237
* Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Filozofski vestnik  |  Volume XXXIX  |  Number 3  |  2018  |  237–251
Rok Benčin*
Temporalities of Modernity in Jia Zhangke’s 
Still Life**
The cinema of Jia Zhangke is well known and celebrated for its portrayal of the 
social and cultural impact of the Chinese economic reforms of the final decades 
of the past century and up to the present day. Usually associated with the so-
called Sixth Generation of Chinese film directors, characterised by independent 
production, realist techniques, and focus on the individuals at the margins of so-
ciety, some critics have claimed that his emphasis on “ordinary” people from the 
lower classes and provincial towns, corresponding to his own origin, represents 
a considerable shift even from the depictions of urban bohemia in the earlier 
Sixth Generation films.
1
 Be that as it may (bohemian youth, as we will see, are 
important for Jia as well, only from a more provincial perspective), Jia himself 
said that one of the main motivations to start making films while he was still a 
film theory student at the Beijing Film Academy was that in 1997 he had yet to see 
a Chinese film that had anything to do with the Chinese reality that he knew.
2
 To 
capture this reality, he claims, one should refrain from storylines of great “trag-
ic and happy events” and focus rather on the more monotonous temporality of 
everyday life: “If cinema is going to show concern for ordinary people, one must 
first have respect for everyday life. One must follow the slow rhythm of life and 
empathize with the light and heavy things of an ordinary life.”
3
And yet, in the grasp of this major societal transformation the slow rhythm 
of ordinary life is itself caught up in the whirlwind of historical change. Jia’s 
**
 
This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy”, which is funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. 
1
 Zhang Zhen, “Bearing Witness: Chinese Urban Cinema in the Era of ‘Transformation’”, 
in: Zhang Z. (ed.), The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the 
Twenty-First Century, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2007, pp. 15–16.
2
 Jia Zhangke in Michael Barry, Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures: Jia Zhangke’s ‘Home-
town Trilogy’, Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute, Basingstoke and 
New York 2009, p. 128.
3
 Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke Speaks Out: The Chinese Director’s Texts on Film, trans. by Claire 
Huot et al., Kindle ed., Bridge21 Publications, Los Angeles 2015, Ch. 12.

238
rok benčin
first three feature films were inspired by and eventually filmed in the director’s 
hometown of Fenyang, which changed dramatically in economic and social 
terms in the years he spent studying in Beijing.
4
 It is precisely the juxtaposition 
of the slow, meandering rhythm of life and the fast-paced, goal-oriented era of 
modernisation and reform that creates the temporal knot of Jia’s films. As Chris 
Berry observes, Jia focuses on “those who are not the drivers of China’s post-so-
cialist project but instead, at best, its passengers, and more often the onlookers 
at the roadside.”
5
 Focusing on marginal characters left behind but still tossed 
about by the currents of progress, Jia manages to depict a conflictual coexist-
ence of different temporalities and the social divisions they immanently entail.
In what follows, I explore the temporal construction of Jia’s films in relation to 
the narrative structures implied by the idea of modernity and the processes of 
modernisation, but also by the aesthetic claim to realism. Presenting reality 
through its slow rhythms rather than through its great events seems to entail an 
aesthetisation that strays away from standard interpretations of realism, acti-
vating what Jia calls “the aesthetic sense of the real”.
6
 I address these problems 
via Jacques Rancière’s recent elaboration of the temporal hierarchies associated 
with the idea of modernity and his discussion of the redistribution of sensible 
capacities enabled by the aesthetical and political reversal of these hierarchies.
Modernisation at a Standstill
In no other Jia film is the problem of modernisation so dramatically set than in 
Still Life (2006), shot at the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam, complet -
ed in 2012 as the world’s biggest power station. The film’s attention, however, 
is not directed at the construction itself – the dam is almost completely absent 
from the film – but rather at the large-scale demolition process in the back-
4
 “The rate of Fenyang’s modernisation and economic growth, not to mention the impact 
the forces of commodification had on people there, were all unbelievable. Shanxi is alrea-
dy a backwater province, relatively, in China and Fenyang … a rather remote place even in 
Shanxi, so the fact that these changes were reaching even Fenyang and in such a visible 
way had an incredible impact on me.” Jia Zhangke in Michael Barry, Xiao Wu, Platform, 
Unknown Pleasures, p. 128.
5
 Chris Berry, “Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By”, in: C. Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus 
II, Palgrave Macmillan on behalf of the British Film Institute, Basingstoke and New York 
2008, p. 251.
6
 Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke Speaks Out, Ch. 16.

