“Face” as Method: Aesthetic Experiment and Era Reflections in Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides

Abstract

In Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, the “face” serves not only as a visual subject but also as a methodology. Continuing the previous realistic shooting style, this film utilizes the faces of ordinary individuals as a poignant commentary on the era. Simultaneously, by leveraging the proper noun “Zhao Tao’s face,” it achieves nonverbal emotional expression while sketching the evolution of Chinese independent film aesthetics. Compared to faces captured in moving images, the faces of lifelike “quasi-human” sculpture resist being fixed as mere images through their vivid presence, autonomously generating narrative momentum by being viewed across different times and spaces. Moreover, in this media age of breakneck technological advancement, the “crisis of the face” has also transformed into a broader “existential crisis.” How to preserve the warmth and vitality of the human face may be the most profound and provocative question the film leaves its audience.

1. Introduction

Caught by the Tides (《风流一代》 2024) began filming in 2001 and took 22 years to complete. The film tells the story of a woman (Qiaoqiao) and a man (Guo Bin) who fall in love, endure a painful separation, and later experience a melancholic reunion years later. In an unexpected way, the film captures China’s social changes and the spirit of the times from the early 21st century to the present. It is regarded as Jia Zhangke’s summative work, reflecting on his personal creative career. In October 2024, the film won the Best International Feature Award at the 48th São Paulo International Film Festival, marking a milestone in Jia Zhangke’s directorial journey. In May 2025, it was selected as the only Chinese-language film to compete in the main competition section of the 77th Cannes Film Festival, where it received a Palme d’Or nomination. Additionally, the film was featured in other prestigious film festivals such as the New York Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival.

Previous research on Jia Zhangke’s films has primarily focused on the following aspects: aesthetic style and formal exploration (documentary aesthetics, long takes, sound design, dialect, pop culture symbols, realism, surreal elements) (Lovatt 2012; Byrnes 2012); narrative themes and content focus (marginalized characters, urban–rural transformation, era memory, youthful drifting, the search for a lost homeland, the growing pains of modernity) (Sandten and Tan 2016; Kim 2016); cultural connotations and social significance (individual destinies amid modernization, the recording and critique of social transformation) (Zhang 2011; Wang and Liu 2022); and directorial creation and “auteur” identity (artistic perseverance versus commercial compromise, unique personal style and consistent authorial consciousness) (McGrath 2007; Rist 2018). Media technology and form innovation (the influence of digital technology on documentary style, the combination of virtual and real footage, cross-media practice, short film creation) (Liu 2023). In Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke maintains his consistent filmmaking style, but a notable shift is the subconscious emphasis on the “face.” By focusing on the micro-symbol of the “face,” he decodes macro-level technological culture, power structures, and the spirit of the times, thereby giving rise to new experiments in film aesthetics.

Film theorist Béla Balázs regarded the “face” as the core of cinematic language, proposing the concept of the “visible human.” He argued that the microphysiognomy of facial expressions constitutes the essential characteristic distinguishing film from other arts, particularly emphasizing that the lyrical, rich, and ever-changing expressiveness of facial expressions is unmatched by any literary form (Béla 2011). In Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides, the “face” serves not only as a visual subject but also as a methodology. Through the juxtaposition of group portraits, Zhao Tao’s face, “quasi-human” sculpture, and digital faces, the biologically defined bodily organ is transformed into a cultural symbol, an identity carrier, and a medium tool. This approach constructs a quintessential social history, offering a unique cognitive pathway for understanding 21st-century China. As Jia Zhangke stated, he is making films with Chinese experiences and perspectives, and hopes to bring China’s “expressions” to Cannes and the world (Li 2024).

The problematic consciousness of “as a method” lies not merely in acquiring objective knowledge, but more fundamentally in exploring the process of the subject’s formation (Zeng 2019). The core lies in adopting a specific starting point to critically reflect on the broader context and challenge the dominant narrative of centralism. By means of the research paradigm of “as a method”, this article aims to take “face” as a method and through the specific and micro presentation of “face” in Caught by the Tides, provide an analytical and critical approach to interpreting the film. Furthermore, within the framework between phenomena and history, and between the individual and structure, it seeks to reveal how the “face” is shaped by its era and, conversely, how its very existence reconstructs our understanding of that era. Simultaneously, by returning to the materiality, temporo-spatiality, and perceptual mechanisms of the cinematic medium, it reconsiders the ontological significance of the “face” for the moving image. Particularly in an age of constant technological renewal, the paper probes the narrative possibilities and experimental visual aesthetics inherent to and extendable by the actor’s face.

