Cinema Disembodied?: Bi Gan Revisiting the Death-of-Cinema Cliché with Resurrection

Following his international reputation established with Lubian yecan (Kaili Blues, 2015) and Diqiu zuihou de yewan (Long Day’s Journey into Night, 2018), Kuangye shidai (Resurrection, 2025)¹ marks the first time that Bi Gan, the young rising auteur representative of Chinese art-house cinema today, aspiringly expands his spatiotemporal vision beyond his hometown and personal memories. This time, it is the collective memory contained within the cinema – as an art form and a meaningful place – that he is engaged with. The emphasis on the connection between cinema and dream persists: in Long Day’s Journey into Night, cinema serves as a place to dream; whereas in Resurrection, cinema appears as some body that dreams, who imagines itself transfiguring into distinct human characters (all portrayed by Jackson Yee) in a series of short stories set against different periods of 20th-century China. The “memory of cinema,” instead of what we remember about cinema, turns out to be what cinema itself recollects or dreams about.

Or maybe “memorial” would be more appropriate, for Resurrection was conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic when the death-of-cinema cliché was revived as if with more poignancy than ever. Bi Gan’s take on the cinema’s death, however, is to give cinema a corporeal body and let it die slowly in dreams. “Film’s body,” for Vivian Sobchack, is an empirical fact instead of a metaphor.² In her groundbreaking The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Sobchack argues that film is a viewing subject more than an object viewed, a body that perceives (via recording) and expresses (via projection). She also acknowledged the vital role of the spectator’s body on the other side of the screen as integral to the cinematic experience, because of the very fact that “we do not experience any movie only through our eyes,” but perceive them “with our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium.”³ Film experience thus becomes the interaction between two viewing subjects, two cinematic bodies. This essay aims to bring the Western embodiment discourse into dialogue with Bi Gan’s unique vision inspired by Chinese traditional philosophies.

Visualizing Film’s Body: An Allegory

The film’s subjectivity has already found an expression as early as in the Kino-Eye movement in the 1920s, when Dziga Vertov claimed that the mechanical eye could perceive a reality that falls out of our ordinary vision, “offering its own ‘I see.’”⁴ In the single-shot sequence of Kaili Blues, about a century later, the camera’s subjectivity manifests itself through a jaw-dropping camera movement, in which it suddenly turns away from the protagonist and takes a shortcut to join him at the destination. At other times, the camera seems to decide of its own volition its target to shadow, as if it assumes the point of view of the wild man (who is said always to follow man). The 3D single-shot sequence in Long Day’s Journey into Night, in contrast, stays loyal to the protagonist’s subjectivity, thus closer to the mainstream single-take films as exemplified by 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019). The single shot teamed with a mobile (hand-held) camera, often associated with the third-person videogame, generates an embodied experience different from that of the durational take employed by slow cinema, indulged in stagnancy and deficient in action or variation. The former hinges on the body of a character onscreen, who guides us to traverse the space and events, to be immersed in a sense of presence and to empathise with the character; the latter often lays emphasis on the offscreen side, where the audience is expected to be aware of the act of viewing (together) in the cinema and to contemplate (in) its durée. This dichotomy is admittedly reductive, for the single shot in Long Day’s Journey into Night explores at once immersion and alienation between which it fluctuates.

What is remarkable in Resurrection is that it invites us to ponder over the film’s body – which is usually exclusive to academic articles – alongside the human body on- and off-screen. According to Sobchack, “the film’s ‘visual body’ is usually invisible to me.”⁵ “We don’t see the film’s body itself, we only see its act of seeing and what it sees.”⁶ Bi Gan brings, presumably for the first time in film history, an allegorical visualization of what Sobchack theorized as “film’s body”: a Fantasmer, a Nosferatu-esque monster, wounded and dilapidated, waiting for an operation from the “Big Other.” In front of the red curtain we see a visage shedding tears in the manner of Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc (1928), while behind it a mechanical body is opened up, with a new film reel being loaded into place. In such a way is the anthropomorphic body united to a cinematograph and born a new perceiving subject. The curtain rises and the first to be (re)enacted is the Lumière brothers’ L’arroseur arrosé (1895), written in film history (at least for the time being) as the first fiction film. The title – literally “The Sprinkler Sprinkled” – lays bare a coincidence that the first dramatic turn in film history results precisely from a subject-object reversal. His mechanical body sprinkled, the Fantasmer falls to the grass dying. It closes its eyes and enters its final dream – one that lasts a hundred years. Cinema appears no longer as a dream machine, but rather as a dreaming body. What Resurrection offers therefore is a cinematic near-death experience, a panoramic life review of this young art. Intriguingly, the Chinese metonymy for the near-death life review is zou ma deng (走馬燈, literally “trotting horse lantern”), a kind of magic lantern that revolves images of horse-riding thus imbued with (pre)cinematic sense.