239
temporalities of modernity in jia zhangke’s still life
ground. Due to the dam’s reservoir, whole towns and villages were demolished 
before a large area was flooded, requiring the relocation of more than a million 
people. Two temporal lines intersect at the Three Gorges area, one pointed at 
the market-oriented future and its demand for energy, and the other pointed at 
the past, with the annihilation of towns with millennia of history.
This intersection, however, is itself pushed to the background by the addition of 
a fictional layer, which constitutes the multiple storylines of the film. Two new-
comers come to the soon-to-be-demolished town in Fengjie County: the miner 
Han Samning, looking for his wife, who left him years ago, and the nurse Shen 
Hong, looking for her husband, an engineer working on the dam, in the hope of 
clarifying their estranged relationship. A third temporality is thus introduced, 
an uncertain present of wandering and searching, through the lens of which 
we encounter all of Fengjie’s current social layers, from the local population on 
the move and migrant workers, to the leading figures in the dam’s construction. 
The outsider’s perspective allows Jia to avoid the simple opposition between 
progress and tradition, modernisation, and its human toll. Instead, the film 
produces a universalised portrayal of displacement without abstracting from 
concrete historical conditions or different social positions. The temporality Jia 
captures in his films is not the temporality of the grand narrative of historical 
progress, nor the temporality of nostalgia for an irretrievable past. The narra-
tive of the past and the narrative of the future still have a starting point or a goal 
that structures their temporality. The present, however, is a time of displace-
ment with unclear origins and destinations.
Showing the apocalyptic scenes at the Three Gorges, as shocking as they may 
be, is thus not an end in itself. Still Life is less a film about the on-going apoca-
lypse, an outright critique of progress and modernity from the perspective of its 
victims, than a post-apocalyptic film that explores the fragile connectivity be-
tween the fleeting moments that fall out of the narrative temporal constructions 
of demolished pasts and constructed futures. The surreal scene witnessed by 
Sanming at the very end of the film, a figure of a tightrope walker between two 
half-demolished buildings, is thus a good indication of Jia’s cinematic meth-
od: rather than dwelling on the loss and destruction, his films forge impossible 

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paths through the disintegrated world of his characters. As suggested by Bruno 
Besana, Still Life “creates a narrative of connection of disconnected elements.”
7
But in what way is it still useful to frame this discussion in terms of the con-
cept of modernity? According to Berry, the Maoist “grand narrative” structure 
of “socialist modernity” was reinstated in the post-Mao era of “the four mod-
ernisations” and “reform and opening-up”, which is also reflected in Chinese 
cultural production: “Appropriated and adapted for the People’s Republic of 
China, the continued domination of materialist ideologies of progress on both 
sides of the post-socialist and socialist historical divide helps to account for 
the continuation of modern modes of time as progress in mainstream televi-
sion documentary and feature film work in the People’s Republic.”
8
 According 
to Berry, however, Jia’s works are among those other types of film that show 
different experiences of time and ultimately lead to the conclusion that time is 
never homogenous, but rather differential and disaggregated. It would, on the 
other hand, be wrong to claim that Jia simply opposes progress per se or that 
he is blind to the benefits that the reforms have brought. His tactic, as Jason 
McGrath observes, is one of “exposing rather than opposing,” showing the con-
tradictions of modernisation in everyday life rather than promulgating an op-
positional ideology.
9
Rather than presenting the problem in terms of opposition to modernisation, we 
should explore the conflictual coexistence of temporalities inherent to moder-
nity itself. One can find an indication of this in Wang Jianjiang’s understand-
ing of Chinese modernity as “bie-modern”. Bie (别) here stands for alternative, 
awkward, or non-modernity, and is defined by Wang as a spatialisation of tem-
porality in the sense of a contradictory coexistence of pre-modern, modern, 
and post-modern elements in contemporary China.
10
 Such coexistence, howev-
er, may very well be inscribed in the idea of modernity more generally. Fredric 
Jameson’s sceptical account of the re-emergence of discussions on modernity at 
7
 Bruno Besana, “Fictioning Disagreement: The Construction of Separation in the Work of 
Jacques Rancière”, Maska, 32 (185–186/2017), p. 80.
8
 Chris Berry, “Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By”, pp. 254–255.
9
 Jason McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a 
Transnational Aesthetic”, in: Zhang Z. (ed.), The Urban Generation, p. 85.
10
 Wang Jianjiang, “‘Quadrilateral’ in Philosophy and Bie-modernism”, AM Journal of Art 
and Media Studies, 13/2017, pp. 129–130.

