Still Life by Jia Zhangke according to the Historical and Contemporary Phenomena in China

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Still Life
Introduction
Development comes with some transformations. These fluctuations can be either geographical or cultural change. A good example of ups and downs due to development is the building of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China. The dam reached its completion in the early years of the 21st century. The project led to the displacement of millions of people. To the government of China and environmentalists, it became a very controversial issue. Still Life, the 2006 film by JiaZhangke shows the price paid by citizens through China’s often bad and degrading shift from state-controlled Marxism to state-authorized capitalism. Set upon the background of Three George Dam the movie Still Life shows the social convolution of two couples from the area where the project was set. The characters demonstrate how construction and annihilation associated with the dam project affected people from the opposite sides of the economic divide of the then developing China. Moreover, the flick explores how the impending flood acmes the difficulties of the socio-economic environment while revealing how people take massive topographical changes.
Still Life according to the historical and contemporary phenomena in China
Still Life, the story of a man and a woman on analogous hunts to find their long lost partners is set in Fengjie, an ancient riverside city that is about to vanish in water. The town is one hundred and fifty miles upstream from the Three Georges Dam that swamped thousands of villages and towns at long-last displacing more than a million individuals. The dam was part of the hydroelectricity power generation project (Dalle, 1). Shot in the era that Fengjie was being smashed for the construction of the dam the flick has a powerful documentary flavor that also borders surreal. Throughout the film, characters are seen wandering in the rubble and disseminated inhospitable surroundings. The vivid narration matches the hitches brought about by the devastation. Even the audience outside China can grasp everything from impacts of demolition for the dam to citizens, to how the project violets Fengjie’s majestic natural beauty.
Though Still Life appears like a political cinema, it stimulatingly brings out the notion of human suffering and visual ideas as result of transformations brought about by Three Georges Dam power project. The flick opens with a series of touching pans across children, men and women congregated in a yacht in the Yangtze proximate to the dam. As the movie goes, the scene of Sanming and Shen Hong emanates. The duo inhabits discrete spaces and personal stories (Dalle, 1). However, they are connected by the language, landscape, culture, and context. The project dwarfs Sanming and Hong; it has ruined their buildings and the surrounding properties. Hence, Mr. Jia uses the pair to demonstrate changes accompanying Three Georges Dam power project. Thus, from them, the audience can view how Fengjie appeared before and after the project.
Fengjie’s demolition is an indicator of how other towns and villages in China where eradicated for the construction of the Three Georges Dam, the world’s largest dam (Dalle, 1). For instance, in the la...