Resurrection

It is an allegory, because we know that this “film’s body” is just a metaphor; there is another film’s body, that genuine film’s body that is watching this one played by an actor. Their similarity and difference are demonstrated through a perspectival in-and-out: midway through the single-shot sequence, the film seamlessly transitions into the first-person perspective of Mr. Luo before our knowing it; but soon it withdraws from the POV shot by discharging a human body into the frame. The film’s body separates itself from the character’s/actor’s body, as well as from the rigid embodiment as in the notorious Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery, 1947).

Marlowe, and we as spectators of “his” behavior, are literally grounded and anchored in bodily existence, and we perceptually and expressively live the body through none of the other modalities of experience it enables: dreaming, imagining images, projecting situations, and temporarily assuming an other’s situation as a subject. […] Whether the human body’s or the film’s, the “address of the eye” transcends its bodily situation and finitude, traverses space and time, visually inhabiting and constituting them as lived experience through reflection, imagination, memory, and dream.⁷

Rather than yoked to a body, Resurrection follows exactly one’s mind and dreams, unrestrained. The act of splitting off, of sending what is seeing to the onscreen to be seen, could be read not only as the division of Fantasmer-film’s ego into different dream characters, but also as a reenactment of how the analogy to the anthropomorphic body (be it machinic or vampiric) is made so that the film’s subjectivity and corporeality could be understood.

A Journey of Disembodiment

In Variety’s exclusive interview with Bi Gan, the film’s structure was revealed prior to the world premiere at Festival de Cannes as if the festivalgoers’ confusion was anticipated: six segments, each corresponding to one of “the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) and the mind”⁸ – to be more precise, Chan Buddhism⁹ speaks of six “roots” (liu gen, 六根):¹⁰ those of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind.¹¹ This paratextual disclosure makes one wonder how the film is going to explore further the multisensory image, especially the sense of smell and taste which seem rare and difficult to be privileged in both film practice and film studies. The sense of touch is arguably the most studied in the field of embodied spectatorship. While Laura U. Marks often mentions touch, smell, and taste in the same breath in her The Skin of the Film, it is nevertheless the theory of “haptic visuality” that really stands out and to which it is often reduced.

As the essays on the six roots unfold in succession, we gradually find out that this structure is not aimed at evoking certain senses other than the audiovisual via synaesthesia, on the contrary, it is about (c)losing all the senses one by one. Therefore, after a brief prologue of embodiment, the film swiftly turns in the opposite direction: what it embarks on is a life journey approaching its end, a journey of dis-embodiment. After all, with a body come not only the senses, but also its mortality. The death of cinema is subsumed under the ultimate fate of corporeality. “All that has xiang¹² is illusory,” this Buddhist dictum from the Chinese version of The Diamond Sutra, repeated several times in the dialogue of the temple-set story, perhaps best encapsulates the underlying idea of Resurrection: yes, cinema is dying, but within the context of a sensible world that is false and is itself fading away.

Sensory loss (of smell and taste) indeed used to be a symptom of COVID-19, a collective experience during the pandemic. Though unrelated to the ontology of cinema, Perfect Sense (David Mackenzie, 2011) has attempted to deal with the same step-by-step sensory loss during a pandemic; yet it mobilises more audiovisual techniques to provoke our multisensory empathy. Remarkably, each loss is heralded by a surge of overpowering emotion. For instance, when people begin to lose their taste, the film dedicates a montage sequence of their devouring raw and greasy things that appeals to our tongue. Nevertheless, that we do not really experience that genuine taste meanwhile shares with us the gustatory deprivation. When Michael becomes deaf, for another example, it lasts about 50 seconds when we barely hear nothing but some faint ambient noise, reminiscent of the sheer silence in Band à part (1964) where Godard utterly deprives us of our cinematic hearing. By contrast, the loss of the senses in Resurrection is conveyed to us primarily through dialogue (“I can no longer hear my father’s snoring,” for example) which fixes the admittedly beautiful concept on the textual level.