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temporalities of modernity in jia zhangke’s still life
the turn of the millennium turned our attention away from the ideal of the new 
and the linear temporality of progress as such and rather focused it on the tem-
porality of catching up with an imposed ideal of modernity. What is thus being 
sold, according to Jameson, is either “the illusion that the West has something 
no one else possesses” from the perspective of developing countries or, also 
within the West itself, the social adaptation demanded by the necessities of the 
global free market.
11
More recently, Jacques Rancière has shown how instead of a simplistic horizon-
tal line interrupted by the breaks that separate the old from the new, modernity 
should rather be thought of as entailing “a complex intertwinement of tempo-
ralities, a complex set of relations between the present, the past, and the future; 
between anticipation and lateness; fragmentation and continuity; movement 
and immobility.”
12
 In our supposedly post-historic age, Rancière claims, the 
temporal structure of the so-called grand narratives has actually been recy-
cled. Capitalist and State power in Europe and elsewhere continue to rely on the 
discourse of historical necessity, although its outcome is no longer Revolution 
but Reform. The triumph of the global free market becomes the new historical 
telos, for which certain sacrifices need to be made.
13
Rather than simply reviving the Lyotardian grand narrative, Rancière gives his 
own understanding and genealogy of the concept. For Rancière, narratives of 
time are fictions, constitutive of how a sense of reality is produced via the distri-
bution of the sensible. Narratives of time shape the common experience by in-
troducing “the causal rationality of temporal linkage between events,” a ration-
ality itself “bound up with a hierarchical distribution of temporalities which 
is a distribution of forms of life.”
14
 His genealogy of this hierarchy starts with 
Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the temporality structured by the causal rationality 
of events according to necessity and verisimilitude is contrasted to the tempo-
rality of the purely empirical succession of events, which lacks a specific inner 
logic and is therefore contingent. The first temporality, linked to poetic fiction, 
11
 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Verso, Lon-
don and New York 2002, pp. 8–9.
12
 Jacques Rancière, Modern Times: Essays on the Temporality of Art and Politics, Multimedi-
alni institut, Zagreb 2017, p. 61.
13
 Ibid., pp. 22–23.
14
 Ibid., p. 18.

