Gabriel Winslow-Yost at the NYRB:
Films are rarely made in response to film critics, so it is unlikely that Bi Gan’s wildly ambitious new film was inspired Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay “The Decay of Cinema.” In any case, Bi was six years old, living in Kaili, China, when Sontag declared in The New York Times that “cinema’s 100 years seem to have the shape of a life cycle: an inevitable birth, the steady accumulation of glories and the onset in the last decade of an ignominious, irreversible decline.” “If cinema can be resurrected,” she concluded, “it will only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.” Yet Resurrection, as Bi’s film is called in English (its Chinese title is more like “Savage Age”—Bi has made a habit of giving his movies quite different titles in English and Chinese), seems conceived in exactly those terms. Its action spans that same century of movies, unified less by any continuity of plot than by the conviction that this era has come to an end. Cinema is dead. It may yet live again, but first: let us remember.
What little overarching story Resurrection has comes on title cards in the opening moments: in the future, we are told, humanity has stopped dreaming in order to prolong our lifespans. The few who can still dream—called “Deliriants” or, in an earlier translation, “Fantasmers”—are outlaws, hunted down and subdued lest they threaten the longevity of everyone else.
more here.
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