For years, Jia Zhangke imagined that the film that would become Caught by the Tides would be his last. He had been capturing and archiving acres of footage since 2001— everything from random fragments to documentary images to loosely scripted fictional scenarios featuring his actors — and figured he’d keep collecting this material until he retired and then create what he describes as “some sort of retrospective work.” But along the way, as Jia, now 54, became one of China’s foremost filmmakers and a major figure in world cinema, something different began to take shape. Rumors spread of an ambitious, ongoing project — an expansive picture that Jia was shooting bit by bit as he made his other features. After the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down in 2020, the director sat down and reassessed not just his footage but also how the world around him was changing. The “retrospective work” became a movie as much about the present as it is about the past.
Now, it’s here. Caught by the Tides, which premiered at Cannes last year and is finally opening theatrically in the U.S., is understandably impossible to classify. It’s a patchwork narrative/documentary/collage that follows a troubled romance, even as the loose, decades-long plot free associates in various directions. At its center are a dancer and model named Qiaoqiao (Zhao Tao) and a smalltime hoodlum named Brother Bin (Li Zhubin) from the industrial coal-mining city of Datong, in China’s Northern Shanxi Province. (The location and the actors — particularly Zhao, whom Jia married in 2011 — are familiar from many of the director’s earlier films.)
In the first section, Qiao and Bin’s tempestuous relationship is interrupted when he abruptly leaves town to make his fortune elsewhere. He tells Qiao that he’ll eventually send for her but never does. In the second act, set a few years later, a quietly determined Qiao goes looking for the elusive Bin in and around Fengjie on the Yangtze River, around the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, a massive project in central China that displaced nearly a million and a half people. The film concludes with one final reunion in 2022, with the country still under heavy pandemic lockdown: The once-distant Bin, humbled and suffering from health problems, returns to Datong and seeks to reconcile with Qiao. The first two acts consist almost entirely of material from Jia’s archive, so we see the characters age in real life, and we also witness China change dramatically, as the excitement of the new millennium gives way to a period of rapid development and, eventually, an era of tech-fueled isolation.
The director says he started this project without really knowing where or how it would end up. After he had shot his first two features, Xiao Wu (1997) and Platform (2000) in 16mm and 35mm, he had opted to use digital video for his 2002 film Unknown Pleasures, a loose narrative following a group of disaffected young people in Datong. Digital cameras were cheap and compact, and they could be used in low-light conditions without having to wait for lengthy set-ups. Taken with the liberating power of this new technology, Jia took the cameras into night clubs, into karaoke sessions and backroom meetings. Such equipment also provided a way around the bureaucratic and organizational challenges of production in China. Jia was an independent filmmaker in a nation where the government kept a firm hold on what got made and seen; labs refused to process films that weren’t government approved. (Jia’s subsequent feature, 2004’s The World, would be the first of his movies to receive an official release in his country.)
Director Jia Zhangke. Photo: Courtesy of X Stream Pictures
“Digital was completely different from the traditional mode of production in the film industry,” Jia says today, sitting in a conference room at the Criterion offices in New York. (Sideshow-Janus, the company’s theatrical distribution arm, is releasing Caught by the Tides in the U.S., while the Criterion Channel is currently streaming a series of Jia’s earlier works, including a couple of lesser-seen shorts.) “You didn’t have to have a script, you didn’t have to finance it, or find investors, or spend all this time in pre-production. You could just get a small crew and a couple of actors and go shoot.” So, the director went out among the streets and citizens of Datong and “started to film anything and everything aimlessly without any purpose.” Initially, he thought maybe it would become part of a project he would call Man with A Digital Camera, an homage to Dziga Vertov’s silent Soviet classic Man with a Movie Camera, a 1929 city symphony montage consisting of seemingly disconnected images and scenarios.
Jia happened to be shooting at a momentous time. In December of 2001, China entered the World Trade Organization. Earlier that summer, Beijing had been named the host city for the 2008 Summer Olympics, the first time the country would host the Games. As we see in Caught by the Tides, the news would proudly boast of these accomplishments, and a celebratory mood seemed to infiltrate everything. “The country at the time was very, very chaotic, but also wild and energetic,” Jia says. “That coincided and reflected the unique qualities of the digital images that we were capturing.”
