Remaking a European, Post-catastrophic Atmosphere in 2000s China: Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, Iconology and Ruins
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Jia Zhangke’s Still Life ( Sānxiá hǎorén , 2006) was shot in Fengjie, shortly before its flooding brought about by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydropower station in terms of capacity. The film remakes the post-apocalyptic atmosphere found in European films made after the Second World War. From a web of cinephilic, intermedial and intertextual references, which inscribes Still Life in a local and global history of art and of film, this text compares the way Jia films his characters in a disappearing Fengjie with sequences from Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero ( Germania anno zero , 1948) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert ( Il deserto rosso , 1964). While remaking the composition of ruins framing Edmund, in the first case, and in the second, a complex relation between background and figure in a deserted industrial landscape, Still Life creates a strange temporality, combining the imminence of a future catastrophe with the memory of past ones.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".