Every night during the shoot, Bi and his assistant directors convened in a conference room, where they and assorted crew members discussed everything from research on opium production to the optimal speed for a spinning phenakistoscope, an early animation device. As each night progressed, ashtrays piled up and bags of betel nuts emptied; every once in a while, Bi’s assistant passed him a glass of milk for nutrition. One night, we rushed over to the set at four in the morning to block out the next day’s scene; on another, members from the prop, art, and special-effects teams trooped in to determine the perfect diffusion of light through a prism and into a smoke-filled room. Upon finding a solution for each dilemma, Bi usually nodded with zealous satisfaction. “I didn’t get it before,” he would say, “but now I understand completely.”
“Resurrection” finished shooting in April. At one point, Bi’s French producer, Charles Gillibert, flew out to Chongqing to tell Bi that he had to finish the film in time for Cannes; it was officially accepted on May 10th, just four days before the festival began. Bi told me that he and his editor didn’t sleep for an entire week before the film’s première, which was placed at the very end of the program. “Resurrection” received a seven-minute standing ovation and a Prix Spécial from the jury, presented by Juliette Binoche. Bi strolled the red carpet in an oversized tuxedo, looking exhausted but giddy, next to his stars and his uncle.
Despite its devotion to the past, “Resurrection” is also a love letter to cinema, and an invocation to reclaim it as a collective dream. In the film’s penultimate act, we get not a genre riff but an inimitably Bi Gan aesthetic: a single, thirty-six-minute sequence set in a pier-side town whose neon-lit streets are lined with drug dealers, sex workers, CD shops, and karaoke bars, a place where the fake can come to feel indistinguishable from the real, or even more authentic. A young man named Apollo (Yee) meets a woman called Tai Zhaomei (Li Gengxi) on a dock; as they roam the town’s streets and promise to view the millennium’s first sunrise together, they encounter a gang led by Mr. Luo (Huang Jue), a man who has a mysterious claim on Tai Zhaomei and occasionally assumes the camera’s point of view.
Bi and his team spent a month preparing for the shoot, relocating to a dock in Chongqing and shooting one take per day, from midnight till dawn. In the sequence’s climax, as revellers wait for Y2K in a karaoke parlor, Apollo breaks into the building to rescue Tai Zhaomei, and is ferociously beaten by the gang as Mr. Luo sings a Cantopop ballad; the film slowly reveals that both he and Tai Zhaomei are vampires, having lived for eons beyond their death, their aged hands hidden beneath black leather gloves.
Bi described two “keys” for devising the sequence. The first was when his cinematographer, Dong Jingsong, showed him some paintings by Mark Rothko on his computer; this inspired Bi to bathe the first half of the sequence in an ominous red, as if seen from the eyes of a vampire, so that when Apollo shatters a window halfway through, the red gives way to a clear blue underneath. The second is a striking moment when, after the frenzy of Apollo’s beating, the camera rests on the broken window, as the scene outside accelerates into a time lapse of people milling about and setting up a movie screen. Projected onto the screen is Louis Lumière’s “L’Arroseur Arrosé” (“Tables Turned on the Gardener”), from 1895, in which a boy pranks a gardener by stepping on his hose, then releasing it as soon as the gardener inspects it; one of the earliest narrative films, it’s also the first that the Deliriant encounters in his dreamscape. The audience watches the Lumière at its original speed as time hurries by within the world of Bi’s movie, the scene not breaking the fourth wall so much as boring a peephole through it. For a brief minute, dream time, cinematic time, and real time coexist in beautiful harmony.
In September, I stopped by Bi’s studio, which is nestled in a secluded park in Beijing. In the foyer stood a giant theatre made entirely out of half-melted candle wax. Chunks had fallen from the ceiling onto the stage; strands hung frozen, as if perpetually dripping, from a set of columns. The prop appears in the final scene of “Resurrection,” a coda that shows spectral figures, modelled after extras and other characters from the film, entering the theatre. As they take their seats, the building begins to slowly decay.
Bi had struggled with how to end his film. He didn’t want to tack on yet another story, so when his art director, Liu Qiang, showed him a picture of a church shaped out of candle wax, he was filled with joy. “I told the crew that the ending should be connected to all the restless spirits haunting this land,” he said. “It should be about the ghosts of history, wandering through this century, constantly passing through our theatre. No faces, no features, no bodies. Just light.”
He grew excited as he detailed the physics behind the effect: the wax had been mixed with milk and other ingredients, so that it would melt just right. A special temperature-controlled room was built; the crew blasted the prop with blowtorches, then with cold air, since Bi wanted the hallucinatory texture of a lit candle, simultaneously dripping and congealing. The whole process took a week. “I think the hardest thing in the world, the hardest thing in filmmaking, is capturing dreams,” Bi told me. “It’s also what every filmmaker aspires to do.” He had brought the remains of the cinema back to his studio, moved that it refused to die. ♦
