Diary entries forStill Life
Still Life
Life man....LIFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXIfZLt8aEM
Still Life
A difficult watch at times, but seems a bit inconsequential in the end. It certainly gives a different view of a slaughterhouse that most don’t get to see, with some pretty grisly scenes depicting a typical day, but I don’t think there was a powerful enough message to amount to much. Well shot, but executed in a way that made it distant.
Still Life
““𝘠𝘰𝘶’𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘨𝘪𝘤.” “𝘞𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘴.” What is home but a wasteland of memories? Why does the past constantly choose to die to let us live? Can’t it be the other way around? Sometimes, I hate what I carry inside me. It gets heavy. I want to rest every so often, catch up to my own breath, only to realize how little I’ve travelled, how little I’ve done, even for myself. Zhangke creates purgatory in the decay of the impoverished. The collapse of the working class. The collapse of blue collar work. What is left for a person, to make so little and to be in search of so little within ourselves and for each other? Though I think some of the orchestrations here are incredible to a grand scale, with demolition workers ripping things apart, sparks flying, wifebeater men in hardhats and sweat bare backs, so little is resolved in the end that it makes you question the runtime. And when that one building-spaceship blasted off into the air, I literally laughed and rolled my eyes because it just looked so bad and silly against the backdrop of everything. All the aimlessness and wandering could’ve better been metaphorized in ways that didn’t take up so much screentime. And though I don’t mind when it’s Zhao Tao doing all the wandering, I think so much more can be utilized from her when it comes to performance. She has so much to offer, but under the guise of this film, her performance is undermined by Zhangke’s constant obsession of landscape as a form of memory. This is inherent in all of his work, but he spends so much time involving himself in time and place as landscape that it is such a disservice to his players at work.
