I had surmised that you might like this one better than the others.
Even though "Platform" is my favorite, "Still Life", which was the
first I saw always seemed the most formally mature. I've now managed
to see all his feature work, including his latest "Useless", and one
can clearly discern a line of stylistic development where "Still Life"
and "Useless" mark the turning point or culmination of everything
that's come before them.

A large part of this flowering is how plastic his art becomes, more
and more with each work. Perhaps most explicitly acknowledged with the
move to DV ("Unknown Pleasures") and then to HD (the latest four
films), Jia starts to play with the presumed integrity of his images
as recorded 'facts', highlighting their artificiality. Especially in
"The World", where nearly every composition seems as arbitrary as it
is elegantly arranged, all aspects of experience have become fake
plastic, and impossibly so. It's a testing of the image as bearer of
truth, conceived mainly in response to the economic devaluation and
deformation of images, and reflected formally but also at the level of
plot and character. We find that in his actor's lives even emotion has
become mass produced. I think this is what you're seeing in "Still
Life", only more fully worked out than in "The World".

In "Still Life", this tension between the artificial and the genuine
visual experience infuses every image. Though Jia stages the majority
of his compositions at a distance, as he has done since "Platform", he
breaks this paradigm quite often in "Still Life" by cutting in to
magnify sections of a space. Here, he picks out objects to study in a
fashion at once discursive because randomly chosen, and controlled
because looked at in a unified and unifying way - mostly slow pans.
Thus objects assume a greater prominence than ever before in his
films. They become nearly as important as the characters. Everything
is product and evidence of the impact of economic and social upheaval.
Everything is wound. People become like objects, while objects acquire
stories just as people do.

That's all I have for now.

edo

--- In FilmArt@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper <f@...> wrote:
>
> 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
>