2. Group Portraits: “Archival” Slices of an Era

The promotional tagline for Caught by the Tides is “The past is gone, never look back,” yet the narrative constantly “looks back,” pulling the trigger of the times, with the bullet hitting everyone squarely between the eyes. Firstly, examining Jia Zhangke’s “cinematic universe,” the director employs a “Found Footage” (Wees 1993) creative approach. By utilizing existing shots or archival visual materials and recontextualizing them through compilation, collage, and appropriation. It is akin to a postmodern, Duchampian “readymade” film, generating critical, challenging, and even subversive force. Caught by the Tides grafts the narrative cores of films like Unknown Pleasures (《任逍遥》 2006), Mountains May Depart (《山河故人》 2015), and Ash Is Purest White (《江湖儿女》 2018), serving both as a summation of past works and showcasing quintessential cinephilic characteristics. Secondly, considering the transformation of the cinematic medium, the genesis of Caught by the Tides stems from Soviet director Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). Jia Zhangke said, “We are watching the film, and the characters in the film are watching us.” After entering the 21st century, he transformed into a “person with a digital camera” and began “drifting shooting”, without any preset plans and creating films spontaneously (Jiang et al. 2025). Spanning from 2001 to the present, the film traverses DV cameras, 35 mm and 16 mm film, 5D cameras, RED digital equipment, and switches between widescreen (1:1.85) and standard (4:3) aspect ratios. This progression serves as both an inscription of the era’s imaging media and an integral part of the film’s narrative texture. Thirdly, from the perspective of audience reception, the film spans three temporal nodes (2001, 2006, 2022) and diverse geographic spaces (Datong, Chongqing, Zhuhai). It interweaves epoch-defining events such as the wave of layoffs among coal miners, Beijing’s successful Olympic bid, the Three Gorges Dam reservoir filling, the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, and the AI wave. This tapestry connects collective memories and individual traumas from the millennium to the present, shifting the audience’s experience from merely “watching a story” to immersive “experiencing history.”

In Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke continues his previous realistic shooting style and employing the faces of ordinary people as footnotes to the era. This choice serves both as an aesthetic experiment in art cinema and a critique of the mainstream film industry. In the film’s opening sequence—an extended slice-of-life scene lasting over ten minutes—the laughter of women singing around a stove intertwines with the soot from coal briquette burners, composing an “unfiltered” portrait of the times. The camera pans horizontally across the slightly shy faces of the women and the coal-dusted countenances of miners (Figure 1). By focusing on authentic faces, raw performances, and the collective narrative of non-professional actors, the film constructs a unique sense of plebeian epic. This style, deeply influenced by avant-garde art and the cinema of Robert Bresson—marked by its rejection of conventional storytelling and use of non-professional actors—was in fact established as early as Jia’s debut feature, Xiao Wu (《小武》 1998).

If earlier recordings of “faces” emphasized an unpolished documentary realism, the gyrating disco scenes in dance halls and KTVs amplify the emotions of the nameless. The on-screen crowds are consistently presented as silhouettes, outlines, or blurred figures in frenetic motion. Individual facial features are deliberately obscured, replaced by writhing bodies, flying strands of hair, and flickering neon lights. As fireworks celebrating Beijing’s Olympic bid victory burst in the distance, the swaying crowd in the dance hall resembles moths drawn to a flame. Their frenzy functions both as a farewell to the old era and an unconscious tribute to the new century.

The film extensively employs confrontational close-ups in group portraits, thrusting the faces of ordinary people directly towards the audience, creating a nearly archival sense of visual pressure. Whether capturing the relaxed passengers on a green-skinned train (in China, green-skinned trains are the slowest and cheapest), the bewilderment on the faces of the Three Gorges migrants, the ease of residents in mahjong parlors, the masked close-ups of airplane passengers, the frozen faces of youths running in the streets, or the visages of young footballers in the Pearl River Delta neighborhoods—these faces are “assembled like words in a sentence (Gotto 2011). ”With an anthropological field-survey-like gaze, Jia Zhangke contemplates these countenances, collectively collaging a “peripheral topography” within China’s urbanization process. Consider this: had the lens not recorded the portraits of tens of thousands of ordinary individuals, these faces would inevitably have been lost to the river of history. Through Jia’s cinematic documentation, we are compelled to confront faces often overlooked in daily life, and to some extent, to confront ourselves. The “carefree generation” in Caught by the Tides perhaps does not refer to the urban cultural elite, but rather to those nameless individuals swept along by the tides of their era. As the English title “Caught by the Tides” suggests, individuals may be unable to escape the engulfing waves, yet their faces will ultimately become history’s truest testament. These collective visages do not serve specific narratives; instead, as temporal slices, they bear the disorientation and restlessness spanning the turn of the millennium.

