A propósito da exibição de Plataforma amanhã às 18h, transcrevo aqui algumas passagens de uma entrevista de Stephen Teo a Jia Zhang-ke, publicada na Senses of Cinema, em 2001:
Stephen Teo: In watching your movie Platform, your characters seem to want to tear themselves away from their native place, Fenyang, but they always return. Why did you devise your movie like that?
Jia Zhang-ke: Fenyang is a pretty isolated place that has not yet opened up to the world. In fact, there's nothing there. I think what it has is an original face of China. Personally, I was born and grew up in Fenyang. While growing up, I always had the compulsion to leave and to see the world -- this is probably something common to all youths. Maybe it's because I never lived in a big city, or maybe even in big cities like Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong, there are young people who also want to leave and see the outside world. As for myself, I had that same feeling. I went to live in Beijing when I was 23, and even then, I began to feel homesick for my place of birth. Such homesickness engenders a feeling of insecurity and anxiety. When I came to make movies -- my first movie, Xiao Wu and now Platform -- I had an unconscious urge to return to my birthplace to make these movies. I think that this feeling of home is something basic in my work -- it's a motif.
On another level, my films deal with people who struggle in life and being failures, they have no other option but to return to their original place. I feel that going home is only one process in human behaviour. In following the process of growing up and coming of age, human spirituality returns to the starting point. The title Platform refers to a point of departure as well as a point to which one returns. I wanted a mood in Platform where all my characters would wander around all over the country but in the end, they would return to their original place. Nothing happens really, but at the same time, a lot has happened.
[...]
ST: Are you more prone to the negative?
JZK: I am more concerned with the people who have fallen into the margins. As a director, I am not into analysis.
ST: You only want to observe?
JZK: I only see what I want to see. Within China, I've been attacked by critics. I've been frequently accused of making films that show a negative side of China to foreigners. But I haven't responded to such criticism because I feel that even if I have shown what is negative, I have put in much greater emotions of mine into the films.
ST: Do you make your movies for Chinese or for a foreign audience? I ask this because your movies have very local features but somehow they also transcend the local and become universal.
JZK: I am not willing to say that my movies are made for Chinese and neither are they made for foreigners. I make them for people to see. As human beings, we face problems that are basically the same [...]
[...]
ST: There are many long takes in your movies. Is it because you are fond of them or is it because they are convenient as a form of technique in your methodology?
JZK: I am fond of it. It's a kind of hobby (laughs).
ST: Have you been influenced by other directors into adopting this technique?
JZK: Absolutely. Like Hou Hsiao-hsien, or Ozu. I have been through film school and to say that I haven't been influenced by these directors would be a lie.
ST: Would it be that it's more suited to naturalism?
JZK: What I like most in a long take is that it preserves real time, it keeps time intact. It allows me to film something important. If I were to cut the scene into pieces, there would be a lot more subjective things that I put in. In Platform, the characters have a relationship with time. You see two people smoking and talking aimlessly for a long time. Nothing happens plot wise but at the same time, time itself is kept intact. In that long and tedious passage of time, nothing significant happens, they are waiting. Only through time can you convey this. If I were to break up that scene which lasts for six or seven minutes into several cuts, then you lose that sense of deadlock. The deadlock that exists between humans and time, the camera and its subject. Everybody experiences the monotony of time passing where nothing that is noteworthy occurs.
ST: But in watching your long take sequences, there is some other information that you want to hold back, that you don't want the audience to see.
JZK: I use a lot of long shots. If the audience can see things in there, that's good, if they can't, so be it. I don't want to impose too many things onto the audience. For instance, in Platform, I used only two close-ups. One was the close-up of the postcard that Zhang Jun sent from Guangzhou. It's not that there are special situations where I wanted to hold back some information. I don't want to impose a message onto the audience. I want to give them a mood and within that mood, you can see things that you want, or you can't see things. My films are rather challenging for the audience. They are not very clearly stated to the extent where the audience can see clearly the objects they want to see - this pen or this watch. If they don't notice it, they don't notice it. It's not that I am being indifferent. Through all these, I am imparting a director's attitude, how he sees the world and the cinema. What I mean to say is that it's only an attitude because you can never be absolutely objective. When you need somebody to look at something, it's no longer objective. There is no absolute objectivity, there is attitude, and through this attitude, there is an ideal.
[...]
O texto completo da entrevista pode ser lido aqui
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