Next week — which is very soon — we (by which I mean: Ralph and I) will be flying off to the arctic embrace of Berlin for 2023’s edition of the Berlinale Film Festival. We’ll be covering as much stuff as we can, and I’ll likely be dumping most of my impressions and thoughts on Twitter until I get back home and get to writing my reviews. If there’s anything on the programme you’d particularly like me (or us) to cover, then hit me (or us) up. Otherwise, we’re going in with only the shred of a plan. That’s life, Etc. This week, anyway, I have a new piece on Lu Zhang — who’s latest film will actually be in competition at Berlinale. This’ll be a kind of taster.
— The funny thing about the frequency illusion is that, once you learn about the frequency illusion, you start running into it continuously; just as you encounter examples that appear to bear its weight. It’s perhaps not coincidental that the first ‘observer’ of the effect — in 1994 — made their claim on an online discussion forum; the internet — particularly in its early days — collapsing all kinds of information together; into an immediate and un-stratified morass.
— My feelings about Lu Zhang’s Grain in Ear (2005) don’t really have much to do with the frequency illusion. But, in watching it, I couldn’t shake the resonance of two filmmakers who’ve been in the water of late: Akerman (and Jeanne Dielman [1975]) and (perhaps to a lesser extent) Godard and Gorin’s collaborative Dziga-Vertov Group.
— The latter. Text (and textuality) always played a very prominent role in Godard’s cinema. His characters often read — blankly; almost yellingly — from political tracts and texts. They may or may not make eye contact with other characters in the room. Lu Zhang borrows some of this drapery; characters who recite Tang Dynasty-era poetry (namely, Li Bai), typically without context. They might also read scraps of advertising copy pasted on (and eroding from) walls. These little intrusions of melancholic lyricism are met — if they’re reacted to at all — with outbursts of bafflement or anger. Early on, Cui’s sister chases away a group of boys who are intoning lines from the sentimental poetry of Liu Bai. Later, we cut to a typically Zhang scene — static camera, gathered people who stand, listlessly, together; one of whom, crouching on the floor, recites poetry from a book. He’s scolded by one of the women, who then seizes the book from him and flings it to the ground. He rises, shrugs, and walks away. Later again, two sex workers stand idly in an alleyway – one smokes, the other reads decontextualised clippings from a local broadsheet that’s been pasted to a wall. Inside of this, she seems to be talking about her own life, indirectly; returning home, something about the harvest, about a man. The other woman chases her away. I think they’re laughing.
— Perhaps these moments of exogenous profundity are supposed to sit awkwardly over the veil of this film — a film which unfolds in a remote, scrappy industrial town; a place seemingly evacuated of poetry. Certainly, the lyrical longing of Bai’s lines bear almost no relationship to the often distant and emotionless relationships that dominate the film. Cui begins a sexual liaison with a persistent (albeit largely silent) factory foreman. They share very few words; the primary driver of their attraction being either apathy (and loneliness) or cultural longing (they are both ethnically Korean). Throughout, kimchi — which Cui makes and sells from a cart — becomes a heavily overdetermined signifier of cultural displacement; one that is obviously structured by its own lack.
— It’s something that Lu Zhang had earlier explored in 2003’s Tang Poetry — a film set entirely within the confines of a single apartment. It’s an ordinary, even squalid, apartment; and the protagonist is a shut-in former pickpocket (this was shot literally in the midst of the SARS epidemic, for context). Here, the ‘Tang poetry’ of the title comes in the form of TV programmes he watches about Tang poetry, and in the form of aphoristic, lyrical inter-titles that segment the film. Like Grain in Ear, these intrusions of poetry arrive as bathos — deflated, ironic; yet not without retaining a skein of their proper potency. Lu Zhang shot his film on blown-out, low-quality DV-cam – the man’s apartment feeling pulled apart at its seams, seen from the visually synonymous remove of surveillance or TV news. He is a quiet master of dislocation.
