Resurrection
Does cinema still have a place in todays world? In a society where homes keep getting smaller and phones keep getting bigger, where we no longer dream but merely dream of dreaming, why keep going to theaters? What remains of art when each of us holds in our hands a device that turns us into both constant consumers and potential creators of trash? In a world flooded with images in a constant state of alarm, what gestures, what shots, what words can still move us? Edward Yang once wrote: “we live three times as long since man invented movies…”. Now, ever since we invented infinite scrolling, we no longer live at all.
All of this and more, much more, is what Bi Gan proposes in this vast, ungraspable masterpiece: a condensation of the history of cinema in its broadest sense.
Resurrection moves through different cinematic styles across five stories, each one paying tribute to a different movement or tradition in 20th century film history: German expressionism with assistance of chinese shadows. Film noir of the 40s. Taiwanese new wave. Fantasy set in Buddhist temple. 70s-80s crime drama. 99’ vampire love story with the visual style of War Kar-Wai. And as if that weren’t enough, the film also carries echoes of Andrei Tarkovsky, David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, and Leos Carax, blending metacinema, conceptual experimentation, and surrealism into a form of purely sensory filmmaking that certainly won’t be for everyone.
The director and his magnificent crew propose an exercise in virtuosity that is practically unmatched in my experience and not merely as an empty display of technical mastery, but as a genuine resurrection of the entire magical trail of forms and styles through which cinema has ever been made. But the resurrection of the medium cannot be a return to what already exists; it must be a mutation, not a rebirth. Bi Gan understands this, and it is we, the spectators, who must rise to meet this new cinema.
Art is, above all, experimentation and play. No canon is sacred if existing forms cannot contain what you are trying to express. Let us invent new languages, challenge the viewer, refuse to settle into the familiar. Cinema is a living creature, and like the dying delirant trapped over and over in visions of the past, it disappears the moment it ceases to evolve.
Resurrection is not an easy film, and it certainly will not appeal to everyone. Bi Gan does not make conventional cinema, but this time he has tripled down on his approach. You have to surrender yourself to it without losing awareness; this is a dream, but a lucid dream, and the language it speaks is that of dream experience itself.
Nothing on screen feels outwardly strange; there is no surrealism in its forms or aesthetics. Yet, as in dreams, nothing is where it is supposed to be. The film exists on a thin line between total chaos and complete meaning, and that is precisely where we must place ourselves if we truly want to experience it.
The final, devastating chapter placed me in a trance unlike anything i had experienced in a very long time, to the point where my body seemed to abandon those limiting perceptions of space, time, and everything in between. I do not know if my mouth has ever remained hanging open in awe for so long while watching a film.
It reminded me that a two dimensional screen is still capable of capturing such overwhelming texture and presence that i felt as though i was staring through a window into a world so tangible i could step inside it, touch it, smell it, breathe within it, feel the dampness in the air seep into my bones.
Resurrection functions simultaneously as a closing chapter to the history of cinema, to what the medium has been until now, but also as a vision of what it is, and what it should become from this point onward. In that sense, the film is at once the most beautiful elegy ever made about cinema, a reflection on what still remains of it, and a call toward the future of art itself.
If the voyager program probes were launched again today to show the universe the pinnacle of human artistic creation, I would choose “Mirror”, “The Color of Pomegranates”, and “Resurrection”.