ABSTRACT
In Jia Zhang-ke’s film 24 City, Chengdu hovers like some unreachable object. The film concerns the demolition of an aeronautics factory that was a world unto itself. In its mixture of ‘real’ and ‘fake’ interviews with workers and children of workers it traces how a seemingly self-sufficient world moves to its own dissipation; how the city grows up around it, and thus how the sale of land enables the company to raise the money to modernize technologies that hadn’t really changed for 50 years. But also how the factory complex – now to be the site of a massive luxury real estate development – persists as a kind of affective field; one of sacrifice and respect that enables subsequent generations to trace their way into the larger city. Districts such as these represent techniques of traceability – how the continuous struggles and innovations of urban everyday life trace their way across individuals, spaces and times; how they attempt to implicate themselves into other scenarios; how they aggregate and regroup.
