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This chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). It diverges from the critical commonplace that aligns the form of To the Lighthouse with Lily Briscoe's painting and claims instead that the novel unfolds the iconographic implications of a still-life composition. The carefully arranged dish of fruit and a seashell on the Ramsays' table signals the novel's interest in minor, everyday objects and also establishes a vanitas motif—a reminder of mortality and the impermanence of human life. Woolf's still life metamorphoses into various vanitas forms throughout the novel, precipitating later turns of the plot and linking up with the novel's elegiac project. All these vanitas motifs are thus mortal forms that help to determine the shape and flow of the narrative, which is itself a mortal form—hopelessly entangled with human emotion, fated to reckon with mortality, and challenged to mourn the dead. In this way Woolf, like James, requires one to modify the notion that the modernist novel is best approached as a spatial form.

This introduction introduces the shifting terms and characteristics historically ascribed to the still life genre, in order to open up a more nuanced discussion of the significance of stillness and still life for modern cultural practices across different media, in literature, painting, sculpture and dance. The still life paintings of the French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) are paradigmatic in this exploration of modern still life and the phenomenon of the ‘animate inanimate’. This introduction examines a range of textual responses to his still lifes by Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wassily Kandinsky and (in an extended exploration) D.H. Lawrence, in order to explore a constellation of motifs, concerns and desires that shape the still life in the ‘age of speed’.

This chapter explores how Hou Xiaoxian and Jia Zhangke have responded critically and reflexively to the commoditization and neoliberal redevelopment of place by challenging their own notions of authenticity and realism in two iconic shooting locations: Jiufen and Chongqing. By the production of Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996), Jiufen has transformed into what Urry calls a “tourist place,” a nostalgia themed space where film-induced tourism has all but overwhelmed the historical aura so cherished by Hou. I argue that the film’s disruptions of Hou’s realist style are reflexive responses to his own sense of complicity in transforming Jiufen into a tourist place. Operating like an alienation effect, moments of spectacular excess expose how the spectator’s perception of Jiufen is far from natural, but mediated through images popularized by Hou’s own films. Whereas Hou seems unable to experience Jiufen outside the dichotomy of authenticity and inauthenticity, Jia makes meaningful sense of his hometown's neoliberal redevelopment through a critical lens shaped, surprisingly, by none other than Hou's cinema. It is with this translocal, cinephilic, and reflexive framework of place making that Jia Zhangke re-imagines the decimated landscapes of Chongqing in Still Life (2006). Rather than simply lament the disappearance of authenticity, the film carefully observes the place making practices of China's "floating population," who must depend on their resourcefulness to navigate a geography of ecological ruin. Importantly, these unexpected modes of agency show Jia's departure from the authoritative, detached, and privileged modes of place making institutionalized by Fifth Generation auteurs.

The relationship between still life, spiritual contemplation and the ‘numinous’ comes to the foreground in the work of British painters, Winifred Nicholson, Ben Nicholson, David Jones and Ivon Hitchens, in the context of the artists’ different commitments to the ‘spiritual’, from Christian Science to Catholic theology. This chapter proposes that still life - and in particular the ‘still life at a window motif’ - functions in their work as a mode through which to explore the relationship between the material and the immaterial, as well as to tease out fundamental aesthetic questions. It offers close readings of their still life and flower paintings of the 1920s and early 30s and of writings by contemporary collectors and by the artists, to make the case for the emergence of an ‘enchanted’ domesticity in their circle, which was intimately related to still life and its transformation of the everyday object world. It concludes with an excursion into Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, the former home of Jim Ede, the collector and friend of the Nicholsons, to propose a reading of his domestic space as an extended still life.

Ever since its emergence at the turn of the seventeenth century, the aesthetic body of Dutch still life painting has been hamstrung by iconography. Viewed through the magnific lens of Britannica Online, iconography is “the science of identification, description, classification, and interpretation of symbols, themes, and subject matter in the visual arts. The term can also refer to the artist's use of this imagery in a particular work.” In iconographical discourse, the text most frequently inscribed in or on still life painting is said to be the vanitas. This definition may be shopworn but it is accurate as far as it goes. Vanitas embraces both senses of the term “vainness”: futility and conceit.