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is given preference by Aristotle over the second temporality, which is charac-
teristic of historical chronicle. Such temporal hierarchy, Rancière claims, pre-
supposes a social hierarchy between two classes of human beings that expe-
rience time according to one of these forms: on the one hand, free, active, and 
knowledgeable people, living in a time of rational causality, and, on the other, 
passive people, who live in a time dictated by production and reproduction, to 
whom, being ignorant of its ways, history merely happens as a succession of 
events.
15
 In other words, the two forms of temporality imply a distinction be-
tween those who have time and those who do not. The modern grand narrative 
then applies Aristotle’s fictional logic to history itself and today reproduces its 
immanent social division by denouncing “the ignorant people who are unable 
to fit the time of the globalized free market” and who oppose the supposedly 
necessary reforms it dictates.
16
For Rancière, the question is how this temporal injustice, the injustice of not 
having time, can be reversed, which leads to the question of whether there can 
be a different way of linking events, one based precisely on the temporality of 
bare succession, which was discarded by Aristotle. The temporality of emanci-
pation thus entails “an inner redivision of time,” which is dependent on “the 
production of gaps” in the logical temporality of causes and effects, based on 
inducing “the power of the moment that begins another time.”
17
 In order to de-
scribe the temporal structure of such emancipatory moments, Rancière draws 
on not only his repertoire of emancipatory figures, especially “the plebeian 
philosopher,” carpenter Gauny, and the “ignorant schoolmaster” Jacotot, but 
also on the recent occupation movements and the problem of precarious work 
today. What is at stake here is not a preference for the ephemerality of the mo-
ment against any kind of duration or progress. The question is rather how these 
moments can be prolonged and connected so that “a new common time” can be 
“constructed out of breaches made within the dominant order of time.”
18
Finally, the reversal of the Aristotelian temporal hierarchy also takes place in 
literature, i.e. the narrative art itself. Modern literature from Gustave Flaubert 
15
 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
16
 Ibid., p. 25.
17
 Ibid., pp. 33–4.
18
 Ibid., p. 35.

243
temporalities of modernity in jia zhangke’s still life
to Virginia Woolf challenged the preference for a well-constructed narrative 
and introduced “a time made of a multiplicity of micro-events [in] democrat-
ic coexistence” into which plots and characters dissolve as if into “an inces-
sant shower of innumerable atoms,” to use Woolf’s idiom frequently quoted by 
Rancière.
19
 While there is no direct relation between artistic and political trans-
formations, no direct correlation between the aesthetics of politics and the pol-
itics of aesthetics, they both operate with fictions that determine the framing 
and distribution of the sensible fabric of what is perceived as reality. Fiction, 
for Rancière, is “not the invention of an imaginary world,” but a framework that 
determines a sense of reality.
20
With this in mind, what kind of a sense of reality can we find in Jia’s films, 
which are, according to Barry, characterised by a strong “narrative distension” 
that resists the narrative structures implied by both socialism and so-called 
post-socialism alike?
21
 What is achieved by the long takes and other means Jia 
uses, in his own words, to “preserve real time”?
22
The Aesthetic Sense of the Real
As we have seen, Jia’s primary motivation to start making films was to record 
the everyday reality of post-Mao China in the turmoil of market reforms, the 
effects of which have been, as he claims, just as drastic as those of the more 
widely discussed Cultural Revolution.
23
 Jia’s films have thus been commonly 
viewed as an epitome of a new style of urban realism in Chinese cinema.
24
 Jia 
himself, while committed to portraying historic reality as he thinks and expe-
riences it, is sceptical of the stylistic ideal of realism. Realist techniques such 
as using a handheld camera, natural settings, non-professional actors, etc., all 
of which he has employed, can just as easily be used to produce hallucinogenic 
effects, completely bypassing any realist ambitions: “It’s quite possible that the 
19
 Ibid., pp. 35–7.
20
 Ibid., p. 13.
21
 Chris Berry, “Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By”, p. 251.
22
 Jia Zhangke in Stephen Teo, “Cinema with an Accent – Interview with Jia Zhangke, Direc-
tor of Platform”, Senses of Cinema, July 2009, http://sensesofcinema.com/2001/feature- 
articles/zhangke_interview/ (last accessed 12 July 2018).
23
 Ibid.
24
 Jason McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke”, p. 82.

