A Collapsing World: An Interview with Bi Gan
BY
Jordan Cronk
An interview with Bi Gan on his new film, A Short Story.
A Short Story and Long Day's Journey Into Night are playing now at Metrograph in theatre, and the latter is available to stream via Metrograph At Home.
Among a new generation of Chinese filmmakers, 33-year-old Bi Gan is uniquely fascinated by cinema’s ability to transform time and space. Across a handful of shorts and features, Bi has traversed spatiotemporal boundaries in a manner familiar to many of his East Asian contemporaries, but with a confidence and ambition arguably unmatched by any of his peers. In both Kaili Blues (2015), his first feature, and his breakthrough Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), Bi brought a dreamlike fluidity to fable-like stories that, through the use of discrete, show-stopping long takes (accentuated, in the latter, by the use of 3D technology), seemed to collapse time and bring forth memories from deep within its characters.
A Short Story (2022), Bi’s first film in four years, is a self-described fairy tale that finds the director trading the virtuosity of his features for a different kind of experimentation. Commissioned by Pidan, a Chinese company specializing in cat products, the 15-minute short centers on a black Maine Coon that sets out, on advice of a mysterious scarecrow, to find “the most precious thing in the world.” Over three chapters, the cat (walking upright in a black trench coat) encounters a weird trio of figures who may hold the answer: a dying robot, a demon magician, and a woman who eats noodles to forget her lover. Taking each scene as an imaginative challenge, Bi fashions the film as a kind of modern day Cinema of Attractions, complete with rear projection, scale models and miniatures, scenes that unfold in reverse, and an abundance of neon lights. As these techniques might suggest, A Short Story has strong links with surrealism, and as such adds points of reference including René Clair, Germaine Dulac, and Luis Buñuel to the director’s longstanding connections to Alain Resnais, Wong Kar-wai, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Far-flung influences notwithstanding, that “the most precious thing” is ultimately located closer to home confirms that Bi, who continues to shoot exclusively in and around his hometown of Kaili, is an artist whose flights of fancy have roots that extend beyond the cinematic.
JORDAN CRONK: More so than with your features, A Short Story feels especially literary, or maybe indebted to a certain tradition of Chinese storytelling.
BI GAN: I think it’s related to my different filmmaking stages. Unlike my previous features, self or self-expression is here less important. This film, narrated from an outside perspective, still has my distinctive signature, but it is no longer a personal one. At the same time, as this short film is like a fairy tale, I chose to follow some conventions of fairy tales by directly narrating the story myself, while at the same time complementing the literary text with imaginative audiovisual flourishes. I felt that was the most fitting and concise way to film A Short Story.
A Short Story (2022)
"I struggled a lot with how to present the soul of the black cat."
JC: I understand that a cat company commissioned the film?
BG: Yes, a pet company asked me to make a film for them, so I decided to make a fairy tale from the perspective of animals and kids. I struggled a lot with how to present the soul of the black cat in the film, as it seemed impossible to achieve by simply filming a real cat. And I didn’t want to rely on any special effects. Then I remembered David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017), in which Casey Affleck wears a white sheet and becomes a ghost. We decided to embody the soul of the cat in a little detective costume so that it could wander in the film, in a real sense.
JC: How did the collaboration with the cat company come about? Were there any rules or restrictions about what you could make?
BG: The person in charge of the pet company is a fan of my films, and he loves art. There were no restrictions. He just wanted me to make a short film with cats—everything was welcome. While my previous films were perhaps more serious, this collaboration enabled me to find a new way of thinking through filmmaking.
JC: You’re working here with a co-writer, Zhai Xiaohui. What did they bring to the process?
BG: Xiaohui is a young screenwriter who recently joined my team. Up until now I wrote my scripts myself. He worked more like an engineer for me on this film. He once made a joke to us that he felt like a programmer. As for our process, I told him the main idea, and then he began to sort out the details. After that, I started to write literary scenarios and scene outlines. He also worked as an assistant director. He brought a different perspective to the film, and in fact directed the scene with the devil magician rehearsing the backward performance.
JC: The devil is one of the “three weirdos” in the film. What can you tell me about them, what do they represent?
BG: The three weirdos hold the three most precious things: the robot has sugar, which is actually bittersweet; the amnesiac has the letter that contains memories of not only pain but also of love and happiness; and the devil holds a dirty ball of mud that also has a flower bud inside. These stories represent different circumstances that we may experience throughout life’s journey, and the film is dedicated to such a collapsing world, along with those desperate and miserable weirdos, as well as our children. I think it’s a universal truth that the most precious things are actually those that are most common and simple.
A Short Story (2022)
JC: You mentioned the woman who eats noodles to forget her lover. Can you talk about the idea of memory in the film?
BG: In the film, the woman wants to forget her painful memories. When the black cat comes to comfort the woman and light up the lamp, I wanted to convey that the memory is actually bittersweet: it contains not only eternal pain but also eternal love. So I set this part of the story in a still house, as a direct manifestation of memories. When the letter is read by the voiceover, the house starts to really move, like a train.
