Jia Zhangke Essays

“Judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.” -- Simon Bolivar. Throughout each book, both of the characters,Jem from To Kill a Mockingbird and Junior from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part - Time Indian mature a lot from experiences and judgement they use. Jem believes he is invincible and no punishment can touch him and also that all people have good intentions. As he grows up through the novel, he learns an important lesson and so does Junior as he grows up. The

The Story of the Stone and The Death of Ivan Ilyich both present rigidly organized social settings. Jia Baoyu struggles against his role as a first son in a society informed primarily by Confucian academia while Ivan Ilyich seeks to better his position in the Tsarist bureaucracy. These characters react very differently to their respective societies but, regardless of their willingness or ability to exist within these social structures, the obligations and expectations put upon them by social convention

Whereas the introduction of melodramatic plots cannot be understood as a pure attempt to “go mainstream” (Wang 159) or complete deviation from Jia’s realistic concern, not only because all four stories are loosely adapted from authentic news. Different from the play of Quentin Tarantino as a fan of violence, the use of spectaculars in A Touch of Sin is a way of sketching socio-political circumstances in which ordinary people are hustled into the dead end, rather than fetishizing the genre of carnage