Kaili Blues and Bi Gan
Bi Gan was raised in a lower middle class household in Kaili City, Guizhou province, China. He was born in 1987. He is ethnic Miao – that is, Hmong.
Kaili City is an industrial blue collar metropolis. To the north of Kaili, coal mines and cement factories dominate the landscape. South of city, the landscape becomes more rugged and the river valleys are deeper and narrower. This is the scene karst landscape of the “Ten Thousand Peaks” area. The people living to the south of Kaili are ethnic Miao. The Miao speak languages related the Hmong and are mountain dwellers with an entirely different culture than the Mandarin-speaking Chinese who live in Kaili and the other metropolitan areas. At present, the economy of this area is dominated by the tourist trade – Chinese people come to see the picturesque karst topography where a popular Tv show,
Journey to the West, a sort of Mandarin equivalent to
Game of Thrones was filmed. Visiting ethnic Miao villages is also an important feature of the tourist business in this area.
Kaili City is poor and Bi Gan claims that there were no movie theaters in the town when he was growing up there. He watched TV and considers himself a “child of TV.” He had no interest in film until he attended a junior college and took courses in TV production. One of those courses briefly addressed the history and esthetics of film. In that course, Bi Gan was required to watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s
Stalker. Bi Gan says that he hated the film at first and thought it would be impossible to watch to its conclusion. But he persevered and, now, says that this film influenced him to become a director.
Bi Gan did some Tv work, made a couple of well-received short films, and, then, received funding, largely through the Guizhou regional film authority, to make
Kaili Blues. The movie was internationally premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in Italy in 2013. The picture won numerous international awards – Bi Gan was, then, 26.
His next film,
A Long Days Journey into Night, was completed in 2018. It was also premiered to some acclaim. Unfortunately, however, the movie was released on Valentine’s Day and marketed as a date movie. Several million Chinese couples paid to see the movie that was alleged to be a romantic comedy. In fact, the film is an experimental picture that is incomprehensible on first viewing. (At least, this was my impression when I saw the picture in May, 2019 at the Walker Art Center.) Lots of couples demanded that their money be returned and Bi Gan says that the film has a bad reputation based on the way it was marketed.
It’s not clear to me what he is currently directing. He toured with
A Long Days Journey into Night as well as earlier with
Kaili Blues. A number of interviews with him can be watched on You-Tube. Bi Gan is short stocky man with a buzz-cut hair do. He looks a little like a less sinister and more merry Chairman Kim. He likes to drink and, frequently, claims that he is a bit intoxicated during interviews. He seems to understand some English but can’t speak the language. His answers to questions posed to him are generally evasive.
Although Bi Gan’s work seems related to some of David Lynch’s films, particularly the American’s nightmarish Inland Empire, an uncompromisingly abstract experimental film, he admits only to admiring Blue Velvet. Bi Gan claims as his primary influence the Taiwanese director, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, particularly that film maker’s
Goodbye, South, Goodbye (1996). Hou Hsiao-Hsien is famous for his extremely long sequence shots, often implemented by intricate camera movements.
Bi Gan writes poetry. He claims that he is more influenced by classical Chinese poetry than films or TV. In particular, he cites as influences the poetry of 9th century Tang Dynasty and the prose from the Song dynasty – in both types of writing, he notes a rhythmic alternation between long and short lines.
Tarkovsky’s book on cinema is called
Sculpting in Time. Bi Gan says that film allows the director to compose with light, color, shadow, and time or duration. The duration of shots is integral to the design of Bi Gan’s films. He relates the alternation between long and shot to ci, a technique in classical Chinese poetry in which long lines alternate with short phrases.
Bi Gan shoots his films in Mandarin. He maintains an outsider status – he is not part of the Chinese commercial film industry, producing his movies in remote Guizhou Province. China also has a thriving and internationally acclaimed experimental or
avant garde film community. Art-house or independently produced films are, generally, made by directors based in Beijing. Bi Gan is not associated with the avant garde scene in Beijing either. In interviews, he affects the posture of a blue collar Asian hillbilly, a hard-drinking
montagnard from the boondocks.
