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This article views the Three Gorges Dam as the moment of stasis brought to the century-long daily practices of Chinese people on its historically enriched land. Through Jia Zhangke’s visual poetics in Still Life, this stasis presents us with the gently emotional and minute quotidian details of lives on the brim of unprecedented change, whose uprootedness and estrangements too embody their power of agency to this massive alteration brought about by high modernization. By interpreting Still Life as a visual activist film that redeems grassroots as agents of historical change rather than recipients or victims of fundamental environmental change, this article reveals the power of Jia’s documentary-style film by decoding two modes of agency: dysfunction and the uncanny. Through the visual representations of dysfunction and the uncanny, Jia offers a potent statement on the totalizing effects of a modernization project and reveals the agency embodied in people’s daily practices.