kind of documentary footage we see in the first two parts of Caught by the Tides? Is this something you do during every production?
您拍摄我们在《风流一代》中看见的之前两部作品中那种纪录片有多长时间了？这是您每次制作时都会做的事吗？
It’s something I’ve done continuously for the past twenty-some years, starting in 2001, when DV technology became available and began making filmmaking so much easier. Coincidentally, during this same time, China was going through major transformations: we joined the World Trade Organization that year, and also won the bid for the 2008 Olympics. People were very hopeful and excited about what was to come.
在过去的二十多年里，我一直在做这件事，从 2001 年开始，当时 DV 技术的出现让电影制作变得更加容易。巧合的是，在同一时期，中国正在经历重大变革：我们在那一年加入了世界贸易组织，还赢得了 2008 年奥运会的申办权。人们对未来充满希望和期待。
I had a working title at the time for a project to be made from this footage called A Man with a Digital Camera, paying homage to [Dziga] Vertov. As you can tell, I didn’t have a concrete idea of what the film would be, but I knew I wanted to keep using the digital camera to start gathering materials and footage—documentary-like moments of my actors and actresses interacting with the spaces and cities I’m making films in. It’s become a habit of mine to use this continuously to interact with the spaces I’m in. I feel very privileged to interact with particular spaces, and I often think it’s unlikely that I’ll return to certain locations, scenarios, or environments, so I want to capture as much as I can, in addition to the film I’m making.
当时，我为用这些素材制作的项目起了一个名字，叫《持摄影机的人》，向吉加·维尔托夫（Dziga Vertov）致敬。正如你所知道的，我对这部电影的内容并没有一个具体的想法，但我知道我想继续使用数码相机，开始收集我的演员与我拍摄电影的空间和城市互动的记录片般的瞬间。不断使用数码摄像机与我所在的空间互动已经成为我的一种习惯。能与特定的空间互动，我感到非常荣幸，而且我经常认为自己不太可能再回到某些地点、场景或环境，因此除了正在拍摄的影片之外，我还想尽可能多地捕捉这些瞬间。
I didn’t know when this gathering process would end because I wanted it to be large-scale, nonlinear, impressionistic. It wasn’t until COVID-19 hit that I had to put everything on hold, and I began to think about closing the curtain on this era and preparing for the second act of my career. That’s when I revisited the footage and the materials I had gathered over the past 20 years, and began to think about a way to edit it so that it would be coherent, and serve a narrative purpose alongside a newly scripted last third of a film.
我不知道这个收集过程何时结束，因为我希望它是大规模的、非线性的、印象派的。直到 疫情的到来，我不得不搁置一切，开始考虑结束这个时代，为我职业生涯的第二幕做准备。就在那时，我重新审视了过去 20 年收集的素材，并开始思考如何剪辑这些素材，使其具有连贯性，并与新的影片最后三分之一一同起到叙事作用。
How did you come to this particular love story? Were there other characters or narrative possibilities in the material that you considered pursuing? Is there another film to be made from this footage?
您是如何想到这个特别的爱情故事的？在这些素材中，您是否考虑过其他角色或叙事可能性？这段素材是否还可以制作成另一部电影？
I have so much material that it is very likely I would be able to create another story. But if I were to do that, I’d have to find the right moment, emotionally, for me as a filmmaker.我有很多素材，很有可能创作出另一个故事。但如果要这样做，对我这个电影制作人来说，在情感上我必须找到一个合适的时机。What made this particular project so daunting is the options the footage afforded. It’s almost like the clouds in the sky: you can move vertically or horizontally. It gave me a lot to think about, especially in terms of how I should structure it: whether spatially, depending on the different locations and cities, or temporally, narrowing in on one particular era, or even the changes that occurred during those periods.
这个项目之所以如此令人生畏，是因为镜头提供了多种选择。它就像天空中的云朵：你可以垂直或水平移动。这给了我很多思考，尤其是在如何安排影片结构方面：无论是从空间上，根据不同的地点和城市，还是从时间上，缩小到一个特定的时代，甚至是在这些时期发生的变化。
I eventually decided to use Zhao Tao as a vehicle to take us, as an audience, on an emotional journey. Through her perspective, we get to see not only how [Qiaoqiao] experiences the country’s changes as an individual, but we can also see, as viewers, the changes in the backdrop as she traverses the different locations, at different ages, from young to older. That’s the intention: to tease out what I want the audience to pay more attention to, which are the historical and contextual cues of the changes that China experienced in the past two decades.
我最终决定以赵涛为载体，带领观众进行一次情感之旅。通过她的视角，我们不仅可以看到巧巧作为个体是如何经历国家变迁的，而且作为观众，我们还可以看到她在不同的地点、不同的年龄、从年轻到年老时背景的变化。这就是我的目的：我想让观众更多关注的，是过去二十年中国所经历的变化的历史和背景。
You worked on this film with Wan Jiahuan, the same co-writer who worked with you on Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue (2020), a portrait of rural China told through the lives of four authors. Can you tell me a little about that collaboration, and how it may have differed between the two films?
您曾与万嘉欢合作过这部电影，他也是您在《一直游到海水变蓝》（2020 年）中的合作编剧，该片通过四位作家的生活描绘了中国农村的风貌。您能谈谈这次合作吗，以及两部影片的不同之处？
Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue is, of course, a documentary. We had narrowed in on the subjects very early on. Based on the publicly accessible information, we also knew how we wanted to structure the film and the subjects we wanted to showcase. Through the personal narratives of these subjects, we were able to put the film together in the relatively conventional way of making a documentary.