Jia was one of the few directors at the time who truly managed to use video’s native properties to create a new kind of cinema, and a lot of it had to do with how the very environment around him was transforming at the turn of the century. Lighting in homes was shifting from tungsten to decorative lights and fluorescents. Fashion and interior design were changing. “A lot of clothing started to have a plastic, nylon texture to it, and a lot of housewares began to be made with plastic,” he recalls. Meanwhile, with many Chinese cities undergoing rapid development, “the air was full of particles, air pollutants, dust. Somehow all this worked perfectly with DV technology and the images that I captured.”
Over the years, as he toiled on other projects, Jia continued to collect this footage, eventually winding up with around a thousand hours of material. “I somehow just kept on going because I hadn’t found a reason to stop,” he says. Aside from its final act, which consists of new scenes filmed in 2023, much of what’s in Caught by the Tides was gathered in 2001, 2006, and 2017, as Jia directed the features Unknown Pleasures, Still Life, and Ash Is Purest White. Some of it is independently shot, some of it is outtakes from those movies. He shot material that could perhaps be put together to tell a story, but he had no idea what that story might be. “We did it in such a loose and spontaneous way that even with a script, it wasn’t something that had continuity or a narrative arc,” Jia says. “I tried to fictionalize things in such a way that would allow me to capture a particular moment. I thought that, maybe in the future, during the editing process, I’d find a way to make it work.”
This loosely scripted approach did ultimately inspire key elements in the finished film. In 2017, Jia shot a sequence of Zhao’s character buying a box lunch on a boat along the Yangtze. The scene, set in the vessel’s engine room, was so loud that the actress had to shout to be heard by the food vendor. Zhao suggested to Jia that her character not say anything and just point to communicate, so the scene was then shot without dialogue. Now, in Caught by the Tides, Qiao doesn’t speak at all. Jia had shot scenes in which she talked, but he decided during editing that he wanted to cut out the dialogue. “I wanted to take the audience on this journey along with the female character,” he says. “I realized that people could empathize with her through her body language, through her facial expressions, to really connect with her on a more emotional level. When you take something away, somehow you heighten other senses.” He adds: “I do think contemporary films rely on dialogue and words a lot. You can watch a movie without watching it and instead just listen to it. And I think that’s a pretty lazy way of watching. It defeats the purpose of having this particular medium called cinema.”
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The character names of Qiaoqiao and Brother Bin recur throughout some of Jia’s pictures, but the director doesn’t see them as the same people. “I’m almost thinking about Zhao Tao as an embodiment of the entire female population of China,” he recently told Filmmaker Magazine. “In Chinese legends, especially the legends of Journey to the West, you’ll see that the Monkey King can turn into 72 different iterations — different appearances, forms and shapes. So this is not foreign to Chinese audiences, this is something we’re very used to.”
The characters might be different, but several of Jia’s films do tackle long swaths of recent Chinese history, with people longing across decades. “Jia’s recycling is not haphazard or mistaken,” my colleague Madeline Leung Coleman wrote recently in her review of Caught by the Tides. “He’s an artist squeezing all the juice from his lemon: How many different ways can he show us that China’s development is leaving people behind?” Jia has used some of his archive on earlier projects and contemplated using even more at times. He considered it for his 2015 feature Mountains May Depart (which takes place in 1999, 2014, and a forward-looking 2025), though he ultimately wound up using relatively little of it. Similarly, for 2018’s Ash Is Purest White (which takes place in 2001, 2006, and 2017), he looked at what he’d captured of the fraught romance between Zhao and Li Zhubin’s characters. He and editor Mathieu Laclau even edited together about an hour’s worth of outtakes featuring Qiao and Brother Bin from Unknown Pleasures and Still Life, but Li Zhubin had suffered a stroke and was unable to do the part, so Jia went with Liao Fan playing Brother Bin instead.
