[COLUMN] In Bi Gan's Resurrection, Cinema is a Shared Dream | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers - as much as spoilers are possible - for Bi Gan’s Resurrection, a film that is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. It is a stunningly beautiful piece of work. If you have any tolerance for surrealist or abstract art, films that are mostly “vibes” for lack of a better word, it’s well worth checking out. My go-to very reductive summary of and elevator pitch for the film is “David Lynch’s Inception”, and if those three words appeal to you, it should be well worth your time.

In some ways, Bi Gan’s latest film, Resurrection, feels like an organic extension of his previous film, Long Day’s Journey into Night, released almost eight years ago.

Running two hours and twenty minutes, the final fifty-nine minutes of Long Day’s Journey into Night are a dream sequence. That dream is captured in 3D in a single long take. It is a choice that immediately distinguishes Bi as one of the defining formalists in contemporary cinema, a filmmaker preoccupied with not only the idea of dreams and imagination, but also with the mechanics and the artistry of filmmaking. For Bi, form and function are fully integrated into one another.

Resurrection feels like an extension of that final hour into an entire film. Resurrection is not a plot-driven film, but the narrative framework suggests that it unfolds in a future where humanity has achieved immortality at an incredibly high cost, by surrendering one’s dreams. As the opening titles inform the viewer, “In a wild and brutal era, humans have discovered that the secret to eternal life is to no longer dream!”

However, there are those human beings who have refused to give up their imaginings. The opening sequence follows an operative (Shu Qi) tasked with hunting down and tracking one such “deliriant” (Jackson Yee). In the film’s stunning opening sequence, the operative effectively wanders into what is a silent film, heavily influenced by German Expressionism and set against the backdrop of a 19th century opium den.

Navigating the language of early cinema, the agent is able to track down her quarry, finding him feasting upon poppies as a way of maintaining his lucid fantasy world. Discovering a latch on the man’s body, the operative finds that the deliriant’s insides operate as a projector – or perhaps a camera. As an act of compassion, she loads film into her subject, allowing him one last opportunity to revisit his dreams and his imagined lives. This serves as the framework for the rest of Resurrection.

In practice, Resurrection is something of an anthology film, a collection of short stories in which the deliriant imagines himself in a variety of different contexts: a murder suspect at a foggy train station, a former monk assisting in the looting of a sacred monastery, a con artist who manipulates a young girl (Mucheng Guo) into helping hustle an old gangster (Zhijian Zhang), and finally as a young ne’er-do-well who falls in love with a girl (Li Gengxi) on New Year’s Eve 1999.

Each of these segments has a distinct cinematic style and affect, most pronounced in the first and final stretches. The train station murder mystery is designed to emulate a mid-century film noir, a foggy tale populated by morally ambiguous characters wearing fancy suits and armed with uncertain intentions. The millennial love story is shot in a single take – including time-lapse photography – that runs over half-an-hour.

Resurrection is a film that wants the audience thinking about film and their relationship to it. After the opening title cards and a fire that seems to tear through the screen, the first proper image of Resurrection is an audience staring through the screen, inviting the viewer to consider their own engagement with the work. Resurrection is not a work that lends itself to being reduced to a simple plot summary. It is an experience.

It is hardly the most novel of concepts to compare dreaming to filmmaking, to suggest as Spielberg does in The Fabelmans that “movies are dreams that you never forget.” Indeed, the most reductive description of Resurrection might be “David Lynch’s Inception.” There is a long history of treating films as similar to dreams, such as subjecting them to psychoanalysis. Philosophy professor Colin McGinn argues that an audience watching a film is in something close to a dream state.

A decidedly abstract work, Resurrection is obviously open to various interpretations. Indeed, there is a recurring sense that Bi is using the film to make some very specific commentary on the evolution of Chinese culture over the past hundred years or so, with one sequence set during the ransacking of a Buddhist temple during the Cultural Revolution while the final two segments are preoccupied with exploitative gangster capitalism simmering beneath the surface of contemporary society.