244
rok benčin
so-called reality that is produced with realist techniques is actually obstructing 
and concealing the way reality really works.”
25
Rather than in terms of realist adequacy, he defines what he is after as an aes-
thetic sense of the real: “I pursue a sense of the real in cinema more than I pur-
sue reality itself, because I think that the sense of the real is aesthetic, whereas 
reality itself is the domain of sociology and sciences.”
26
 Obviously, this does 
not imply that the aesthetic real is in any way an imaginary realm detached 
from reality. Social issues ranging from privatisation and working conditions 
to ecological concerns in contemporary China, along with their clearly stated 
“sociological” causes, are essential to Jia’s cinema, but are explored through 
distortions in the fabric of experience rather than as adequate representations 
of a concept of social totality.
The first indication of this approach is the peculiar mix of realism and fiction 
or, more accurately, of hyperrealist settings with added fictional layers or even 
surreal elements. Jia first went to Fengjie County to film a documentary about 
the contemporary painter Liu Xiaodong, who used the demolition workers as 
models for his paintings, many of which then also appeared in Still Life. While 
observing the setting, the workers, and the local people, Jia decided to make 
a fictional film at the same location, adding the stories of Sanming and Hong 
looking for their spouses. The fictional film and the documentary, Still Life and 
Dong, respectively, which share a number of shots, were released separately 
in 2006, while in his next film, 24 City (2008), both approaches coexist. In a 
similar tale of demolition and construction, Jia documents the oral history of a 
demolished factory in Chengdu that made way for an upmarket apartment com-
plex. The interviews with actual former factory workers are complemented by 
fictional interviews, scripted by Jia and filmed with professional actors. Jia sees 
no contradiction here, since history, as he explains, “is built with [both,] facts 
and fabulations.”
27
 The use of well-known actors made the distinction between 
the documentary and the fictional part of the film clear to Chinese viewers. 
Rather than deception or stylisation, the added layer of fiction thus conveys 
25
 Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke Speaks Out, Ch. 16.
26
 Ibid.
27 
Ibid., Ch. 11.

245
temporalities of modernity in jia zhangke’s still life
something real about the situation which might be missed in a strict documen-
tary and which corresponds to the aesthetic dimension of the real itself.
The most curious interruptions of the realist cinematic mode in Still Life are 
the surreal scenes, from the already mentioned figure of a tightrope walker to 
properly sci-fi elements such as UFO-like objects in the sky and an enormous 
concrete monument that at a certain point in the film lifts off from the ground 
like a rocket. Jia explains that the introduction of such seemingly misplaced ele-
ments corresponds to the surreal nature of the Fengjie reality itself: “Seeing this 
place, with its 2,000 years of history and dense neighborhoods left in ruins, my 
first impression was that human beings could not have done this. The changes 
had occurred so fast and on such a large scale, it was as if a nuclear war or an 
extraterrestrial had done it.”
28
 Such scenes therefore function as some kind of a 
prosthetic enhancement of realism itself. As noted by Corey Byrnes, discussions 
on realism in Chinese art and literature have tended to favour “a disinterested 
representational mode” over formal and stylistic concerns, while Jia’s “stylis-
tic hybridity” manages to put forward and benefit from the “transformative ca-
pacity of realism” that explores “the unstable nature of the category of reality,” 
which is never more obvious than in the case of the Three Gorges Dam.
29
If, on the one hand, realism is enhanced by additional layers of fiction, on the 
other it is in a certain way reduced by narrative subtractions. This approach is 
most glaring in Platform (2000), where an original 210-minute cut was reduced 
to the 150-minute final cut preferred by the director, in which many scenes im-
portant for the continuity of the storyline are omitted. As Michael Berry explains:
The primary difference between the final cut and the various extended versions 
lies in the removal of numerous scenes (or portions of scenes) that further eluci-
date the motivations behind various characters’ actions. … Certain plot details 
that are very clearly delineated in the longer versions need to be extracted from 
subtle hints in existing dialogue, or, in many cases, simply inferred from con-
text. The result is a significantly different viewing experience between different 
28
 Jia Zhangke in Andrew Chan, “Interview: Jia Zhang-ke”, Film Comment, March/April 2009, 
https://www.filmcomment.com/article/jia-zhangke-interview/ (last accessed on 12 July 
2018).
29
 Corey Byrnes, “Specters of Realism and the Painter’s Gaze in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life”, Mod-
ern Chinese Literature and Culture, 24 (2/2012), pp. 55–56.