Resurrection

Cinematic Duration Disembodied

As Bi’s fourth feature film, Resurrection has reached the longest and broadest in terms of the runtime and the spatiotemporal horizon; yet it is also his least “tedious” work. Bi Gan’s ambition precisely lies in – after his previous piece managed to combine personal expression with an “unexpected” box-office success¹³ – an attempt to truly balance authorship and commercial appeal, and to embrace a larger audience. Probably for this reason, he seeks recourse to the iconic historical periods which are aligned to the state-endorsed textbook historiography for a (constructed) collective memory that resonates as widely as possible. Nevertheless, the nation’s historioscape remains as a backdrop and is not much engaged in Bi’s expression. Maybe we could sense a critique obscured in that temple story, which is supposed to take place during the radical leftist period (from the late-’50s to the mid-’70s, including the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution). The isolated temple is clearly a choice to avoid censorship, for the catastrophe everywhere else is quasi-forbidden to represent. The offscreen space is alluded to through the dialectic between bitter and sweet. (A Chinese idiom: find joy in bitterness.) The following one set against the Reform and Opening up is more of a genre modulation, while the fin-de-siècle teenage vampire romance¹⁴ gestures towards a fairytale. Apart from the cinema history as cinema’s dream, there is no narrative renewed, no history rewritten.

Above all, the inflation of the narrative dimension results in the acceleration of the image. If Kaili Blues and Long Day’s Journey into Night allow us to witness the death of time, then what Resurrection resurrects in the first place is the “dead time,” by reorienting time back to a frame of reference where the efficiency of narrative progression prevails. As an essential element of contemporary slow cinema, dead time refers to narratively un(der-)productive screen time, as if time is wasted. Of course this appellation is problematic, as we contest the domination of narrative productivity while basing time’s life and death on it. Time’s meaning could also be sourced from a cinematic experience. While the mainstream cinema of fantasy strives to make the audience forget time’s passage and the physical existence (confinement), the dead time emphasises the bodily experience in time: boredom, abstraction, ecstasy, sleep, or agitation in one’s seat. Only in this context are the double meanings of “endure” completed: time endures; we, endure the lasting of time, subsisting in time, with time, in the form of duration.

“Cinema is an art that requires continuous viewing,”¹⁵ says Bi Gan in an interview after Kaili Blues’s premiere. The continuous space-time in the film’s second part is indeed indispensable to its unique magical realism. The spatiotemporal integrity on the audiovisual level gives a Bazinian realist impression in the first place. But the way the diegetic information interlaces contradicts the linear continuity of time, generating anachronism. In this way, multiple times are quietly sutured into an illusion of continuity: the protagonist in the present, the old doctor from the past, the little nephew from the future co-exist in a natural way without the slightest absurdity. There is, without doubt, a reference to Lung Bunmi raluek chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010), yet Bi Gan reinvents a low-key magical realism distinct from the surrealist elements in Weerasethakul’s film: its persistent realist appearance makes sure any unreality is introduced only through time itself. When it comes to Long Day’s Journey into Night, realist appearance gives way to a stylised audiovisual language. That almost every scene is shot in one take extends greatly the average shot length (ASL), slowing down the film’s tempo while producing more dead time. Aesthetic experience is foregrounded, with duration a device to prolong the perception of the artificial style. Contrary to the extreme stagnancy in the cinema of Béla Tarr or Lav Diaz, however, Bi Gan never really intends to exploit the spectator’s boredom. He always fills the long dialogueless sequences with poetry recitation or music. Even in that notorious apple-eating sequence, the apparent monotony is indeed replete with interior drama, exhibited through the actor’s progressive emotional expressions. As for the cable-car sequence, 2 minutes is definitely much longer than what is necessary to understand this action; but in order to fully experience the slow descent into the depth of the night or dream, duration becomes a necessity.

Kaili Blues

Perhaps out of the idea to include various film languages and genres, Resurrection stops using a single shot to choreograph the dream part which this time constitutes a majority of the film. The runtime is first divided into several independent stories, which are then divided into shots by continuity editing, except for that on the touch. Even though it bears the auteurist single take, the mise-en-scène is unprecedentedly rich and intense, eliminating any extra moment of slowness or silence. Here, time is given in span rather than in duration. A hundred years passed according to the voice-over, yet we feel nothing. This epic narrative exempts a broader audience from a possible boredom, but also from the irreplaceable experience afforded by duration.

