an elephant sitting still (w&d hu bo)

Film and context. I’ve just read the wiki entry for Hu Bo, the film’s director, writer and editor. One paragraph instantly throws the four hours of film I watched yesterday into a different light, a prism through which this film is bound to be seen forever more. 

The film itself takes place over the course of a single day. Á la Magnolia or Amores Perros,  it interweaves the stories of four characters in a backwater Chinese city, one which has yet to reap the full benefits of China’s economic transformation. The city is post-industrial, cold, filmed with a washed-out grade, as though colour itself struggles to thrive in this environment. Over the course of four hours we participate in this fateful day, when Wei Bu accidentally kills the brother of a local gangster, Yu Cheng, who himself has witnessed a man committing suicide at the start of the film, after discovering that the gangster has slept with his partner. Death stalks the screen; sooner of later it seems its going to catch up with at least one of the protagonists. 

Four hours is a lot of screen time. The pace is wilfully slow. There are myriad shots of the back of people’s heads as they walk towards the next point in their day’s journey. The director compels us to experience the same lassitude, the same sense of creeping, omniscient despair, that his characters face. Secondary characters, parents or school staff, live in a vortex of rage or petty corruption. When the hunter Yu Cheng and hunted, Wei Bu finally meet, this despair gives way to a Beckettian humour. Both laugh bleakly together at the absurdity of the game they have been caught up in. The poetic motif of a motionless elephant, which is part of a travelling circus in another city, nearby, unites them. For both, life is like the elephant, a vast, useless alien which just sits around, provoking curiosity by the mere fact of its existence. And, of course, the film itself is also the elephant, this extended, unwieldy body of time, which seeks to be so vast that it encapsulates every aspect of these characters’ harsh lives, but does so going nowhere. It too has provoked curiosity by the mere fact of its presence, an unwieldy suicide note.

Because, I learn from Wiki, Hu Bo himself is no longer with us. He committed suicide after the film was completed. A startling fact which seems to warp the density of this movie, giving it an immortal element. The director might not walk the earth anymore, but he lives on through his art. As though it is sending a sign that the sitting elephant can and will move at some point. And when it does, be careful, because it will tread on you.