This is the second of three documentaries Jia has planned on artist figures. I wasn’t too taken with the first one, Dong, which fell down for me on two counts: the utter banality of painter Liu Xiaodong’s style of realism, and the inauthenticity (Jia’s eye reduced to a touristic one) of the second half shot in Thailand. Useless is another case entirely. It centres on fashion designer Ma Ke, who’s attempting to design a brand — “Useless” — of handcrafted clothing in deliberate opposition to the mass-produced industrial model now predominant in China. Jia has a clear admiration for Ma — just as he did for Liu in Dong – but it’s more subtly tempered through the film’s structure, which first offers some scenes of workers in the big clothing factories in Guangdong, before moving to a brief scene of the banality and empty materialism of upmarket brand names, and then to Ma, first in her studio in Shanghai, and after at her fashion show in Paris. The final section of the film then follows Ma on a visit to Jia’s hometown of Fenyang where she extols the virtues of a return to the country/simpler values, and Jia simply, thrillingly abandons her in favour of what strikes me as an acted scene of a man taking some clothing to a seamstress for repair. (If I’m right about this being acted, then it makes Useless a companion piece to Jia’s latest feature film, 24 City, which is comprised of a series of interviews, some real, others acted.) In this final section, which stylistically is the closest to his feature film work, Jia contextualises his admiration for Ma’s artistic statement and underlines the limitations of her gesture with his portraits of individuals made “useless” by the economic forces of globalisation and China’s rampant brute capitalism — the seamstress barely making ends meet; the tailor forced to give up his trade to work in the mines; and the other tailor still plying his trade, but in a building marked for demolition, as a whole artisan-profession seems to be.
by Ian Johnston | Source: DigiBeta projection
22 Jun 2008 1:48 PM | Submit Comment
