“How charming it is to make a silent film”: Bi Gan on Resurrection

A meditation on the history of cinema, the five senses, and the nature of dreams, Resurrection is the most ambitious work yet from director Bi Gan. Split into five vignettes, the movie is framed by the concept of a world where humanity has surrendered the ability to dream in exchange for immortality. A stubborn few, known as Deliriants, cling to their dreams. To free one such Deliriant (Jackson Yee) from his delusions, an operative (Shu Qi) enters his dreams, guiding him through a century of cinema towards release. Bi’s film moves between eras and styles, beginning with silent expressionist cinema and passing through film noir, the Cultural Revolution, the era of Chinese capitalism, and finally a single long take set on the turn of the millennium. With monsters, spies, monks, con artists, and vampires, the result is a psychotropic celebration of the moving image. 

What was the initial image or thought that grew into Resurrection? 

I’ve given a lot of thought to where inspiration comes from. Actually, at the time we were thinking about how to make the next film, we thought about a lot of concepts, like how to make a film for the future, but we didn’t really have any specific ideas. That’s why we decided to explore the past century instead, how film evolved. We wanted to raise questions instead of answers in terms of the land where we live and questions about cinema’s life.

Were there challenges shooting in Academy ratio for the opening chapter? 

I think the biggest challenge in making the first part was not making a film in Academy ratio, it’s not about the size of the frame. It’s actually to create a piece of art using the mindset of silent film. Of course, we used a lot of modern techniques, but we wanted to adopt the mindset of making a silent film using the logic, the techniques of the silent film period and how we can better integrate the sound and visuals to create this artistic piece. In this process, we realised how charming it is to make a silent film. The mission of the film is not to describe something as authentically as possible, but to inspire the imagination of the audience.

Resurrection references F.W. Murnau and Georges Méliès; did you draw inspiration from Chinese silent cinema of the Shanghai period? 

Yes, we watched a lot of documentaries about filmmaking at the start of the 20th Century in Shanghai and there is an archive with a lot of material. The inspiration we got from early Shanghai cinema is different from the inspiration we took from Murnau. With Murnau, maybe we learned more about the language of film, but from the early Shanghai films, we learned about the landscape of China at that time.

Did the silent section pose a challenge for stars Jackson Yee and Shu Qi? 

There were challenges, but I believe they were also very excited because they could present a different side of themselves. Shu Qi watched a lot of material from the silent era. She observed how female actors presented their bodies, their facial expressions, how they presented the emotion of being surprised in a silent film. Jackson was really excited because he knows that we were trying to make the film in a very old school way. When we shot the silent part, they all enjoyed it like children.

The young actress, Guo Mucheng, is excellent in the chapter about the conman and his accomplice pretending to possess psychic powers. What’s the key to directing a child? 

The reason we ended up with that little girl was she was very quiet; we could see that she wasn’t trained in a drama school. Everything seemed very natural. When you work with children, the only way to direct is to become their friend. She asked me, “Is the girl’s father gone forever?” And she was very sad about that, so to make her happier I wrote a different ending just for her. I told her, “I won’t shoot this ending, but this ending belongs to you,” so that made her trust me.

How did you approach creating a different aesthetic for each section? Did you aim to tie them together stylistically? 

We had a lot of discussions with the art director, and we tried a lot of different possibilities, for example in terms of the image ratio. We decided that we needed a consistent framework, but we also believed that for different time periods you have different film language and people used different methods to make a film. That’s what makes these different sections very distinctive from each other but still I believe that there are some clues that are consistent throughout all these different sections. For example, the main character, the Deliriant, was consistent throughout the whole film, and the feeling of the passing of time was consistent. There were changes of colour, but we didn’t want to have very sudden switches, for example we didn’t want to suddenly jump from black and white into colour. That’s why in the silent section it was still coloured. We wanted everything to be distinctive but still consistent in some way. 

What guided your approach for the story of the former monk in the abandoned temple during the Cultural Revolution?  

We tried to tell the story in a very simple way, and we took a lot of inspiration from folk stories and legends, for example Liaozhai zhiyi [Pu Songling’s Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio] which are Qing Dynasty fables, and stories told by my grandparents from the 1960s and 1970s about ghosts. Basically, we tried to tell the story in a very simple form; you can see that in how the space is just the temple, so it’s quite different from other time periods, for example the period of film noir. You can come up with a distinctive feature for that generation of cinema, but it was different for the third story about the temple.

I think the most challenging thing for the temple story is how to present the idea of causality in a very simple space, how to present the idea of consequence and the relationship between the sin or crime you’ve committed and the punishment that comes along with it. That’s why we used imagery such as snow and ghosts.

Resurrection explores the idea of perspective, opening with an image of an audience looking into the camera, thereby observing the real audience watching the film. Then you play with POV in the final story which shifts perspectives from objective to subjective. What were you expressing with those ideas? 

I think the technique of perspective is the most fundamental, simple yet mysterious technique in filmmaking. Everyone knows about different types of perspective, but I don’t think everyone can use it well to tell a story. We adopted different perspectives to try to explore the deepest essence of film. For example, at the opening of the film, you can see the film reel has caught on fire, you can see the audience sitting there. On one hand, you feel like the audience is being observed and on the other you feel like they exist within the film itself, or they are a consciousness that follows the journey of the Deliriant. I don’t want to present this relationship between the film and the audience using words, I don’t want to type a line on the screen and tell everyone this is what it is, that’s why I used the image of fire, the auditorium and the audience to present what I wanted to say. 

In the section with the long take, the perspective switches from the vampire’s perspective to an objective perspective, we wanted to use that to present the passing of time, telling everyone that time passes consistently, time passes nonstop.

 ► Resurrection is in UK cinemas now.