The End?

The final chapter apparently returns to the space where the first (visual) chapter takes place. We are no longer inside the Fantasmer’s dreaming mind, unable to tell whether he is still dreaming or dead already. In this way the dream/film approaches its end, which could be meanwhile understood as the last step of how the mind closes. Resurrection is concerned about the end of dream before the end of cinema. “In the beginning, I didn’t think of the [Fantasmer] as a cinema monster. But as I developed the story, I realized it had to be one.”¹⁶ Dreams in Bi Gan’s filmography often appear as a quest propelled by a longing to reunite with the lost ones through the reconstruction of time. In the previous two films, they are mother and lover; here, they become the diasporic cinema-goers as well as the lost culture of cinema-going: “Screens are getting smaller and smaller, and I want to evoke that old feeling of watching films in theatres.”¹⁷ Resurrection represents the death-of-cinema trope as a dying body, but also as a burning wax-made theatre at the end. The audience – in the form of light and without physical body – enters, replacing the projector as the only source of light. They take seats, only to find “The End” of the film. The wax theatre is burning out, and so is the glow of the audience, who disappear one by one. Suddenly, the screen that they are watching expands and becomes the screen watched by us. Their borders fuse, superimposing the collapsing candle theatre onto this movie theatre that is projecting Resurrection. We could say, a film dies each time it comes to an end; an image dies each time a frame passes. For Godard, cinema is “truth 24 times a second,” whereas for Laura Mulvey cinema is more of “death 24 times a second.”¹⁸ Film history then becomes a history of its death, written at its beginning: on the day of the very first public film screening on 28 December 1895, the Lumière brothers’ father, Antoine Lumière dismissed the future of the cinématographe as uncommercial.¹⁹ Cinema dies out, yet curiously, it is not until then that the title RESURRECTION comes into view. This witness and encounter themselves are perhaps the temporary resurrection of cinema, for they prove that films are still being projected, and people still see a film till its end, as if seeing it off.

Resurrection

An end always flows into (a) beginning(s), non-stop. There is a point when time forks, one into a linear end, another into an infinite loop: by tailoring his mask and making him up, the Big Other paints the Fantasmer – in the appearance of a young man – back into the Nosferatu of the beginning. She sends him to the stream of time, to the next samsara. Then, the theatre is burnt to the ground. Then, after everything, there is no more image, no more sound, which is the necessary condition for a Daoist ultimate form. “The greatest music barely makes a sound, the greatest image/form²⁰ has no shape” – Laozi’s Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) is almost explicitly quoted in the chapter on the ear, in which the hearing loss brings the true Music. Informed of Classical Chan Buddhist and Daoist philosophies, Bi Gan gestures towards what comes after the audiovisual form. The transcendent potential is left after the film, or rather, precisely on the interface between cinema and “reality.” Accompanying the title card writing RESURRECTION, it is our full perception of the world outside the screen that gradually revives. The lights come back and we realise that cinema isolates a space where a cinematic perception distinct from the everyday one is possible. Entering and leaving the cinema entails the conversion between two perceptions, relinquishing one perception for the other. For Chan Buddhism, transcending the falsity does not necessitate abandoning all six roots, but recognizing that what we perceive and conceive is all illusory and empty – which is perfectly mirrored by/in cinema – and, most importantly, letting go, not clinging to any phenomenon, concept, or feeling. In the dreams of the Fantasmer, people are struggling to let go their attachment to a certain sense/root as well as to their beloved – for example, father and snoring, daughter and lunchbox – in that sensory experience is intertwined with memory.

Resurrection invites the audience to reflect on cinema as a way of world-perceiving, its origin, and its future. The dialogue with André Bazin could be made out in the last camera movement of the single-shot sequence: in the foreground is the young couple, whose romance just survived the last night of the last century; in the background the boat window frames a CinemaScope aspect ratio, the “cinematic” aspect ratios adopted by the previous three stories: a frame-within-a-frame, a mise-en-abyme (centripetal), but also a window-within-a-window, a cache placed over the sunrise scene on the river (centrifugal). This composition therefore creates a cinema/reality dichotomy within the film. As the camera slowly moves towards the window, gradually expanding the aspect ratios, filling the view with the pink rays of the sunrise, Resurrection manages to take us beyond the screen, to confront us with the millennial daybreak of a “post-cinematic” world, perceived by senses in secret transformation.

Endnotes