Poetics of Still Lives: Rewalking the Ruinscape of Still Life (English version)
Résumé
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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The article has been translated by the author.
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Introduction
- 1 See, for instance, Brooke Wilmsen, “After the Deluge: A Longitudinal Study of Resettlement at the T (...)
- 2 Katiana Le Mentec, “The Three Gorges Dam and the Demiurges: The Story of a Failed Contemporary Myth (...)
1After more than twenty years of construction, 2006 saw the completion of the Sanxia hydro-power gravity dam (also known as the Three Gorges Dam), a gigantic infrastructure that caused the forced dislocation of more than 1.3 million residents along the Yangtze River in China. While the infrastructural megaproject may have had positive economic impacts, the resettlements as well as the environmental damage caused by it have also drawn much international critique.1 In China, as Katiana Le Mentee notes, the construction of the dam was accompanied by a state-sanctioned cultural production including poems, songs, and statues that connected the dam to a national myth of progress as well as ancient legends; at the same time, these official narratives have been resisted and challenged by the circulation of stories and rumours at the grassroots level.2
- 3 Dai Jinghua, “Temporality, Nature Morte, and the Filmmaker: A Reconsideration of Still Life”, trans (...)
2Released in the year of the dam’s completion, Jia Zhangke’s Still Life (China, 2006) also adopts a grassroots perspective on the region transformed by the dam’s construction. The film follows coal miner Han Sanming and nurse Shen Hong, both from the province of Shanxi, on their journey to find their estranged spouses in Fengjie, a small town under demolition due to the construction of the Sanxia dam. As Dai Jinghua points out, in Still Life, space is a crucial subject.3 It is a film about a space that is subjected to veritable acts of ‘terraforming’ on earth and therefore undergoing unprecedented changes; a natural landscape that is instrumentalised for state use and a cultural landscape that is brutally disfigured and reorganised. Rejecting a dramatic representation, Jia’s camera is fixated on a ruinscape – workers swinging sledgehammers in a vast pile of bricks and rubble, dilapidated buildings, rumbling machineries, and slum neighborhoods soon to be flooded. While Still Life is partly driven by a desire to document what will soon vanish, Jia punctures the film’s realism with his widely noted surrealist interventions: a UFO flying across the sky, a giant monument launching into space, a cable-walker crossing the gorges, and other surreal events which I will dwell on later.
3I propose that the spatial expression in Still Life features a textual fluidity and mobility that invites the viewer to view/walk the ruinscape in the film beyond ideological conceptualisation. The camera functions as a perceiving eye of a slow walker in the ruins. This kind of viewing or reading features a perceptual disorientation and emotional alienation that is more susceptible to what is invisible, absent, or not yet actualised. In Jia’s slow camera tracing the walker’s mobility, the present is ruptured by the return of the past alongside the vague call of the future, and as a result, the familiar place in mundane settings can suddenly slip into a strange nowhere. Traversing the ruinscape remaps it as a space of home where the inhabitants engage in a corporeal relation with and improvised reappropriation of waste materials. The film thereby resurrects and places at the center of history and narrative a mobile, agentive, and resilient subject who has been objectified by both the ideology of progress and the mythological, symbolic aesthetics of earlier, fifth-generation Chinese films. Jia’s alleged surrealism is more than a rhetorical device that highlights alienation and absurdity as it also foregrounds the revelatory and evocative potential of the ruins. As I will demonstrate, the surrealist images of the cable-walker and the river foreground a sense of continuity and slow mobility that overpowers the official discourse of acceleration and enclosure. The film thus transcends its socio-political context and constitutes a planetary reflection on issues of urban regeneration, mobility, and displacement.
- 4 Corey Kai Nelson Schultz, “Ruin in the Films of Jia Zhangke”, Visual Communication, vol. 15, no.4, (...)
- 5 Zhang, “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Vision”, pp. 332-44.
- 6 Zhang, “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Vision”, pp. 332-44.
- 7 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, London, Routledge, 2006.
4My reading of Jia’s film in light of spatial and mobility discourse also attempts to recontextualise the director’s work within a broader context of global urbanity. Existent scholarship on Still Life has paid little attention to theories of mobility, although the film is a rich reservoir of visual presentations of mobility. In his reading of Jia’s films, Corey Kai Nelson Schultz touches upon Tim Edensor’s conceptualisation of the act of walking in ruins.4 However, the phenomenological nuances of ruin-walking do not challenge Schultz’s ultimately realist and ideological conceptualisation of Jia’s ruinscape. Zhang Yingjin draws on the notion of liminality and spectrality to discuss Jia’s work, but again ignores the transcendental potentials inherent in these concepts.5 Although he connects Jia to contemporary psychogeography, he does not engage with the liberating potential of psychogeography and its creation of a sense of place that is temporary and transient rather than permanent and enduring. Zhang also identifies the motif of imagined mobility in Jia’s films, which foregrounds entrapment and stasis.6 However, in mobility studies, stasis means more than interruptive stoppage; it is also integral and indispensable to the flow of mobility infrastructures.7 As critics from China and abroad draw on urban theories to read Jia’s work, they somewhat overlook the inherently ambiguous nature of these urban concepts.
- 8 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, Massachusetts, (...)
- 9 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 3.
5In acknowledging a more transhistorical place consciousness in Jia’s works, what is at stake is also the future of China’s reality. What is a typical Chinese place and how do we relate to it? Is xiancheng (county-level zone between the urban and the countryside), an in-between generic area, really a non-place devoid of meaning and fundamentally unrelatable? Still Life opens up an interpretative space for Jia’s film aesthetics beyond realism and also creates a conceptual space for China’s xiancheng outside a dystopian nowhere. Xiancheng embodies characteristics reminiscent of Anthony Vidler’s uncanny suburb, both familiar and illegible, both homely and unhomely.8 For Vidler, the suburban uncanny reflects a postmodern proliferation of homogeneous non-places.9 Within Chinese urbanity, which is also infiltrated by forces of global capitalism, the sterility and conformity of xiancheng make it comparable to a Western suburban nowhere. Yet, as I argue in this article, Jia’s cinematic mapping of Fengjie’s ruinscape in Still Life features a slow mobility that allows these unhomely xiancheng places to be habitable and meaningful.
