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Jia Zhangke on the ‘Stargazing’ Mysteries of Caught by the Tides
The director’s sprawling new film is as much about the present as it is about the past.
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 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 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.
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