Mon, Feb 2, 2009, 8:30 pm
Location:
Communications, Studio C
To see Still Life as social documentary that shows us the ‘other China’ that most of us do not know is to largely miss the point. While the film for the most part adheres to a documentary style, it can also introduce at crucial moments bizarre, anti-realist, details. If the film documents a social space, it is a space that has undergone a twist, just as socialism in China has been twisted into 'the socialist market economy.' Such a space cannot be approached directly through straight documentary, but only deduced through the bizarre effects that it produces; effects akin to slips of the tongue that allow access to what might be called 'the spatial unconscious.'