STILL LIFE / 三峡好人

If Jia Zhangke’s breakout film PLATFORM (2000) was about the destruction of China’s social fabric as it transitioned from Mao to Deng Xiaoping, then Jia’s 2006 Golden Lion winner STILL LIFE focuses on the physical destruction of the built environment as the country ventures through another epochal shift. Like Ou Ning’s MEISHI STREET, STILL LIFE is firmly located during what Western observers routinely note as the era of a “rising China.” A few years after the country’s admittance to the WTO, a couple years before Beijing hosted the 2008 Olympics, and during a time of rising GDP, STILL LIFE asks, in literal terms, whether a rising tide indeed lifts all boats. Shot on location in Fengjie, a town along the Yangtze River in central China, the film centers on two people as they search for their spouses in the city, slowly being demolished to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. Slated to be flooded by the dam’s reservoir, the town is replete with hand painted red lines on the sides of buildings that indicate the imminent water levels, offering a stark warning for those below the line to get out while they can. Like Pedro Costa’s IN VANDA’S ROOM, STILL LIFE is filmed on digital video, lending it not only a documentary aesthetic (emblematic of the Urban Generation of Chinese independent filmmakers at the time), but one of uncanny immediacy. Jia, embracing the xianchang spirit of on-the-ground filmmaking, has argued that the documentarian must allow themself to be “seared” by the immediate present. The traces of the people and buildings of Fengjie, though now relocated and demolished, respectively, become irrevocably imprinted on STILL LIFE and its maker.

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