Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures Zhuoyi Wang recently gave an online talk titled “The River, The Lake, and the Monument: Social Changes and Nostalgia in Still Life (2006)” at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for its Chinese Studies Workshop Series.
The talk examined how Still Life, a 2006 Chinese film directed by Jia Zhangke, uses a series of cultural and political symbols, including the jianghu (lit. rivers and lakes), cigarettes, liquor, sugar, tea, boats, and a monument, to depict the powerlessness and nostalgia shared by those people who are overwhelmed by the rapid social changes and lose their sense of time, place, and identity.