In the documentation of group portraits, Caught by the Tides exhibits remarkable avant-garde and experimental qualities. Compared to the “photogénie” championed by Louis Delluc—which endowed everyday objects with a poetic quality transcending reality through mise-en-scène, lighting, makeup, and rhythm (Yang 2017)—Jia Zhangke’s film distinctly manifests a “de-poeticizing” tendency. It deliberately retains the handheld camera’s shakiness, aligning more closely with the documentary ethos of “Direct Cinema” than with the visual sublimation pursued by Delluc. Furthermore, the absence of a star-studded cast also constitutes a resistance to the kind of iconic “star faces” epitomized by “The Face of Garbo (Barthes 1993)”. Compared to demanded smiles, we seem more inclined to believe the unconscious “non-expression” is more authentic. Jia Zhangke positions the lens as a “bystander” rather than an “intervener” within the social scene. It is not so much that nameless crowds intrude upon the auteur’s frame, but rather that the auteur’s lens fleetingly glimpses the visage of the multitude. However, this “glimpse” is not a casual glance; it is a conscious act of visual archaeology, salvaging fragments discarded by mainstream narratives to allow the silent collective to “develop” anew within the image.

3. Zhao Tao’s Face: Silenced Resistance in Social Transformation

While capturing collective portraits of an era, Jia Zhangke focuses intensely on Qiaoqiao—narratively centered on Zhao Tao—making her face a microscopic anatomy of individual lived experience amid the tides of time. Caught by the Tides embeds Zhao’s face within group portraits across different decades, forging intertextuality between the individual and her epoch. In the disco scene, Qiaoqiao’s face is molded into a symbol of youth and rebellion: her tender features and defiant aura collectively metaphorize the millennial era’s restlessness. During the Three Gorges migration, her face assumes deeper narrative weight—weary wrinkles and hollowed eyes become a collective portrait of marginalized groups like the displaced. In the wintry jogging sequence, Zhao Tao consciously merges into the surging crowd, completing a narrative arc from passive drifting to active agency; her face transforms into an abstract ode to female awakening. As a concrete representation of collective portraiture, Zhao’s image transcends mere character portrayal, becoming a vessel for shared memory.

As the recurring face of Jia’s cinema, Zhao Tao has long surpassed traditional actor status, evolving into an organic, ever-growing symbol within Jia’s auteurist system. Crucially, her real face ages synchronously with her on-screen personas. Just like the “empty shots” in Hou Hsiao-hsien’s films (Udden 2022), it is a part of the director’s aesthetic system. In Jia Zhangke’s cinematic universe, “Zhao Tao’s face” has transcended the physical features of the actress Zhao Tao herself, becoming a highly condensed cultural symbol and aesthetic device. Through the proper noun “Zhao Tao’s Face,” a dual narrative dimension emerges: superficially tracing a character’s linear growth across fictional timelines, while deeper down chronicling the evolution of Chinese independent film aesthetics. Like Douglas Fairbanks featured in Close Up magazine’s 1920s “Film Face” special—What readers saw was neither close-ups nor medium shots, but all the roles this actor had ever played, alongside that ever-changing yet unforgettable face instantly recognizable in every frame. So too does Caught by the Tides harness Zhao’s face to refract her cinematic legacy. We glimpse the rebellion and fragility of the wild model Qiaoqiao in Unknown Pleasures (《任逍遥》 2002), the bewilderment of Shen Hong searching for her husband in Still Life (《三峡好人》 2006), and the weathered independence of the gangster’s wife Qiaoqiao in Ash is Purest White (《江湖儿女》 2018). Her visage also evokes Zhao Tao seeking meaning amid simulated landscapes in The World (《世界》 2004), Xiao Yu’s fierce indictment of systemic violence in A Touch of Sin (《天注定》 2013), Yin Ruijuan shielding herself from rain with her coat in Platform (《站台》 2000), the wanderer drifting through Shanghai streets in I Wish I Knew (《海上传奇》 2010), and Tao dancing in snowflakes in Mountains May Depart (《山河故人》 2015) (Figure 2). In essence, Zhao’s face accumulates cross-textual visual memories, becoming a yardstick measuring time, technique, and society in Jia Zhangke’s filmography. Detailed content is shown in

Table 1. Roles portrayed by Zhao Tao in Jia Zhangke’s films.