《一直游到海水变蓝》当然是一部纪录片。我们很早就确定了拍摄主题。根据公开的信息，我们也知道了影片的结构和要展示的主题。通过这些主题的个人叙事，我们能够以相对传统的纪录片制作方式将影片制作完成。
Caught by the Tides, by comparison, is a very unconventional project. The process of thinking about the narrative began with the visual components—the old footage—and because of this, the first two-thirds of the film took shape in the editing room. The way we thought about how to narrow into Zhao Tao’s character and her narrative arc very much happened after we examined the wealth of footage that we had. After we teased out that character, I then had to make a decision about what would be kept in to serve the narrative. Based on that, we finished the first two-thirds of the film. The last third had us going back to the traditional way of writing a script to fit the purpose of a narrative arc. So it was a combination of a conventional and unconventional script-writing process.
相比之下，《风流一代》是一个非常规的项目。思考叙事的过程是从视觉部分--老镜头--开始的，正因为如此，影片的前三分之二是在剪辑室里形成的。我们对赵涛的角色和她的叙事弧线的思考，在很大程度上是在审视了我们所拥有的大量素材之后进行的。在确定了赵涛的角色后，我必须决定保留哪些镜头来完成叙事。在此基础上，我们完成了影片的前三分之二。最后三分之一，我们又回到了传统的剧本创作方式，以符合叙事弧线的目的。因此，这是一个传统与非传统相结合的剧本创作过程。
Can you talk about the idea to keep Zhao Tao’s character silent for the majority of the film, but also about some of the devices you use in lieu of dialogue, such as music and intertitles, to push the narrative forward?
您能否谈谈让赵涛这个角色在影片的大部分时间里保持沉默的想法，同时也谈谈您用来代替对白以推动叙事的一些手段，比如说音乐和字幕？
The inspiration to keep the character silent came from a particular moment I captured in the old footage, when Zhao Tao is on the boat in the Three Gorges, trying to purchase a lunch box. It’s very common for the engine room on these boats to serve as a place for vendors to sell lunch boxes. Usually it’s very noisy, because it’s an engine room, and people will be howling at the top of their lungs to have their orders heard. Zhao Tao approached me while I was shooting that footage and asked me why she needed to shout to purchase a lunch box when she could do it with her eyes, without saying a word. As I watched the footage, I also noticed that she is initially suspicious that the vendor shortchanged her and gave her only rice, but when she begins to eat, she suddenly smiles and realizes that she misjudged the vendor. It’s just so beautiful. I thought that that’s something I wanted to capture and express for the rest of the film. It was a good way to showcase the fact that, in Chinese society, there is a type of person of few words. It’s not because they have nothing to say, but because they have so much to say they don’t know where to start. That is the feeling I wanted to capture—that she has so much to say, that she’s experienced so much, but she keeps it to herself. I wanted that to be a device for the audience, so they don’t have to rely on words, which often make things too concrete. Instead, I wanted them to pay attention to the visual and audio cues captured in the footage—to pay more attention to the things not said.
让角色保持沉默的灵感来自于我在老镜头中捕捉到的一个极为特殊的瞬间：赵涛在三峡的船上想要买盒饭。在这些船上，机房通常是小贩们卖盒饭的地方。由于是机房，通常会非常嘈杂，人们会扯着嗓子叫喊，希望能让人听到他们的叫卖声。我在拍这段时，赵涛走过来问我，她可以用眼睛买盒饭，为什么还要大声叫卖？我在看这段视频时还注意到，她一开始怀疑小贩亏待了她，只给了她米饭，但当她开始吃饭时，她突然笑了，意识到自己错怪了小贩。这真是太美了。我想这就是我想在影片的剩余部分捕捉和表达的东西。这是一个很好的方式来展示这样一个事实：在中国社会，有一种人不善言辞。这并不是因为他们无话可说，而是因为他们有太多的话想说，却不知从何说起。这就是我想要捕捉的感觉——她有那么多话要说，她经历了那么多，但她都藏在心里。我希望这对观众来说是一种叙事手段，这样他们就不必依赖言语，因为言语往往会让事情变得过于具体。相反，我希望他们关注镜头中捕捉到的视觉和听觉线索，更多地关注那些没有说出来的东西。
In terms of the use of music, the footage covers such a long span of time, and because of that, it has very different qualities, textures, and aspect ratios. Similarly, the footage features very different types of sound, from mono to surround. So I tried to use music to create a seamless transition between these audio and visual components. Music also serves the purpose of giving the footage a sense of time and place.
就音乐的使用而言，这些影片有着这样长的时间跨度，正因为如此，它们的质量、质感和长宽比也大相径庭。同样，片段中的声音类型也大不相同，有单声道的，也有环绕声的。因此，我是在尝试用音乐在这些视听元素之间创造无缝的过渡，而音乐的另一个作用是赋予影片一种时间感和地点感。
You have a supporting role in another film here at Cannes, Black Dog, and you’re increasingly appearing in films by young Chinese directors. How do you feel about the state of personal filmmaking in China, particularly for young directors taking after you and Guan Hu?
您在戛纳电影节的另一部影片《狗阵》中担任配角，而且您越来越多地出现在中国年轻导演的影片中。您对中国的个人电影创作现状有何看法，尤其是对以您和管虎为代表的年轻导演而言？
Because of COVID-19 and the economy not doing well, young filmmakers in China are struggling to find financing and investors for their films. So I try to do my best to help out, not only with financing but also by playing small roles in their films. I do think that this is something that is hopefully temporary, and we will be able to have an established and mature production system going forward. But investment and financing issues are something we have to struggle through right now.
由于疫情和经济下行，中国的年轻电影人正努力为他们的电影寻找资金和投资。因此，我尽我所能提供帮助，不仅在融资方面，还在他们的电影中扮演小角色。我认为这只是暂时的，我们会有一个成熟的制作体系。但投资和融资问题是我们现在必须努力解决的问题。
