Even
today, families remain the essential building block of Chinese social
organization, especially when it comes to retirement and economic safety nets.
Yet, the Communist Party has a long history of pushing policies to weaken
family unity. Lei Lei explores his family’s history of trauma during the
Cultural Revolution through a series of interviews with his mother in the
experimental documentary, Breathless
Animals, which screens during this year’s Art of the Real.
Breathless is an exercise in
found art, crafted out of photographs, magazines, and cast-off footage Lei Lei
has collected. Yet, it is also a work of oral history, wherein his mother
chronicles her family’s painful milestones from the period of Cultural Revolution
until the 1980s thaw, as well as her own concurrent personal experiences.
Although her memories are often presented in a fragmentary and elliptical
manner, viewers will clearly come to understand how the tribulations her
parents endured caused tremendous emotional anxiety for her (that frequently
manifested in her dreams of ominous animals).
There
is no doubt her testimony is the most crucial element of Breathless. Lei Lei also assembles some striking images, which he
sometimes partially animates in clever ways. However, his aesthetic austerity
does not always work hand-in-glove with the story-telling aspect of the film
(but obviously that earned it an invite to Art of the Real).
In
many ways, Breathless represents the
fractured and mysterious nature of memory, but both family and national history
would probably be better served by a smoother and more accessible account of
their Cultural History years—even if it is as straight forward as Wang Bing’s static
steady-shot talking-head interview documentary, Fengming: A Memoir. After all, the Party remains in denial,
determined to pretend the Cultural Revolution (as well as the Great Leap
Forward) never happened.
Lei
Lei has skills and his mother has important testimony to recount, but they
combine rather awkwardly here. Of course, both aspects pretty much guarantee
the film will never see the inside of a Mainland movie theater, both separately
and most definitely when taken together, which makes it worth seeing just on
principle. Indeed, this is absolutely a case where the act of remembering is
significant. Recommended for experienced patrons of experimental cinema, Breathless Animals screens tomorrow (4/27)
as part of Art of the Real ’17.