— Earlier, I mentioned Akerman — and Jeanne Dielman specifically. Why? Like Jeanne Dielman, we’re subjected to a lot of barely sublimated commentary on class, sex, and gender. Lu Zhang fills many of his largely static shots with everyday work — or listlessness (they’re much the same thing). Washing vegetables, cycling from place to place, counting trucks on a highway, selling bags of produce by the roadside. Not only this, but it also has these violent perforations that fill its pages. Cui’s cart is stolen by a group of policemen; she strikes a man who attempts to barter with her for sex; her sister is beaten up by a group of men (whom I presume are former clients). Most of these events happen offscreen — not appearing to necessarily advance the action so much as create a “structure of feeling” around what happens in the film’s final act.
— This is an act toward which we’ve glacially been building; a series of encounters in which Cui has frequently been caught short. The police steal her cart; a local businessman offers her a stable job making kimchi for his staff canteen, but expects sex in return (she declines); her diffident lover is caught out by his wife and explains that Cui is actually a sex worker, leading to her arrest; next, a seemingly friendly police officer un-cuffs her — before leading her into a bedroom and shutting the door. Throughout, Cui is utterly at the mercy of a series of quietly sinister officials and ‘superiors’ who typically try to extract something from her: be it monetary or sexual. In this, she’s not wholly unfamiliar from one of Petzold’s heroines: destined to be the witness and subject of history’s structuring flows.
— Gazes. They are rarely met. Not directly. I think this is relevant, even necessary. Eyes are cast down, to the side, away. Bodies are framed in a kind of shallow deep-depth. Does that make sense? Diffidence, not even shyness. There’s something else.
— This brings us to revenge — for Cui young son later dies in an unspecified accident (he spends his days playing alongside railway sidings). It’s not the first displaced death in the film (Cui’s absent husband is in prison for “killing a man” — over money). The death is visually deferred, made present by its absence. Cui — who is already staid, largely emotionless before her bitter life and the minor (and major) tragedies that befall her — responds not with tears but with violence. Invited to provide kimchi for a wedding party at which many of her ‘enemies’ will be present, she laces the pickled cabbage with rat poison. Here again, Zhang defers the presumed deaths: she cycles along the highway just as ten or fifteen ambulances roar past.
— I want to pull up for a moment. Zhang’s drifting, interstitial use of travel and motorways draws a sly parallel with the films of Jia Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-hsien — both of whose films (in different ways: explosive and contemplative) feature much aimless journeying through folds of extra-urban and denuded rural space. Like Zhangke, rural poverty, corruption and aimless violence are also very palpably felt. This scene is quickly followed by the first (and only) use of handheld footage in the entire film: following Cui as she staggeringly walks through the train station, across the railway sidings, across the tracks, and beyond — into a field. It’s one of the rare intrusions of the seemingly pastoral into the film (earlier, she gazed down on the town and its surrounding rough greenery from a hillside). Here the film ends abruptly, after almost three minutes of pacy, breathless walking; her body tilted forward, arms held tightly swinging at her sides. Here, the emotion that has previously been held back is concentrated into her body and the motioning body of the camera — all that was previously deferred flooding forward into action. It’s really another act of deferral —replacing the satisfyingly explosive denouement of the poisoning with a formal, cinematic gesture.
— Without this propulsive and final relief, I’d wonder if the film’s earlier emotionlessness would have seemed a bit stiff and too compositionally detached. The gesture (this formal break) really speaks to all the sublimated rage and confusion that is otherwise barely held in check. There are of course moments of grace and humour that slide away from the arch — when Cui finally gets her licence to sell kimchi from a friendly female official, she meets up with her to teach her how to dance. They share some time in a pool (splashing each other, coyly), in one of the film’s rare moments of relief. Zhang is too sensible to render Cui into an expressionless machine. She is –– has the capacity to be — treated with kindness.
— Everything I’ve said here might shift its load after I see his latest at Berlinale (one of the in-competition films that I’m especially braced for). Flying tomorrow. See you soon.
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