Jia’s (Sur)realist Aesthetics
- 10 Yomi Braester, “Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in t (...)
- 11 Shelly Kraicer, “Chinese Wasteland: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life”, Cinema Scope, vol. 29, 2006, p. 119.
- 12 Li Jie, “Home and Nation Amid the Rubble: Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town and Jia Zhangke’s Still L (...)
- 13 Zhang Hongbing, “Ruins and Grassroots: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontents in the Age of Globalizat (...)
- 14 Schultz, “Ruin”, pp. 439-60.
- 15 Dai, “Temporality”, pp. 67-90.
- 16 Zhang Xudong, “Poetics of Vanishing: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke”, New Left Review, vol. 63, 2010, pp (...)
- 17 Zhang, “Poetics”, pp. 71.
- 18 Zhang, “Poetics”, pp. 71-88.
6Jia’s reputation is inseparable from his persistent and uncompromising critical voice that continues to illuminate what has been suppressed and rendered unspeakable by the policing eye of the state. Critics have read the ruins in Still Life as “scars in spatial form left by traumatic events,”10 “enduring monuments that elegize and mock the transient follies of human strife and aspiration,”11 and a comment on homelessness as well as crisis in personal relationships.12 In his films, people trapped in ruins are “dwarfed by these enlarged mise-en-scenes and struggling futilely under their weight.”13 Jia’s surrealist touch in Still Life is usually interpreted within a realist register. It is read as a lament over an alien, estranged landscape that his characters cannot and will not inhabit, and a pessimist declaration of how the promised utopian future will never arrive.14 This temporal disjuncture is seen as a postmodern intervention that communicates an absurd and alienating effect in the speedy urbanisation of China’s post-socialist era, a symbolic representation of the spectral past that haunts the progressive narrative.15 Such readings of Jia’s ruinscape seems to be still grounded in a realist and documentary aesthetics that provides a cognitive mapping of the shabby, unshapely look of China’s reality in the underbelly of the state discourse of progression and modernisation in the post-socialist reform era.16 His concentrated gaze is seen as a “poetics of vanishing” that provides an epistemological framework to map a crude, formless reality, and to uncover the neglected and vanishing aspects in China’s reform era.17 Jia’s sense of place has also been understood to be grounded in xiancheng as an epitome of the chaotic and crude undercurrent of China’s reality. This is where his early works like Xiaowu (2000) and Unknown Pleasures (2003) are set, and later films such as 24 City (2008) and Mountains May Depart (2015) have also been read as offering a xiancheng outlook on the world.18
- 19 Corey Byrnes, “Specters of Realism and the Painter’s Gaze in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life”, Modern Chin (...)
- 20 Yiju Huang, “Loss and Absence in Still Life”, Senses of Cinema, 2022. http://www.sensesofcinema.com (...)
7The tendency to identify Jia as a dissident and place-bound observer of dystopian Chinese reality, however, misses some of the broader resonances and implications of his films and becomes particularly insufficient when it comes to Still Life. Corey Byrnes in his seminal study offers an important corrective to the realist framework through which Jia’s films are usually interpreted.19 By offering a close reading of Still Life, Byrnes traces the film’s debt to a wider traditional Chinese landscape aesthetics that is nonmimetic and nonrealistic. For Byrnes, Jia’s aesthetic style takes inspiration from and also inverts various strands of realism – Bazinian realism, socialist realism, and the realism of Chinese paintings and portraits. As Byrnes argues, Jia’s multiplanar, composite aesthetics allows him to integrate multiple visual and temporal realities in deep-focus shots and mobilise their interactions. Thus, he opens space for the characters to contemplate the disparate realities around them as his camera slowly and attentively moves across the landscape, generating a meditative and poetic mood that dignifies the characters’ plights. Yiju Huang’s reading also identifies a transhistorical dimension in Jia’s ruinscape. Drawing on trauma theories, Huang argues that the loss of home caused by the Sanxia dam project represents what Dominick LaCapra calls “structural trauma,” an existential absence rather than historical loss. For Huang, the film thus transcends a fixed ideological standpoint of mourning, or what Svetlana Boym calls “restorative nostalgia.”20
8The central importance of Still Life for these new scholarly voices, which identify a transhistorical and contemplative dimension in Jia’s work, is not accidental. Indeed, the film stands out from other works in Jia’s oeuvre for its visual plasticity and bold insertion of surrealist images. This surrealist tendency persists in his later film Mountains May Depart (China, 2015), where it is manifested in a scene in which the female protagonist Tao seems to hear her son’s call across the Pacific Ocean. However, the surrealist elements in Still Life, compared to Mountains May Depart, more prominently and forcefully puncture the film’s realist temporality, with more profound political implications. Byrnes’s study of the formal hybridity of Jia’s aesthetics is a helpful point of departure for my own reading of the landscape in Still Life through spatial and mobility theory, which further complicates the realist readings of Jia’s work.
Infrastructural Mobility and Personal Mobility
9Two different modes of mobility are in dialogue with each other in Still Life: infrastructural mobility and personal mobility. The huge viaduct that looms over the film is a prime example of mobility infrastructure centered around modernisation on a national scale. One official visiting the viaduct in the film comments on it as follows: “Turning the deep chasm into a thoroughfare, have you turned Chairman Mao’s dream into reality?” The line he quotes is taken from the second stanza of Mao’s poem “Swimming”:
- 21 Mao Tse-tung, Nineteen Poems, translated by Andrew Boyd, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1958, pp (...)