246
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cuts, with the original version following much more closely traditional conven-
tions of film narrative.
30
Jia completely embraced the shorter version and the plot gaps in the film as a 
narrative method: “I don’t want to provide reasons or explain why a young girl 
who was dancing is suddenly wearing a tax-clerk uniform or why she is still sin-
gle after so many years. This is my narrative philosophy. Isn’t that the way we 
get to know people and understand the world? In bits and pieces and on a su-
perficial level?”
31
 Platform follows a group of cultural workers based in a small 
town and their evolution throughout the 1980s from an official group perform -
ing shows filled with revolutionary songs and propaganda pieces to a private 
group performing an eclectic mix of newly-embraced pop-culture influences, 
from punk rock to breakdance. The film aims to show the historical changes 
of the period through the everyday experiences of provincial youth, who, for 
all their big hopes influenced by the market reforms and cultural opening-up, 
experience time in a series of prolonged moments, detached from any idea of 
progress. McGrath claims that “the film manages to depict epochal historical 
change largely through the scenes of trivial events and even boredom,” min-
imising “obvious cause-effect narrative progressions.”
32
 By allowing us to ob-
serve the effects without necessarily showing the causes, McGrath concludes, 
the filmic ellipses achieve a realism of true-life experience, along the lines of 
Bazin’s analyses of Italian neorealism.
In Still Life such narrative subtractions occur again, only this time Jia credits 
the actors for rejecting some parts of the original script. The character Han 
Samning gets his name from the actor Han Samning, who is actually a coal 
miner and – to add some trivia – the director’s cousin (Sanming, as a miner 
and the protagonist’s cousin, also appears in Platform). It was Sanming who 
suggested that no reasons for his character’s 16-year long wait to go and look 
for his wife should be given, contrary to the script: “There are so many things 
in life that don’t need to be explained clearly. There is no need to spell out every 
cause and effect.”
33
 Jia also reports that the actor Zhao Tao (also a regular in 
Jia’s films and now the director’s wife), who played the other protagonist, Shen 
30
 Michael Barry, Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures, p. 55.
31
 Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke Speaks Out, Ch. 3.
32
 Jason McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke”, p. 98.
33
 Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke Speaks Out, Ch. 38.

247
temporalities of modernity in jia zhangke’s still life
Hong, suggested the scene in front of the fan, where she lets herself be swayed 
by the artificial wind that blows away the narrative tension of the troubled rela-
tionship with her husband:
We shot the night before she had to make a decision about her estranged hus-
band. The original script described her as being alone, yawning, and clueless. 
I chose a documentary-style shoot. I shot her sitting around for more than an 
hour; she really got tired and impatient, until she finally fell asleep. When I was 
ready to wrap, she asked me to look at the fan on the wall and said, “Breaking 
up is a big and difficult decision. To express her wavering emotion, can we shoot 
her using the fan to blast away the Sichuan heat and humidity? To relieve the 
anxiety inside her?”
34
This scene typifies Jia’s relation to temporality, caught between the monotony of 
duration and the affective intensity of the moment. In such scenes, Jia explains, 
narrative “linearity becomes a surface plane.”
35
 In several interviews and com-
mentaries the director elaborates on another scene from Platform, showing two 
friends sitting on a bed talking. The long take allows Jia to preserve the real time 
of youthful boredom: “You see two people smoking and talking aimlessly for a 
long time. Nothing happens plotwise, but at the same time, time itself is kept 
intact. … Everybody experiences the monotony of time passing where nothing 
that is noteworthy occurs.”
36
 The conversation casually moves from public ex-
ecutions to the latest developments in their romantic affairs. The monotony is 
thus ambiguously charged with joy and melancholy mixed in a specific kind of 
affected indifference. This is the kind of fleeting moment that the camera can 
preserve and prolong: “The two women’s melancholy passes swiftly, as does 
their leisure time. This type of scene is exactly how I remember such moments. 
I get sad about the ceaseless passing of time. I felt a dull pain while shooting it. 
I was hoping the camera would just keep rolling.”
37
 What appears on one hand 
as a time of empty duration, which the long take attempts to capture, is, on the 
other, an affectively charged moment that the camera seeks to prolong.
34
 Ibid.
35
 Jia Zhangke in Stephen Teo, “Cinema with an Accent – Interview with Jia Zhangke, Direc-
tor of Platform”.
36
 Ibid.
37
 Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke Speaks Out, Ch. 3.

