Chinese odyssey ‘Resurrection’ sculpts images you’ve never seen before

The winner of a special jury prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Resurrection begins in the visage of an early 20th Century silent film (albeit in faded color), combining eras and designs to create magical images that should not exist. Slowly, and purposefully, Bi pulls back the curtain on tricks, techniques and technologies used to conjure the modern magic of cinema, from overlapping sets using forced perspective, to phenakistoscopes and other early animation devices that break movement down to its fundamental parts. The era-appropriate text titles tell of an alternate world where humanity has lengthened its lifespan by giving up dreaming, and people who still dream are persecuted and quickly die.

It’s a flimsy premise, but one that’s only relevant in roundabout ways. The movie transitions between a handful of lengthy scenes, each presented as a different dream by a single dreamer (Jackson Yee)—a convenient excuse to present a series of loosely fastened mini-movies bound by a vague semblance of theme. What’s more relevant, perhaps, is that the on-screen text mentions that persecuting dreamers has the added benefit of keeping time perfectly linear, whereas dreaming, and by proxy cinema, breaks through that linearity. Resurrection, in this way, presents creative imagination as a revolutionary force, fighting against the constraints of the literal. Not since Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Book in 2018 has a movie felt like it was snatching cinematic language from the jaws of death. 

In Bi’s last two films, Kaili Blues and Long Day's Journey Into Night—stories of people searching for something, or someone—the characters become untethered from time, as past and future collide. The latter even culminates in a nearly hour-long unbroken dreamscape in 3-D, pushing the limits of what the silver screen is capable of containing. Here, Bi takes his visual stress-test even further, through a journey of five semi-connected dreams told in different styles, and with wildly different scopes. The first, his aforementioned silent cinema odyssey, harkens back to the lavish, oppressive sets of German expressionist classics from the 1920s, as a monstrous, Nosferatu-like “dreamer” becomes the simultaneous object of pity and scorn.

Before long, this film transitions to a murder mystery—centered on a missing theremin, an ethereal instrument—set in a grimy, sprawling, retro-futuristic megacity. Then, it becomes an absurd, philosophical morality play about temple raiders, in which a man’s extracted tooth comes to life and takes the form of his father. Then, a more straightforward and languid melodrama about a young psychic-in-training. Until eventually, it lands on perhaps Bi’s most stunning achievement to date, in the form of yet another long, unbroken take, from the perspective of a ghostlike viewer, where the camera lacks physical weight, but has an imposing emotional presence. Describing this shot in words isn’t likely to do it justice, given the head-spinning ways in which it bends space and time. It follows a mysterious, playful young couple through a sprawling, gloomy city awash in red on New Year’s Eve in 1999, a point of global transition marked by both optimism and fears of technological oblivion (not to mention, by Smile.dk’s bubblegum dance pop track “Butterfly,” which was immensely popular in China at the time, and shows up here as well).

What makes this particular shot so complicated to describe is that while it lasts about 33 minutes on screen—a stunning work of blocking and choreography, up stairways and through various buildings, and in and out of different perspectives—it’s actually much, much longer, given the audacious ways it collapses time. There are moments when the world seems to move by infinitely fast, but an old silent film projected on a sheet in a nearby alley unfolds at what we perceive to be a normal speed, having likely been played much slower on set. This illusion involves technical coordination to a mind-melting degree (a sensation further enhanced by the specific image on which the dream sequence ends), but its flourishes are always tethered to the tragic tale of romance at its center.

In moving from one dream state to the next, Bi creates moments of transition that feel uncanny. They’re based around familiar images, sounds and textures, but as Bi and cinematographer Dong Jingsong’s camera moves through them, they ripple in unfamiliar ways. This is in part because these images dissolve into one another—water becomes cloth, and vice versa, and they take on each other’s properties—but it’s also because of the way Bi frames gravity and physical space, as forces that become mutable as the film moves from one dream to the next. A body might move from one scene to another, but when it does, up becomes down. Left becomes right. A camera moving inward somehow becomes a backward movement. Nothing makes physical sense, but it all feels right, because Bi is showing us things we’ve never seen before.

To say that Resurrection has one distinct narrative wouldn’t exactly be exactly true—it’s not meant to be understood like a traditional story, if it’s meant to be understood at all—but each of its scenes is, in its own way, about desire. Like Stalker, which centered around a mysterious, wish-granting room that revealed people’s truest selves, Bi’s dreamlike stories all center on the abstract concept of desire crystallizing some kind of physical form, whether as complex as a biomechanical “dreamer” that runs on film reels, or as simple as someone peering through time to read what a burnt letter from a long-dead lover once used to say.

Movies shouldn’t look like this. However, Bi harkens back to the earliest days of silent cinema—as sleight of hand, à la Georges Méliès—and moves forward in time through the images of Soviet montage innovator Dziga Vertov, until the movie reaches a point where Art Deco becomes inseparable from some intangible, future transcendence beyond the physical. He wraps the history of cinema itself into an inescapable time loop, lashing you back and forth while drawing your gaze to things that don’t make physical sense, but feel spiritually harmonious. If Resurrection is about the last 100 years of cinema, then it’s also the starting point of the next 100 years. Movies shouldn’t feel like this either—like they’re on the verge of changing our understanding of sight and thought for good—but in Bi’s hands, they do.