How Nomadland, The Rider, and Eternals reshape time, existence, and the space between human and world
When wind passes over a desolate plain, it leaves no trace. Yet the camera catches the absence of that wind — not sand, but a surface on which the grain of time is made visible. A figure moves slowly across it, and the movement resembles something prior to narrative, a unit of life not yet given a name. Chloé Zhao’s cinema always departs from a condition of this kind: not from the beginning of a story, but from some state that precedes the story. The question is not a dramatic event but how a being is placed within the world.
Her frames are not empty so much as they treat emptiness itself as a material. In Nomadland, the vast desert and the open ground of parking lots are not simple backgrounds. They do not reflect or amplify the character’s emotion — instead, they are the space where emotion remains in an undecided state. The camera does not narrow the distance between person and world; it maintains the gap, and in maintaining it, reveals the sensation that a human being cannot fully belong to the world. This gap operates less as tragedy than as a condition of some original freedom.
This sensibility differs subtly from the mystical union with nature characteristic of Terrence Malick’s cinema. Where Malick draws human beings upward into a transcendent order through nature, Zhao leaves nature as a flat surface that permits no transcendence. Her camera stays close to the ground rather than looking toward the sky. Light is not grace — it is simply light. The world is returned to a condition prior to the assignment of meaning, and within it the character must define herself.
In this, her work connects to the tradition of Neorealism — but not as simple inheritance. The formal choices of non-professional actors, actual locations, and minimal narrative intervention are not a strategy for reproducing reality; they are closer to a method of allowing reality to disclose itself. In The Rider, the protagonist’s body is not an instrument of performance but the trace of a life that has already passed through experience. The camera does not interpret it — it simply remains with it. What matters is not what happens but how existence continues.
This disposition is equally evident in the way her films approach emotion. Feeling does not explode as the consequence of an event. Instead it settles slowly through time. Characters do not weep, yet their silences delay emotion and in doing so make it denser. Invoking Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the time-image, Zhao’s films produce knowledge of the world through duration and dwelling rather than action and causality. Her shots do not press toward the next scene; they remain inside the present moment and become, in themselves, a complete experience.
Yet her films are not simply slow and contemplative. Inscribed within them are the fractures left by the structures of contemporary capitalism. The migrant workers, the dispossessed, the bodies that cannot settle in Nomadland are not the result of personal choices. They inhabit a fluidity produced by the system. Yet Zhao does not fix these figures as victims. She watches instead how they generate their own rhythms within that fluidity. Movement here is not a survival strategy — it becomes a way of being.
What is striking is that this aesthetic does not disappear even in a large-scale franchise film like Eternals. The film is certainly shaped by the demands of an enormous narrative structure and visual spectacle. Yet even within it, Zhao places her characters within vast natural spaces and continues to ask what kind of beings they remain through time. The solitude experienced by immortal figures resonates, strangely, with the sensation of finite life explored in her earlier work. Eternity is not a blessing here — it becomes the weight of time that continues without end.
Ultimately, Chloé Zhao’s cinema asks not how a story is to be told but what it means to exist within the world. Her camera does not organize events — it places beings. And that placement always remains in an incomplete state. Characters do not arrive at destinations; narratives do not reach conclusions. Instead, the film holds us within a condition — duration, dwelling, time that has not yet ended.
Wind passes over the plain again. Nothing appears to have changed, yet the time that passed through is unmistakably present. What Zhao’s cinema captures is the fine grain of that change — the trace of time that cannot be reduced to event. It cannot be seen. But once sensed, it is the kind of experience that can no longer be erased.
— The Cinematic Visionaries
From the abyss of genre to the pinnacle of classic aesthetics