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, is that 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 it in "The Delirious Cinematic Artifice of Bi Gan’s “Resurrection”, it is simply 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 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".