Rank	Director	Release Year	Film Name	Actor	The Name of the Protagonist in the Flim
1	Jia Zhangke	2000	Platform 《站台》	Zhao Tao	Yin Ruijuan
2	Jia Zhangke	2002	Unknown Pleasures 《任逍遥》	Zhao Tao	Qiaoqiao
3	Jia Zhangke	2004	The World 《世界》	Zhao Tao	Zhao Xiaotao
4	Jia Zhangke	2006	Still Life 《三峡好人》	Zhao Tao	Shen Hong
5	Jia Zhangke	2008	24 City 《二十四城记》	Zhao Tao	(herself)
6	Jia Zhangke	2010	I Wish I Knew 《海上传奇》	Zhao Tao	(herself)
7	Jia Zhangke	2013	A Touch of Sin 《天注定》	Zhao Tao	Xiao Yu
8	Jia Zhangke	2015	Mountains May Depart 《山河故人》	Zhao Tao	Shen Tao
9	Jia Zhangke	2018	Ash is Purest White 《江湖儿女》	Zhao Tao	Qiaoqiao
10	Jia Zhangke	2020	Swimming out till the Sea Turns Blue 《一直游到海水变蓝》	Zhao Tao	(herself)
11	Jia Zhangke	2024	Caught by the Tides 《风流一代》	Zhao Tao	Qiaoqiao

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Zhao’s face not only threads through Jia’s filmography but also anchors Caught by the Tides from start to finish, becoming a fluid chronicle of time. From her youthful innocence on the streets of Datong in 2001 to her weathered presence in 2022, the evolution of her facial wrinkles and gaze transforms her visage into a living testament to the passage of time. This is especially palpable in the supermarket scene where she removes her mask: the lingering indentations from prolonged mask-wearing, alongside age spots and wrinkles etched by time, silently narrate her untold experiences over two decades. Such unretouched, filter-free documentation on the big screen demands courage—a courage embraced by truly accomplished actors who confront their own rough skin, aging wrinkles, and even sagging eyelids without artifice. For instance, Yong Mei, who won the Berlin Best Actress award for So Long, My Son (《地久天长》2019), explicitly requested her wrinkles remain untouched in post-production edits, viewing them as “storybooks gifted by time.” Similarly, Hollywood A-listers like Scarlett Johansson (Avengers) and Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) have publicly rejected excessive digital retouching to mask their on-screen age. Thus, in an era dominated by algorithmic filters and an entertainment industry obsessed with “little fresh meat”1 and “traffic stars”2, Caught by the Tides not only defies the logic of superficial popularity but also reaffirms the coordinates of art cinema within the torrent of capital.

The face can even exist independently of sound. As is well known, within the early 20th-century Hollywood star system, Greta Garbo, a Swedish immigrant, had her Nordic features—high cheekbones and deep-set eyes—distilled by MGM studios into the very embodiment of “serene and detached beauty”. This exoticism held a dual appeal within contemporary American popular culture: it satisfied imaginations of European aristocratic refinement while simultaneously gratifying audiences’ curiosity towards the “Other.” Consequently, MGM prohibited Garbo from smiling in public and even restricted her to silent films, fearing that “speaking” might undermine the aesthetic integrity of her face (Bret 2012). Through the collusion of power and capital, her countenance became one of Hollywood’s most successful “artificially crafted aesthetic products.”

In contrast to the silent “ice queen” persona cultivated for Garbo, Zhao Tao’s face in Caught by the Tides represents a distinctly different experimental expression. The deliberate design of the female protagonist Qiaoqiao remaining entirely wordless throughout the film stands as one of its most striking artistic features. Qiaoqiao’s silence is not a narrative deficiency but a deconstruction of linguistic hegemony. Jia Zhangke constructs an “aural montage” through layered natural sound effects and background music. This allows the audience to autonomously fill the narrative gaps within the flow of sound, fostering polysemic interpretations of the character’s fate. As Heidegger noted, language possesses inherent limitations; for the world beyond language, the best mode of articulation is silence: Silence corresponds to the soundless gathering call of the stillness of appropriating-showing saying (Chernova and Talalaeva 2020). This “silent form” within a non-silent film serves both as an homage to early cinematic aesthetics and a breakthrough in the boundaries of contemporary visual expression. It is well known that contemporary mainstream images mainly rely on dialogue and language logic to advance the narrative and shape characters. However, “The Generation of the Wind” has essentially conducted a bold “subtraction” experiment. By stripping away the redundant auditory information, the film forces the images to return to their core visual power, which is a rebellion and challenge to the current habits of image consumption. Especially in the era dominated by short videos and fast-paced editing, Zhao Tao’s performance in a near-silent film form urges the audience to slow down and invest more patience and thought. This is an important breakthrough in the contemporary paradigm of image expression and reception.

