Chinese Urban Shi-nema by David H. Fleming & Simon Harrison

Author:David H. Fleming & Simon Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030496753
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Jia’s films also reveal an aesthetic fascination with landscapes and spaces and affectively harness the flows of energy moving through them. None more so than his San xia hao ren/Still Life (2006), we might add—an andante film that traces the intersecting lives of different characters affected by the building of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam project. This being a mega-dam of heretofore unimaginable engineering proportions that was completed in 2009 to create a “reservoir the size of Lake Superior” in order to help energise China’s new modern cities: the weight of which was also felt to “slightly alter the earth’s axis and increase the length of everyday by a microscopic amount” (Li 2016, p. 171). Characteristically, rather than celebrate the modernist subjugation of “nature” into a form of standing reserve for the purposes of powering new consumer lifestyle cities (see Li 2016, pp. 184–5), Jia’s surreal (rather than realist) film opens up a dilated moment of inbetweenness that invites viewers to grasp the passing of the rubbled city of Fengjie before the rising waters envelop the ancient landscape forever. These ideas become most pronounced in poetic images filmed beneath the red lines that mark out the future water levels upon the remaining buildings, or a scene featuring a team of archaeologists frantically attempting to excavate a historically significant site before the landscape is submerged and these material traces of the past are lost forever.

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