DVD of the Week: Jia Zhangke’s “The World”

It’s fitting, during the week that Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, to discuss “The World,” from 2004, by Jia Zhangke (in the clip above). The Swedish Academy praises Mo, “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.” So does Jia—who doesn’t so much tell folk tales as suggest that his characters find occasional solace in them. He films characters who bear the scars of history even as its truths are so often denied to them, for whom the persistence and suppression of history is one of the fundamental facts of contemporary life in China, and for whom “hallucinatory realism” is a frank depiction of the nightmarish quality of Chinese daily life. “The World” is the first film that Jia made with official approval; it’s hard to imagine a more radical repudiation of the regime that approved it. Over the years, as Jia has continued to make movies within the system, he has become a master both of irony and of symbolism; far from being engulfed by the system, he has turned it into a subject of his art.