Art historian Hans Belting once defined the “cinematic face” as “countenances bearing the movement and expression unique to life, confronting the viewer only to vanish again—faces of such immense power and suggestiveness that they cannot be seen anywhere but on the screen and in the dark movie theater (Belting 2013).” In Caught by the Tides, Jia Zhangke captures the micro-expressions of Qiaoqiao’s face through close-ups: a glance over the shoulder, a lowering of the head, even the moment of swallowing food. These transform the character’s inner loneliness, resilience, and sense of loss into visual emotional signifiers. This approach resonates with Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “affection-image,” wherein the face functions as the direct presentation of pure affect, capable of transcending language’s limitations to achieve nonverbal emotional expression. Deleuze argues, there is no close-up of the face. The face is in itself close-up; the close-up is by itself face. Both are affected, affection-image (Deamer 2016).

In the supermarket break room scene, Qiaoqiao stands eating a boxed meal; her sudden choking sob while swallowing a steamed bun is not incidental, but rather the floodgate release of long-suppressed emotions. From the desolate melancholy of searching to the wordless gaze upon sudden reunion, Guo Bin’s visit awakens Qiaoqiao’s buried memories. Through Qiaoqiao’s face, we witness not only her individual loneliness and helplessness, but also sense her embodiment as an epitome of a transformative generation—her fate rendered powerless and insignificant within the tides of the era. “When a director attempts to minimize the kinetic energy of the dialogue to the greatest extent possible, or to bring out the documentary nature of the film, the ‘anti-linguistic’ quality of the film becomes particularly prominent” (Zhou 2025). Qiaoqiao conveys emotion solely through body language and shifts in gaze. This choice not only challenges the limits of the actor’s performance but also metaphorically reflects the existential state of the voiceless in contemporary society. And the sudden, explosive “Ha!” at the film’s climax, while pushing the tension of silence to its breaking point, is nothing less than a defiant outcry from those rendered voiceless amidst social transformation. “As she jogs forward with them, there’s something left of the communal spirit with which the film started, in happier Chinese times, and she lets out a brief yell. It is her only vocalized sound, but it is a rallying cry” (Beebe 2025).

When the Daoist attempts to decipher Qiaoqiao’s physiognomy using so-called fortune-telling magic, her expression undergoes a subtle metamorphosis within mere seconds—shifting from a melancholic visage to a forced, momentary smirk, then to a pensive sorrow (Figure 3). This sequence declares the individual’s sovereignty over self-interpretation, thereby deconstructing the authority of face-reading to a significant degree. Paradoxically, this deconstruction reaches its climax the moment the Daoist removes his wig, instantly revealing himself as a mere “blond youngster”. Emmanuel Levinas posited that the face is the most direct manifestation of the “Other,” its essence lying in vulnerability and unpossessability. When the face of the Other appears before me in its vulnerability and nakedness, it issues an ethical injunction: “Thou shalt not kill (Levinas 2016).” This prohibition against killing extends beyond the literal act of murder to encompass the spiritual annihilation of another person. This injunction stems not from reason or power, but from an awe towards the Other. By attempting to circumscribe human possibility through the deterministic framework of physiognomic fate, the Daoist violates this injunction. Qiaoqiao’s resistant countenance, refusing cooperation, thus becomes an act of upholding the Other. Through the instantaneous movements of her facial muscles, Qiaoqiao’s face eludes the Daoist’s grasp, denying him fixed signs for interpretation, and simultaneously proclaims that the visage forever exceeds capture within any interpretative framework.

