Club Heaven

Human spaces are designed and built for specific purposes – they follow intrinsic rules that, if one knows how to look, are conditioned by cultural, social, and economic dynamics and hierarchies. They are heated, illuminated, and divided according to a set of design principles whose main goal is to remain as transparent and cohesive as possible, so that our experience within a given space feels complete, harmonious, and stable – to the point of making us forget the very notion of space itself, focusing only on what it serves. If these essential components were to be removed – if the space were to look and feel as it is not supposed to – it would become menacing, disfigured, and even abhorrent. This is precisely why the opening scene of Jona Honer’s Club Heaven leaves such a baffling impression on the viewer. A vast dance floor with scattered tables and booths, stripped to its bare bones under blaring lights, like a disemboweled whale; a giant metal cubicle descending from the ceiling, crowned with a structure draped in wires, cables, and headlights – all exposed in their alien-like ugliness.

Decidedly engrossing in its spatial disorientation, the four-minute-long static shot plunges us into the underbelly of the monster that is Play House – an electronic music venue in Chengdu, China, known to be among the most famous clubs dedicated to the genre. At a quick glance, Club Heaven appears to be one of those typical fly-on-the-wall documentaries, centring on institutions and their inner workings through in-depth examination. This impression is reinforced as the ceremonious opening scene is followed by a series of scenes featuring staff members with different roles within the club, particularly one in which the manager delivers a callous speech reminding everyone how disposable they are if they fail to generate profit. But very soon, Honer makes it clear that his formal and aesthetic ambitions deviate from the framework of detached observation – a framework that already begins to feel limited due to the film’s relatively short runtime, rendering those scenes somewhat rudimentary. Honer alternates depictions of labour, as well as the discussions and conversations club employees have during their downtime, with images shot on the dance floor using a thermal camera.

These fully muted black-and-white images take the otherworldly dimension of the opening scenes to an entirely different level. With depth perception almost erased by the monochromatic palette, the bodies moving within the frame are reduced to nearly pure figural forms. Reminiscent of two-dimensional representations from antiquity and Christian iconography, the hallucinatory thermal images transform the drink-bearing employees into priests of a modern religion of capitalism, while the inebriated woman who slumps over her seat – and is later carried away by two clubbers – appears not far removed from a sacred offering to Bacchus. Since the film already attempts, rather blatantly, to channel this meaning through its formal strategies, it may seem redundant to state that it frames the club as a modern temple of exploitative capitalist forces.

Suffice it to say, then, that the two alternating visual regimes Honer relies on fundamentally render Club Heaven a conceptual work – for better or for worse. Why for the worse? The concept of inversion, whether spatial or chromatic, is clearly employed here to shed light on the machinery of capitalism, which is usually obscured by the entertainment, pleasure, and exhilaration that clubs such as Play House provide. And yet Honer’s fascination with – or rather, fixation on – this argument confines his approach to broad brushstrokes, resulting in a lack of critical incisiveness that leaves the film prone to schematization and generalization. The most obvious flaw in his approach is that all his formal and aesthetic strategies are mobilized in the service of making a point – paradoxically instrumentalizing the very people for whom he is trying to advocate, or at least those whose invisible labour he seeks to render visible. A more insidious, yet nonetheless present, layer of this involuntary instrumentalization is closely tied to an inevitable tendency toward exoticism – one the film cannot help but suffer from. There is no doubt regarding the Play House group’s trust in Honer – and even the pleasure they take in being on camera – but, at the end of the day, their very image, which the film appropriates and renders more visible, contributes to its circulation within the hyper-capitalist economy and techno-orientalist culture that China also benefits from. There is, too, an inversion at work here, one that Honer does not seem to have given much thought to, though one wishes he had.