ABSTRACT
Still Life (Sanxia haoren 三峡好人) received wide acclaims from both domestic audiences and western critics and reaped the 2006 Golden Lion award and the “best director” award in the 28th Durban International Film Festival. In this movie, Jia’s characters roam the crumbling town that is being demolished in anticipation of the national dam project. It is composed of two unrelated stories, narrating a man and a woman searching for their respective spouses. This fable shows the rootless physical as well as spiritual situations of men and women. Analyzing its cinematic structure and textual architectonics, this chapter suggests that, by critiquing social illness and extolling the innate goodness of the subaltern class, the movie comes close to the tradition of revolutionary realism and even socialist realism in modern China and thus shows a resuscitation of the spirit of critical realism. However, its conviction in certain un-political, a-historical and universal human nature constrains its deeper exploration of the social contradiction.