Béla Balázs believed the facial close-ups in early silent film were richer and more valuable than language precisely because the face possesses subconscious elements beyond the control of free will. A liar, “even the most accomplished, may have his words perfectly accomplish their task, yet there will always be regions of his face he cannot master.” Furthermore, “when the camera draws near, he frowns with all his might, revealing his weak and frightened chin; the sweetest smile at the corners of his mouth is in vain (Bela 1972) “Thus, even if Qiaoqiao’s face evades the Daoist’s physiognomic decoding, her rigid, forced smirk cannot ultimately conceal the desolation within her soul. Crucially, it is not the expression people make that is decisive, but the way they are perceived… Even the greatest landslide begins with the movement of dust. Similarly, the whole expressive face is merely a condensed external picture; in reality, it is formed by the almost imperceptible movements of the tiniest parts of the face. This microphysiognomy is the direct manifestation of microscopic psychology (Béla 2011). Though Qiaoqiao never speaks, her sudden choking sob while mechanically chewing in the supermarket betrays years of pent-up exhaustion; her calm gaze while listening to Wutiaoren3’s song “Yi Mu Yi Yang” speaks volumes of the inner turmoil surging within her; the glistening tear at the corner of her eye when facing the aging Brother Bin reflects her faded passion… Whether depicting youthful recklessness, the blunt pain of existence, or reconciliation with fate, Qiaoqiao’s face performs, time and again, moments where “silence speaks louder than words.”

4. “Quasi-Human” Sculpture4: The Aspiration and Disillusionment of the Tech Utopia

In Caught by the Tides the astronaut sculpture located in Datong Park features a lower body elongated into a serpentine form, its tail still coiled around the Earth. This surreal form, blending Soviet-style monumentalism with modern sci-fi elements, resembles a microcosm of China’s modernization process—where pre-modernity, industrial rationality, and post-human fantasies coexist brutally within a single physical space, presenting an imagery interwoven with absurdity and historical debris. Significantly, when the face of the astronaut sculpture appears on screen, it is often juxtaposed with the background sounds of news broadcasts. This utilizes a highly recognizable acoustic totem to trigger the audience’s conditioned reflex towards national politics.

This “quasi-human” sculptural form resonates with what Hans Belting described as the “epochal masks” manufactured by European portraiture (Belting 2013). Although the sculpture, as an artifact, is an inanimate surface, it possesses the persistence of the object. In the 1999 segment, the astronaut sculpture makes its first appearance with a stern, metallic texture, symbolizing the collective yearning for technological modernization and globalization prevalent in Chinese society around the turn of the millennium. Coal mining, an iconic symbol of China’s industrialization, is juxtaposed with the futuristic astronaut, hinting at a desire to transition from a traditional industrial society towards a technological utopia. By 2022, however, the face of the same astronaut sculpture appears oxidized and blackened by rain, with water stains resembling tear tracks collecting in its eye sockets. Weathered by time, the sculpture now exudes a palpable grittiness and weariness, signifying the disillusionment with the technological utopia and the mourning of collective ideals (Figure 4). The “quasi-human” sculpture images at the film’s beginning and end form a temporal loop. Through this dissection of a tech utopia spanning over two decades, Jia Zhangke articulates a profound sense of historical cyclicality and the powerlessness of individual destinies.

Unlike the faces in moving images such as the group portraits or Zhao Tao’s face mentioned earlier, the face of the astronaut sculpture, though presented as a still object, transcends the static nature of traditional visual symbols. Viewing the sculpture across different spatiotemporal contexts activates its dynamic metaphor, producing a visual effect of movement within stillness. Distinct from the illusory motion of the “awakening stone lions” created through editing in Battleship Potemkin (1925), the “quasi-human” sculpture in Caught by the Tides autonomously generates narrative momentum through its being viewed in disparate times and spaces. The metallic sheen of 1999 and the rust stains of 2022 are not merely testaments to the passage of time—they also reflect a mirror of collective desires. “The same face exhibits a multitude of appearances, seemingly capable of seamlessly integrating into any context (Belting 2013).” The face of the “quasi-human” sculpture resists being fossilized as a mere image through its vivid presence, corroborating Hans Belting’s assertion that masks, as cultural products, possess vitality.

Stripped of the warmth of human expression, the face of the “quasi-human” sculpture functions as an “interface” for viewing with its industrialized mechanical texture, prompting Qiao Qiao and even the “Qiao Qiaos” beyond the screen to engage with it. “Immersive experiences are often understood as physical, but these experiences cannot be separated from the cognitive (Lawhead and Mondloch 2025).” As a sublime symbol of the technological era, the sculpted face mirrors the collective ideals pursued by Qiao Qiao’s generation amid social transformations. When the elderly Qiao Qiao looks up once again to gaze upon this face, she is, in fact, looking back at her own life, swept along by the torrent of time. This act of viewing resonates with Jacques Lacan’s “mirror stage” theory: the face of the sculpture becomes a screen for the projection of others’ desires, while the gazing subject encounters a fissure in self-recognition within the mirror image. Furthermore, as something to be viewed, a visual image, we seek the other in the act of looking, and we seek ourselves in the act of gazing. When audiences scrutinize the metallic face on the screen in the darkness of the cinema, their sense of identity continually oscillates and reorganizes between technological worship and nostalgic longing for humanity, collective belonging and individual alienation.

