Still Life
The From Below travels to central China for Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life (2006) on WEDNESDAY, February 5th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10! Note that this screening is on a Wednesday!
*Still Life *focuses on the small town of Fengjie in the Three Gorges Dam area along the Yangtze River. Marked for flooding in the construction of the dam, the city is in a process of self-deconstruction, and the movie captures two people, Han Sanming (played by Han Sanming) and Shen Hong (played by Zhang-ke muse Zhao Tao) who return to the soon-to-be-doomed town to search for their estranged partners amidst the industrial upheaval. In as much, the From Below is returning to a similar theme as last year’s screening of This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection regarding the encroachment of destructive hyperglobalization through the damming of a river.
For those that haven’t experienced much of Jia Zhang-ke’s work, this is a fantastic place to start. *Still Life *comes at a fulcrum point between his early, punk-ish films about the alienated and aimless Y2K youth in *Xiao Wu *(1997), Platform (2000), and Unknown Pleasures (2002), which were all banned by the Chinese government in some form, and his more recent (and more government approved) work that experiments with memory and the passage of time, set against genres like the gangster movie (Ash is Purest White (2018)) the action movie (A Touch of Sin (2013)), and the romantic melodrama (*Mountains May Depart *(2015)). While you can’t go wrong with any of Zhang-ke’s films, Still Life is a personal favorite and fantastic distillation of his ethos.
Often described as the most important Chinese filmmaker of the 21st century, Zhang-ke is, in part, notable because of his origins in the rural northern province of Shanxi, as opposed to the more populated filmmaking communities that developed in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. As Jonathan Rosenbaum notes, “ Like William Faulkner and Alexander Dovzhenko, Jia is a hick avant-gardist in the very best sense — someone whose outsider/minority status enhances both his humanity and his art.“ With that context, the forced relocation of entire communities for the Three Gorges Dam makes perfect sense as a backdrop for this beautiful, yearning film.