248
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Among the Ruins
But what is there to prolong in Fengjie, a place in which archaeological excava-
tions are being rushed to preserve at least some ancient artefacts from the ris-
ing waters, which will efface any trace of the town and its history? On the other 
hand, the future is very uncertain for the people moving away, for the migrant 
workers seeking new jobs, and for Samning, who must return home to make 
enough money to pay off his wife’s brother’s debt and thereby free her from the 
usurer whom she is forced to work for. Snippets of community remain, from the 
opening shot of the passengers on the riverboat carrying Samning to Fengjie, 
which the long shot embraces as a panorama of humanity, to the migrant work-
ers talking about the natural wonders of their provinces, which, somewhat 
ironically, they observe as represented on banknotes. As Pheng Cheah ob-
serves, among the destruction, “the film depicts the establishment of new ties 
of solidarity and community and the restoring of sundered ties of affection … 
that involve the sharing of mundane objects of consumption,” particularly cig-
arettes, liquor, tea, and candy, which appear as subheadings to quasi-divide 
the film into distinct parts.
38
 Yet even these fragile communities are, as Pheng 
admits, provisional and themselves always on the brink of ruination.
39
The film thus goes beyond communities to the core of ruination to portray el-
ementary encounters between vanishing ruins and bodies on the move. Jia 
explains how the apocalyptic situation at the Three Gorges was not in itself 
what moved him to make the film. Rather, it was his enthusiasm for the way 
Liu painted the demolition workers that gave him the idea to make a fictional 
film at the same location.
40
 In Dong we see a group of workers together with Jia’s 
cousin Sanming posing for what is to become a five-panel canvas entitled Hot 
Bed No. 1. Jia claims that regardless of the harsh realism reminiscent of Lucien 
Freud, the canvas manages to capture the beauty of their bodies.
41
 Ultimately, 
for Jia, Liu’s paintings convey a universal capacity to be poetic, to affect and be 
38
 Pheng Cheah, “World as Picture and Ruination: On Jia Zhangke’s Still Life as World Cine-
ma”, C. Rojas, E. Chow (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas, Oxford University 
Press, Oxford and New York 2013, p. 199.
39
 Ibid., p. 203.
40
 Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke Speaks Out, Ch. 27.
41
 Ibid.

249
temporalities of modernity in jia zhangke’s still life
affected, “a form of poetry that anyone can experience.”
42
 What we see in Liu’s 
canvases and Jia’s films is not an aesthetisation of the hardships in the sense 
that beauty would prevail over social misery in the eyes of an artist, who does 
not share the burden of the workers. There is no escape from the omnipresent 
misery. Nevertheless, despite the misery, a universal capacity to be poetic is 
transmitted, thus countering the distribution of capacities dictated by the tem-
porality of modernisation.
As for the ruins, their poetic quality should generally come as no surprise, but 
the ruins of Fengjie are not ancient monuments to long-lost worlds. They are 
fresh ruins, produced by the very same poetic bodies that inspired Still Life. Not 
only does this ruination put bodies on the move, those of demolition workers 
and, more crucially, former inhabitants, but its trace will also soon disappear, 
immersed in the water, and will therefore be bereft of any capacity to testify to 
this lost world in the future. Walter Benjamin described how ruins became the 
finest material of creation in the context of German baroque Trauerspiel, avail-
able for the melancholic allegorist as fragments to invest meaning in after the 
sense of the whole has been lost.
43
 It is doubtful that apart from the dam itself, 
with all its ambiguity, these ruins could be used for creation or allegory, but a 
minimum potential for figurative connectivity – and therefore poeticity – re-
mains, as testified to by the figure of the tightrope walker. On the one hand, the 
ruins cast their shadow on other objects in several still-life compositions in the 
film, commented on by Jia in his notes on the film: 
I entered an empty room one day and saw a bunch of dusty objects on the table. 
I seemed to have uncovered the secret of still objects. Those furnishings that sat 
in the same places for years, the dusty utensils on the table, the wine bottles on 
the windowsill, and the decorations hanging on the wall all carried some sort 
of poetic sadness. Still objects are one part of reality we neglect. Although they 
endure, they remain silent and hold secrets.
44
42
 Ibid.
43
 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne, Verso, Lon-
don, New York 1998.
44
 Jia Zhangke, Jia Zhangke Speaks Out, Ch. 8.