A bridge will fly to span the north and south,
turning a deep chasm into a thoroughfare.
Walls of stones will stand upstream to the west,
to hold back Wushan’s clouds and rain,
till a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges.
The mountain goddess if she is still there,
will marvel at a world so changed.21
- 22 Elleke Boehmer and Davies Dominic (eds.), Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures, Li (...)
- 23 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994.
- 24 Michael Rubenstein, Bruce Robbins and Sophia Beal, “Infrastructuralism”, Modern Fiction Studies, vo (...)
- 25 Colin Mcfarlane and Alex Vasudevan, “Informal infrastructures”, in Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin (...)
10Mao’s poem demonstrates the neophilia and technophilia prevalent in China’s socialist era, when the dominant discourse of progress reinforced by state power gave birth to industrial constructions, especially mega-infrastructures. The bridge materialises the fantasy of reversing natural forces and drastically changing the landscape through technological means. In the official discourse, the dam, a stoppage in the course of the river, transports the nation to a future of prosperity. However, what belies the glamor of these technologically-enhanced infrastructures is their planned violence towards disenfranchised parts of the population.22 Infrastructure is immediately and inevitably political; the mobility of some is based on the immobility of others.23 Thus, towards the end of the film, boss He, the owner of a small guesthouse that hosts Han upon his arrival in the gorges, is forced to move into a hole in a timeworn bridge after his property along the river has been demolished, which forms an ironic contrast to the state-built viaduct. The arrangement of infrastructures and mobility facilities and the use of space are shaped by power relations. In other words, infrastructure collides and overlaps with structures of social class.24 Unlike formal housing, temporary houses, abandoned public areas, or slum neighborhoods are rarely protected by laws and regulations.25 Boss He’s bridge home represents a type of such informal housing, while the viaduct benefits the kinetic elites and deprives the socially vulnerable groups of their right to move.
- 26 David Bissell and Gillian Fuller (eds.), Stillness in a Mobile World, London, Routledge, 2011.
11The film thus explores the lived spaces of those on the lower rungs of society and their restricted mobility, exposing the planned violence exerted on marginalised people. In one scene, we see a car driving on the expressway with the glamorous viaduct in the background, epitomising the way in which mobility infrastructure looms over the landscape, the narrative, and the protagonists of Still Life. As part of the supporting mobility infrastructure of the Three Gorges Project, the motorway and the viaduct are two symbols of progress. The dislocation of the dwellers is centrally planned and orchestrated by an invisible network that revolves around the national discourse of modernisation. The countless migrating citizens are driven by an incomprehensible force bigger than themselves. In depicting these disoriented crowds, the film highlights their helplessness and passivity as they are at a loss about the large-scale contexts of their displacement, drawing attention to their lack of agency within the system of mobility infrastructure.26
- 27 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”, Environment and Planning. A, vol. 38, no (...)
12However, the nature of mobility is to create links in stoppages, and Still Life repeatedly complicates the supposed immobility and lack of agency of its protagonists. Mobility and stagnation, connection and isolation are inseparable; stagnation and fracture both hinder and generate mobility.27 In Jia’s film, the mobility infrastructure has caused the separation of people and now prompts the two protagonists to establish contacts with local culture. Han and Shen use less prestigious, local means of transportation, such as motorcycles, bicycles, and boats, to look for their partners in the Three Gorges area. They create a different mode of mobility that largely relies on chance and contingency. Their mobility is random and nonlinear, creating a messy and varied topology with uncertain boundaries, full of setbacks and pitfalls. Different from the rigidity of infrastructural mobility, the topology created by personal mobility covers a multitude of people and spaces. The personalised landscape they traverse forms a contrast to the repeated panoramic shots that display urban progress, modernisation, and large-scale change.
Walking the Ruins
- 28 Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City”, in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Lond (...)
13The personal mobility of Jia’s protagonists also manifests itself through walking the ruins, which gives them an agency that is absent from their automated existence in an infrastructural flow. In “Walking in the City”, Michel de Certeau offers two opposing views of New York City, a view from the World Trade Center and an intimate view from the street.28 In the first view, New York is a concept that belongs to an architect. It is only when one descends onto the street that the city belongs to the mass of pedestrians and inundates their senses. For de Certeau, walkers are authors that write transitory stories as they move about. Jia’s cinematic creation of space in Still Life takes the mode of a slow, half-conscious street-level walker. Both Han and Shen come to Fengjie not to witness its changes or do sightseeing, but to find their spouses. Han does not notice Kuimen, a famous tourist site on his way to Fengjie. He does not even seem to be aware of the Sanxia project until the motorcycle driver takes him to his wife’s old address now submerged in water. Shen also hardly pays any attention to the scenery on the tourist cruise. In this sense, they are outsiders and somewhat distracted and insensitive readers of space. The landscape that unfolds in front of their eyes does not align with the nostalgic sentimentality felt by those who are going to lose their homes. The emotional distance that forestalls identification with the land as home also delays its ideological conceptualisation as a traumatic site. For Han and Shen, the land is simply nowhere. Stripping off the historical, ideological, and aesthetic meanings that are often associated with the place and refashioning it as a nowhere in an outsider’s indifferent eye, Jia creates a perceptual space that allows the readers to be disoriented and detached. Divorced from nostalgia and victimhood, both walkers and viewers are urged to interpret it and relate to it in new ways.
- 29 See Patrick Barron and Manuela Mariani (eds.), Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, (...)
- 30 Barron and Mariani, Terrain Vague, p. 1.
- 31 Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, Oxford, Berg, 1995, pp. 166-7.
