{"id":16622,"date":"2008-01-18T11:40:30","date_gmt":"2008-01-18T18:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2008\/01\/18\/drowning-in-progress-j-hoberman\/"},"modified":"2008-01-18T11:40:30","modified_gmt":"2008-01-18T18:40:30","slug":"drowning-in-progress-j-hoberman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2008\/01\/drowning-in-progress-j-hoberman\/","title":{"rendered":"Drowning in Progress &#8211; J. Hoberman"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nThe Village Voice reviews <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Jia_Zhangke\" target=\"_blank\">Jia Zhangke&#8217;s<\/a> Still Life, which is just being released in the U.S.:\n<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nMore observer than director, Jia is concerned with how it feels to be in a particular environment. His films are predicated on a sense of everyday social flux and, more than any I&#8217;ve seen, they provide some sense of China&#8217;s seething interior. Jia&#8217;s parents were sent to Shanxi during the Cultural Revolution, and that&#8217;s where he was born. (Dislocation is his birthright.) Shanxi was also the setting for Jia&#8217;s first three movies &#8212; Xiao Wu, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures. Now, in Still Life, Shanxi&#8217;s inhabitants are themselves on the move. For Jia, the sense of a lost past is not only a matter of personal history, but something cultural and even geological. The eternal is transitory &#8212; or is it vice versa? Fengjie, which has been on the banks of the Yangtze forever, is now the essence of the ephemeral. People live amid the rubble&#8217;s crevices, on abandoned piers and in derelict barges. Raw, unfinished, and painfully specific, the setting is the opposite of the denatured Beijing theme park in Jia&#8217;s last movie, World. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.villagevoice.com\/film\/0803,hoberman,78844,20.html\" target=\"_blank\">[Full text]<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>\nThe New Yorker also <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/arts\/critics\/cinema\/2008\/01\/21\/080121crci_cinema_denby\" target=\"_blank\">has a review <\/a>of both Still Life and Lou Ye&#8217;s Summer Palace.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Village Voice reviews Jia Zhangke&#8217;s Still Life, which is just being released in the U.S.: More observer than director, Jia is concerned with how it feels to be in a particular environment. His films are predicated on a sense of everyday social flux and, more than any I&#8217;ve seen, they provide some sense of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[7734,1288,1550],"class_list":["post-16622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-jia-zhangke","tag-movie-reviews","tag-movies","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v24.1 (Yoast SEO v24.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Drowning in Progress - J. 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His films are predicated on a sense of everyday social flux and, more than any I&#8217;ve seen, they provide some sense of [&hellip;]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2008\/01\/drowning-in-progress-j-hoberman\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"China Digital Times (CDT)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/ChinaDigitalTimes\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2008-01-18T18:40:30+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/CDT-logo.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"186\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"177\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Kate Zhao\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@cdt\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@cdt\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Kate Zhao\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"1 minute\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2008\/01\/drowning-in-progress-j-hoberman\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2008\/01\/drowning-in-progress-j-hoberman\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Kate Zhao\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/#\/schema\/person\/dc4c77d136cf2d5be96c8e11f47f45d1\"},\"headline\":\"Drowning in Progress &#8211; J. 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