Having propelled himself to cinephilic fame with the mesmerizing Kaili Blues (2015) and, more recently, an audaciously mind-bending interpretation of dreams in 2018’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, Chinese auteur Bi Gan has come to be lauded for his seductive and hypnotic cinematic form, a form inextricably fostered from the sheer technical prowess which saw both features induce trance-like reveries by way of their use of the long take. More so than those afforded traditional slow cinema (e.g., Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Béla Tarr), the long take in Bi’s oeuvre signifies the continuity of dreams, just as his other more scattershot scenes typically embody the fragmentation of latent dream rebuses, to be made manifest once again upon waking. In both Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night, a lone man wanders into his past, in search of a hometown or history. Despite the aching romanticism with which they plunder the streetscapes of memory, neither film quite relished the bittersweet warmth of nostalgia; the effects of their psychoanalytic reconstitution, rather, found meaning in the very movement of dreaming, remanding the ecstasy of exorcism while reviving the literary impulses that have effectively consecrated their director’s auteurial status.
With Resurrection, his fourth feature (including 2011’s crudely realized student film, Tiger), the 35-year-old Bi has largely kept to this register, assembling what will inevitably be received as five disparate narratives woven together by the fiat of dream logic, but the scale and size of its ambit by far exceeds his previous works. Amounting to no less than a history of cinema itself, Resurrection situates this history squarely within the history of the 20th century, a matter of chronological fact but also a veritable conduit for the inventions of fiction. Taking from Fernando Pessoa his belief in the reality of dreams as more vivid than reality itself, the film renounces the scenario it posits — that of a future when immortality is achieved precisely by not dreaming — through two quasi-mythical characters. One, the Fantasmer (Jackson Yee), is a dreamer turned monster, shuffling off his mortal coil into the light of a candle flame, destined to dream until death. The other, a young woman (Shu Qi), seeks to awaken the Fantasmer in order to also right the passage of time, rendered out of sync by the fixation and specificity of his dreaming.
It would be foolhardy to graft this metanarrative onto what follows, and Bi’s coy attempt at supplementing interpretation proves to be a red herring which nonetheless historicizes and politicizes the cinematic dream. Much like Qiu Jiongjiong’s A New Old Play, whose chronicling of Chinese history from Japan’s WWII invasion to the Cultural Revolution took shape from the recollections of a deceased Sichuan opera actor, Resurrection undertakes a historical survey of modern China that quietly doubles as a representation of historical periodization itself. Beginning with a labyrinthine tribute to the silent film aesthetics of the German Expressionists such as Lang and Murnau, the film settles into the sights, sounds, and senses of different cinematic registers. A wartime spy noir set sometime in the ‘30s first embodies the Fantasmer in the body of a dashing young man, who searches in vain for a mysterious suitcase amid much gloom and paranoia. And then a derelict monastery, ostensibly sometime during the ‘60s, finds the Fantasmer a wayward monk who crushes his bad tooth to release the spirit of an annoyed and vaguely comic deity.
Thriller morphs into fable, and then into the humanist sojourn of the Hong Kong ‘80s, when the Fantasmer, now a vagrant card sharp, coaxes a young girl into a scam of scent and trickery; through these transitions, a brief interlude describes the Fantasmer’s stalker and savior watching over his dream, a “Big Other” attending out of pity to his dwindling, century-long fantasy. The candle wax burns, and the oft-unseen woman — like her Lacanian counterpart — affirms and regulates its burning. Is cinema, then, the drug of dreams and consequently that which kills, as the film’s intertitles suggest, or does its very medium forestall mortality, not so much for its dreamers but for the histories and lives it represents? Both interpretations have a maudlin, sentimental ring to them; both constitute the romantic aporia that Resurrection brazenly ascribes to the seventh art of the world. As both the opium of the masses and its restorative cure, cinema occupies an ambivalent spot in the film’s metaphysical netherworld, not merely a necessary illusion to be blindly restored, but equally not the violent act that precedes the plenitude of its representations.
The netherworld in which the film’s final sequence takes place stands at the precipice of Y2K, momentous in its historical designation (both for China and the world at large), but also portending mystery and maleficence: cinema, according to its premise, is ending, and the jouissance accrued throughout its preceding milieus will inevitably melt away. It is also here that Bi transplants the technical sophistry of his long-take into a deeply soul-stirring one; reportedly improvised by his actors, the 35-minute tracking shot through the seedy alleys by a harbor sees the Fantasmer pursue his vampiric love interest (Li Gengxi), while being thwarted by a demon of the night. In one segment, the gag that kickstarts the Fantasmer’s journey — riffed off of Louis Lumière’s 1895 short L’Arroseur arrosé — is repeated by the very placement of Lumière’s film, played at regular speed, against a foreground of breakneck movement. Diachronicity jams up; synchronicity whirls away all at once. If the “beauty of the act,” as Leos Carax sought to realize in Holy Motors, could be found in the kineticism of action, the beauty of cinema may be revived from the kineticism of stasis, of dreaming of untold possible worlds and the illusions they conjure into being. More than anything, Resurrection proffers dreams and little else. But only in dreams do the dead come back to life.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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