14The ruinscape of Fengjie is thus a post-apocalyptic site where previous spatial and temporal registers are removed. However, more than a signifier of moral decay, spiritual desolation, and nostalgia, the ruins also have a liberating effect as they dismantle the usual geometries, rhythms, and spatial relations within which we place ourselves. Mutable, ephemeral, and difficult to delineate, they are a non-zone, an illegible text that begs remapping. In this sense, they are a terrain vague, indeterminate, interstitial, and thus full of potentials for improvised reinventions.29 Surveyed by the walker’s improvisational and impractical routes, the terrain vague unveils, in unexpected, unplanned moments, its “fragmented shared history30 or “forgotten forms of collectivity and solidarity”31 that escape everyday work or home routines. Going through demolition for the anticipated flooding, the town of Fengjie is a terrain vague par excellence. It is both marginal to the gorges and inseparable from them. Destructed into ruins, these sites appear strange and mosaic-like, without fixed contours or structures. The disfigured geometry confuses Han’s sense of location but is also generative. Thus, his disoriented and unplanned walking leads him to rescue Xiaoma, who has been beaten up and discarded in a ruined site. The creation of new stories and relations in a ruined landscape is also performed filmically, notably in Han’s purely cinematic encounter with Shen Hong, which has a strong surreal appeal. In a long take, Han is looking at the river when a UFO appears from the left. As the camera follows the UFO to the right, we hear the eerie electronic music by Lim Giong that often accompanies the film’s surrealist moments. A sudden cut takes us to Shen Hong in a different space, making her first appearance in the film. She also looks towards the UFO that appears on her left and follows it to the right until it disappears. The out-of-placeness of the UFO both triggers our imagination of the future and links the two protagonists although they are in separate locations. The surrealist intervention hints at the magical appeal of the landscape, opening it up to complex spatio-temporal dimensions and alternative narrative possibilities. Like Shen’s visit to the archeological site where her friend Dongming works, the scene exposes the inherent historicity and futurity of the landscape, invisible in our everyday habitation of the land.
- 32 Edensor, Industrial Ruins, p. 166.
- 33 Mikita Brottman, “Apocalypse in Surburbia”, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 3, 2003, pp. 8-2 (...)
15Han’s and Shen’s journey to find their estranged spouses are filled with setbacks, dead ends, and unbearable periods of waiting. However, trapped in these non-zones of wreckage, the two characters’ walking also leads them to a string of surreal scenarios that expose the dysfunctional aspects of urban organisation. In Han’s first day working as a demolisher, he suddenly sees a group of firefighters in white costume spraying disinfectant on the ruins, an act that seems absurdly futile. The eerie music in the background also suggests the occurrence to be uncommon. To more perceptive viewers, the surreal episode unveils the problematic ways in which the state decants and sanitises the land for instrumental use. As Edensor argues, walking in the ruins causes us to question normative ways of urban organisation.32 Indeed, the critical and revelatory content of the scene is tied to Han’s navigation of the land. The apocalyptic destruction in the ruins gives us a glimpse of what is seething and imploding underneath the surface reality.33 The ruins caused by the Sanxia project bring about such post-apocalyptic introspection in Still Life. As such, Jia’s surreal sequences call forth a synthetic impulse to weave together disparate temporalities, spaces, and realities, as well as a phenomenological reading of space in perpetual becoming.
- 34 Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, London, Verso, 2008.
16 As the post-apocalyptic ruinscape removes established boundaries and calls for cognitive reorganisation, walking sets up personal routines that map out the (possible) contours of a new space of home. Thus, Han traverses the derelict buildings and industrial sites, turning the neighborhood into his family. His journey thereby also discloses how people form short-term yet meaningful relations with what Marc Augé calls “non-places,” temporary abodes and transit points such as motorways, bridges, elevators, hotels, or shopping malls.34 According to Augé, these spaces are marked by anonymity, isolation, and emptiness; they are incapable of generating relations or constructing identities. However, in Still Life, different modes of mobility intersect in these buffer zones, which are home to underprivileged groups. In a scene where Han visits boss He’s new bridge home, the camera pans across a collection of domestic objects, pots, cups, towels, and a board that says “Tang Dynasty Pavilion Guesthouse,” revealing that these are He’s personal belongings. The camera continues to follow Han as he walks into a dark hall, calling out to He that he is coming to see the latter’s new home. The two then sit down in a medium shot, exchanging friendly greetings. It is only in the following long shot of He waving goodbye to Han under an arch in the bridge that the viewers realise the location of He’s new abode. The belated revelation and the quotidian homeliness highlighted throughout the scene normalise He’s unusual residence in a bridge and dignify his situation. In a later scene in which Han visit’s his wife Yaomei’s boat where she works and lives, the composition and sound also depict a domestic set-up. In a long shot of Yaomei’s boat parking in a dock, she takes Han’s coat and hangs it on a log along with her clothes and bed sheets, with geese running around near her feet. The two then sit down at a table next to a basket of vegetables, where they catch up after sixteen years of separation. The curtain in the background blocks a big section of the river, creating a sense of shelter and a homely ambience. In these scenes, the boat and the bridge, two spaces usually associated with transition and emptiness, become places for long-term dwelling and emotional reunion.
- 35 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 80.
- 36 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no.1, Autumn 2001, pp. 1-22.
17Another way that people dwell in the ruined (non-)places is through a corporeal relation to and creative use of waste materials. From a phenomenological perspective, dwelling is a form of demarcation we draw to assert ourselves against unknown space, and an organisation of surrounding chaos through material appropriation.35 The characters in the film constantly reuse waste to construct habitable places. Immediately following the UFO episode and prolonging its surrealist appeal, a series of close-ups shows four discarded objects: a rusty pipe, a glove, a fan, and bricks dripping rusty water like blood. These shots connect with an aesthetic strategy that runs through the film: the camera often lingers on the ruinscape at the end of a shot after the humans have left the frame. These long and static shots liberate the used objects from their everyday contexts and bestow an inhuman permanence on them, a secret life of primary materiality that defies its cultural categorisation as “waste.” The audience is enticed to ponder on what Bill Brown calls the amorphous and intelligible thingness at the core of cultural objects that only emerges when they stop working for us.36
- 37 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966.
