Still Life

Film maker Jia Zhanghke has been essentially capturing China in flux and this was especially true in 2006's Still Life. In this film Zhangke captures the process of the installation of the Three Gorges Project (the largest in Chinese history originally planned by Mao) in which cities with 2000 years of history were sacrificed, leading to the relocation of 1.2 million residents, for a new dam project that would flood the valley and create energy for the country. This project was only put into reality in recent times by the central Economic Planning division, which is a throwback to the more autocratic days before the economic reforms of contemporary times. Zhangke wanted to capture these changes so he made a documentary to educate himself on the region in the southwest far from his northern home and then applied this new knowledge to make a fictional film which chronicles the search of a miner, Sanming (Sanming Han the director's cousin), for the wife and daughter that left him 16 years before.and the nurse Sanming and a woman, Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) who is seeking contact with her husband, who has been sent to the region by the government to oversee the demolition project and has not returned home in two years. In the film there are four sections that are entitled tobacco, alcohol, tea, and toffee (sweets) which reflect the past distribution of luxuries according to the planned economy of the communist state in the past linking this to the present planned economy project of the Three Gorges Dam project. This region inspired Zahngke (as stated in the interview in the extras on the DVD) because of its association with classical Chinese painting which is rife with cloudy mountains surrounded in mist. This in turn inspired the cinematography of the film which includes a lot of tracking shots and slow pans that mimic the continuous flow of the unfolding a Chinese scroll painting. HD video allowed him to make his documentary Dong and this film as the process was taking place-with the director noting that 35mm takes too much planning to be of use in a situation like this where time is of the essence. The result is no less grand given the canvas of the Three Gorges. There are a couple of false notes in the film for me, one a strange space like sculpture that is framed in several scenes is sent into space-a flight of fancy that does not usually find its way into a ultra realistic film as well as a tight rope wire walker in the background of another scene they distract the viewer from the world that was being presented. However, that being said this is my second favorite Zhangke film after the recent, A Touch of Sin, and it is a remarkable film visually and in the fact that it has captured history in the making.