Abstract
Nothing is more urgent in China today than a critique of the everyday; and a social analysis of the conditions and prospects of ordinary individuals vis-à-vis – or despite – the achievements of the nation and the state. Jia Zhangke's film, Still Life (2006), reveals this urgency vividly, describing the destruction of local settlements and the dislocation of ordinary people amidst the great engineering feat of dams and bridges over the Yangtze River. A husband and a wife, having lost contact with each other for years because of hectic careers and radical socio-spatial dislocation, finally meet and agree to divorce. With sounds of music flowing down distantly, they dance for a minute and bid farewell, with one watching and the other walking away, disappearing into the distance against a vast landscape of debris and magnificent structures building-up behind them. This scene was followed immediately by another depicting a tourist cruise on the river with a loudspeaker reciting a Li Bai poem from the eighth century: poetic words about a scenic spot that would soon be flooded for the building of the Three Gorges Dam, to power an industrial China on the rise.
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