Arts & Entertainment

Still Life: A flood of memories In

By team ⋅ March 27, 2008 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The Guardian, 1st February

A large part of China’s history is being submerged by the Three Gorges dam – but it makes the subject of a fascinating meditative film.

If you are interested in a break from coercive cinema, signposted cinema, cinema that uses incessant close-ups and a musical score to tell you single feeling you should be experiencing, then Still Life, a deeply felt and quietly impressive film, is for you. Directed by Jia Zhangke, it was the winner of the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice film festival, and features the superb and elegant actress Zhao Tao.

Still Life is a palimpsest of ideas and intentions – a meditation of mortality, a contemporary drama-documentary about an entire city preparing to be downed in the service of China’s Three Gorges hydro-electric dam project, and a portrait of a vast nation preparing for turbo-capitalist superpower status, whilst retaining the autocratic political habits of communism: high-handedly ordering the displacement of a million-and-a-half people, and the abolition of thousands of years of history.
The gigantic engineering project has meant flooding huge areas. It has meant the entire evacuation of the city of Fengjie, where the film is set. The director and the crew appear to have got out virtually as these things were happening; they have used actual, live history as their backdrop.

The story tells of two visitors to Fengjie, each desperate to recover something of the past before it disappears into the water. Still Life is a poignant record of a hidden sorrow in a modern powerhouse, and well-worth experiencing.