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We are five minutes and eighteen seconds into the film when we hear that “there’s someone even saying that she hopes to die in Beijing”. It is the first time the narration breaks character to make a comment on the film’s slow camera method, breathing real life into the story — just as the film draws to an end. The statement seems abrupt compared to the previously objective tone and steady narrative tempo. But this change of rhetorical mood allows the character to break away from the constraints of status and temporality that goes beyond the news clipping narrating style.
Nineteen people were killed and eight people injured on 18 November 2017 when a fire roared through the Chufuyuan apartments in the town of Xihongmen, Dazing District, Beijing. The municipality of Beijing gave an urgent order forcing the residences to evacuate in three days, cutting off water and electricity supplies during the eviction process. The event is part of a long and stringent urban gentrification process, which rendered subjects powerless in this crisis.
Hao Jingban’s film Slow Motion (2018, 慢鏡頭) touches upon the reality of how the population “at the lower end” (低端人口) was cleansed out of Beijing. The film is composed of on-location footage shot at the night of the eviction in slow-motion, with additional footage sourced online: a bullet penetrating a light bulb, a hammer breaking a mannequin head. Presented in slow-motion, a sense of violence is emitted through the decomposition of movement. The soundtrack, including speaking voice and background music, remains at a normal speed, which might help the viewer to create some distance visually and mentally from the happening of extremely emotional and bodily sequences.
The narrator guides us through navigating between two different kinds of slow-motion footages, creating a path that is understandable and sensible towards an event: Although here we are focusing on the medium itself, the “speed” could be interpreted in many different ways, including the pace of urbanisation in the country’s development, the vanishment of a particular set of social structures and ways of living, the erasion of messages under pervasive surveillance control and how fast things are forgotten. The slowness not only diluted the violence but also satirised the urgency. By conveying a sense of urgency, the film not only portrayed residences facing pressing eviction deadlines but also provoked spectators of this film to be aware of their compromised freedom of speech and living spaces outside of the frame. The background music “Liberation Day” (自由日) opened up another dimension: a space of resistance, where the foreign, sensual and uplifting melody transcended the language once again to a universal bodily experience.
One merit of Slow Motion is that it built up a direct and layered relationship with reality within a limited time-frame. The dialogue between the art and the world, the context within which the artwork represented have always been at the core concern of serious artists. It can be even more pungent and yet paradoxical especially at times facing tremendous uncertainty. While the bigger and more complex reality triggered rising anxiety and impulsiveness accompanied by feelings of weakness or aphasia, the language of art could seem to be losing its relevance.
However, the language is not absent in Slow Motion. Despite being in an age of over flooding visual image, as a medium that was over-analyzed and critiqued, the arts stand at the forefront, emancipate the mediums’ historical power, and eventually invade the structure of reality with its unique agency. At the same time, the film reminded us of different ways “manipulation” played out: The relics scenes as a consequence of the top-down force and speed (including its aesthetic) is one obvious example; the artist’s manipulation of time in the studio can be seen as creating another small but resilient obstacle (in this sense, what the elder female scavenger said that she “hopes to die in Beijing” could have created a small monument).
No matter which direction future might take, Slow Motion undoubtedly represents “a form” of documentation, where reality is relieved against the fiction: the meaning of the artwork was not only created by the action of on-site filming, but was also enhanced by the artist’s cautious and creative adaptation of mock-documentary materials in post-production. This layer of “fiction” added later on opened up and preserved those hard-to-tell and easily vanished stories in reality.
When imagining the dramatic change of cityscape and the widening gap of class division in Beijing, we can’t neglect the fictional world portrayed in Folding Beijing (2012, 北京折疊). It had to be said that the future has arrived too fast in China, some prophecies had overlapped with the reality in ways that felt excruciatingly sarcastic, such as the text’s “folding” imagery can symbolise that not only the space but also the timeline could be compressed in reality. “To separate” might be a better phrase than “to fold” in describing the manoeuvring of the urban landscape in the story: different social classes were separated into different insulated living spaces. Although mobility between classes was not entirely impossible, there involved risks and sacrifices.
The scope of this fictional story ran parallel to or even foresaw the reality (before the cleansing of “lower-end population” unfolded before the public’s eyes). But on the other hand, it was apparent that what pushed the storyline forwards was quite conventional: familial love, love relationships, hometown comradeship, or heart-warming incidents between strangers. Hao Jingfang utilised recognisable emotions that do not go beyond one’s “sphere of duty”. As a result, there were no unexpected narratives or emotional turbulences, in addition to the lack of “fictional” spaces where one could pull away from, the novel is closer to an honest, non-fictional reportage than a work of science fiction, which it was sometimes categorised.
There was a “malfunction” towards the end of the novel, where the narrative was diverted from the protagonist Lao Dao’s perspective entirely for the first time, and the omniscient reader was brought into a leader’s office, a central nerve system for decision making. This brought us to the most unnerving part of the novel, a moment in which the rules set up by the novel were subverted entirely. The author’s intention might be to re-confirm the power dynamic between the system and the individual. The incident did not branch out into anything beyond the ordinary logic; we fall back into the first-person narration of Lao Dao and all that he saw which constituted as “the reality”. However close this “reality” might seem to represent our “reality”, under the overlapping shadow, any sharp contours were blurred, and cruelty and affection were levelled out.
Indeed, the city of Beijing is not all about demolishment, clearing out, stress, and exhaustion. There are also celebrations, cheering, and traffic controls. Ordinary life stretches between these extreme moments, destinies collide or cross each other’s ways without hesitance. That might be the lure of writing about this city: its scale from a macro or micro perspective, the endearing relationships between “good” and “evil”, extreme drama and banality, under this spatial scale and unbalanced power dynamics, transmission of messages would be inevitably diluted, faded, becoming elusive, surreal in the memories of individuals.
