Gong gong chang suo aka in public (2001) dir. Zhangke Jia
As enthusiastic beginners, both Jia and Tsai seized the digital camera as a tool that could provide them with a more intimate, closer, way of grasping reality. Yet, once again, they end up with a world of missed encounters. The real, said Lacan, is not only what eludes us, but what we tend to resist, and both filmmakers articulate this dilemma with elegance and poignancy. The intimacy produced by the digital recording is more with the subject than with the object, and what strikes at first in both Jias and Tsais contributions is how congruent they are with the rest of their work they are, somehow, a form of inverted selfportrait, the captured images functioning like a mirror image of their emotions and concerns.
|