Catastrophe, Minimal and Maximal (Patreon)

The Night (Tsai Ming-liang, 2021)

The English title of Tsai's latest experimental short, The Night, seems to ask for consideration alongside his last feature film, Days. That film was shot in Thailand, and paired Tsai's longtime collaborator Lee Kang-sheng with a newcomer, a Laotian immigrant named Anong Houngheuangsy. Across its running time, Days alternates between the daily lives of the two men, separated by class but eventually brought together in a tender moment that begins as a transaction but transcends and surpasses that hard logic. In other words, it's a film about overcoming separation.

The Night, by contrast, depicts public spaces that are virtually empty, save a few random people waiting for a city bus. Shot around an urban intersection in Hong Kong, The Night is both patient and systematic in its representation of a city purged of the demos by repressive forces. As Tsai begins articulating the space with precise geometrical shots, we notice that a skywalk above the main street bears scars from the recent attacks on pro-democracy protesters by the PRC. In fact, the lighted walls are a palimpsest, with posters and slogans half-heartedly scraped off by the authorities. The pavement, meanwhile, is still stained with blood. The Night, then, reflects an authoritarian regime's attempt to destroy the solidarity of the people. It is a gaping chasm, a portrait of enforced absence.

The Blazing (Jonathan Caouette, 2021)

Jonathan Caouette is still best known for his 2003 breakthrough Tarnation, an experimental feature that explored the mental illness of the artist's mother by, to a large extent, mimicking her jumbled, manic world. An often aggressive layer cake of diary footage, animated graphics, and unexpected music cues, Tarnation struck me at the time as too showy and undisciplined, although in retrospect, it could be legitimately construed as a folk-art version of Ryan Trecartin's hyper-adrenal video epics. And although Caouette has made several other works over the years, nothing seemed capable of matching Tarnation's heady combination of sketchpad aesthetics and confessional reality.

 In his latest work, The Blazing, Caouette slows down just a bit, directing his skittering brand of montage toward the seemingly endless trough of public-domain images on the Internet. Using mostly material whose slick high-def gloss suggests bank commercials and anonymous camera demos, he assembles a fractured narrative regarding our imminent demise. Starting with TV and radio reports of a huge, unexplained booming sound (cf. Apichatpong's Memoria, of course), Caouette's film catalogs a vast array of hermetic scenes of "everyday life," all characterized by their alienating lack of tactility. These "professional" sequences are so detailed and overly produced as to suggest a lack of human authorship, as if some data algorithm had just willed them into being.

The Blazing (which I had the good fortune to world-premiere in my program for the Houston Cinema Arts Festival) observes a fairly clear trajectory, from global panic to the stillness of isolation, and finally a rather alien depiction of possible rebirth. Although the film was quite clearly made in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, it suggests that there are less dramatic apocalypses happening around us all the time: environmental, social, and spiritual. There's a very deliberate clash between the film's expansive themes and the kitschy footage that comprises it, perhaps implying that we are already beyond saving, at least in our present form.

At two points in the film, Caouette incorporates music from Lost Horizons, the current project of former Cocteau Twins member Simon Raymonde. (The project began as a music video for Lost Horizons, but evolved from there.) These swirling, ethereal tracks provide a stark contrast to the sourced imagery, most of which is defined by corporate soullessness. The final credits are surprising, since it appears that while many of these scenes were produced for commercial entities, others were made by amateurs. Do these disturbingly banal phenotypes -- truly imitations of life -- now represent the realism of our age? If so, then our era has become utterly defined by the media that once reflected it, our lives composed of discrete moments in clearly labeled desktop folders. Use once, empty trash.