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7

The disappearing city and its displaced present as its diaspora searches for its displaced past. The camera moves much as the river (a first in Zhangke's filmography where such movements become the norm) in sweeping through the people it captures and advancing always to an unseen destination. Keeping up with these currents requires a constant progression on the peoples' parts, eternally migrating in order to end up in the same place relationally and being sured if their lives stand still. As the city disappears to clear a path for the future, one which doesn't hold the city, its people continue to, contradictiously, dig up its culture's artifacts beneath and tear down its structures above. What does it mean to preserve…

5

Bodies wander around cities looking for their significant others....Other bodies wander around landscapes looking for jobs..

5

Jia's digital works are all too-pristine, creating a hyperreal beauty that clashes with the brutality that often propels them. STILL LIFE may not be as openly mired in violence as A TOUCH OF SIN, but then A TOUCH OF SIN does not feature an entire town obliterated by expansionism, and the direct carnage of Jia's most recent is substituted for silent expressions of capitalist irresponsibility: a man wandering into frame with a bandaged head, news of a key character dying in an industrial accident. Money prompts the razing and reconstruction of towns, yet it mocks by pasting images of idyllic home regions on its backs, a friendly reminder of what it helped displace. Jia is the keenest observer/critic of China's shift from totalitarianism to an equally repressive capitalism, and that his work gets sanctioned by censors suggests that his truths are too powerful and concrete to cover up.

Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ Liked

Incredible piece of deep focus digital video neorealism that finds the haunting purgatorial intersection as the past finds itself in the process of being demolished into rubble by the future. Some of the most tactile and beautiful documentary landscape work put to film (the mountains and rivers and decaying architecture), which in conjunction with the dramatic fiction elements turn this into an act of witnessing the personal alienation and material/political destruction it's home to. Love all the sudden bursts of electronic Cantopop and mournful Chinese folk music.

18

There's something about Still Life that just feels ephemeral in how grounded it is. Two stories that are connected by just a strand, really, but in doing so director Jia Zhangke changes the perspective we tend to have when we go into movies: many of us view films from an individual context, a way to empathize with specific people in specific circumstances, but as a result of identifying with individuals we cut ourselves off from the greater picture. So two protagonists go through two different stories, and in doing so this becomes not an individual's quest for their hometown roots but rather a collective experience of lost identity.

Rapid economic expansion and development bleeds over not just in the abstract…

Review by Nick Newman

Jia Zhangke is so enamored with Zhao Tao that only a literal UFO can introduce her.

Review by Ben Nash ★★★★★ Liked

"A city with 2000 years of history was demolished in just two years."

How the hell is someone supposed to react to that?

14

A place amidst dissolution, gradually and ever so painfully starting to exist in banknotes and human memories; clear as day now, but soon to be a hazy relic of the past.

People lost, displaced, uprooted. Their homes abandoned and their lives forced to begin anew in another place. The history and culture of a locality that's getting demolished inevitably begin their march towards obscurity. They turn into fading myths.

Two lost souls searching for their lovers in this place where buildings are broken down until those concrete creations turn into rubble; their lives needing some semblance of a closure so they can either reunite or move on for good – it doesn't matter if their closure matches those of the…

Review by coffee ★★★★ Liked

“A city with 2000 years of history was demolished in just two years.”

the juxtaposition here between form and subject is so striking. HD mid 2000s digital video in all of its deep-focus glory, Jia constantly keeping the camera in motion as the characters walk amongst the rubble of abandoned structures, demolition projects designed to give way to the future even at the immediate cost of dislocation. such modern (at the time) presentation serves to capture people haunted by and in search of the past, the crossroads between history and memory presented as husks wandering around an early 21st century China. the landscape photography here is tremendous. the only other Jia i’ve seen is Ash Is Purest White but even now i can start to see the habits and occupations that i assume take shape in the rest of his career. cigarettes, liquor, tea, toffee, ufos, and Chow Yun-fat movies. the essence of life

13

Time kept up on a string, its chronology traced from past through present and beyond, hoping in vain to salvage some sense of belonging in a heap of grungy ruble. Years are razed to ruin as new goals are set and met; loving relationships are rendered emotionless memories after such change has blazed through us so fast; marvels of nature are reduced to tourist attractions and designs for currency. Things can just disappear, and who’s to say where they went or how they vanished? That very same string we keep time on is the one we’re forced to walk, attempting to stay balanced. When one dirty job is done, so begins another. Build to destroy.

Modernization is a high-wire act.

3

The absolute midpoint of Jia’s career to date, uniting his early Fenyang-set features with his later, more genre-driven work through Zhao Tao’s search for a man named Guo Bin (there are at least three different Guo Bins, and he knows at least two different Zhaos (Zhao Qiao and Shen Hong) and the continuing adventures of Jia’s coal-mining cousin Han Sanming, who plays a coal miner named Sanming in at least three of Jia’s films. 

It’s also where he took a mid career swing into documentary. It’ll be seven years before he makes a true fiction feature again (although even that one will be based on a collection of true stories). 

So it’s all too appropriate of course that this film…

15

Industrialization is creation. A hydroelectric dam generates power for millions. It's a tool of modernization, meant to bring about economic growth and prosperity. Meant to carry us into the future. 

Industrialization is destruction. Buildings must be demolished. Entire communities will be leveled, detonated, wiped out. In Still Life, we are shown a city soon to be submerged under water. Erased from the landscape, it will exist only as a memory. Industrialization is the cause of mass displacement. 

The inhabitants of this land live in ruins and rubble as they continue to go about their daily lives. Some tear down their own buildings in preparation for the flood. In this gradually disappearing setting we meet two people, each separately having traveled…