{"id":2540,"date":"2009-06-07T23:55:08","date_gmt":"2009-06-08T03:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=2540"},"modified":"2009-06-07T23:55:08","modified_gmt":"2009-06-08T03:55:08","slug":"dong-2006-jia-zhang-ke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/2540","title":{"rendered":"Dong (2006, Jia Zhang-Ke)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I assume this was on my must-see list because a bunch of New Yorker critics put it on their best-of-year lists paired with Still Life<\/a><\/em>. Given how unimpressed I was with Still Life<\/em> overall, I should’ve known better than to seek out its lesser-known companion piece. But I’m also drawn to 70-minute movies and figured it couldn’t hurt (it did; it put me to sleep).<\/p>\n

We meet a painter at Three Gorges Dam.<\/p>\n

Later he goes to Thailand.<\/p>\n

Recommended listening: Psalm 69<\/em> by Ministry.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/p>\n

Supposedly “Dong” means “East” in Mandarin – not to be confised with Tsai Ming-liang’s Dong<\/em>, which means “The Hole” in Taiwanese.<\/p>\n

Ian Johnston for Bright Lights:<\/p>\n

A week after starting on Dong<\/em>, Jia decided to make Still Life<\/em>, from then on shooting the two films in parallel. In fact, the films share some of the same footage, including nonprofessional actor Han Sanming. Han’s appearance in both films playing a demolition worker alongside real workers raises some interesting questions about the “documentary” nature of Dong<\/em>. It seems to share here the aesthetics of Jia’s fiction filmmaking, where questions of form – the composition of the image, the placement and movement or lack of movement of the camera, shot length – have as important a role as a film’s content, and the way that content reflects a social reality. This slippage between documentary and artifice in Dong<\/em> is interesting, but the film itself is a minor work of limited appeal. One of its problems is that although Jia feels a generational and artistic affinity with Liu, Liu’s painting style – the focus of Dong<\/em> – is of the most banal representational realism, far away from the challenges of Jia’s aesthetics. Moreover, the second half of Dong<\/em> is very weak, with the scenes in Bangkok, in striking contrast to those in Fengjie, appearing touristic and inauthentic. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scott Tobias: “In every case, the backdrops of Jia’s films are extraordinary: Momentous, politically engaged, and strongly attuned to the consequences of progress on a macro scale. And in every case, he also seems oddly incapable of doing anything interesting in the foreground.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I assume this was on my must-see list because a bunch of New Yorker critics put it on their best-of-year lists paired with Still Life. Given how unimpressed I was with Still Life overall, I should’ve known better than to seek out its lesser-known companion piece. But I’m also drawn to 70-minute movies and figured […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[200,815,302,814],"class_list":["post-2540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-china","tag-jia-zhang-ke","tag-painting","tag-three-gorges"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2540"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2637,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2540\/revisions\/2637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}