Linguistic Landscapes in Jia Zhangke's Still Life

Abstract

This thesis examines the use of linguistic landscapes in Jia Zhangke’s Still Life. It investigates how text is used in the film and if and how these linguistic landscapes connect to Jia Zhangke’s general themes. Data was gathered by pausing the film whenever any text appeared on-screen and marking down the text with a timestamp. The data was sorted and analysed using frameworks derived from both linguistic landscape studies and film theory. The analysis was primarily qualitative. The results establish a clear intent to guide the viewer’s focus towards text in the film and demonstrate a sophisticated and layered use of linguistic landscapes. This study argues that the linguistic landscapes in Still Life are connected to the main thematic elements of Jia Zhangke’s films. In the future, the methodology used here could possibly be applied to analyse the linguistic landscapes of other films as well.