Resurrection

Is there someone behind the screen? The question pertains to the prehistory of cinema, and today it would rather sound like an indirect way to deconstruct cinematic immersion – or to make said immersion an unexpected attraction again. Looking behind the screen is exactly what Bi Gan does in the opening of Resurrection, and in 2025 he is probably right in looking at cinema, I mean at “classical” cinema, as an attraction, one that will awaken the curiosity of the post-cinema generation of “video scrollers”.

In the opening scenes, we (the video scrollers?) see the (old) cinema viewers evacuate a cinema theatre because of a fire. We are at the beginning of the 20th century, when it was not all too unusual  for cinema theatres to catch fire, while what is definitely unusual is the (camera) perspective from which we observe the scene, the perspective of someone behind the screen. Yes, Bi Gan dares to answer in the affirmative to the question “is there someone behind the screen”? After Kaili Blues (2015) and Long Day’s Journey into Night (2018), we know he is the one who dares in cinema – through the opening scenes of Resurrection we are the ones to start a filmic journey, assuming the perspective of cinema itself! In Resurrection, cinema is telling its own history, starting from the times where cinema theatres caught fire. Occasionally.

This novel reversal of the gaze goes together with a counterintuitive connection: the connection of dreaming and mortality. The ephemeral world of dreaming, of cinematic delusions, is habitually connected with the spiritual domain, with something surreal or unreal, where the constraints of reality, like mortality, can be suspended. On the contrary, the science-fictional story in Resurrection, that provides the context for the history of cinema to be self-explained, tells us that the humans have discovered that without dreaming they can achieve immortality. Here, it’s not the material conditions but the spiritual values that are the source of mortality, and cinema lovers – here called “deliriants” – become enemies to the ones who seek immortality. In our post-cinema epoch, Bi Gan does not waste his time in mourning the death of cinema, but (re-)starts from the fact that cinema is mortal or, even better, is the source of mortality.

The original reversal and the counterintuitive connection get a performative (and ironic) connotation, because the actor that impersonates the agonising Mister Cinema in the film is Jackson Yee: actor and one of the member of the boyband TFBoys, the one who for several years has been ranked 1 in the Forbes China Celebrity 100 list (certainly a perfect strike for the film production). Now, performativity is indeed a characteristic of Resurrection, insofar as the five cinema epochs that are the subject of Bi Gan’s storytelling are also described through five different cinematic styles. This should almost be considered as a warning to the viewers, at least in order to encourage them to endure the first Meliès-like episode, which is laden with symbols and optical illusions – and not without a Piranesi taste for dizziness. The passage to the second episode, a sort of expressionist noir, will come as a relief, but the familiarity of this classical style does not make the cynicism of the story lighter. Cynicism will constitute the brutal background of the third episode, on which a spiritual theme, between religious traditions and existentialism, will emerge by way of contrast. The fourth episode will return us from the countryside to urbanity, from abstraction to realism, and will emerge as a pause of light and lightness, before the vertiginous grand finale.

Two invariants connect the stories and counterbalance the heterogeneity of the episodes: on one side, the protagonist – the cinema – is an outlaw and moves in a clandestine state, in marginality or in exile. On the other, his/its element is the illusion: opium (episode one), schemes and mirrors (episode two), ghosts and the supernatural (episode three), tricks and cheating (episode four). The Chinese title of Resurrection, 狂野时代, is made of the conjunction of  “shídài” – whose meanings include time, period, and epoch – and “kuáng” – mad, wild, and violent, but also deception. Instead of a performative contradiction, should we speak of contradictory performativity for the cinema that wildly, illusively, deliriously tells its own history?

There is a further invariant, in Resurrection, still to be considered: the human bond, here between the agonising Cinema and Miss Shu, the caregiver that appears in the first episode to help Cinema survive, and accompanies him behind the episodes to make him slowly, softly, die. Trust, brotherhood, and friendship are thus the figures of the human bond that will reach the peak of a crescendo in the final episode, which is nothing other than a love story. More precisely, a classical love-and-die story. For this episode, Bi Gan has created a long one-take scene – another unforgettable one after those of Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night. What is specific in this scene is the conjunction of the experience of the true duration of time and the feeling of the suspension of time. The lovers meet in a moment that should be an instant, or the instant par excellence, one that is the moment of passage between two millennia (New Year’s Eve, the cusp of Year 2000) and they continuously approach and distance themselves in a flirting dance whose end, the kiss, will coincide with their final separation. (The choice of the actress for Miss Shu, who helps Cinema to survive and to die – to survive in order to die, or to die in order to survive – could be of some significance, as she is the Taiwanese Shu Qi – another big celebrity in Chinese world. We could speculate: Is Taiwanese (or non-communist) cinema the midwife of Chinese cinema, as yet trapped in a suicidal spiral of conjunction and separation?)

It is unquestionable that Resurrection is an “ode to cinema” – the most repeated sentence in the reviews of this movie. My reading aims to bring a fundamental nuance to this statement in saying that the apparent nostalgia of this ode is surpassed by the pleasure for an opulence of the senses that is constantly in search of something unprecedented. Be it agonising or dead, Bi Gan’s cinema is lively so, sensually so, wildly or anarchically so. It is visionary. It is enjoyment.