Platform

On Tuesday night we watched Jia Zhangke's outstanding Platform.



The film starts with the theater troop performing a typical piece of model revolutionary theater praising Mao at roughly the same time that Deng Xiaoping took over the CPC (1979, 1980). These political changes form the backdrop to a film that follows a few members of theater troop from Fenyang, a small city in China's Shanxi province, where Mongolia feels closer (less foreign) than Shanghai and Beijing. Platform is arguably less about the lives of its main characters as it is about the political and cultural changes taking place throughout the 1980s, as the privatization of the theater troop, the acquisition of bellbottoms, perms, and discovering of punk are emphasized as much, if not more, than things like the characters' romantic difficulties, pregnancies, and familial conflicts. Characters drift in and out but what is most striking are Zhangke's long, static shots a country not only very different from than the one presented to the world on 08.08.08, but also in films like Blind Shaft (2003) and Manufactured Landscapes (2006).

There are very few scenes in the history of cinema that force the viewer to stand up in excitement. De Palma's films contain several, for example, this scene from The Untouchables (1987):



Platform contained several such scenes, but all were composed and directed in a manner distant from de Palma. Unfortunately I can't find any of them online but the preview above should give a hint.

Other highlights of the night included our hosts re-enacting the endless fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David from Carpenter's They Live (1988) during the film's intermission: