During the height of China’s Cultural Revolution, circa 1972, a man named Zhu Qiansheng was given an assignment. He was informed that a famous, European film director, Michelangelo Antonioni, would be making a film about his home country. Having supposedly been invited by the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, himself, Zhu was instructed to make sure the filmmaker had whatever he needed. After only two days of shooting, Zhu started growing increasingly concerned by the content Antonioni seemed attracted to. “We have a lot of very good things, but you just shoot backwards stuff,” Zhu expressed. Two years later, he was arrested, his government declaring the film he helped oversee anti-Chinese. To this day Zhu has not watched Antonioni’s documentary, titled “Chung Kuo, Cina.”
In April 2010, acclaimed auteur Jia Zhangke was commissioned to make a film “about Shanghai” to mark the opening of the upcoming World Expo, being given carte blanche. But, outside the festival scene, his sprawling cityscape documentary, “I Wish I Knew,” remains largely unseen by Western audiences. Thankfully, a director’s cut is finally being released in theaters, and it’s not something fans of his work will want to miss. Jia’s transportive doc is simply an unbelievable undertaking on urban understanding by one of modern cinema’s great masters.
As if holding a spyglass in the form of a film camera to examine the last hundred years of one of the world’s most rapidly growing cities, Jia’s movie juxtaposes interviews of 18 different subjects — sharing incredibly, often tragic, personal tales of how their lives have been shaped by the constantly evolving metropolis — against an assortment of film projects made about the beating heart of Shanghai throughout the 20th century. Matching and mirroring modern-day compositions with the stories and stock footage — as the director’s partner, Zhao Tao (“Ash is Purest White”) ruminatively wanders through rubble and ruins — “I Wish I Knew” emotionally interrogates the forgotten secrets of a concrete jungle with veins of water running through it, empathetically exploring humanity’s permanent tether to communal organisms that grow out of industry and global greed.
One man talks about the achievements of his father: the owner of a pickle company, before founding a triumvirate of chemical titans, a post-war response to the anti-Japanese boycott of seasonings and other raw import products. As a port city of trade, ethnic prejudice paved the way for some business owners to make themselves a small fortune, enough to buy themselves a German fighter plane. Another interview subject remembers the day his dad was assassinated by secret agents in 1933, describing the canvas roof of the convertible being shot up, before he blacked out, waking to find his father’s dead body on top of him. He was 14 years old.
Most of the stories share the theme of sacrifice, parents willing to pay the ultimate price to bring their child into being. But it isn’t solely the stories themselves that make the doc so powerful, Jia’s singular look and inspired editing choices make the film feel like a series of ghost stories strung together by a common thread only some remember.
Part of “I Wish I Knew’s” brilliance is that its viewers are listening to an event being described while being directly shown the fallout of the consequences, and often you aren’t aware of this at the outset. It’s hauntingly authentic because it ’s all coming straight from the horse’s mouth; Jia accentuates emotional kernels with a visual idea or heightens a lusciously contemplative image through a verbal cue or a blank stare.
The overall construction of the documentary does start to wane after about a dozen subjects, and the film feels its length, but its humanistic impact is utterly chilling and the aesthetic craft completely undeniable. It owes much to Dziga Vertov, almost as if one of his city symphonies were made as a responsible political artist with the talent of Leni Riefenstahl — Jia specifically juxtaposing Wang Bing’s propaganda schlock “To Liberate Shanghai,” and its Maoist pride against films made by director’s with a personal stake in all the upheaval, and stories about the people surrounding such productions, Taiwanese New Wave master, Hou Hsiao-Hsien sharing a romantic sentiment impressed upon him by the city when filming his movie “Flowers From Shanghai.”
Opening on a handyman shining the back of an Imperial Guard statue, an architectural ornament protecting a bank, Jia uses the recording of a lion’s snore — a form of breathing evokes a sensory reminder of fear — as an ambient track at a couple key moments of the film, the bold audio choices adding a notable layer to his revolving door-like cinematography: the squeak of bike wheels in need of oil, or the clangy hammer of construction noises. Ethereal compositions are shot through surfaces such as fences and window frames, pensive and wraith-like. Mountains of dirt are schlepped across the waves, people idly sit atop their motorcycles as the ferry takes them across the water, and the sky always looks like a blinding blanket of cloudy haze.
Jia has a special eye for shooting and showing people’s relationships to larger structures and “I Wish I Knew” highlights all his strengths as a storytelling artist; a thorough and thoughtful extension of his other, urban hyperlink projects critiquing the complexity of contemporary China’s ongoing globalization. [A-]