Uncertain Fictional Objects

Abstract

SUMMARY The trope of formal rupture in the films of sixth‐generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke is a key site where ethnography and fictionality merge. Situated in Jia’s documentary‐like aesthetic and oriented to a non‐Chinese global art cinema audience, “uncertain fictional objects” are tasked with a great deal of mediating labor. They ultimately tell us not only about Jia’s rural and upwardly mobile characters but also the cognitive leaps they and Jia’s global audience must undergo to function within a landscape of unimaginably rapid industrialization and a world in which China is undermining Western hegemony. Uncertain fictional objects—figured as literal unidentified flying objects, animated intercut scenes, and non‐diegetic voices from elsewhere—pose a frontal challenge to an abiding orientalist gaze and the very possibility of the ordinary in capitalism. Stripped of the familiar and compelled by the inexorable current of industrial economic policy, the totality and mode of cognition left to Jia and his characters are what I term “science fictionality,” as opposed to simply “science fiction.”