5. Digital Faces: The Crisis of Subjectivity Under Algorithmic Rule

The emergence of digital technology and smart devices has ushered human civilization into a new era. During Qiaoqiao’s search for Guo Bin, amidst the scarred landscape of the Three Gorges area, an advertisement for the new-generation robot SF-3 appears. The projected technological slogan “The Future Begins Today” forms an intertext with the layered spatial reality of the Three Gorges. As a temporal vessel of Yangtze River civilization, the Three Gorges bears the folds of millennia of history while simultaneously witnessing the marvels of contemporary engineering. While Caught by the Tides ostensibly centers its narrative on the on-again-off-again love story of Guo Bin and Qiaoqiao, the true narrative subject is the fluctuating fate of ordinary people in an era of rapid transformation. The harmonious image of a human and robot shaking hands on the large screen not only heralds the arrival of the posthuman age but also implicitly underscores the profound individual loneliness of modern humans.

The film features the robot’s face twice. If the appearance of the SF-3 robot in the 2006 projection served as a harbinger to real humans, then the robot appearing in the 2022 Datong shopping mall signifies the total encroachment of technology into everyday life (Figure 5). The facial design of the intelligent robot is not “anthropomorphic” in the traditional sense; instead, it embodies a fusion of technological aestheticism and functionality. It can not only replace humans in introducing supermarket products but also engage in dialogue through facial recognition technology. However, the robot’s “face” in Caught by the Tides is not merely a technological showcase; it carries the director’s profound insight into the symptoms of the age. In the era of artificial intelligence, AI is trained to imitate the flow of human conversation. It uses phrases like “Hello”, “Welcome”, “Thank you for your patronage”, and “Thank you for your attention”, which makes the communication feel very natural and “polite”. When non-humans use the common words of human life, this is an extremely successful pattern matching, but not a true expression of emotion. When technological systems reduce the human face to a data matrix, the “face”—once the vessel of identity and emotional expression—degenerates into a replicable digital code. Whether it’s the robot uttering, “If you love until it hurts…there can be no more hurt only more love” or stating, “The Humans race has one really effective weapon: And that is laughter,” it demonstrates that the robot can only offer mechanical responses based on a pre-set database. What it exhibits is not empathy, but the precision of probabilistic calculation. The compassion of Mother Teresa and the wit of Mark Twain, when algorithmically reassembled, become nothing more than probabilistic combinations within a database. This violence of signification is eroding the uniqueness of human emotional experience.

“Today, images are used solely for the visualization of all facial data. Simultaneously, the face has lost the core significance it once held as an image or image-carrier.” Hans Belting once pointed out with grave concern: “As a data carrier, the face becomes as abstract as the individual data read by the system… In the age of the crisis of the face, archival technology subsumes all individual-s indifferently into statistical categories, leading to the disregard of individual destinies (Belting 2013).” The shopping mall robot’s indiscriminate recognition service for customers is, in essence, a product of the collusion between consumerism and capitalism. When systems reduce individual destinies to cluster analyses of user profiles, the “crisis of the face” articulated by Belting evolves into a broader “existential crisis,” and human subjectivity gradually dissolves within the data deluge.

Amidst the current sweep of digital technology, Caught by the Tides further reveals the alienation and escape of the face through surveillance cameras. The supermarket surveillance camera functions like a hovering “faceless eye,” stripping away the narrative weight of the body present in traditional imagery. From a “God’s-eye view,” it compresses people, commodities, and space onto the same digital plane. Through the characteristics of the fisheye lens—rapid capture, high-definition magnification, and arbitrary inversion—the vividly saturated fruits and vegetables on shelves, the sudden appearance of Guo Bin amidst the shopping crowd, and Qiaoqiao compressed into a pixelated laboring body, all subtly point to the “curved reality” we have grown accustomed to, wrapped in filters, beauty retouching, and AR enhancements. This distortion through the lens compels us to reconsider the lives we are currently living.