- 38 Tim Dant, Material Culture in the Social World: Values, Activities, Lifestyles, Buckingham, Open Un (...)
18For Brown, this inherent thingness allows cultural debris to be repurposed, animated, and revived in acts of “bricolage,” a term Lévi-Strauss uses to describe a re-use of familiar materials to fulfill new purposes.37 Tim Dant similarly argues that bricolage shapes everyday habits and routines.38 We derive meaning, construct identities, and form social relations through the act of keeping, arranging, and relating to objects. In a mise-en-scene that recurs in the film, the workers’ bodies are embedded in industrial machinery and waste. Their dwelling animates the ruinscape and transforms it into a space of home. In one scene, Shen walks through a demolition site. In the background, we see the workers swinging sledgehammers in various corners of a huge steel architecture, turning it into a loud, half-human and half-mechanical body. The enlivened state of materiality is also evident in a scene where the workers’ bodies are inserted into brick walls like tenacious plants growing out of concrete crevices. The corporeal nature of their labour in a hands-on, painstaking, brick-by-brick demolition process creates a form of symbiosis between their bodies and inhuman architectural bodies. In these shots, the workers are not passive victims dwarfed by the terrifying sublime of debris. Instead, the ruins have become extensions of their bodies.
- 39 Dai, “Temporality”, pp. 67-90.
19Another example of repurposed objects reused for home-making as well as emotional bondage can be found in the four artefacts that serve as the four chapter titles of the film: liquor (烟), tobacco (酒), tea (茶) and candy (糖), all of which commonly function as small gifts or luxuries circulating in Chinese society. For Dai, the social, catalytic, and connective power of these cultural artefacts has been replaced by money.39 At the beginning of the film, Han is dragged into a circus tent to watch a magic show where the performer remarks “if you want to float on water, you need US dollars” and turns white paper into dollar and RMB bills. In Chinese society, liquor, tobacco, tea, and candy have lost much of their original function as social bonds and lubricants to money and in that sense become cultural debris. However, throughout the film, Han reuses them to connect with residents and fellow demolition workers. For instance, he constantly treats Xiaoma, the young man he has rescued, to liquor and food. In a heartwarming scene, Han sits among a gang of demolition workers who have almost become Han’s family and passes them cigarettes. In a series of medium shots, the camera slowly pans to scrutinise the naked upper bodies of the workers and highlight their vigor and comradery as they smoke and toast to each other in an oath to team up in coalmining in Shanxi.
- 40 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W. D. (...)
20Still Life thus reanimates the gift economy that has been suppressed by modernity but, as the French sociologist Marcel Mauss noted in 1925, still haunts capitalist society.40 Han’s dispensation of small gifts revives the affective bonds that are inherent in material reciprocation but suppressed in monetary transactions. The suppressed link between monetary transactions and gift-giving is evident in the fact that both serve to reconnect Han with his wife: after Han promises to take her back home by paying her current protector 30,000 RMB, the couple walk side by side through a jungle of dilapidated buildings and trees, before they reach an empty room with a giant opening in the wall. As Han squats in a corner, Yaomei hands him a dabaitu, a chewy milk candy. Attracted by the loud sound of a collapsing building outside the wall, they stand up and look out together. The broken wall serves as a window, and the abandoned room turns into a temporary shelter that protects them from the risky, uncertain world outside. The sharing of candy and the improvised dwelling in the ruins thus work together in reasserting social and affective bonds.
Figure 2. Han Sangming and his wife in a dilapidated building. Jia Zhangke (dir.), Still Life, 2006.
21Another scene in which one of the four artefacts of the chapter titles is linked to home-making occurs towards the end of the film when Han discovers Xiaoma’s dead body. The scene starts with Han calling Xiaoma in a half-ruined building when the demolition work is delayed by heavy rain. As Xiaoma’s ringtone is heard from under a pile of bricks, Han runs over and starts digging while calling on others to help. After this, we see a long shot of a broken wall with a square opening which contains Xiaoma’s dead body lying flat under a red duvet, as if he were sleeping. In a close-up, we see Han placing three lit cigarettes as incense in front of a photo of Xiaoma on a memorial altar made of bricks. Han’s re-use or bricolage of cigarettes and bricks revives their connective and communicative power and turns the ruined space into a kind of home.
- 41 Erik Bordeleau, “Jia’s Zhangke’s Still Life: Destruction as Intercession”, Scapegoat: Architecture/ (...)
22Alongside reviving a primal sense of homemaking in the urban wasteland and the spirit of gift-exchange in commodified social interaction, walking also resurrects a deep time-space and the slow mobility of natural forces embedded in the land, which outlives temporary political impositions. Thus, walking in Still Life creates openings into a seemingly lost past and a denied future. In a scene where Dongming, Shen’s friend, takes her to his room, the camera pans across a disorderly assortment of watches and clocks, a visual symbol of temporal disjunction.41 In another scene, Han is waiting for Xiaoma at the dinner table. As he stands up and looks to the left where Xiaoma is supposed to sit, the camera pans left and reveals four actors in full Peking Opera costumes and make-up, each absorbed in their handheld video games. Their spectral presence both hints at a waning traditional culture and obliquely heralds the death of Xiaoma, who is also absorbed in the virtuality of 1980s Hong Kong cinema. In the already mentioned iconic scene most closely associated with Jia’s surrealist impulse, an enormous monument bearing the shape of the Chinese character “Hua” (華), which means China, ascends into outer space. The grotesque architecture is more than a symbol of a future that is unreachable and uninhabitable. As a monument to the dislocated people of Sanxia, it is first presented behind Shen as a grim silhouette in the background, a spectral symbol of the past. In the context of her fruitless day of searching for her husband, it also represents entrapment and the liminal state of waiting. After Shen leaves the frame, however, its miraculous launch into the sky is a testament both to her departure from the balcony and to her departure with her husband in the following scene. The monument, which signifies Shen’s attachment to the past, departs to an unknown space with an elegant lightness, symbolising her letting go of a heavy episode of the past.