Cheat-Sheet
Kaili Blues presents a narrative that can be stated in a diachronic sequence. Of course, by unscrambling the plot, I am betraying certain aspects of the film – clearly Bi Gan wants his viewers to decipher the plot from information that is scattered and, often, mentioned in an off-hand manner thoughout the film. However, one must recognize that most viewers are not going to have the leisure or opportunity to watch the movie several times in order to ascertain what happens and who is doing what to whom. Furthermore, the film poses difficulties to non-Chinese viewers that don’t confront people seeing the picture in Mandarin and with some familiarity with the circumstances that the movie depicts. Clues as to the narrative may be muttered by a character and shown so briefly in subtitles that the viewer can’t react or assimilate the information. Furthermore, there are clearly two types of experience presented by the movie – there is reality, as represented by events shown to happen in and near Kaili City (although this is confounded sometimes by elliptical flashbacks that may not clearly delineated or set apart) and, then, there are experiences occurring near Dangmai, after the young man picks up Chen Sheng at the reservoir. These experiences are largely compiled within several long takes – the first involving Chen Sheng’s “shaggy dog” story about being beaten in prison and the second, a 42 minute long sequences without any cuts, that takes around the river village and involves a complex series of interactions with the inhabitants of that village. I will not attempt to unravel exactly what takes place in that scene because it is, as Chen Sheng says, “like being in a dream”. The dream-like character of these long sequence shots is particularly remarkable because we can see exactly what happens without any edits or ellipsis – there’s no ambiguity of any kind about what we see, but, of course, there are very significant questions about what these events mean.
The Characters
Since Chinese names are a little tricky, we need to first establish the relationships between the characters. Bi Gan casts family members who are, in fact, related similar to the way the family was constituted by actors (also related) in Vardas’
Le Bonheur.
Chen Sheng, the protagonist, is a medical doctor and poet. He is the uncle of an eight-year old boy, Wei Wei (a nickname). Chen Sheng has written a book of poems called
Roadside Picnic. The poems are ostensibly introduced on TV in an early scene that, in fact, provides credits for the film – the TV show purports to introduce a program in which Chen Sheng’s poems will be recited. (The film’s actual titles occurs about a half-hour into the movie.)
Crazy Face is Chen Sheng’s younger half-brother. He is the father of Wei Wei. Like many of the apparently aimless Miao characters in the film, he seems to be some kind of low-ranking gangster. (The film implies that he runs a chop-shop for stolen motorcycles.) Crazy Face sometimes works at a carnival in Kaili City, but also spends a lot of time gambling on a games that seems to be like dominos.
Guanglian is an elderly female doctor who is Chen Sheng’s partner in their somewhat shabby medical practice in Kaili. Guanglian (Mandarin: “Lotus Light”) was a revolutionary Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution. At that time, she had an affair with Lin Airen, a Miao musician. But she has not seen Lin Airen for many years.
Pisshead is a drunk affiliated with the gangsters in Kaili City. Pisshead is also a member of a rock and roll band in Dangmai.
Monk is a gangster for whom Chen Sheng once worked.
Yang Yang is a hair stylist in Dangmai. Her friend, whose name we don’t know, is revealed by flashbacks to look exactly like Chen Sheng’s wife.
The film takes place in three places:
Kaili City – this is where Chen Sheng practices medicine with Guanglian and interacts with is brother, Crazy Face, and his nephew, Wei Wei.
Dangmai – this is river valley town somewhere between Kaili City and Zhenyuan. The name in Miao means “Hidden Place” – it’s not found on any maps. As Herman Melville remins us “real places” are never “found on maps.”
Zhenyuan – this is tourist town catering to tourists who want to interact with the Miao (Hmong) tribal people. Bananas are produced whole-sale there.
Some of the plot:
1.
As a young man, Chen Sheng worked for the gangster called Monk; he was a “street kid” abandoned by his mother who lived, from time to time, in Zhenyuan;
2.
One of Monk’s henchmen owed money to another gangster, apparently a female mobster;
3.