JC: How did you conceptualize the visual look of the film? Each part seems to utilize techniques that are new for you.
BG: For the story of the robot, I was stuck for a long time. I really wanted to have a toy come out of the robot’s belly, but again, I didn’t want to use any special effects. One day, inspiration came in form of a pair of twins. One of them wakes up with his eyes open, and the camera follows him into the next scene, where the other is already sitting on a couch like a work of installation art. We also used a third person here: this person is actually lying on the couch under the robot’s body; we only show the lower part of the body and the robot’s giant, machine-like belly in separate shots, so you can see the feet move up and down in a very funny, old-fashioned way, like in Buster Keaton’s films.
For the story of the forgetful woman, we initially thought we’d solve the visual problems of the moving house in post-production. But then we found that we could put the house on a real train, like a trailer, and give some real mobility to the room. The impression of surreal memories that this shot conjures is much more attractive to me than what we could have accomplished in post-production. When the house-train starts to move, and the woman opens the door, the great pain she is experiencing also became real on set, as cold winds began blowing into the room.
Finally, for the story of the devil, I wanted to present him in a cute or funny way, because he sells his soul, only to find endless solitude. I put the devil in a space where time is reversing and we made some miniature chairs to let the scene look real, as if were in a theater. But when the devil begins performing backward and walks towards the screen, stretching out his hand, he breaks the frame of the illusion, thus giving the feeling that the whole stage is a magic trick.
JC: The film’s Chinese title is Heart of the Broken Sun. Can you talk about what this title means, and why you changed it for the English version, A Short Story?
BG: I think Heart of the Broken Sun is a more lyrical expression of the film’s main idea, which is literally about the heart or the core of the sun: even though it is broken, the sun and its heart still exists. For the English title, I thought it was the best way to summarize the film for a non-Chinese audience; I hope they can quickly grasp my idea that the film a very simple and short fairy tale. This is my usual practice of naming films: my Chinese titles have deep meanings while the English titles are more direct. It also gives me the chance to name a film twice.
JC: Each of your films are set in your hometown in Guizhou Province. Has your idea of home changed at all over the course of your career?
BG: With the rapid development of railways and the internet, memory has also rapidly changed. My concept of home is an old one: a solid thing that becomes something that floats, as in the air. I want to use my art to preserve my hometown. To me it is no longer a geographical location but a place that carries my memories.
Tang Wei in Long Day's Journey into Night (2018)
JC: Long Day’s Journey Into Night is screening at Metrograph as part of a series of films starring Tang Wei. Can you talk about working with Tang, and why you decided to cast her?
BG: Honestly, I didn’t think about casting Tang Wei. She was immediately in my mind as I wrote the script as the only and best choice for the role of Wan Qiwen. Our collaboration was amazing and wonderful. Long Day’s Journey Into Night was my first film with professional actors; I was moving from making handcrafted films like you would in a workshop to producing films as part of an industry. Tang Wei also started in film very young and began working with famous directors at an early age. Because of this, I think we shared a kind of tacit understanding, and we bonded over these experiences through constant communication and chit-chat on set. That said, there was a lot of trial and error. The narrative of Long Day’s Journey Into Night is very complicated; each sequence comprises many details in its mise-en-scène. Everyone on set had to be highly involved in order to coordinate the shots, and Tang Wei occasionally had to adjust her process to complement the mise-en-scène. Sometimes I would get distracted by various difficulties on set, but she would always make excellent decisions in her performance that made it easier for me.
I still remember the day when we wrapped the shoot and we wanted to take a group photo, but Tang Wei was missing. I finally found her sitting in the revolving room that you see near the end of the film. She was unwilling to leave. This was a shot that required great teamwork; it was achieved in-camera, with no trick editing. The filmmaking process, and this scene in particular, was like a dream to us. I think Tang Wei knew that when she left the room she would no longer be Wan Qiwen. That was a very touching moment to me. I couldn’t distinguish between what was real and what was a dream.
JC: I’m curious, as each of your films grows more ambitious, how you balance these more intimate moments or emotions with the growing scale of the projects?
BG: I think perhaps there is no necessity to balance them, as the difficulties everyone has to confront are always there. Filmmaking is always born out of paradoxes.
JC: Is there any technique or thematic idea from A Short Story that you’d like to expand on in your future work?
BG: I wanted to let this film look and play like a trick film, as if it came from the time when the Cinématographe was just invented. Following the traditions of trick films, we tried to integrate some vaudeville techniques. That’s one reason I wanted to shoot in Academy ratio. But I think I will leave these techniques in this short film. For whatever I might make next, it depends on the main idea. The aesthetic will stay the same but I might find another way or new technique to make the film.
Thanks to Ethan Tao for interpreting and translating this interview.
Jordan Cronk is a film critic and founder of the Acropolis Cinema screening series in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Cinema Scope, the Criterion Collection, frieze, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sight & Sound, and other publications. He is a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.
Long Day's Journey into Night