I have long wanted to post a few comments on Zhang Ke Jia's "Still Life"
(Sanxia haoren) which recently played in Chicago. I had seen two earlier
films of his, "Platform" (Zhantai) and "The World" (Shijie), and thought
this was the best of the three.

What I liked was the way his long take tableaux, while often offering
elegant arrangements of characters and landscapes, also felt highly
tentative and provisional. Every composition seemed somehow temporary,
even to the point of feeling as if it is acknowledging its own
arbitrariness. Characters come together against a background, and one
somehow "feels" that it's simply a temporary arrangement. Every moment
seems somehow fugitive.

This all connects beautifully with a theme of the film, the changes
China is undergoing. The upheavals caused to lives and landscape by the
monstrously huge Three Gorges Dam become a metaphor for China's larger
modernization process, truly uprooting social traditions. Certainly I
could see some of this in the month I spent in China in 2004, in cities
that were chaotic and ever-changing mixes of very old great buildings,
older housing crowded along alleys ("hutongs"), and grotesque new
mega-structures that seem quite at home in an American suburb. Jia
seemed to be depicting this rather than judging it.

I'm not sure I know another filmmaker's work that has this particular
image quality. It reminded me more of some of the paintings of Gerhard
Richter.

Fred Camper