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Mamay Umeng (2012)
Slow, repetitive musing upon awaiting one's demise
Mamay Umeng is not a movie for the hurried. There is nothing there but still shots of the few locations inhabited, or visited by the ancestral protagonist, Mamay Umeng. His sleeping room, the dining room, the living room, the patio, this or that road, the beach, some other places and a small path across the river, which serves as some kind of bridge between two lands, twice attempted to be crossed by Umeng, twice failingly. The first time, the voice of his daughter calls him back home, the second time, it's his grandson who runs to him in an effort to walk him back. You'll have understood that Mamay is willing to "cross to the other side" and meet his timely demise.
And that he succeeds, at his third attempt, when the sun has already gone down and the sky has already darkened with rain-heavy clouds. Psychedelic music plays, we see him limp all the way to the opposite forest, and the film ends. But that should come as no surprise, for the whole movie documents the signs of approaching death, not as an inescapable and external force, but as a conscience, slowly growing over the daily examinations of Mamay's body, his struggles over everyday tasks, the disinterest of his relatives and ultimately, the way they infantilized him. Many times over, the director shows how aging is akin to going backwards ; literally, every time Mamay is brought back from the crossing path ; although figuratively as well, when she places in several scenes the old, chelonian Mamay by the ebullient youth, especially his grandson, whose treatment by his mother (Mamay's daughter) reflects Mamay's treatment by his family.
His awareness of death is rendered on screen through the repetitions of the same scenes, every time with changes so subtle an untrained eye might elude them : differences in light, shade, ambient sounds, presence or absence of objects. Albeit Mamay rejoices over these details, he understands he is henceforth unable to provoke them. Having lived so long, he's now like a stone, a timeless tree, the unmoving water of the ocean in which he bathes, a turtle so still you may not notice she even breathes. As such, Mamay knows well he must leave to be again part of the elements he worships.
While not revolutionary nor tremendously bold, this movie is as soothing as it is emotive.
Xi yang tang (2009)
Capturing what has been lost in time
Now, Wang Bing is especially famous for The West Of The Tracks, a monumental masterpiece whose merit needs no further recall. Such an early achievement tends to obscure the rest of his work, which shows a director in full possession of his wits and eagerness to document even further the sickness of a country where his voice is not welcome.
Xi Yang Tang, otherwise distributed under the title "Traces", has Wang filming the site of what had been a Chinese work camp, where many thousands men had died of hunger. A friend of him, who worked with physical film, had 1 hour of spare reel, which he freely gave. Wang, in return, decided to use this reel while shooting on the location of his next documentary, and as he prospected, he discovered humans bones and vestiges of human lives scattered all over the desert ground. From the 1 hour footage, he made a 17 minutes cut.
What is remarkable is how Wang rushes through the sand, head down, holding his 35mm camera in a firm perpendicular way to the ground, only stopping for a few seconds when he finds a vestige of human life (a bone, a cloth, a foot print, ...). That alone would have been sufficient for an interesting movie. But Wang decides to make full profit of the 35mm film, a format he never used before in his work, for he simply had no funds whatsoever. He thus submits the film to various effects, rippling the surface with dendrites, for instance.
One effect in particular is worth an analysis. On some occasions, Wang will re-film his footage : instead of re-filming the actual frame (the 1/24th of a second), so that you wouldn't see a difference between the frame re-filmed and the filmed frame, he composes a new frame, where the upper third consists of the bottom third of a frame ; the middle third is taken by the blank space between two frames ; and the lower third is the top third of the next frame. What happens then is that we're seeing, in a single frame, the past (what Wang shot in the first frame), the future (what Wang shot in the second frame) and a present (NOT the blank space between the frames, but the whole frame as such). This technique makes an even deeper impression, since the lower third is usually the top part missing from the upper third, blurring the distinction between what has been and what is yet to come.
Wang achieves a way to suspend time, or more accurately, to render our common conception of time obsolete. In these vast wastelands where human remains lay in silence, almost unnoticed through the clear sand and the crude light, where the past lives have taken an unmoving form, time seen as linear is no longer relevant. This place has sunk into a dimension of its own, neither made of space nor time, but of silence, of traces, of light. Closing the 17 minutes, is a shot made in a small cavern, where people had chiseled words in the stone ; one of them reads "freedom".