The female mobster punished the debtor by burying his son alive after cutting off the child’s hand – I presume the hand was cut-off to provide evidence that the boy had been actually killed. The film implies that the child may have penned onto his wrist a watch to imitate the flashy way that Chinese mobster’s dress;
4.
Chen Sheng accepted the justice of burying the boy alive but thought that the hand amputation went too far;
5.
Chen Sheng attacked the female mobster and may have murdered her;
6.
Chen Sheng was convicted of murder or assault and sent to a labor prison (a coal mine) for nine years;
7.
While Chen Sheng was in the labor camp, his wife left him and, then, died;
8.
Presumably in prison, Chen Sheng learned medicine and became a doctor;
9.
While in prison, Chen Sheng’s mother (who wore slippers embroidered with a Batik pattern) died. Crazy Face cared for his mother while Chen Sheng was in prison.
10.
Crazy Face and Chen Sheng are estranged because their deceased mother gave Chen Sheng the family house. Furthermore, Chen Sheng is angry at Crazy Face because of his neglect of Wei Wei;
11.
Guanglian, the woman in medical practice with Chen Sheng, asks her partner to track down her former lover, Lin Airen, and give him a casette tape and, also, a batik shirt;
12.
Lin Airen is thought to be living in Zhenyuan, the Miao village – he is said to be old and sick;
13.
Chen Sheng accuses Crazy Face of evading his responsibilities to Wei Wei and, in fact, says that Crazy Face sold the child to Monk and that the boy is living with Monk in Zhenyuan.
14.
So Chen Sheng sets out on a road trip to go to Zhenyuan via Dangmai for two purposes: first, to find Lin Airen and give him the shirt and cassette tape, gifts from Guanglian; and, second, to retrieve Wei Wei from Monk.
Titles
Bi Gan’s titles for his films are curiously allusive and unhelpful. He initially called
Kaili Blues, The Book of Disquiet after the volume of prose poems by the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa. He wrote the script to the film now called
A Long Day’s Journey into Night under the title
Roadside Picnic. Roadside Picnic is the name of the novel by Alexander Strugasky that was adapted by Tarkovsky (very loosely) into the film Stalker. He decided to release
Kaili Blues under the Chinese name
Roadside Picnic –this was because Bi Gan’s book of poems, nine of which are read in the film, was published under the title
Roadside Picnic (
Lo bien ye can in Mandarin). “Because of this decision,” Bi Gan says, “I had to call my next film
A Long Day’s Journey into Night”, although the Chinese name for the film is
The Book of Disquiet.” This suggests that we shouldn’t devote too much critical energy to deciphering the relationship between Bi Gan’s titles and his films – the titles seem to be simply allusions to books that he is reading or admires.
A Long Day’s Journey into Night, of course, is the title of a play by Eugene O’Neill (1941-1942, first published in 1956) which seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Chinese film of that same name directed by Bi Gan and released in the United States this year.
Poetry and Time
What is
Kaili Blues about? Many years ago, the Italian film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote an essay on cinema and poetry. (Pasolini was also an important Italian poet.) Pasolini said that film is absolutely objective and absolutely subjective – by this he meant that the camera is always recording a real thing in real light and real space, but that the selection of the thing to be photographed and the way the image was edited into the film’s continuity was wholly subjective. Film’s subjectivity in marshaling into real objects into pictograms or ideograms (that is, constellations of juxtaposed images) is poetic. In this respect, Pasolini’s ideas comported with many of the theories underlying modernist poetry in English – William Carlos Williams famously proclaimed that there are “no ideas but in things” and Ezra Pound as well as T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore created a verse comprised of citations, fragments of prose and verse, arranged to create ideograms. Bi Gan, also a published poet, devises his film as a sequence of indelibly tangible images that, nonetheless, are suffused in a poetic atmosphere.
Kaili Blues is about trains, watches, tunnels, dripping water, batik fabric, disco balls, humidity and rain fall – these are the elements from which the film is constructed. But
Kaili Blues is about the poetry of these objectively real things displayed against a luminous background of impenetrable enigma – the things in the world are everywhere present to us, but they can’t quite be grasped.
