Every evening during filming, Bee and his assistant directors gathered in a conference room, where they and other crew members discussed everything from research into opium production to the optimal speed of a rotating phenakistoscope, one of the first animation devices. Every night the ashtrays piled up and the bags of betel nuts emptied; From time to time, Bee's assistant would pass him a glass of milk for nourishment. One evening at four in the morning we rushed to the set to plan the next day's scene; on the other hand, members of the props, art and special effects team gathered to determine the ideal distribution of light through a prism into a smoky room. When he found a solution to every dilemma, Bee usually nodded with eager satisfaction. “I didn’t understand this before,” he said, “but now I understand it completely.”
Filming for “Resurrection” ended in April. At one point, Bee's French producer Charles Gillibert flew to Chongqing to tell Bee that he needed to finish the film in time for Cannes; it was officially adopted on May 10, just four days before the festival began. Bee told me that he and his editor didn't sleep for a week before the film's premiere, which took place at the very end of the program. “Resurrection” received a seven-minute standing ovation and a special prize from the jury, awarded to Juliette Binoche. B walked the red carpet in an oversized tuxedo, looking exhausted but giddy alongside his stars and uncle.
Despite its devotion to the past, Resurrection is also a love letter to cinema and a call to reclaim it as a collective dream. In the film's penultimate act, we see not a genre riff, but Bi Gun's inimitable aesthetic: a single thirty-six-minute sequence set in a coastal town whose neon streets are filled with drug dealers, sex workers, CD stores and karaoke bars, a place where the fake can seem indistinguishable from the real thing, or even more authentic. A young man named Apollo (Yi) meets a woman named Tai Zhaomei (Li Gengxi) at the pier; While roaming the streets of the city and promising to see the first sunrise of the millennium together, they encounter a gang led by Mr. Luo (Huang Jue), a man who has mysterious rights to Tai Zhaomei and sometimes assumes the camera's point of view.
Bee and his team spent a month preparing for filming, moving to a pier in Chongqing and filming one take a day, from midnight to dawn. At the climax of the episode, as the revelers wait for the year 2000 at a karaoke parlor, Apollo breaks into the building to rescue Tai Zhaomei and is brutally beaten by the gang while Mr. Lo sings a Cantopop ballad; the film gradually reveals that both he and Tai Zhaomei are vampires who lived many centuries after their deaths, their old hands hidden under black leather gloves.
Bee described two “keys” to sequence development. The first was when his cameraman Dong Jingsong showed him some paintings by Mark Rothko on the computer; this inspired Bee to bathe the first half of the episode in an ominous red, as if seen through the eyes of a vampire, so that when Apollo breaks the window halfway through, the red gives way to the clear blue below. The second is the startling moment when, after Apollo's frantic beating, the camera stops on a broken window and the scene outside speeds up to slow motion of people milling around setting up a movie screen. Projected onto the screen is Louis Lumière's 1895 film L'Arroseur Arrosé (Tables Against the Gardener), in which a boy pranks the gardener by stepping on his hose and then releasing it once the gardener has examined him; one of the earliest narrative films, and also the first that Deliriant encounters in his dreams. Viewers watch Lumiere at pristine speed as time speeds up in B's film world, a scene that doesn't so much break the fourth wall as drill a peephole into it. For a brief minute, dream time, cinematic time, and real time coexist in perfect harmony.
In September, I walked into Bee's studio, located in a secluded park in Beijing. In the foyer was a giant theater made entirely of semi-melted candle wax. Pieces fell from the ceiling onto the stage; the strands froze, as if constantly dripping, from the columns. The prop appears in the final scene of “Resurrection”, a coda that shows ghostly figures modeled after the film's extras and other characters entering the theater. As they take their places, the building slowly begins to collapse.
Bee struggled with how to finish his film. He didn't want to tell another story, so when his art director Liu Qiang showed him a photo of a church sculpted from candle wax, he was filled with joy. “I told the crew that the ending needed to relate to all the restless spirits that inhabit this land,” he said. “We should be talking about the ghosts of history wandering in this century, constantly passing through our theater. No faces, no features, no bodies. Only light.”
He was excited, detailing the physics of the effect: the wax was mixed with milk and other ingredients to make it melt properly. A special temperature-controlled room was built; The team blasted the props with blowtorches and then cold air, as B wanted the hallucinatory texture of a lit candle dripping and freezing at the same time. The whole process took a week. “I think the hardest thing in the world, the hardest thing in filmmaking, is making dreams,” Bee told me. “That’s what every director strives for.” He brought the remains of the cinema back to his studio, making sure it refused to die. ♦
