Poetics of Still Lives: Rewalking the Ruinscape of Still Life (English version)
Jia Zhangke’s landscape in Still Life (2006) has been read as a traumatic site of memory and loss and a dystopian counter-narrative to the utopian dream of progress in China’s post-socialist modernisation. Such readings, I argue, emerge from a framework that classifies Jia as a realist director, an...
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| הוצא לאור ב: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/transtexts, |
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| מחבר ראשי: | |
| פורמט: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| שפה: | Anglais |
| יצא לאור: |
Transtext(e)s Transcultures
2023
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| גישה מקוונת: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| סיכום: | Jia Zhangke’s landscape in Still Life (2006) has been read as a traumatic site of memory and loss and a dystopian counter-narrative to the utopian dream of progress in China’s post-socialist modernisation. Such readings, I argue, emerge from a framework that classifies Jia as a realist director, an ‘outside’ observer of China’s reality. What is missing from these analyses is a sensitivity to Jia’s transhistorical aesthetics and the wider resonances with global urbanity in the film’s place consciousness. More than a dystopian representation of estrangement, entrapment, and displacement, Still Life offers a powerful picture of reconnection, mobility, and emplacement. Jia’s use of surrealist aesthetics with its emphasis on uncanny temporal disjunctures is not to be conflated with a postmodern intervention. His dyschronic ruinscape re-emplaces the slow walker as the subject of history and constructs space as a collective, parabolic site, thereby conjuring the spirit of the future as well as the past. At the same time, the film also evokes the slow mobility of natural forces that haunt human dreams of technological progress, offering a planetary contemplation of mobility and displacement. |
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