The Delirious Cinematic Artifice of Bi Gan's "Resurrection"

""Resurrection," a magnificent intoxicant of a movie from the thirty-six-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is no ordinary love letter to cinema. It's more like a love labyrinth-a multi-tiered maze, full of secret passages, shadowy rooms, and winding staircases, with a giant movie theatre, sculpted from candle wax, waiting at the incandescent finish. It's an ecstatic, extravagant work of artifice and imagination, and, from the start, Bi and his collaborators (they include the director of photography Dong Jingsong and the production designers Liu Qiang and Tu Nan) embrace their craft with a childlike sense of wonder and play."

"An extended early shot, set in an opium den, practically overflows with intricate visual trickery-paper-cutout characters, an outsized hand that reaches into the frame and begins manipulating the scenery-that I could have happily watched unfold for hours. More than once in "Resurrection," the precise mechanics of a sequence can prove confounding, but the meaning is utterly clear: cinema is both a toy to be played with and a canvas of unlimited possibilities."

"Resurrection, which Bi wrote with Zhai Xiaohui, is both an expansive work of cinematic fantasy and a condensed survey of cinema's history; it consists of a prologue, an epilogue, and four chapters in between, each one set in a different time, place, and genre. The prologue is effectively a silent film, composed in a nearly square aspect ratio, structured with elegant intertitles, and possessed of an explicit homage to "L'Arroseur Arrosé," Louis Lumière's comic short from 1895."

Resurrection is an extravagant, genre-spanning cinematic labyrinth that blends fantasy, homage, and visual trickery. The film unfolds across a prologue, an epilogue, and four chapters, each set in different times, places, and genres, including a nearly square, silent-film prologue evoking early cinema. Elaborate production design, inventive camerawork, and playful artifice populate scenes such as an opium den sequence with paper-cutout figures and a manipulating oversized hand. Narrative mechanics can be confounding at moments, but the film emphasizes cinema as a playful toy and a boundless canvas for imagination and cinematic history.

Read at The New Yorker