Renegotiating Jia Zhangke’s Contestious Auteurism on Douban

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on sixth-generation mainland Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke and examines how his independent filmmaker’s profile is renegotiated and reevaluated on Douban, a China-based platform for cultural commentary. Whereas Douban allows viewers to rate a film, post a review of any length, and comment on other posts, it manifests a self-censoring tendency with sustained state control. Examining in Jia’s contentious auteurism through a “post-independent’ lens, this article recounts how Douban users approach and interpret Jia’s more recent titles such as Ash Is Purest White (2018) and Swimming Out till the Sea Turns Blue (2020) that pose a question of whether Jia’s auteurism is perpetuated. The account extends to the controversies surrounding Jia’s departure from and re-entry to the independently-run, government-supported Pingyao International Film Festival, which took place in 2020 and 2021 and have further perplexed his established brand. Contextualizing Jia’s Douban-represented authorial identity in China’s platform-based cultural production, this analysis unravels the intricate dynamics of market logic, state governance, and audience agency in the rise of the mass media-saturated intertextuality and crossover capitals.