But the director says that it wasn’t until the lockdowns hit in 2020 that he fully began to reckon with all this material. “Suddenly, everything stopped, and you couldn’t really venture out, which meant you had a lot of time on your hands to really think and look back,” he says. Whereas before, Jia thought of his work as character-driven, now he started to see a panorama of life extending in all directions. The footage wasn’t there to help flesh out a new story; the footage was telling its own story. “While dealing with my micro problems, I was able to look back from a more macro perspective — to think about the turn of the century until now. It really gave me a sense that maybe it was the end of a certain era and the beginning of a new one.”
Jia had documented the early ubiquity of the internet, the rise of the cellphone generation and its longing for individual freedom. Now, he was witnessing another major transformation, one that predated the pandemic but would be accelerated by COVID-era isolation: the age of digital currency, the death of brick-and-mortar stores, the emergence of social media stardom and artificial intelligence. The warmth and huddled chaos Jia had captured in those early digital forays — the freewheeling intimacy, abandon, and unpredictability that had made such an ideal subject for his cheap and versatile cameras — was now gone, replaced by an unprecedented distance between people. Masks are everywhere throughout the final act of Caught by the Tides, which obviously reflects pandemic-era caution but also enhances a prevailing sense of alienation. Now working in a supermarket, Qiao lives by herself; the warmest interaction she has in this section might be with one of the obsequiously friendly robots that Jia says have become commonplace in China.
Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides. Photo: Sideshow and Janus Films
“I started to think of her as a person that has no social media footprint or anything in terms of data that can be gathered online,” he says. “Because she’s such an independent individual, maybe the only way she can make friends is with a robot that knows nothing about her past.” With artificial intelligence now on his mind, Jia also went back and modified some material he’d previously shot. In the earlier Three Gorges section of Caught by the Tides, which takes place around 2006, Qiao goes into a tea house where a film is being projected on a wall. In the original footage, that was a Chinese action flick, but now, it’s an unnaturally slick, tacky sci-fi movie. The action flick “had nothing to do with robots, but we used artificial intelligence and CGI to change it into a science fiction film with robots,” Jia says. “So now, what would have been science fiction at the time has become reality in the present.”
Jia had most of the first two archival sections of Caught by the Tides edited before embarking on shooting and scripting these final scenes. He did show the edit of that earlier footage to Zhao, who likes extensive preparation. But he chose not to show it to Li Zhubin, who had aged quite a bit over the years due to his medical challenges. “I didn’t want to break his heart,” Jia says. “He’s not a professional actor. He’s a good friend of mine who sometimes did these parts for me. I decided to just let him be himself, because the physical transformation was already there, and the only thing he needed to do was to utilize what he has now to rebuild this character.”
As we see actors age and society transform in Caught by the Tides, we might notice something else: We also see an art form change. Handheld digital images give way to more solemn documentary reveries, which give way to surveillance footage and TikTok-style social media interludes. These transformations are not linear. Although the freedom of using inexpensive digital video had inspired the project, Jia mixes and matches media throughout Caught by the Tides, leading to a tapestry of cinematic textures that begins to border on the abstract. We might see a 35mm shot of a character walking through a door in 2006 and enter a scene set in 2001 and shot on cheap digital video. “I don’t really mind what kind of cameras or devices I use, I just want to capture images that will touch me and then deposit them into the archive,” he says. “Regardless of the production or the situation or the environment, the independent spirit stays the same.” At a few points, Jia even uses actual scenes from his previous pictures. He says that he liked the idea of giving these scenes “a new identity,” and treating them as if they were just another element of the cultural memories he was collecting and reshaping.
Especially for those familiar with Jia’s work, the experience of watching Caught by the Tides can feel like a half-remembered dream. We’ve seen these places and faces and clothes before. Sometimes, we’ve seen these very situations before. Perhaps it is this paradox that makes Caught by the Tides so powerful and unlike any other movie: this fragmented familiarity, this sense that we’re watching a seemingly endless tapestry of life, with these characters emerging organically from the bustle and then disappearing back into it. Jia likens it to stargazing: “You look up at the sky, and you’re looking for one particular star, and you think it’s an independent star that has nothing to do with the other stars. But if you stretch your eyes, you start to see an entire universe. And what I’m trying to capture in this particular film is the human universe of the past 20 or so years.”
