Poet
Cong Feng invites you to take a tour of Beijing suburb Tongzhou, a city of
debris. As he sees it, the municipality is constantly in the act of tearing
down. Lives and memories can be measured like sedimentary rock layers in Cong’s
Stratum 1: the Visitors, which
screens as part of Cinema on the Edge, the retrospective tribute to the Beijing
Independent Film Festival.
What
started out as a more traditional documentary on the wholesale razing of
neighborhoods became something more experimental when Cong faced the
overwhelming wreckage of it all. Throughout the film, he and his actor-narrators
Fan Yuansheng and Tian Dazhuang remind us the ruined buildings also represent
damaged lives.
Without
question, the film’s strongest sequence is the hushed telling of an episode
that would be worthy of its own narrative film treatment. One of Cong’s
colleagues remembers how injuries sustained during the Cultural Revolution
caused long term psychosis in his mother. He recalls how the family dog would
follow her during her impulsive flights into the nearby woods, returning home
to lead the family back to her location. It is easy to see its crossover
potential, like Coming Home crossed
with Lassie.
However,
the story of the loyal canine is easily the most accessible aspect of Stratum. Cong takes a self-consciously avant-garde
approach, but he is clearly mindful of the tradition. By the standards of the
genre, he maintains a comparatively high energy level and at times seems to
deliberately parody, or at least twist the conventions of experimental filmmaking,
most notably with his use of video rewinds and peppy pop music. Most
importantly, Cong, Fan, and Tian have real screen presence and a clear sense of
purpose as the clamber over the ever growing mountains of rubble.
