That
hardly took long. An oil boomtown in the
1990’s, Yumen is now a deserted ghost town—literally so if you believe some of
the stories told by stragglers. Regardless,
viewers certainly get a vivid sense of contemporary China’s “burn rate” in Huang
Xiang, Xu Ruotao & J.P. Sniadecki’s Yumen
(trailer
here), which
has its North American premiere tomorrow during MoMA’s ongoing Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions film
series.
According
to one disembodied voice-over, the abandoned hospital is and was haunted by the
spirit of an infant. She once saw it
with some friends, one of whom still bears a scar from the encounter. Another man also remembers the hospital,
having frequently visited an ambiguously sickly woman there. These remnants of Yumen’s glory days are like
ghosts themselves, often filmed like ant-like specks shuffling through the
surreal post-industrial landscape.
The
directorial trio consistently plays games with the doc format, incorporating
what sound like staged reminiscences and showing the seams in between their
16mm reel changes. Nonetheless, there is
no mistaking the reality of the northwest Gansu town. It is impossible to recreate ruins of such
scale on an indie budget. It looks like
Pripyat outside of Chernobyl, just without the background radiation (as far as
we know).
For
what it’s worth, the woman’s ghost story is kind of creepy. Yet more to the point, the intertwining
memories and images clearly illustrate the pain and dislocation resulting from
the death of a community, even one not especially beloved by its residents, such
as Yumen.
Yumen is an
impressive looking film, but even at its sixty-five minute running time, it
feels a smidge stretched. Certain
visuals start to repeat themselves and a late scene rather overindulges in
globalist irony, as one of their POV figures strolls through a nearby open air
market singing along to Springsteen’s “My Hometown.” As a multi-millionaire and self-appointed spokesman
of the proletariat, Springsteen might actually be the perfect voice for today’s
China, but the sequence just feels too long and stagey.