- 42 Dai, “Temporality”, pp. 67-90.
- 43 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, Duke UP, 1991.
- 44 Mark Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology”, Dancecult: Journal of Elect (...)
23The temporal disjuncture in these scenes gives the film a postmodern touch,42 but I would suggest that the uncanny effect in these shots sets them apart from ahistorical postmodern interventions. Fredric Jameson argues that postmodern pastiche flattens history and reduces it to simulacra that are freely and seamlessly woven into the present, without ironic or subversive intents.43 For Jameson, the way that postmodern pastiche blurs contemporaneity showcases the waning of historicity. As Mark Fisher points out, postmodernist pastiche only demonstrates a formal attachment to traditional styles without real yearning for the past. In comparison, “hauntology art” is an art style that focuses on the remnants of history, culture, and society. By recombining and reconstructing the forgotten or abandoned past, it explores the complexity of contemporary culture and identity. For Fisher, Afrofuturist music is a typical representative of hauntology art. This kind of music foregrounds a form of “dyschronia” by preserving the jarring crackles in an old recording, and the “metaphysics of crackles” restores a sense of historicity lost in the endless production of simulacra. Thus, it opens a trajectory to the future which has been cancelled out in the temporal flatness or finitude of postmodernity.44 Jia’s surreal shots, too, manifest an unsettling dyschronia. The eerie extradiegetic sounds that accompany them function in a similar way as the metaphysics of crackles, countering the temporal acceleration in China’s progressive discourses. The film’s surreal moments disrupt temporal, spatial, and narrative continuity; the past returns with a jarring noise, and the future sparkles with an ethereal light in outer space.
- 45 Dai, “Temporality”, p. 76.
- 46 Dai, “Temporality”, p. 77.
24Another past that returns in Jia’s spatial text is China’s socialist ideology. As Dai observes, the Sanxia project is a repetition of Mao’s dream to compress time and condense the Western history of modernisation into a few decades. Far from a rupture from Mao’s era, the post-socialist reform era is “deeply, intimately and directly intertwined with it.”45 The Sanxia project thus embodies the uncanny return of past socialist ideology. Jia documents this return in several moments. For example, Han misrecognises Mao on a ten-yuan note when he tries to find Kuimen. In another scene, as the camera follows Shen to her husband’s previous workplace, we see a shot of the portraits of socialist leaders on the wall before the camera tilts down to reveal the angry workers confronting the union leader. By tying the Sanxia project to China’s socialist past, the film draws attention to the fact that state-mandated accelerated modernisation, wreaking havoc on landscapes and people, has occurred many times in Chinese history. Dai notes that the representation of rapid change in fifth-generation Chinese films goes hand in hand with a “subjectless film.”46 In Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth (1984), for example, the agentive subject is replaced by the undisguised film camera, which becomes the subject of the gaze and the narrator of history. The characters become prisoners to their environments, unable to break free from the land and the environmental constraints it represents.
25While post-socialist ideology and the subjectless films of the fifth generation unconsciously re-enact the past, Jia’s recognition of the past highlights its uncanny return. In a striking shot of workers and dilapidated buildings flattened into a silhouette in Still Life, the subjectless film narrative briefly returns. It is the only shot that seems to betray Jia’s multiplanar aesthetics. Here the depth of field that foregrounds corporeal beauty elsewhere is canceled. The workers’ bodies are unrecognisable, characterless, and enmeshed into the building like a ghostly shadow, an enigmatic symbol and illegible mark. The mythological, symbolic undertones of the shot and its aesthetic singularity, I would suggest, indicate an uncanny return of the mythological, symbolic, and subjectless fifth-generation film aesthetics.
26Countering the ideological narrative of national progress that renders individuals disposable as well as the mythological fifth-generation film aesthetics where individuals become objects rather than subjects of the filmic gaze, Jia in Still Life creates a walking subject embedded within the film’s multilayered space-in-transformation, allowing the viewer to observe it with them. This reaches its apex in the last shot of the film, in which Han watches a shadowy figure crossing the gorges on a steel cable. The silhouette of the cable-walker is implanted within Han’s field of vision as he leaves Fengjie and goes back to his coalmining work. Here Jia does not simply sneak the cable-walker into the background as another plane of reality undisruptive of the protagonist in the foreground, an aesthetic strategy otherwise common in the film. Han’s repeated look at the cable-walker signifies a meaningful moment of self-identification that reveals their ontological parallels. Rather than blurring contemporaneity and flattening historicity like fifth-generation directors, Jia contains the past, the present, and the future in one frame while preserving their inconsistency and dialogue.
- 47 Steve Connor, “Man is A Rope”, Steven Connor, 11 April – 24 May, 2008. http://stevenconnor.com/rope (...)
27The cable-walker is a parabolic figure linked to Han’s and the Chinese labourers’ states of being. Through walking, the fragile footsteps animate the elegant rope into a life-sustaining device and a synthetic thread that sutures the gap between the past and the present, the human and the natural. An archetypal solitary urban walker, mapping the distant land in microsteps and crossing the river of time in micromoments, takes back the right to be the subject of history and narrative. As Steve Connor notes, wire-walking “thickens the infinitesimally thin itinerary of the wire into a habitat” and its destiny is “an indefinite deferral of destination.”47 The mobility of wire-walking is not functional but performative. The exercise of human agency is process-oriented rather than purpose-oriented. The solitary walker is a metaphor for each dislocated immigrant in the age of globalised mobility who performs their agency as they improvise individual itineraries. The steady footsteps and incessant searching also rewrite the vast landscape as a collaborative text and collective site that outlasts ideological impositions. Trodden by a parabolic walker, the landscape turns into a parabolic site shaped by collective mobility. The slow mobility of walking serves to loosen and open up the land that is enclosed and privatised by the state, returning it to the commons.