When Virginia Woolf sought to evoke Roger Fry’s qualities as an art critic, she reached for the image of him as a humming-bird hawk-moth, ‘quivering yet still’ in his absorbed attention to Post-Impressionist paintings. This chapter argues that modes of ‘active’ stillness and receptive, vibratory states of being were crucial to Woolf’s experience and representation of art. It traces ‘quivering’ as a talismanic word across a range of her fiction and non-fiction, and explores the pervasive figure of the insect in Woolf’s re-imagining of the human sensorium, with particular focus on her essay Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934), and on Sketch of the Past (1939). The second half of the chapter addresses Woolf’s underexplored biography of Roger Fry and her confrontation with the problem of ‘writing’ Fry under the imperative not to ‘fix’ her subject, but rather to register his ‘vibratory’ non-physical presence. It considers the role of vibration more widely in Woolf’s life-writing and in Fry’s art theory, in the context of twentieth-century spiritualism, Quakerism and new communication technologies. It proposes that by examining the different functions and meanings of still life (visual and verbal) in Woolf’s and Fry’s work, we can further illuminate their approach to the relationship between art and life.

This chapter displays how material and cognitive spaces are shaped and demolished due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam by examining Zhang Ming’s 1996 Rainclouds over Wushan [Wushan yunyu] and Jia Zhangke’s 2006 Still Life [Sanxia haoren]. The enormous national project represents the macro spatial view of rationalising and modernising the urban space, yet Zhang Ming chooses a micro perspective to examine the inertia and subjective dimension of the city. He creates a Thirdspace by showing the street view of the urban space and everyday life related to emerging commercialism and oppressed desire in a claustrophobic space, which opposes the grand discourse of building the Three Gorges Dam to national resurrection and modernisation. Still Life adopts the style of magical realism to convey the dramatic changes underway in the physical space and the consequent traumatic experiences in the mental space of characters. It works as a space of resistance by focusing on those marginalised people who make ruins, live in ruins, are exiled and even buried by ruins. Ruins, therefore, bear clear and indivisible class marks. The cinematic representations of the city resonate with the immensity and complexity of the trend toward urbanisation and modernisation.

This chapter situates Murry's first novel, Still Life, within the frameworks of his friendship with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and his intimate relationship with Katherine Mansfield. It discusses the impact of Lawrence's ideas about sexuality on Murry's treatment of sex in Still Life, and also takes up the issues of repressed homosexuality and homosocial desire in his friendships with Lawrence, Gordon Campbell, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Mansfield's bisexuality is discussed in relation to Murry's treatment of lesbianism in his novel. The chapter analyses Murry's writing process and his difficulty in following nineteenth-century narrative conventions to write a modernist novel.

This chapter contains an intertextual reading of Murry's Still Life and Lawrence's Women in Love. It considers the ways that Murry's ambivalent friendship with Lawrence is reflected in Women in Love. Using both the first and final versions of Women in Love, this chapter analyses Lawrence's changing interpretations of the homosocial/homosexual relationship between Gerald Crick and Rupert Birkin and argues that they evoke some of the traumatic incidents that occurred during Murry and Mansfield's visit to the Lawrences in Cornwall in 1916.

The chapter begins with an intertextual reading of Mansfield's short story, ‘Bliss’ and Murry's Still Life. That reading emphasises differences between Murry and Mansfield in their fictional treatment of the concept of ‘bliss’, female sexuality, bisexuality, and the power dynamics of marriage. The chapter then explores the ways that Murry's and Mansfield's relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell underlie the structure of ‘Bliss’. It considers how these relations mark a general shift from the influence of Lawrence to that of Bloomsbury on Murry and Mansfield.

This chapter presents early European still life insect paintings. Artists referred to cultural practices related to displaying the natural world such as kuntskammers and natural history in the formation of aesthetic conventions for this new genre. The chapter initially looks at the objects present in early floral still life paintings, where insects can be a frequent sight along with shells, coins, and so on. It also explains that European collectors actually prefer small items like coins and medals for their size and durability, making them easy to preserve in still life paintings as evident in Jan Van Kessel (the Elder)’s insect still life.

