It
sounds like the premise of a horror movie, but it really happened. Due to
shifting fault lines and water contamination caused by ill-conceived
construction projects, locals genuinely believed the land Losheng Sanatorium was
built over really was cursed. Intended as a place to shut away patients
suffering from Hansen’s disease (leprosy), Losheng was not a particularly
progressive undertaking, even by the standards of the Japanese imperialists.
Yet, decades later, residents protested plans to close the facility, because
they had no place else to go. Losheng and the ironically similar looking Taipei
Prison provide the settings for Chen Chieh-jen’s Realm of Reverberations (trailer here), an essayistic
docu-art installation hybrid, which screens as part of What Time Is It There? Taiwanese Film Biennial at the UCLA Film
& Television archive.
Chen
frequently explores the (often oppressive) impact architecture has on the
ant-like humans who navigate the demarcated spaces, but in the cases of Losheng
and Taipei Prison, you could say he is shooting fish in a barrel. Nonetheless,
Losheng and its displaced residents have become a cause célèbre for Taiwan’s
activist class. Franky, the underlying land sounds uniquely ill-suited for a
transit hub and the high-handed manner in which local authorities made
decisions understandably rubbed many the wrong way.
Chen’s
starkly dignified close-ups of the wheelchair-bound residents make a powerful
statement, but they lose their potency due to repetition. Likewise, the
circumstances of the hospice nurse’s life are certainly dramatic. She survived
the Cultural Revolution while young girl on the Mainland, eventually coming to
Taiwan to marry her future ex-husband. Eventually, she was forced to retire
from Losheng, because it was too painful watching her patients die. Yet, watching
her do penance by cleaning up the decaying Losheng premises is maybe not the
most profitable use of her presence and it gives short shrift to her deeply
compelling story. Similarly, the guilt-ridden niece who constantly returns to
visit the spirit of her Uncle Yang and the fictional time-traveling political
prisoner function more as symbols (or even props) than characters or subjects.
Nevertheless,
Chen’s black-and-white visuals are absolutely arresting. He and cinematographer
Chien Ming-chi just hold them for exquisitely hushed, maddeningly static long
takes. In all honesty, it is probably much easier to relate to Realm as the installation piece it was
intended to be, rather than as a work of beginning, middle, and end cinema to
be properly screened. Instead, it is probably best to walk under its large
projections screens, remark how it sure is something, and then continue through
the museum or gallery. Lovely to take in, in a tragically scarred kind of way,
but not really recommended as a film for theaters, Realm of Reverberations screens this Saturday (11/11) at the UCLA
Film & TV Archive.