While Tuo Li published his full-length novel Ring Finger (also translated as Beijing Blues, 無名指) in 2018, the story was set in a time background that raised my curiosity. This ambitious novel depicted Beijing in 2008. The difficulty to revisit a so-called “turning point” is not less than that of responding to an immediate emergency or predicting what the future might entail (their methods might seem opposite, but the same amount of intelligence and patience ought to be invested). Especially after tremendous changes in the last ten years, how can a fictional “stagnation” revive a passing “truth”? Is that “truth” a fixture of a particular time background, or is it something that can travel with time and develop other kinds of “reality”? Does the reason for this reflection lie in identifying what has been transformed rather than what is being reconstructed?
The protagonist in Ring Finger, psychologist Yang Boqi, “roams” around in the city and bridges together different crowds and locations. To use Folding Beijing as a comparison, the journey of Yang Boqi was smoother or even more street-wise. As a character setting, a psychologist was somehow an unusual profession in China, it had the potential to enter other people’s world (including inner, spiritual world), and gave Yang the ability to break through the class barriers and divisions where “people from all walks of life” could be seen in the city. However, the divide between different crowds was more severe in the Ring Finger than that in Folding Beijing. The protagonist’s sense of “freedom” enhanced the perception: when Yang Boqi walked across a road that circulates Beijing, monologues were bubbling up from the bottom of his heart that praises and criticises different facades and subjects of the city. Capitalism and consumerism had become the very root causes of major symptoms in our epoch.
That timeframe was reiterated through symbolic meanings of various cityscapes: in Ring Finger, old Wanping country and the nouveau riche villa constituted the suburb and edge of the city, both places were written in dreamy hues, where wealth was what twice motivates the movements (no matter due to the nostalgia or some degrees of “awe-inspiring” in respectively). And within the protagonist’s walking distance, a downtown village, which symbolises the life of people from the bottom of the society, was where smells, noises, accents, and sensual elements weaved together an underground world, in which the portrayal of “working-class people” closely followed that of an early social realist model. And in this reversed “center-edge” metropolis structure, regardless the “absurdity” of nouveau riche or the “consistency” of the working class, everything just automatically obeyed the same rules of distribution that were as unjust and as resented in reality; while the protagonist gazed “above” with a real sense of awe, acquainted people from “below” with simplified stereotypes, they all deviated from its intended “dreaminess” and “sensulality” moods of writing.
The paradox of the story seemed to be that “consumerism” had made people, especially intellectuals, schizophrenic, however it was more likely that the author had fused his interpretation and critique of this era into a bias, with which as the space of this fictional story collapsed with the protagonist’s “madness”, we were not given an answer nor a clue to comprehend what issue did the author intends to raise through this symbolic year. In many interviews conducted after the book was published, Tuo Li repeatedly mentioned the coming back tradition of “realism novels” as if there were no other ways to respond to the profound changes in China. This might have some sense to it. However, “realism” is never a fixed concept or methodology that does not correspond to its surrounding environment, nor meticulous recollections of clothing, food, artifacts, or catchphrases of a particular era, nor a one-sided summary of a spirit (or a critique) of the zeitgeist, where an intellectualist reflection became a failed hypothesis. That had made the author and the fictional characters within their realm of reality all situated in a ruthless and unfavourable adaptation, resulting in a world that is unable to resonate, secluded and disconnected. The intention to write in “realism” has lost all sense of realness in the end.
It’s challenging to discuss the reality under tight censorship. Science fiction seems to be an “effective” framework, a way to draw in real-life materials — sometimes as mere “materials”, without disclosing the whole ideology. This is my rough impression of Cao Fei’s 2019 artwork Nova (新星): the artist adapted a fictional framework which allowed many subjects to surface and to be dissolved again one by one in the fictional structure. This “film” is over two hours in length, telling a story of a time-travelling, or to put it in another way, “a story within a story” about a father-and-son relationship. The film revisited The Eternal Wave (1958, 永不消逝的電波) from the “pre-” technological era, the era of ideal and feverish socialist construction, and the concept of sacrifice and rebirth. The story not only erased the barriers of the past, present and the future, but also transformed the existence of humans from bodies to signals, emotions to messages.
If Hao Jinfang utilised the basis of human emotions to open up the door to the cruelty of the reality in “Folding Beijing”, the abstracted emotions in “Nova” were like relievers for concrete pains from concrete history, thus the fictional stories seemed to have really entered into the fictional world, where the human body did not exist, and the past were no longer relevant, the reality was a mere illusion. In Cao Fei’s early works, no matter the up-beat hip hop mix-mash or world factory’s poetic imageries, the real-life scenery were touched upon lightly and transformed into something sensible, which were not necessarily critical, but gave people an unusual insight to see the ordinary surroundings. “Nova” was like a collage painting, enlarged to a hundred times bigger in size but with the same logic, in which reality in its messiness and coarseness could make no comparison.
However, the scenes where the story played out in the film were incredibly real, an area that is difficult to erase and gentrify on the Beijing’s city map: as the story’s starting and centre-point, Hong-Xia theatre is located in a worker’s cultural palace in Jiuxianqiao, Beijing, where the residences’ head and face still filthy with grime, and the building out-of-date. Hong-Xia theatre had transformed into artists’ studios, where historical documents and objects were gathered from this area and became artworks and footnotes of new “stories”. Juxtaposition, overlapping of time, conflicting and paradoxical ideologies, the clashes between the arts and the reality had a real presence in this space. It was hard to imagine how one can construct such a secluded (like the computer screen that separates father and son in the film) story while living in this space. What was even more peculiar: who would be moved by such a story?
image credit: Slow Motion, 2018, HD Single Channel Video, 6’45”.