Conclusion: A Planetary Contemplation of Urban Change
- 48 Laura Grace Ford, “A Visionary Sense of London”, British Art Studios, vol. 15, 2019. https://britis (...)
28Through acts of walking, Jia’s ruinscape in Still Life enables alternative ways of perceiving, dwelling, and imagining the future. As Laura Grace Ford describes in her psychogeographical account of walking in London, each remembrance and evocation of the past immediately performs a type of sorcery that points to the future.48 Jia’s remembrance of what is going to be eradicated does not embalm the past into permanence. Rather, he weaves the past into the present in a mobile text that implicates the future. The fluid nature of the ruinscape heralds the futility and future entropy of instrumental planning. It not only unveils a neglected undertext of destruction behind construction, loss behind progress, but also evokes an ongoing, constant mode of slow mobility that defies the country’s accelerated march into the future, and a circular repetition of time that defies linear progression. With its parabolic quality, the walking represents a force that is constant in the drastic change of time, like the river with its immanent mobility.
29Indeed, the river is another manifestation of this slow mobility that is largely unnoticed as a backdrop to human activities. A silent, still, and nondiscursive absent presence in the film, it articulates a hidden planetary power that subverts the human utilisation of nature. In the sequence where Shen takes a tourist cruise after her departure with her husband, the camera first offers a panoramic shot of the Sanxia landscape. The narration of the tour guide cites a poem by Tang-dynasty poet Li Bai (701-762 CE) in which the poet marvels at the speedy travel through the gorges on a light raft. In doing so, the film alludes to the use of poetry to mythologise the Three Gorges Project in official discourse, but it also evokes the river’s transportive mobility that has been lasting for millennia. In the following shot, a TV screen plays historical footage of political figures – Sun, Mao, and Deng – with the tourists out of focus and occupying only a small corner of the screen in the background while the narration continues to describe the Sanxia project as the dream of several generations of Chinese leaders. Yet the film disrupts this display of official rhetoric by cutting to Shen drinking a bottle of water with the river in the background; the electronic soundtrack comes back on, again creating an uncanny effect that is associated with a sense of futurity. The river, which breeds new life and carries dead bodies, experiences temporary stoppages but eventually flows on; as such, it has a more permanent presence than humanity on a planetary scale.
- 49 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, (...)
- 50 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet Is a Political Orphan”, Noema, 2022, https://www.noemamag.com/the-p (...)
30Like the river, which is presented as an almost cosmic force that transcends human-induced transformations of the land, the image of the UFO gives the changing local landscape a cosmic significance. The film thus contemplates the drastically altered landscapes from a planetary perspective beyond the human temporal scale, as if engaging in what Fredric Jameson terms “archaeologies of the future.”49 By portraying the drastic mutations of the earth’s surface caused by the Three Gorges Dam as an awe-inspiring spectacle, however, Jia also reminds us that human beings have become, as Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, a planetary and geophysical force.50 The Three Gorges Dam has altered the geophysical outlook of the planet with unpredictable consequences. An explicit expression of this planetary awareness is the song “Any Old Wine Bottles for Sale?” in a performance that Han watches with his coworkers near the end of the film:
No earth without heaven !
No home without earth !
No you without home !
No me without you !
31The doctrine of heaven (tiān) and earth (dì) is an important concept in Chinese philosophy. It calls for oneness with the natural world and the cosmos, without which human beings are bound to perish. As the reference to tiān dì in the song suggests, Jia’s meditation on the problems of urban mobility exceeds its national context; his preoccupations with dislocation are framed by an acknowledgment of man’s oneness with the planet. Bridging the gap between realist documentation and surrealist imagination, Still Life portrays the landscape of the Three Gorges beyond its political and geographical context; its impact on humanity is more widely conceptualised as a planetary issue.
32While the Chinese title of the film, which literally translates as “The Good People of the Three Gorges,” has a moral undertone, the reference to still life paintings in the English title highlights the seemingly inert and immobile quality of the film’s human and non-human subjects (the protagonists; the river). Yet Still Lives complicates their status as passive objects transformed and displaced by gigantic mobility infrastructure. By foregrounding their movement on the ground through an aesthetics of slow mobility, and by puncturing the realist narrative with surrealist interventions that open the present to both the past and the future, the film offers an alternative both to the national myth of modernisation and to nostalgic narratives of loss. The ontology of still lives in Jia’s film is thus also a Derridean hauntology, a being that is defined not by what is present, but what is virtual and haunting. As a method of analysing history and culture, hauntology reveals the impact and significance of forgotten and neglected cultural remnants and historical phenomena in modern society through their reconstruction and deconstruction. The film indeed offers a poetics of still lives, whose permanent yet reticent, ubiquitous yet invisible, immobilised yet slowly mobile presence haunts our dreams of technological progress and urges us towards a planetary reflection on urban regeneration and human displacement.
Notes
1 See, for instance, Brooke Wilmsen, “After the Deluge: A Longitudinal Study of Resettlement at the Three Gorges Dam, China”, World Development, vol. 84, 2016, pp. 41-54.
2 Katiana Le Mentec, “The Three Gorges Dam and the Demiurges: The Story of a Failed Contemporary Myth Elaboration in China”, Water History, vol. 6, 2014, pp. 385-403.
3 Dai Jinghua, “Temporality, Nature Morte, and the Filmmaker: A Reconsideration of Still Life”, translated by Lennet Daigle, in Dai Jinhua, After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History, Durham, Duke UP, 2018, pp. 67-90.
