Images

Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life took a long time to get to the Bay Area. The film, which won the Grand Prize at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, screened a few times at the SF International Film Festival last week (a belated offering) before sitting tight for a weeklong run at the Roxie which ends tomorrow. I went Tuesday night with my friend Ian, and the print we happily watched had evidently been around the block a few times. But I do not wish to write about presentation so much as resonance.

Cinema, especially cinema which integrates documentary technique as with Jia’s Still Life, has the strange capacity to be both indelibly marked by a fixed moment (setting, color, actors’ faces etc etc) and evocative of an ongoing consciousness or reality. This is something I think about a lot watching Pedro Costa’s movies, the way they frankly upset our unhesitant assumptions of historical linearity and a recognizable continuum of narration/perspective/judgment. Still Life isn’t nearly so thorny. I saw Jia’s Useless at Vancouver last fall and its elegant laterality has stuck with me since—the scope of the film resembled that of a ranging social documentary (documenting the fashion industry by representing a star designer, tailors, garment laborers) but at a poetic remove. I was expecting the long floating camera movements and continuous compositions in Still Life, though I was still surprised by just how Antonioni-esque it is. But where Antonioni’s figures are existential drifters, Jia’s are actual migrants—a more physically vivid vision of dislocation. Both directors like the idea of a fruitless search and both find something colossal in ruins and large-scale urban decay, but Still Life’s lament isn’t airless in the same way as Red Desert or L’eclisse.

There is much to write about Still Life—its loose, but not untethered narrative structure; its surprising musicality (some scenes reminded me of Chaplin’s Modern Times, of all things); its delicate balancing of allegory. But having seen Jia Zhang-ke’s film when I did, I am not thinking of these things as much as its resonance with the news of the Sichuan earthquake. The film’s images—composed in form; raw in subject—looped in my mind along with the radio reports so that they now seem inseparable to me. The smoke in newspaper photographs seem patterned after Jia’s own inchoate mise-en-scene. Part of all this simply has to do with when I happened to see the movie. Would I be thinking about it so much if I had seen Still Life? Probably not. But I’m also inclined to think that this convergence is indicative of the latent power of a filmmaker who is able to melt lyricism and realism, who is able to simultaneously represent and reflect.

The first two photographs below are stills from Jia’s movie; the second two are from the Times slideshow on the earthquake.

Asides: I want to thank both Michael Guillen and Brian Darr for their flattering mentions. I find both of their blogs invaluable in my own work as a film writer and so greatly appreciate their welcome. Last, I want to make a special mention of kino21’s three-part series of Warren Sonbert films starting tomorrow evening at SF Camerawork. We have Konrad Steiner and Johnny Ray Huston to thank for the short survey; they were both kind enough to write long responses to some questions I had about Sonbert’s life&art, form&milieu for a sf360 piece. I had to trim too many of their acute observations for the article, so I’m hoping to post a transcript here soon.

Some photographs from Snowblink’s show at the Fillmore are here. Thanks to Daniela for already making the summer.

~ by maxgoldb on May 15, 2008.