dreamdead
08-21-2008, 02:19 AM
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Jia Zhang-Ke’s Still Life (2006) furthers Jia’s study of the divergent cultures that inhabit mainland China (Fengjie, to be exact). On the one hand, the film cogently documents the tourism that resides within the developing Three Gorges Dam through an opening entirely devoted to an analysis of performers who entertain the disinterested tourists, so that the demolition process is largely disavowed of displacement. On the other, such enterprise is situated purely on capital; when lead male Han Samning (Jia’s real life cousin) states that he has no money to offer the ostensibly complimentary performers, they intimidate him until he lets them search his belongings for cash. This same manhandling of the citizens is dominant throughout the rest of the film, finding a thesis wherein both man and city are subjugated in the attempt to form a more prosperous “landmark,” even if the demolition destroys communities; in brief, the alterations enacted upon the city by the administration will always dwarf the individual (a comparison with Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru would be revelatory).
Similarly, film is constantly mediating between reality and a representation of the real. Early on, Jia matches up a shot of the Chinese yuan with the real-life mountain that is emblazoned on the money; yet these scenes achieve an uncanny and altogether organic architectural lens precisely because Jia possesses a light, though critical, eye. The depths of human sacrifice to the city are always noted, as citizens endure years of separation (and failing relationships) to sate the growing enterprise of Chinese urbanity. Yet the film also is adept at noting the cultural appropriations from Hong Kong industries, such as a moment where Sanming watches a youth showboat and appropriate the infamous Chow Yun Fat lighting-of-the-cigarette-with-a-burning-Hong-Kong-dollar from A Better Tomorrow; that moment is doubled when the cynicism of the moment, a typical gesture from Jia, is balanced by newfound melancholy when Han Sanming later mourns the youth’s death during a demolition accident.
Yet the film is not entirely a normal text insofar as Jia includes disruptive gestures of the surreal. Whether it’s letting Chinese words pop up on the frame, nearly all of which mark off objects of potential capitalism (cigarettes, liquor, tea, toffee, and, most obliquely, demolition, which is the last pop-up and which subverts the previous structure) or watching Jia mix CGI with real location (as in a small flying object that links the otherwise unconnected narratives between Samning and Shen Hong’s (Tao Zhao) efforts to procure a divorce from an absent, possibly philandering, husband; a man crossing a high wire in the last frame; and, most tellingly, an architectural criss-crossed building that grows rockets and takes off to the heavens): Jia seems to be suggesting the ways in which modernization is taking flight even as it abandons the individuals who observe the (sur)reality.
Still Life succeeds, then, in interrogating a culture where home can easily become a casualty, one filled with empty bureaucracy that dislocates the blame endlessly onto other bureaus. Ultimately, though, the film’s epistemology is delivered when Hanming tells the youth over the exchange of cell phone ring tones, “We remember our own pasts.” This affirmation speaks out against the subjugation and implosion of the architectural past for something at once devoid of (and yet still tied to) capitalism--the power of memory that is personal and thus impressed upon the individual apart from national orthodoxy.
Jia Zhang-Ke’s Still Life (2006) furthers Jia’s study of the divergent cultures that inhabit mainland China (Fengjie, to be exact). On the one hand, the film cogently documents the tourism that resides within the developing Three Gorges Dam through an opening entirely devoted to an analysis of performers who entertain the disinterested tourists, so that the demolition process is largely disavowed of displacement. On the other, such enterprise is situated purely on capital; when lead male Han Samning (Jia’s real life cousin) states that he has no money to offer the ostensibly complimentary performers, they intimidate him until he lets them search his belongings for cash. This same manhandling of the citizens is dominant throughout the rest of the film, finding a thesis wherein both man and city are subjugated in the attempt to form a more prosperous “landmark,” even if the demolition destroys communities; in brief, the alterations enacted upon the city by the administration will always dwarf the individual (a comparison with Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru would be revelatory).
Similarly, film is constantly mediating between reality and a representation of the real. Early on, Jia matches up a shot of the Chinese yuan with the real-life mountain that is emblazoned on the money; yet these scenes achieve an uncanny and altogether organic architectural lens precisely because Jia possesses a light, though critical, eye. The depths of human sacrifice to the city are always noted, as citizens endure years of separation (and failing relationships) to sate the growing enterprise of Chinese urbanity. Yet the film also is adept at noting the cultural appropriations from Hong Kong industries, such as a moment where Sanming watches a youth showboat and appropriate the infamous Chow Yun Fat lighting-of-the-cigarette-with-a-burning-Hong-Kong-dollar from A Better Tomorrow; that moment is doubled when the cynicism of the moment, a typical gesture from Jia, is balanced by newfound melancholy when Han Sanming later mourns the youth’s death during a demolition accident.
Yet the film is not entirely a normal text insofar as Jia includes disruptive gestures of the surreal. Whether it’s letting Chinese words pop up on the frame, nearly all of which mark off objects of potential capitalism (cigarettes, liquor, tea, toffee, and, most obliquely, demolition, which is the last pop-up and which subverts the previous structure) or watching Jia mix CGI with real location (as in a small flying object that links the otherwise unconnected narratives between Samning and Shen Hong’s (Tao Zhao) efforts to procure a divorce from an absent, possibly philandering, husband; a man crossing a high wire in the last frame; and, most tellingly, an architectural criss-crossed building that grows rockets and takes off to the heavens): Jia seems to be suggesting the ways in which modernization is taking flight even as it abandons the individuals who observe the (sur)reality.
Still Life succeeds, then, in interrogating a culture where home can easily become a casualty, one filled with empty bureaucracy that dislocates the blame endlessly onto other bureaus. Ultimately, though, the film’s epistemology is delivered when Hanming tells the youth over the exchange of cell phone ring tones, “We remember our own pasts.” This affirmation speaks out against the subjugation and implosion of the architectural past for something at once devoid of (and yet still tied to) capitalism--the power of memory that is personal and thus impressed upon the individual apart from national orthodoxy.