Over roughly the last decade we have seen the slow decline of some the biggest names in mainland Chinese filmmaking. Luminaries of the fifth generation of Chinese cinema like Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou have abandoned the simplistic and artful styles that made up films like Yellow Earth and The Story of Qiu Ju, and with perhaps an eye to China’s ever-growing foreign markets, have produced glossy, flamboyant period pieces that are nearly as foreign to domestic audiences as they are to those who flock to them in the West. This vacuum in art cinema has been filled by a new generation of directors who have focused their lens on daily life in a country that is marked by upheaval and perpetual social change stemming from breakneck economic development. The name that has received the most recognition as of late is Jia Zhangke, director of Unknown Pleasures, Platform and The World. His most recent feature length production, Still Life, has taken him from the margins of obscurity into the fold of world cinema, for which he received the 2006 Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival.
Shunning any form of adornment, Jia’s films focus on the daily lives of ordinary people in some of the most underdeveloped regions of China. In Platform, a performance troupe-turned-rock band tours the back towns of north central China, finally ending up in the same place they started. The World follows the daily routines of migrant workers at an ambitious theme park in Beijing, where famous global landmarks are recreated in miniature form for Chinese tourists. Every film captures the mundane life of those people absorbed in a country changing by the minute, but held just outside the benefits which are purported to follow--an endless waiting for something new or something better. Jia’s films unfold slowly with a deliberate pacing similar to Abbas Kiarostami or Hou Hsiao-hsien, marked by understated gestures and austerity, a far cry from Hero or Curse of the Golden Flowers.
Still Life makes its setting in a small town on the Hubei/Sichuan border, currently under destruction for the massive Three Gorges Dam project, which will bring cleaner energy to thousands more Chinese citizens, but has in the process destroyed innumerable local ecosystems and cultural landmarks, uprooting hundreds, if not thousands, of local residents, the subject of a recent documentary Up the Yangtze.
The film opens with the return home of one of the two main characters, Han Sanming, hailing a motor-taxi to his old address, only to find it completely submerged below water. He proceeds to find work with a local demolition crew as he searches for his estranged wife and tries in vain to re-establish contact with his daughter, whom he has not seen for 16 years. Wandering amid the rubble and chaos is the film’s other protagonist, Shen Hong, who is also looking for her spouse, who has been incommunicado for quite some time. Even in the same town, the two’s paths never cross, and when they finally accomplish their missions, the results are anticlimactic at best. In the meantime, they form ephemeral relationships with others amid the disarray that surrounds them.
People wander in and out of scenes as in a Fellini film: a young teenager singing saccharine love songs, a lackluster proprietor of a small prostitution ring, a civil engineer showing off his elaborate light display to a group of businessmen. All the while, there is the noise of sweaty demolition workers toiling in the humid haze amid fumigators and crews marking new buildings for destruction or projecting stages of future water level rises.
The scenes that unfold, less like a movie than the titular style of painting, show a section of society crushed under the boot of so-called progress. Air conditioning here is either absent or useless in the sticky climes of southern China. The music emanating from old radios and television sets is from decades past. When not repetitively hacking away with sledgehammers, barely-clad men sit in idle groups, mechanically wiping sweat from their faces. There seems to be such a tacit acceptance of the tumult that has marked their otherwise monotonous existence, that no one seems to notice, or care, when a flying saucer wobbles in over the mountains and then exits as nonchalantly as it came, or when a building inexplicably rockets itself off into the hazy skyline. In a world coming slowly undone, these are minor details to be observed, and then discarded, before moving on to the next routine task.
But it would be too easy to attribute some air of condemnation originating from Jia’s projects. He never appears to be pointing the finger, or making a value judgment in his films. He merely documents what he sees around him, and does so to aesthetically stunning effect. The subjects and themes may speak to the viewer in any number of ways, but they are, after all, just daily life in a country whose citizens make up over one third of the world’s population.
