Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, a screening and lecture event

Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin: Film Screening and Lecture

Lecture: "Jia Zhangke, Chinese Post-socialist Realism, and A Touch of Sin”

Speaker: Dr. Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

Time & Place: October 1, CNS 6

3:30 pm – Screening of A Touch of Sin (dir. Jia Zhangke)

6:00 pm – Talk by Professor Jason McGrath

The Visual and Performing Arts Department warmly invites you to a talk by Professor Jason McGrath, "Jia Zhangke, Chinese Post-socialist Realism, and A Touch of Sin.”  A screening of A Touch of Sin,  winner of the Best Screenplay Award at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, will precede Professor McGrath’s talk.

During his nearly thirty-year filmmaking career, director Jia Zhangke, from relatively remote Shanxi Province, has been the foremost practitioner of what I define as post-socialist realism. This talk will outline that style with reference to his work, focusing in particular on his 2013 film A Touch of Sin (天注定) an anthology film dealing with difficult topics such as work conditions at factories and coal mines, sexual exploitation, social injustice, and official corruption. While the film is somewhat unusual in Jia’s career for its several depictions of violence and its genre traits as a thriller, it is nonetheless typical in its on-location shooting and focus on the struggles of ordinary people—in short, its neorealist techniques. It also shows how contemporary China is caught between the legacies of Mao-era state socialism and the current centrality of China within the global system of neoliberal capitalism—in short, the post-socialist condition. The film thus serves well as an example of how a neorealist aesthetic applied to the postsocialist condition results in the cinema of post-socialist realism—a style which itself is an update of social or critical realism which in this case borders on naturalism, in which people cannot escape their fates as determined by social conditions beyond their control—as is indicated by the Chinese title of the film: “destiny.”

Speaker bio:  McGrath is a Professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and the graduate program in Moving Image, Media, and Sound Studies. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford UP, 2008) and Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2021).

Contact: Jiwei Xiao, Ph.D., Program in Film, TV, and Media Arts, Dept. of Visual and Performing Arts, jxiao@fairfield.edu