Still Life
In 2010, when the Three Gorges Dam was still filling up to become the world's largest reservoir, work had just been completed at a different hydropower project at Mangla, hundreds of miles away. That winter, as on every Eid, five-year-old me accompanied my family to visit my grandfather's close friend in Kharak, a village adjacent to the reservoir, just a fifteen minute drive from our home. Their house had residential rooms with white plastered walls on the far end of the property, space for storage and cattle on the other, and a very large courtyard in between. We drank oversweetened tea with milk from their goats.
The next year when I visited, there was no home. They had moved to the other side of town, "New City," it was called. Most houses in the village had been cannibalized for bricks; the few kothis that still stood seemed to be in disbelief of what was happening around them. The year after, when the summer snowmelt finally inundated the village before water levels fell in the winters, the kothis had fallen apart and the trace of the road itself was disappearing.
The year after, the village was just a mound of bricks and trees.
The year after, even the trees had died.
This year I came across Still Life by Chinese director Jia Zhangke, a film about a town slowly being inundated by the Three Gorges Dam, a town that no longer exists. I knew I had to watch it.
Many of Jia's stories are about a kind of rising tide, the deluge of social and economic growth in China through the 90s and 2000s. In Fengjie this tide can be experienced in the flesh. This experience is seen through the eyes of Han Sanming, a laborer, and Shen Hong, a nurse, who come back to search for their estranged spouses.
They arrive by riverboat; there is no other way. The Yangtze has swallowed the lower buildings; the gorge walls rise on either side. Fengjie is sealed between water and cliff. But this is no longer their Fengjie: neighborhoods have been erased, old addresses lead to water, the people they seek are now untracked. They continue their search anyway.
Construction workers appear in films often enough, but usually as prop, the scaffolding behind someone else's story. Wall Street bankers, Hollywood stars, tech billionaires, entire movies are built around them, and audiences are made to feel the tension, the drama, and chaos of their work. I cannot think of another film where labor is inseparable from the character.
Jia's use of naturalism makes this possible. The meandering conversations between characters run on unsharpened dialogue, the story is littered with as many logistical frictions as life itself, and the background is ambient car horns and city noise. Without the usual grammar of cinema, the familiar feels unfamiliar, and just like the protagonists, you feel made a stranger in Fengjie.
Han Sanming is played by Jia's cousin, a real Shanxi coalminer, and it shows. Following him through the city, through small talk with strangers, seeing him share his cigarettes with comrades, you feel the self-dignity and camaraderie of this life made vivid. Later, as a family of a laborer injured during construction argues with local officials in some bureaucratic office, the two parties stared down by portraits of various Communist leaders from above, there is no dramatic score, and the arguments from neither side feel refined. It is just another day, another complaint at the party office. And yet you come out with something stronger than sympathy, because sympathy requires distance. You are already inside this life.
In between the more dialogue-driven scenes, Jia constructs Fengjie itself: the river becomes a character, boats transit, water rises, and construction work turns into an orchestra in industrial ruins, sledgehammers and pickaxes swinging. The film moves chronologically between two parallel stories that never overlap, held together by the landscapes around them. What connects them is this rhythm, between the deadpan mundane and the moments where the central characters are the river and Fengjie.
Jia uses the geography to timestamp the movie with shots of the rising river and scenes of industrial decay as the old city is dismantled, half-demolished walls and ruins of old Fengjie drifting through the frame until the film also becomes a historical document of the city's last moments. These ruins are the backdrop against which the important moments happen, the dialogue spoken against collapsing walls and rising water. But it is the scale of the valley that you cannot escape, an ever present reminder of how small the characters are against everything that surrounds them.
Occasionally, Jia lets the impossible enter his otherwise naturalist world: a tightrope walker crosses between two crumbling towers, a building lifts off like a rocket. Jia has argued this is intentional; the dam itself is so surreal in its scale that only the impossible can represent it. Sometimes these moments deepen the film's symbolism. But it does not always translate. When a UFO flies across the sky, it is jarring; it breaks the immersion Jia has so carefully built.
It is in these settings that the quest of both protagonists to salvage the unsalvageable reaches its end. When they do find their spouses, the reunions are brief; there is no return. Jia frames these moments against the landscape. Shen Hong's choice to leave placed against the newly raised walls of the dam, Han Sanming's unfulfilled desire to reunite against collapsing towers. One faces forward, the other lingers. Fengjie has already decided what remains.
Han Sanming and Shen Hong turn back just as they came, on the same boats, carrying nothing they sought. What was familiar has become unfamiliar to them, too. Not brick by brick, but person by person, entire lives are displaced before we even realize that the past is no longer here.
I remember my uncle working in the agricultural department. When the entire state machinery of my city turned toward the dam, his task was calculating compensation for the displaced families of Kharak. Once, he explained it to me as a joke: his job was to count every plant in every farm, grain by grain. As a child, I pictured him walking through endless fields, his fingers indexing each kernel. Of course, he couldn't have - there were simply too many. But then, what had happened to all the grains left uncountable?
Amid progress, Jia Zhangke asks: when the tide rises, does it carry everything with it? And what is left to submerge?
As the Yangtze rises, Han Sanming and his team hammer away at the ruins of old Fengjie. Mirroring them, a white hazmat-suited team disinfects the remains, a shadow crew to the labor crew. They spray the crumbling walls without pause. They work inaudibly, invisibly, sterilizing what remains, perhaps the most important work to be done.
Steel shatters, glass splinters, bricks turn to dust, the ruins of which will always be there under the water. But disappearing memories leave no rubble.