In his book,
The Red and the Black, Stendhal says that the novelist uses prose like a man carrying a mirror through the countryside. The novelist writes in order to reflect reality. Bi Gan adjusts this image to warp and fracture his mirror into a reflective disco ball – an emblematic image often shown in
Kaili Blues. The disco ball reflects reality but shatters it into innumerable prismatic shards – the world is reflected in a discontinuous series of broken images. Poetry and memory assemble these scattered reflections of a world into a structure that makes meaning. There are many different ways of assembling the prismatic fragments of memory – we can construct a diagram of the past, that is, decrypting the shards into a narrative; we can devise plots that explicate, justify, or defend our actions; or we can make poetry (and reverie or dreams) out of these broken shards of reality. Bi Gan typically opts for an order that does not explicate – this is the order of poetry. He opts to reconstitute memory into a poetry that simulates, in some ways, dream. More accurately, Bi Gan is interested in the transitional half-lit zone where memory becomes dream or memory becomes poetry. “Cinema is too realistic for dream sequences,” Bi Gan has said. “Dream sequences seem phony. I’m interested in the transitions from dream to reality.”
Consider Bi Gan’s deployment of train imagery in the film. Wei Wei rides a small train that runs in a loop at the carnival in Kaili City. Crazy Face seems to have a train projected on fabric on the wall of his apartment. Chen Sheng rides a train to the reservoir above Dangmai and, then, ultimately to Zhenyuan. (At the end of the movie, he seems to be returning to Kaili City on the empty train.) Throughout the history of film, trains have signified the onward rush of time, the march of history, the irreversible nature of historical events – consider the train in Bertolucci’s
1900 resplendent with red Communist flags that appears at the end of his film. An old man lays on the tracks between the rails and the train passes over him – when the red train has passed, time has reversed and the old man has reverted to being the child that he was 70 years earlier. Yang Yang tells Wei Wei that she will go with him back to the City “only if you turn back time.” At the end of the movie, we see a train which Wei Wei has covered with graffiti of clock faces seeming to reverse time. Film is comprised of photographs which have frozen or stopped time – time can be reversed by running a film backward. The windows of a train are metaphorically like the individual frames from which movies are (or were) made. A moving train is like celluloid strip of frame moving through a projector. (We will need new metaphors in this digital age.) Einstein used trains to demonstrate relativity – the fact that clocks will seem to run at different speeds according to the frame (that word again) in which the clock is observed. Time may move like a locomotive in one direction, but we also experience times as spiral or circular – events reoccur and history cycles in loops. One poem in the movie addresses “42 windmills” – this is the whirligig that Yang Yang buys on the other side of the river, but also the ubiquitous spinning fans in hot apartments (when first started, the rotors seems to run backward), the faces of the clocks with or without hands, the clock inscribed on the train that reverses time – 42 windmills also seems to identify the 42 minutes that comprises that long take in the film’s second half.
The landscape in
Kaili Blues also is inflected with time. The linear flow of time is like the linear flow of a river – rivers are also emblematic of time and, in
Kaili Blues, a great river bisects the landscape running in deep narrow gorge. Space is defined as upriver or down river. (It comes as an almost physical shock when Yang Yang moves cross-river defying the linear logic of the roads and elongated villages in the river valleys.) The climax of the film is when the two trains pass one another and we see time reversed.