In stark contrast to Caught by the Tides’ gritty visual texture are the highly filtered digital faces emblematic of the short-video era depicted within the film. When the middle-aged Guo Bin, dragging his prosthetic leg, traverses a Zhuhai urban village, the former real estate tycoon has become utterly disconnected from the present age. Similarly, Old Pan, the once-influential broker dominating the Pearl River Delta, now lies in a hospital ICU. Their existential plight transcends mere generational disconnect; it signifies the total collapse of the flesh within digital colonization. Conversely, Xialiu Xingge (an internet celebrity in the film)—with his aged countenance, singing classic Cantonese tunes, and twisting in retro dance steps—has become an “accidental darling” of the new media age. He has 1.25 million followers on TikTok, with a hundred million watches across all social networks. Accidentally resurrected in the digital medium, Xialiu Xingge, on one hand, embodies the aesthetic of 1980s–90s song-and-dance troupes, bearing witness to the cultural fissures of that bygone era. On the other, his flawlessly filtered visage exposes the individual nihilism of the current epoch. Byung-Chul Han defines “das Glatte” (Han 2019) as the core aesthetic feature of the digital age, whose essence lies in eliminating all contradiction, negativity, and trauma. “As is well known, the smooth is always the attribute of the perfect, because it is opposed to the traces of technical or human processing (Barthes 2010).” Stripped of natural traces like wrinkles, scars, and skin tone variations, the face becomes an editable data surface, thereby masking the finitude of life and the inevitability of trauma.

Furthermore, digital technology can extract faces from specific bodies and minds, allowing for infinite replication, splicing, and generation. This has led to a crisis of authenticity regarding “faces”. On the one hand, content creators often actively cater to algorithmic preferences, deliberately presenting expressions and emotions favored by algorithms to attract more attention and traffic. On the other hand, recommendation algorithms based on user behavior data confine audiences within information cocoons constructed by beauty functions or social filters. In this two-way shaping and adaptation process, people’s emotional expressions are actually gradually being defined and reconstructed by the logic of data. Imagine if everyone designed their virtual or real faces according to the same optimal template recommended by algorithms, Will we embrace a diverse universe of aesthetics or another form of aesthetic hegemony?

Amidst the overwhelming deluge of images manufactured by mass media, the face paradoxically becomes a scarce entity. Overproduction renders faces increasingly formulaic, flattened, hollow, and impoverished. Jia Zhangke not only utilizes the “faces” within the diegesis—the intelligent robot, the fisheye surveillance, and Xialiu Xingge—to document the very disappearance of the face, but also employs the “faces” of Zhao Tao and the multitude of nameless individuals in his imagery to resist this silent vanishing. Crucially, what the film actor’s face needs most is the “living face,” capable of etching every emotion across the brows, eyes, mouth, nose, and cheeks (Romantic 1927). In other words, within this media age of breakneck technological advancement, only the authentic human visage can withstand the relentless erosion of time.

6. Conclusions

In Caught by the Tides, the “face” is not merely an aesthetic symbol but a methodology. Using the “face” as an anchor, Jia Zhangke conducts a cinematic experiment on the essence of existence. From the flesh-and-blood visage to the digitalized face, from the object of the gaze to the resistant subject, from objective scrutiny to self-projection, Jia transforms the “face” into a key cipher for deciphering China’s social transformations. While one might critique the film for its nostalgic parade of Mandarin pop classics, its loose episodic structure resembling a chronicle, or its perceived indulgence in “rehashing old tropes,” it remains undeniable that these faces—whether weathered, mechanical, or disoriented—are the very physiognomy of our era. These “distinctly Chinese” visages represent the spiritual cartography of a people undergoing tectonic shifts, where the bedrock of traditional culture collides with postmodern lived experience to forge a uniquely fractured countenance.

This article discusses four representative faces in Jia Zhangke’s Caught by the Tides: the group portraits, Zhao Tao’s face, “quasi-human” sculpture, and digital faces. While the first three faces exhibit distinct Chinese characteristics, the emergence of digital faces represents a global phenomenon. This is also an important reason why Jia Zhangke’s films can transcend national and cultural differences and achieve global dissemination. In the posthuman perspective, the absolute boundaries between physical existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanisms and biological organisms, robot technology and human goals are gradually blurring. Hybrid, mutant, interconnected and technologically infiltrated life forms are entering our lives, which cannot help but make us ask: when the boundary of “human” becomes increasingly blurred, what exactly will we become?

The theoretical value of this research lies in that it proposes and practices “face” as a methodology to analyze social and cultural phenomena, providing a new critical and thinking paradigm for interpreting literary and artistic works. Of course, there is also the possibility of further research. For instance, regarding the methodological issue of “face”, if it is studied in more literary and artistic works from different periods, media, and types, it will also be a promising research path.