Resurrection

In the year cinema celebrates its 130th anniversary, the Chinese director Bi Gan takes a radical step: he wants to reinvent the language of film — something pure, luminous, never seen before. It is no accident that his work is called “Resurrection”, and what is meant is nothing less than the rebirth of cinema itself. A film that takes cinema as its subject, a dream about dreams, an adventure that overruns the senses.

Bi Gan’s futuristic dystopia feels borrowed from a Philip K. Dick novel. In his world, everyone who can no longer dream is condemned to live forever. And the others — the dreamers, the “Fantasmers” — wander through endless, dreamlike landscapes, in cinema and as cinema. That is the overture to a visually overwhelming odyssey that moves through film history in six episodes as through the layers of a dream: from expressionist silent film to a war-marked noir, on to a Buddhist parable, a neorealist heist and finally a vampiric millennial romance. Each episode unfolds an aesthetic universe entirely its own, and they are interwoven with virtuosity. “Resurrection” is hypnotic, rigorously composed cinema that wants nothing less than a return to the origin — and proof that in the age of digital images, sparks of a radically new film language are still possible.