Memory reverses time. Memory is like dream in which linear time doesn’t really exist. (
The Diamond Sutra argues that space and time are both illusions.) Memory also corresponds to reincarnation. The Chinese proverb tells us that “every meeting is a reunion” because everyone we meet we have encountered in a previous life. Chen Sheng’s (Bi Gan’s) poem says that “reunion is in a dark room.” The dark room is the cinema in which memory counteracts time’s arrow. The dark room is also our dreams – a closed, twilight space in which people from all times in our lives brush elbows and are all simultaneously present. A poem is a kind of waking dream made from memories. Ultimately, there’s no point in explicating a poem – if the poet wanted the meanings of the verse to be reduced to prose, he or she would have written those meanings out in prose. But, of course, we explicate poetry endlessly, fascinated precisely by a structure that will not yield to explanation. It’s our melancholy fate as human beings to move from the entrancing experience of poetry to its explication – but without explication poems are merely onanistic, masturbatory, a sort of self-pleasuring. What we explicate in poems is the communal meaning that can be expressed. This explication leaves us with an excess, with something left-over – that left over thing is my own personal, private, inexplicable response to the poetry, my visceral reaction. When I have reduced (and I intend the verb) the poem to its meanings, I have described in the common language what can be said about the poem and what we can share in our understanding of it. But there’s a hermetic core, a secret center of the poem, that I may feel but can’t express. We can say what happens in
Kaili Blues and may, even, devise some ways of explaining those events – but the essence of the movie, like the essence of a poem, is communicable only in the language of emotion and memory which is not a language at all.
Notes
Batik – Batik is a technique for producing colorful fabric using a wax-resistant pattern while dyeing. Batik is an Indonesian term, probably related to a Asian verb for “tattooing.” Fabric is marked with hot wax painted onto the cloth. The fabric is, then, dyed. After dyeing, the wax is scraped off the fabric leaving an undyed area on the cloth. This process can be repeated several times to produce complex and colorful patterns on the cloth. Batik has been invented various times and in various places – Indonesia is famous for its Batik-patterned fabrics. The technique is used extensively in Africa and India and also among the Hmong in southwest China.
Diamond Sutra – This Buddhist scripture dates to 200 to 400 Common Era. The text is written in Sanskrit but was translated into various other Asian languages within a hundred years of its inception. “Diamond” is a translation for the Sanskrit vajra – which means “lightning bolt that cuts like a diamond.” The short scripture, it is 6000 words long, is thought to be a “diamond that cuts through the appearances in the world and reveals all things to be illusory.” The sutra is very popular, often memorized, or carried about in folding pocket editions.
The Diamond sutra is also the oldest printed book – a copy of it was found printed from woodblocks circa 868 CE. This Chinese language translation was commissioned by Wang Jie in honor of his parents and, according to its colophon: “for universal free distribution.”
The sutra proceeds by the logic of negation to deny the reality of everything, including the self. The text purports to be a dialogue that took place between the Buddha and a monk Subhuti near the Jeta grove outside the Indian city of Sravasti. The most famous passage of the sutra is the admonition “to view this fleeting world (as) a star at dawn, a bubble in the stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.”
In
Kaili Blues, Bi gan quotes the part of the sutra in which the Buddha tells Subhuti that he knows the minds of all gods, men, and sentient beings because all of those minds are alike in sharing the same error, that is, the mistaken notion that time exists. The Buddha says “the past is not to be attained.” Similarly the “present is not to be attained.” And the “future is also not be attained.” This means that the mind can not truly “grasp” or comprehend the future because it has not yet happened, the past because it has vanished, or the present because it is too ephemeral and elusive to be seized.
Little Jasmine – this is a pop song released in 1980 by the Taiwanese singer Mei Sheng Bao. (Not to confused with the very famous and much-played “Jasmine Flower” (“Mo Li Hua”), an 18th century Chinese folk song that you have heard a dozen times playing in the background at Chinese buffets.) Mei Sheng Bao’s record is simply called “
Songs” – it was an enormous hit in Asia. (The song is an example of so-called Mandopop – Mandarin pop.) Chen hears the song being played while riding with the musicians in the back of the white pickup truck. Later, he tries, without much success, to sing the melody on the street where the Miao rock and roll band is playing. He learned the song in prison so that he could sing it to his wife upon being released. We know she died before his release. However, the hair stylist who cuts Chen’s hair looks exactly like the hero’s wife – we know this from several flashback scenes. Therefore, Chen’s wife is standing on the street listening to him when Chen tries to sing “Little Jasmine.”
Wei Wei – typically a nickname. When applied to a boy, the name is written with characters that denote “loftiness” and “Power” – an English equivalent would be “Biggy”. (When applied to a woman, the characters mean “Little Fern”.) Bi Gan’s nickname as a child was Wei Wei.