“The Profundity of Still Life” argues that the still life is the most philosophical of genres. The chapter demonstrates how various modes of reflection in still life painting (in mirrors, dew drops or shiny surfaces) can be linked to philosophical reflection and (Cartesian) self-consciousness. The discussion includes perspective as a mode of thinking and examines visual concepts such as the finite and the infinite as worked out by Blaise Pascale and Hubert Damisch. A comparison of seventeenth-century still life painting to Paul Klee’s Equals Infinity will reinforce the claim made by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari that art is a form of thought.

This chapter ventures to read the trompe-l’oeil of Dutch still life paintings as a trace of the self-referentiality of the illuminated manuscript page of the late fifteenth century, which is characterized by trompe-l’oeils and other features that thematize its own materiality and mediality (like for instance its two-dimensionality or its verticality). Departing from the observation of strange phenomena in Jan van Kessel’s small copper plates depicting insects and other natural objects, and the excessive trompe-l’oeils in the book illuminations of Joris Hoefnagel, which involve the fact that a book page has a recto and a verso side, the text argues that the Dutch still life emerged from the margins, edges, and borders of Flemish illuminated book manuscripts, that were constantly reinterpreted as represented objects. It is the re-entry of the material carrier into the imaginary pictorial space, that keeps generating the trompe-l’oeil. The Dutch still life is thus the pictorialized, ongoing, unarrestable collapse of the distinction between material carrier and painted object. The trompe-l’oeil appears as a symptom of the suppressed late medieval order of co-presence and the figural in the sense of Jean-François Lyotard, and thus also as a symptom of the media genealogy of representation itself.

This chapter analyses a group of films that are set against the background of the construction of the Three Gorges Dam Project and the impending flooding of the area: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2002), In Expectation (1996), and Still Life (2006). These films bear testimony to the ruthless physical eradication of cities, towns, villages, and communities. This is the result of reckless modernization under the reign of instrumental rationality that treats nature as a “standing reserve” awaiting human appropriation.

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.

This chapter defines the category of pensive images as not representing a narrative or a meaning, but as articulating thought. In contrast to self-reflexive images (such as Las Meninas) that have produced discourse, pensive images’ main characteristic is stillness, a productive silence. They do not so much trigger thought as arrest it. The chapter explores the concept of stillness, starting from recent discussions around the still image in photofilmic video art of Fiona Tan to the debate about stillness’ relation to thought in theory of photography of Barthes, Mulvey and Bellour to Lessing’s pregnant moment.

In still-life painting, particularly in seventeenth-century Netherlandish art, mimetic and illusionistic realism is extreme and refined, but it does not exhaust the meaning of the painting. Beneath their material covering of canvas, wood panel, images, and colors, the things depicted in these paintings conceal precise and encoded symbolic values—and, by their very nature, symbols connect what is visibly represented to what is invisibly absent; thus grapes allude to the blood of Christ or oysters to sexual pleasure. The vegetables, fruits, cut flowers, game, fish, and shellfish in these pictures are all things painted for the pleasure and enjoyment of people. They appear suspended between their ephemeral or recently extinguished life and their death, between their solid visible form and the evanescent perspective of their imminent dissipation or decomposition. They testify at one and the same time to the pleasures of life and the desire to take advantage of those pleasures before it is too late, to the fulfillment of all five senses and their progressive weakening, to happy moments and their passing, and to the usefulness and beauty of everyday goods and their transitory nature.

Documentary film in the PRC has become an important mode in the palate of Sixth Generation (or urban or independent) filmmaking. The recent prominence of documentary turns on the notion of indexicality and the capacity for film to present reality. Jia Zhangke, probably the most critically acclaimed of Sixth Generation filmmakers, in his film practice, though largely conforming to this long-take, observational documentary style, also brazenly deploys technologies such as nondiegetic music and CGI effects. On the face of it, these tactics may seem to undermine the indexical reality portrayed in Jia’s films, but on further consideration actually augment his historical project of capturing China’s contemporary moment.