Still Life.

"Jia Zhangke has an uncanny knack for grounding his portraits of Chinese alienation in settings that are at once schematically allegorical and tangibly lived-in," writes Fernando F Croce in Slant. "The town of Fengjie is both backdrop and main character of the Venice Film Festival winner Still Life: Gradually vanishing under rising water levels as a result of the nation's mammoth Three Gorges Dam project, it is a transitory landscape that beautifully evokes the existential malaise - the helpless feeling of spiritual drowning - that so many of Jia's characters find themselves locked in."

"In Fengjie, as far as we can see, there's no social structure or authority, and the commercial life of capitalism hasn't taken hold," writes David Denby in the New Yorker. "Inanition and mere things have overwhelmed the human presence, as in one of Antonioni's empty urban landscapes.... As in The World, the story is minimal, or intermittent, the mood everything."

Updated through 1/20.

"Perhaps no nation on Earth has endured more social, economic, and artistic change in the last century than China - and perhaps no modern artist is more qualified to document that change than the director Jia Zhangke," writes Martin Tsai in the New York Sun.

"'Still Life was made like a documentary,' Jia told the Reeler in an interview conducted while he was in town for last fall's New York Film Festival screening of Useless, his follow-up real documentary.... 'I think of my films in Beijing, and then go to my old province, Shanxi," he said. "I feel that Beijing is not representative of a Chinese city; it's a very special city, but my old province is more representative of how people live and go about their daily lives in China.'"

Updates, 1/15: "The world's oldest civilization is in some respects the world's newest—which is why Jia Zhangke, the pre-eminent cine-chronicler of contemporary China, could well be the most contemporary narrative filmmaker on earth," writes J Hoberman. "More observer than director, Jia is concerned with how it feels to be in a particular environment. His films are predicated on a sense of everyday social flux and, more than any I've seen, they provide some sense of China's seething interior."

Also in the Voice, Anthony Kaufman talks with Jia and hears news of his next project: "Next month, Jia begins shooting a new dramatic project, 24 City, which will continue to reflect on the way China's breakneck pursuit of the future steamrolls its past. Spanning 50 years, the story chronicles the lives of workers in a factory that will be demolished to make way for a skyscraper. 'And for those who live in the skyscraper, they will have no memory of what was there before,' he explains. 'It's almost like China is eating its tail. It's going forward, but what it gets in return is disproportionate to what it loses.'"

"As with his earlier Unknown Pleasures and The World, Jia Zhangke's masterful Still Life is shot on digital video and skirts the line between documenting its nation's transitional woes as it moves towards promised free-market independence, and creating fictional narratives around these events," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Yet those descriptions can't begin to illustrate the delicacy with which Jia surveys the scene, or the miraculous mixture of hope and despair that seems to spring from every moment he captures.... What's most extraordinary about Jia's exquisite compositions is how fragilely rendered they are; Jia's technique may be rigorous, but it never feels stringent, and character and setting always come before aesthetic rigidity, as with the work of Olivier Assayas or Maurice Pialat."

Updates, 1/18: "Antonioni's influence on Mr Jia is pronounced, evident in the younger filmmaker's manipulation of real time and the ways he expresses his ideas with images rather than through dialogue and narrative," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "The drifting, rootless men and women in many of his movies, and the wide-open, nominally empty landscapes through which they on occasion wander, further underscore the resemblances between the filmmakers. Even so, when Mr Jia's characters roam through the crumbling town in Still Life - which is being demolished in anticipation of an engineered inundation - it's impossible not to think even further back in cinema history to Rossellini's postwar films, like Paisan and Germany Year Zero, works in which the director's moral position is etched into every human face and fallen building."

"Still Life balances elements from across Mr Jia's past work, which, with the shift in focus away from the young, makes it his most successful and distinctive film for its particular alchemy," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "It gets the anomie of his 90s films without drowning, and finds a visual scheme more eloquent than the translucent glitz of his last drama, 2005's The World, which was overwhelmed by its metaphoric location, a Vegas-like town of replica landmarks. Veteran of more than a dozen festivals (and winner of the Golden Lion at Venice), Still Life has finally wended its way to theaters here, and rises to the top of the must-see list of this young year."

"Like all of Jia's work, it suggests that China may as well have an 'under construction' sign covering the entire country while it concentrates on the people left behind, rather than yuppies benefiting from the rise of capitalism," writes Steve Erickson in Gay City News. "This approach impresses initially as a directorial tour-de-force. Its deeper meanings emerge only later."

"Still Life acts first and foremost as a pictorial recording of a landscape in tremendous transition," writes Daniel Kasman. "For all its surface simplicity, the film is immense in what it records, in the changes it documents, in its deadpan humor and whimsy (including a half-built structure that turns into a rocket ship, references to John Woo's A Better Tomorrow and particularly lovely concluding shots), in its the reticent sorrow, and in its openness for a future after the Three Gorges Dam."

Update, 1/20: "A meticulous record of a vanishing world - Mr Jia's cinematographer, Yu Lik-wai, surveys the wreckage with slow panning shots that evoke the horizontal expanse of Chinese scroll paintings - Still Life is an act of commemoration and of stoic protest," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "'I don't start from a political standpoint,' Mr Jia said. 'But if you make a film about China right now, you have to talk about the politics and the changes that are affecting people.'... At 37 he has amassed a body of work - seven feature-length fiction films and documentaries - that is remarkable for its formal ambition, ethnographic richness and moral weight."

Posted by dwhudson at January 14, 2008 7:48 AM