Bi Gan's "Resurrection" at SIFF Cinema: Jan 23 - Feb 5 | "The Delirious Cinematic Artifice of Bi Gan" | The New Yorker

Reporting from Cannes this past summer, in his review of Chinese filmmaker Bi Gan's Special Prize-winning third feature Peter Bradshaw writes for The Guardian on the boldly ambitious, visually astounding embrace of the heightened meanings and unreal dreamlike sense left in the wake of, "'Resurrection''s Fascinating Phantasmagoria is Wild Riddle about new China and an Old Universe". Through conjuring a boundary-pushing tale that evokes both moviemaking and also being an episodic journey through Chinese history, with "Resurrection", the director brings audiences into his "Hallucinatory Voyage Into Cinema". Yet this historic perspective is changed, in that the history is seen through the vantage of an alternate reality in which human beings have discovered their propensity for immortality, if they abstain from dreaming. The consequence of which is that for those who sleep and dream, it is as though they are consumed and burn down like a lit candle. Bradshaw writes on the film's enigma, and if the resurrection in question offers any clear transformative sense. Or instead in "The Delirious Cinematic Artifice of Bi Gan’s “Resurrection”, it is simply a witness to the journey of its shape-shifting dreamer, who becomes lost in a densely allusive maze of stories and genres. From the director's interview with Film Stage, "Cinema Will Not Come to an End": Bi Gan on Resurrection", it is possible to interpret this labyrinth as cinema itself in its auditorily sumptuous soundscape supplied by M83, and its mesmerizing, flickering images as seen on screen at SIFF Cinema next month.

In the body of the director's filmmography, the connective tissue to his most recent foray can be seen in Bi Gan's remarkable arthouse debut which swept up Locarno's Best New Director prize, ranked in Film Comment's Best Films of 2015, and was hailed as one of the most assured directorial debuts of the decade by both Film Comment and Cinema-Scope. Ostensibly the story of a middle aged doctor and ex-con searching for his young nephew, "Kaili Blues" offers up an increasingly dreamlike elegy for bygone Miao traditions, and the sweeping changes seen throughout the landscape of mainland China. Most striking is the emphatically experimental detour in it's middle passage into a "Dreamy Trek with Otherworldly Beauty", as the narrative proceeds into an extended exercise in cinematic time and space. Delivered through extended shots and images that are achingly melancholy, and teasingly cluttered, "Kaili Blues: A Dream Without Limits" describes the subtropical province of Guizhou, a mountainous, lush region of sporadic human habitations. The film's sensibility for the subject, and setting of this abstract chronicle of persons lost and a past revealed, is best expressed in Mark Chan's Short Take for Film Comment; "one of the rare moments in recent cinema where ostentatious screen-craft proves equal to the task of channeling a multitude of these inexpressible sorrows".

Again, finding itself included in Film Comment's Best Films of the year,  Bi Gan returned in 2018 with a sophomore leap into neo-noir centering around the fading embers of a mysterious romance told in the key of early Wong Kar-Wai. In this dream of a movie, much of it told through almost omnipresent voiceover, "Long Day's Journey Into Night" centers around the return of Luo Hongwu to his hometown in Guizhou province, to find the woman he’s loved and never forgotten. This most noirish of storytelling devices circles around a set of recurring concepts, whether journeys, romantic encounters, the abstraction of recollection, time, (or during one startling technical sequence) cinema itself, all expressed with the same half-remembered quality. Mention should be made of the strength of the film's independent components. Particularly Liu Qiang’s set design, an explicit selection of Cantonese pop, and the ethereal electro-acoustic score supplied by Lim Giong and Point Hsu. Most significantly, during the film's initial sequence the sensuous and atmospheric cinematography of Yao Hung-I and Dong Jinsong, setting the tone for the extended set piece that culminates this highly stylized and oneiric cinematic voyage, not unlike that seen in "Ressurection", whereafter "Long Day’s Journey Into Night Follows its Own Woozy Dream Logic".

Cate Le Bon's "Michelangelo Dying" & North American Tour: Jan 12 - 31

Rumaan Alam writes in The New Yorker on his obsessive listening to Cate Le Bon's shift toward a prophetic lyrical presence heard on her newest, "Michelangelo Dying", in which he sees an evocation of Laurie Anderson's acclaimed "Big Science" album of the 1980s. In "The Uneasy Prophecies of Cate Le Bon", further parallels can be found in that of the production and guitar sound of Robin Guthrie and Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, the soaring vocal incantations of Björk and Kate Bush, and the liquid, flowing, non-euclidean pop structures and production of Brian Eno. The pedigree, and it's parallels with formative artists of the 1970s and 80s is made explicit in "Ride", the album's penultimate track, a duet with Welsh art-pop songwriter and violist John Cale, who had his beginnings in none other than The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Velvet Underground. Coming from a Welsh tradition of the surreal, the singer-songwriter is forever trying to capture that which cannot be said, and in channeling the art-pop lineage of these inspirations and peers, "Cate Le Bon Evokes Pop Outliers", in her "Choosing of Absurdity". The newest work is striking in its shift away from such sensibilities. Speaking with NPR, Le Bon relates that after a long relationship ended painfully, she swapped the desert of Joshua Tree for south Wales, and set to work on her most emotionally direct record yet, "‘The Breakup was Like an Amputation that Saves You’: Cate Le Bon on Healing From Heartache and Her Heavy New Album". In conversation with Vogue a month before her North American tour with a night at Seattle's Neptune Theatre, “I had this image of something industrial and angular,” Le Bon shared from her home in Cardiff, Wales. “I was sidestepping, trying to outrun sitting with heartache. But I kept veering back towards what "Michelangelo Dying" became". An album which has its origins in wanting to craft a work which fit into the hard edged electro-industrial sounds on the 1990s, has instead manifest as a plaintive, soaring, paean to the end of love, "With Her New Album, Michelangelo Dying, Cate Le Bon Takes on Heartache".