(Un)making Space in Cinema: Representations of ruination in Still Life by Jia Zhangke

Abstract

This essay provides a critical analysis of Jia Zhangke’s film Still Life (2006), exploring its representations of ruination within the broader context of the socio-spatial upheavals induced by China’s economic liberalization. Associated with the Sixth Generation of Chinese cinema, Zhangke focuses on spaces and subjects marginalized by modernization, exposing the contradictions produced by globalization in the country’s millenary landscapes and social fabric. Set in the ancient city of Fengjie — demolished and submerged by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam — the film unfolds through personal journeys across a dissolving territory. Bringing together theories of cinema, space, and memory, the essay analyzes the multiple configurations of ruination depicted in the film — material, social, symbolic, and subjective — through concepts such as ruin, rubble, ruination, spatial memory, solastalgia, and heterotopia. It highlights how Zhangke’s cinematic practice combines urgency and slowness: a realist approach to documenting disappearance that stretches time and unsettles the spectacular temporality of global capitalism, exposing its destructive effects. By examining the embodied engagement of characters with ruined spaces the analysis explores how demolition, displacement, and loss reconfigure individual and collective spatial experience. The essay also addresses the heterotopic nature of the film’s transitional sites, where everyday life and spatial erasure coexist, generating temporary zones for the improvisation of alternative spatial practices. Through the juxtaposition of documentary, fiction, and moments of fantastic rupture, Still Life offers not only a representation of destruction, but also a meditation on memory, persistence, and the afterlife of disturbed places. In doing so, the film positions itself as a critical response to the violence of the dominant model of development, reclaiming slowness as a tool for rethinking space, progress, and subjectivity under conditions of accelerated landscape transformation.