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Matthew’s Film Notes

“The weather’s so nice today. Let’s die together.”

Bi Gan’s third feature Resurrection (2025) takes place, at least at its outset, in a future where humans have discovered that “the secret to eternal life is to no longer dream.” Some individuals, known as Deliriants, rebel against this somewhat Faustian bargain by continuing to dream, flirting with their own mortality, bringing “pain to reality and chaos to history.” Deliriants are said to “send time into spasms,” which Resurrection presents to us in the form of six distinct sections that occur at different points of 20th century Chinese history, taking us from the era of silent film to the dawn of the most recent millennium. These sections are also distinguished by corresponding to one of the five human senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) and the mind, mirroring the six internal sense bases, āyatana, in Buddhist thought.

Resurrection focuses on one quite unique Deliriant, played by Jackson Yee, whose “true form is unknown, because he has been hiding in an ancient, forgotten past”: cinema itself! The first of the six sections, Sight, chronicles the Deliriant’s inability to evade a pursuit by the Big Other (played by Shu Qi), an individual gifted with an ability to separate truth from illusion, tasked with preventing the Deliriants’ capacity to spasm time. The next four sections (Hearing, Taste, Smell and Touch) are wildly different in setting, tone and style, united only by Jackson Yee’s Deliriant’s adoption of a different character in each: a mysterious WWII-set noir thriller; an enigmatic fable of visitation that takes place in a snowy Buddhist temple in the 1960s; a gambling yarn set in the 1980s; a romance between a small-time gangster and vampiric young woman that develops across New Year’s Eve and Day, 1999-2000. A final section, regarding the Mind, draws the film’s own consciousness to a close. As is probably clear at this point, Resurrection is an ambitious, philosophically-minded film, brimming with ideas and concepts that resist mere descriptive exposition. Best to focus on one aspect here: how cinema itself, an “ancient and long-forgotten language”, becomes the defining subject of the film.

Film references abound in Resurrection, some obvious (a wonderful homage to the set-building of German Expressionism; a revisitation of the hall of mirrors shootout from Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai [1947]), some more fleeting and oblique (a glimpse of what appears to be a poster for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath [1943]). Different viewers may bring different recognitions from cinema history to bear: personally, the moonlit Buddhist temple sequence reminded me of the remoteness of the Himalayan convent in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), and I thought of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times (2005) more than once, featuring as it does a triptych structure spanning a similar century-long time period, and another formidable silent performance by Shu Qi. It’s worth mentioning that Bi employs an extensive array of cinematic techniques that are unconstrained by historical period: different aspect ratios (roughly: ‘Academy’, ‘flat’ and ‘CinemaScope’) and frame rates, CGI, elaborate prosthetics, and a boundary-pushing experimentation with shot duration (the fifth section consists of a single sequence shot that lasts 36 minutes, dazzling in its logistical construction and variance of incident and momentum).

A brilliant article by Xinyuan Wang for Senses of Cinema explores in detail how Resurrection uses “the collective memory” contained within cinema as an artform as its subject. In the form of Jackson Yee’s Deliriant, cinema itself appears as a body that dreams, a body that imagines itself transfiguring into distinct human characters across history. Over the course of the film, the “collective memory” of cinema that we encounter is not limited to what we as the audience remember about cinema, but what cinema itself might recollect or dream about.

Wang recalls film scholar Vivian Sobchack’s groundbreaking argument in The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992) that film itself is a viewing subject, a body that perceives (via recording) and expresses (via projection). The spectator’s body in front of the projected screen is of course also integral to the cinematic experience, because, as Sobchack says, “our entire bodily being, informed by the full history and carnal knowledge of our acculturated sensorium” will experience a film, rather than just our visual perception. Experiencing a film is therefore “an interaction between two viewing subjects, two cinematic bodies.”

Wang notes that “what is remarkable in Resurrection is that it invites us to ponder over the film’s body – which is usually exclusive to academic articles – alongside the human body on- and off-screen.” Sobchack commented that a film’s ‘visual body’ is usually invisible; “we don’t see the film’s body itself, we only see its act of seeing and what it sees.” Resurrection delivers, for Wang, “presumably for the first time in film history,” an allegorical visualisation of Sobchack’s theorisation of ‘film’s body’, in the form of the Deliriant.

The most striking visualisation of this occurs as the Deliriant’s body is opened up whilst being cleansed of opium poppies, revealing the surprising capacity to spool a reel of film through a hatch in his back. The physical body is here fused to the cinematograph, birthing a “new perceiving subject.” The first thing this subject experiences is a reenactment of the very first recognisable fiction film: the Lumière brothers’ L’Arroseur Arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled, 1895). In L’Arroseur Arrosé, a boy steps on a gardener’s hose, causing the gardener to inspect the nozzle and endure a soaking when water pressure returns. In Resurrection’s reenactment, the Big Other steps on the Deliriant’s hose, sprinkling him and causing the mechanical film equipment that powers his heart to catch fire. The Deliriant falls to the grass dying, closing his eyes to enter a final dream – one that will last about a century, a review of the majority of cinema’s lifespan from L’Arroseur Arrosé onwards. Although we are used to thinking of cinema as a site where dreams are imagined, here it takes the unique form of a dreaming body.

As Resurrection makes its way through an exploration of the six sense bases one by one (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch and the mind), we discover that its structure intends not to evoke a fullness of sensory experience but to (c)lose all the senses one by one. The film embarks on “a life journey approaching its end, a journey of dis-embodiment. After all, with a body comes not only the senses, but also its mortality.” The death of a body, communicated through the gradual loss of the senses, and the death of cinema become intertwined.

Resurrection, duly, ends with a staging of the death of cinema, through both the dying body of the Deliriant and the melting of a movie theatre made of wax. The Deliriant is eventually bid farewell by the Big Other, for his dream of cinema has fallen apart, the silver screen’s “ancient, forgotten past” spoken of at the film’s outset. It might be said that premature pronouncements of the death of cinema have been a permanent fixture over the course of the medium’s history, to little avail; having thus far survived the onset of television, one would assume the more recent intrusion of audiovisual social media will not induce cinema’s extinction either. However, cinema-going as a mass pastime appears to have waned when compared to the medium’s 20th-century heyday, and Resurrection speaks to an oft-raised concern regarding its viability in a competitive attentional landscape.

Many things are unexpected in Resurrection, so of course the film ends with an audience entering a theatre, taking the form of light rather than physical bodies. On taking their seats, the audience swiftly encounters ‘THE END’ of the film: as wax drips from the walls and ceiling of the theatre, and seats puddle on the ground, the glow of the audience is extinguished one by one. Suddenly, the screen that the audience watches expands and becomes the screen watched by us; the collapsing wax theatre fuses with this and any movie theatre that is projecting Resurrection. The gesture is hopeful: true to form, only after cinema has appeared to die, does the title card ‘RESURRECTION‘ appear! We have witnessed a staged resurrection of cinema, our encounter proving that, as Wang says, “films are still being projected, and people still see a film ‘til its end, as if seeing it off.” Movies are alive, and hopefully still young! As long as we continue to dream of cinema, of its collective memory and of its potential, the cinema will continue to dream for us.