250
rok benčin
On the other hand, the ruins break away from the stillness and become the set-
ting of life itself in its endurance. As Jia adds in his notes on shooting in Fengjie: 
“Among the deafening noise and flying dust, there was still a sense of vibrant 
colour blooming out of life itself, despite the despair.”
45
The question that remains to be answered is what this poetisation of ruins and 
the demolition process entail in terms of the peculiar realism of Jia’s cinema. 
McGrath suggests that already with Platform Jia moved away from the more 
direct documentary-style “on-the-spot” realism achieved by means of shaky 
handheld camera and similar techniques that characterised his earlier work, 
to the long-take aesthetisation characteristic of many contemporary art-house 
directors on the film festival circuit: “Such films become so exclusively reliant 
on the long take, so concerned with showing in detail the real-time intervals 
between narrative actions, that the Bazinian long-take realism is pushed to, 
and sometimes past, the point that it becomes its ostensible opposite – an in-
triguing kind of formalism.”
46
The opposition between realism and formalism can, however, be re-examined 
through a more detailed look at – to use Jameson’s phrase – the antinomies 
of realism itself.
47
 The basic antinomy of realism was given its classic formu-
lation by Georg Lukács, the greatest proponent of realism against formalism, 
who identified a formalist deviation already at work within realism. In his 
1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?”, Lukács pits Balzac and Tolstoy, representa -
tives of realism proper, against Flaubert and Zola, who in their novels get too 
close to real-life perception and thereby lose any focus on the social totality.
48
 
According to Lukács, only the narrative can properly represent the forces of 
history at work in a specific situation. In Flaubert and Zola, however, detailed 
descriptions of scenes are emancipated from the narrative and become an end 
in themselves, thereby dissolving realism into formalism.
Lukács’s essay finds its distant echo and mirror image in Rancière’s writings 
on modern literature. For Rancière, it was precisely the descriptions, written 
45
 Ibid.
46
 Jason McGrath, “The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke”, p. 102.
47
 Fredric Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, Verso, London and New York 2013.
48
 Georg Lukács, Writer & Critic and Other Essays, ed. and trans. by Arthur D. Kahn, The Mer-
lin Press, London 1970, pp. 110–148.

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temporalities of modernity in jia zhangke’s still life
as “chains of perceptions and affects,” rather than narrative constructions of 
causes and effects, that defined realism and with it, the modern literary rev-
olution.
49
 Even in film, as Rancière elaborates in relation to Béla Tarr (another 
“post-socialist” director fond of long takes), the “essence of realism … is the dis-
tance taken with regard to stories, to their temporal schemes and their sequenc-
es of causes and effects,” the distance that, however, “requires us to go ever 
deeper into the interior of the situation itself, to expand, ever farther back, the 
chain of sensations, perceptions, and emotions” that precedes stories and even 
makes them possible.
50
 The Aristotelian temporal hierarchy is thus reversed, 
opening the possibility of a new type of temporal linkage based on the succes-
sion of moments that breach the narrative structure.
From this perspective, the so-called formalist aesthetisation is no longer neces-
sarily the opposite of realism, but rather a way of exploring and transforming 
the temporal and spatial aesthetic fabric that constitutes what we experience 
as reality. Still Life redistributes the sensible capacities by delving into what Jia 
calls the aesthetic sense of the real, following the slow rhythm of life in the in-
tervals and cracks of the narrative of modernisation. This approach transforms 
the ruins from a site of loss to a scene of fragile connectivity.
49
 Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction, trans. by Steven 
Corcoran, Bloomsbury, London 2017, p. 16.
50
 Jacques Rancière, Béla Tarr: The Time After, trans. by Eric Beranek, Univocal, Minneapolis 
2013, pp. 8–10.