More broadly, there is a recurring emphasis on censorship and oppression, most obviously in the framing device that involves a literal attempt to police thought and imagination but also in the second story that focuses on the torture and brutalization of a queer character who was involved in a homosexual romance in a context where such love could not be acknowledged. There is undoubtedly a cultural specificity to Resurrection that feels rooted in contemporary Chinese culture and media.

However, Resurrection is also universal. The film feels like a meditation on cinema as an artform – and perhaps a eulogy to it. It is a linear journey through the medium’s history, opening with an homage to the surrealism of the silent era and then the repression of the film noir period, and culminating in a very young and modern dynamic love story. The film’s closing sequence is set in a model of an old cinema carved in wax that slowly burns down. The audience – glowing figures – slowly disappear and fade away.

It’s hard not to read subtext into this, in an era where cinema seems to be under perpetual existential threat whether due to the pandemic or streaming or corporate consolidation or any number of other potential problems. Bi may understand these shifting realities and existing hardships personally. It only took Bi three years to follow up his first film, Kaili Blues, with his second, Long Day’s Journey into Night. In contrast, the seven-to-eight year gap before Resurrection, an idea he had in 2020, is quite pronounced.

Bi seems to make a metaphorical connection between his subjects and film as an artform. There is a recurring preoccupation with liminal spaces in these vignettes: train stations, bus stations, docklands. The implication is that cinema has the power to literally transport people, to connect them with the larger world. Depending on how cynical one is, film can either be a spiritual place like that abandoned temple or a carefully-honed manipulative magic trick like that practiced by the con man.

Many of these snapshots are focused on criminals and gangsters: the opportunistic looters picking at the remains of a once-sacred space or the old gangster who just wants to believe in magic. In a plot beat that mirrors other recent movie metaphors about the balance between art and commerce, it is revealed that the sinister Mister Luo (Huang Jue) is a vampire, like Remmick (Jack O'Connell) in Sinners or (perhaps) Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary) in Marty Supreme.

Throughout Resurrection, there is a recurring anxiety about the breakdown of social and interpersonal relations, the loss of a communal trust. The con man lies to the little girl, to get her to lie to the old gangster. A site of religious worship is raided for whatever earthly valuables it might contain. Nobody can trust anybody. The worlds of Resurrection are solipsistic. “What can one person do but two people can’t?” the film’s marketing campaign asks. “Dream.”

Bi has spoken on the press tour about his anxieties concerning the fractured and disconnected state of the modern world. “As a human being, how are you going to remain who you are in a more wholesome sense?” he has asked. “Technology is currently, continuously, and very intensively trying to make us fragmented, whether that’s the short reels that people watch or the streaming platforms or the different devices, making human beings experience life in such a fragmented way.”

Indeed, as much as what the operative is doing is monstrous in hunting and eventually euthanizing the deliriant, Resurrection presents its lone dreamer as a pathetic and grotesque creature. In the opening sequence, he looks like a fiend from a silent horror film. In suppressing the human capacity to dream, in suppressing the collective imagination, Resurrection suggests instead that individuals have been disconnected from society and becoming lost in insular fantasies.

This is, after all, the big difference between film and dreaming. Dreaming is a solo activity. Each person dreams their own dreams and lives in their own internal world. Film is a collective experience. Philosopher Noël Carroll argues that the biggest difference between films and dreams is that films are “interpersonally available.” Films can be shared. They become a social phenomenon in a way that an individual’s dreams and fantasy simply cannot. Films connect us to one another.

This sharing is thematically central to Resurrection. In the film’s final vignette, the deliriant and his lover get to be together in the light rather than alone in the dark. In journeying through the deliriant’s dreams, the operative is finally able to understand him. In the film’s final moments, as she disposes of his body, she ruminates that through the shared experience of navigating his dreams – of watching the film – she has come to understand something that she would never have processed on her own. It is a literal manifestation of Roger Ebert’s argument for cinema as “a machine that generates empathy.”

While working on Resurrection, Bi would repeatedly remind his crew, “We’re in the business of making dreams.” It’s a pleasure to get to share them.