4 Corey Kai Nelson Schultz, “Ruin in the Films of Jia Zhangke”, Visual Communication, vol. 15, no.4, 2016, pp. 439-60.
5 Zhang, “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Vision”, pp. 332-44.
6 Zhang, “Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Vision”, pp. 332-44.
7 Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, London, Routledge, 2006.
8 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1994.
9 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 3.
10 Yomi Braester, “Tracing the City’s Scars: Demolition and the Limits of the Documentary Impulse in the New Urban Cinema”, in Zhen Zhang (ed.), Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, Durham, Duke UP, 2007, p. 162.
11 Shelly Kraicer, “Chinese Wasteland: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life”, Cinema Scope, vol. 29, 2006, p. 119.
12 Li Jie, “Home and Nation Amid the Rubble: Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town and Jia Zhangke’s Still Life”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 21, no.2, 2009, pp. 86-125.
13 Zhang Hongbing, “Ruins and Grassroots: Jia Zhangke’s Cinematic Discontents in the Age of Globalization”, In Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi (eds.), Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge, Hong Kong, Hong Kong UP, 2009, pp. 129-53.
14 Schultz, “Ruin”, pp. 439-60.
15 Dai, “Temporality”, pp. 67-90.
16 Zhang Xudong, “Poetics of Vanishing: The Cinema of Jia Zhangke”, New Left Review, vol. 63, 2010, pp. 71-88.
17 Zhang, “Poetics”, pp. 71.
18 Zhang, “Poetics”, pp. 71-88.
19 Corey Byrnes, “Specters of Realism and the Painter’s Gaze in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 24, no. 2, 2012, pp. 52-93.
20 Yiju Huang, “Loss and Absence in Still Life”, Senses of Cinema, 2022. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2022/feature-articles/loss-and-absence-in-still-life/ , accessed 3 April 2023.
21 Mao Tse-tung, Nineteen Poems, translated by Andrew Boyd, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1958, pp. 28, l. 13-19.
22 Elleke Boehmer and Davies Dominic (eds.), Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures, Literature and Culture, Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
23 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1994.
24 Michael Rubenstein, Bruce Robbins and Sophia Beal, “Infrastructuralism”, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61, no.4, 2015, pp. 575-86.
25 Colin Mcfarlane and Alex Vasudevan, “Informal infrastructures”, in Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman and Mimi Sheller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, London, Routledge, 2014, pp. 276-284.
26 David Bissell and Gillian Fuller (eds.), Stillness in a Mobile World, London, Routledge, 2011.
27 Mimi Sheller and John Urry, “The New Mobilities Paradigm”, Environment and Planning. A, vol. 38, no.2, 2006, pp. 207-26.
28 Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City”, in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, London, University of California Press, 1984, pp. 91-110.
29 See Patrick Barron and Manuela Mariani (eds.), Terrain Vague: Interstices at the Edge of the Pale, London, Routledge, 2013, pp. 2-3.
30 Barron and Mariani, Terrain Vague, p. 1.
31 Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, Oxford, Berg, 1995, pp. 166-7.
32 Edensor, Industrial Ruins, p. 166.
33 Mikita Brottman, “Apocalypse in Surburbia”, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 3, 2003, pp. 8-20.
34 Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, London, Verso, 2008.
35 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, London, Routledge, 2005, p. 80.
36 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no.1, Autumn 2001, pp. 1-22.
37 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966.
38 Tim Dant, Material Culture in the Social World: Values, Activities, Lifestyles, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1999.
39 Dai, “Temporality”, pp. 67-90.
40 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, translated by W. D. Halls, London, Routledge, 1990, p. 87.
41 Erik Bordeleau, “Jia’s Zhangke’s Still Life: Destruction as Intercession”, Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 26-9.
42 Dai, “Temporality”, pp. 67-90.
43 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, Duke UP, 1991.
44 Mark Fisher, “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology”, Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, vol. 5, no.2, 2013, pp. 42-55.
45 Dai, “Temporality”, p. 76.
46 Dai, “Temporality”, p. 77.
47 Steve Connor, “Man is A Rope”, Steven Connor, 11 April – 24 May, 2008. http://stevenconnor.com/rope.html , accessed 5 January 2023.
48 Laura Grace Ford, “A Visionary Sense of London”, British Art Studios, vol. 15, 2019. https://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-15/visionary-sense-of-london , accessed 3 April 2023.
49 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London, Verso, 2005.
50 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Planet Is a Political Orphan”, Noema, 2022, https://www.noemamag.com/the-planet-is-a-political-orphan/, accessed 5 January 2023.
Haut de pageTable des illustrations
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| Légende | Figure 1. The lit viaduct over the three gorges. Jia Zhangke (dir.), Still Life, 2006. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2145/img-1.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 166k |
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| Légende | Figure 2. Han Sangming and his wife in a dilapidated building. Jia Zhangke (dir.), Still Life, 2006. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2145/img-2.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 94k |
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| Légende | Figure 3. Architectural ‘Hua’ launching into outer space. Jia Zhangke (dir.), Still Life, 2006. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2145/img-3.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 208k |
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| Légende | Figure 4. Silhouette of demolition workers. Jia Zhangke (dir.), Still Life, 2006. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2145/img-4.png |
| Fichier | image/png, 265k |
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| Légende | Figure 5. Han Sanming watching a cable-walker. Jia Zhangke (dir.), Still Life, 2006. |
| URL | http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/docannexe/image/2145/img-5.jpg |
| Fichier | image/jpeg, 47k |
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Chan Du, « Poetics of Still Lives: Rewalking the Ruinscape of Still Life (English version) », Transtext(e)s Transcultures 跨文本跨文化 [En ligne], 17 | 2022, mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2022, consulté le 19 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transtexts/2145 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transtexts.2145
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