It’s been over a week now since I watched Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Not the Eugene O’Neill play but the 2018 film by director Bi Gan, which as the trailer proudly states, is the most successful Chinese arthouse film of all time. In some ways I felt set up to like this film; the Tarkovsky influence on Bi Gan is unignorable – at one point we watch a glass shudder ever-closer to the edge of a table as a train thunders by outside, and anyone who has seen Stalker knows that this isn’t just reference but homage. Steering this thing even more emphatically into my wheelhouse is the genuinely breath-taking cinematography, dripping with colours straight from the pallet of Wong Kar Wai. And as for what scant plot there is, the writing has a distinctly Murakamian flavour, and the enigmatic, ponderously masculine protagonist Luo could easily be one of Murakami’s leading men.
I’ll get my one complaint about the film out of the way early – and it can be more generally tied to my complaint about the Murakamian style as a whole. Certain scene set-ups and lines of dialogue did frustrate me in a similar way to Murakami’s novels. As enjoyable as they are to read, it’s difficult not to be jolted out of their spell by an awkward metaphor or a clumsy grasp at profundity. I’ve never been quite convinced that he is owed the Nobel prize in literature that so many people claim is overdue. Though, admittedly, I have only experienced Murakami and Bi Gan in English, so it’s hard for me to know what blame for this should be laid at the feet of the translator and what at the feet of the artist.
But the further I get away from my initial viewing, the less the occasionally faltering writing matters. I remember very little of what was said in the film, but the visuals have burrowed their way into my head and refuse to leave – like all the best films and dreams do. Film speaks in images, and even some of the great masterpieces have shortcomings that would be more severe if these were novels we were discussing. But film is a visual medium, and each frame contains a thousand words with the power – in the hands of the right director – to overcome sometimes even the most unfitting screenplays, and knit together a pictorial tapestry that long outlasts any narrative faults.
Film is, in a sense, only a pure medium when we consider it on the basis of visuals alone – in order to flesh itself out into movie-hood it borrows, sometimes wonderfully, sometimes ham-fistedly, from the older art-forms of theatre, literature and music. Movies are Frankensteinian artworks, but because of this they also have the potential to harmonise the visual, the verbal and the auditory in a way that no other art form can do.
The potency with which a great film installs itself in the memory is a phenomenon that keeps us coming back not only to re-experience our favourite filmic dreams, but to seek out new ones. Personal growth is possible through interaction with images; any psychologist of dreams knows that. To the keen and reflective mind that hungers for new experience in film there is always more to be learned, more dreams to inhabit, more eyes through which to see.
The ability to view the world through more than only one lens is a capacity that we in 2023 are in dire need of cultivating. The problem with Hollywood commandeering that need is that an industry with the shallowest conception of empathy has steered the cultural ship when it comes to the provision of new perspectives – and in doing so has turned many people away from the empathetic nature of art, instead encouraging them to champion the unnuanced sloganeering of one-dimensional hero figures. Being presented with a slew of shallow characters, and even more shallow messaging, only pushes us further away from true self-examination, which is what the best art elicits in its audience – though not always at the conscious level.
Any serious artist committed to creating characters or expounding themes in their work should first of all have sought out sufficient apprenticeship for their own empathetic capability. What we need is a strong culture of working artists – directors, writers, musicians – who whole-heartedly embrace the position of artist as a cultural role, and do not diminish themselves or let themselves be diminished to mere entertainers. Entertainers of course will still be present, and rightly so, but too many people have come to conflate entertainment with art – including those holding positions of influence within the arts – and if all that you consume serves only to entertain, the impulse for self-improvement atrophies. And we are already experiencing an emerging generation of entertainers who have grown up engaging only with entertainment – and from whom the artistry is sorely lacking.
What is encouraging here, is that Bi Gan was only 29 when he directed Long Day’s Journey Into Night. And though it may not be flawless (many masterpieces aren’t), it is quite clearly the work of an artist steeped in the study of their art-form – and the work of a human being wanting to communicate what can only be communicated through their chosen art. I have not rewatched Long Day’s Journey Into Night in preparation for writing this, because it struck me that the half-remembered dreamy state in which it lives in me is exactly the aspect of cinema I want to address here.
Like so many of my favourite movies: Stalker, Apocalypse Now, Maborosi, Through a Glass Darkly – it is not the clear memory of their narratives that causes me to love them (though I could give an outline if I was asked). When I remember them I don’t quote them at length, or summarise their plot, instead I am drawn to discussing the images they contain, because that is first and foremost what films communicate to us – it is the dream of film that lasts. Loving a film is not the same as memorising a favourite poem, or highlighting and re-reading a favourite passage of literature – the magic of cinema is the magic of memory, in all its fallibility. The world of cinema is not the world we live in. Movies are meant to be captured and held in their entirety only in order that they can be made, but they are not to be committed to memory, instead they seed themselves in the mind like the dreams that they are.
Sometimes those images that we remember do come attached to words, but they are like burrs clinging onto a winter coat – it is the image that allows them to be carried. In film the image contains all, and all is beholden to the image. How much less powerful would the famous ‘tears in rain’ monologue be in Blade Runner if you could not also see Rutger Hauer streaked with rain and blood as he delivers the lines? Or the tender moment in Edward Yang’s masterpiece Yi Yi, where we see the face of the teenage girl (herself in a dream) resting on her grandmother’s lap when she asks her: ‘Grandma, why is the world so different from what we thought it was?’
The words of cinema are not supposed to stand on their own, nor should that be the standard they are held to. In film words arrive within an imagistic milieu, they sprout from the seeded dream of the film and when they capture an essence – in the great works of cinema – it is as if some spirit already native to the images has been given a voice. Some filmmakers know how to use dialogue like brushstrokes, dancing across the visual field, whereas for some the emphasis is reversed and the images may be more of a cradle within which dialogue can occur – but when there is dialogue it is unfair to consider it as its own separate work. Even a black screen should communicate something in the visual thread of a film.
As I said, I have not rewatched Long Day’s Journey Into Night since my first viewing a week and a half ago. And I’m not sure that there is a single line of dialogue that I could recall now, but the film has taken root in me – and my own internal landscape has been gifted with a new imagistic lens that, however indebted it might be to others, is still unmistakeably the work of a true new artist. When I remember Bi Gan’s film now, I remember lichen greens, puddles and walls running wet, faces in mirrors, chipped brickwork, cigarette smoke, washed-out light, I remember Tang Wei seeming to walk on water, and the lines of untold torment on Huang Jue’s face, I remember the cold feeling of desire expiring, the warm feeling of desire arising, faces in a cinema screen, the isolation that seemed to cloak each character…
And then there is the 59 minute long shot that closes the film. It is one of the purest examples of the oneiric power of cinema I have ever seen – to describe it would be futile, to refer back to Blade Runner; it would disappear like tears in rain. The longer the unbroken shot went on the more the compounding sensation that it was building grew inside me, until I reached a kind of exhilaration – simply the fact that it had held me within this shot for so, so long cast me into the role of the awe-inspired witness of something pure and unbroken that would eventually have to break. It was a kind of tightrope act, which in lesser hands could have come across as a technical exercise in style over substance, but the atmosphere that I have still not been able to shake ever since seeing that scene is testimony enough for me at the artistry at work under the direction of Bi Gan. I am eager to go wherever this dream-weaver leads us in the future.
Great piece. I've not seen the film but will seek it out. A few things you wrote brought to mind the Thai film Cemetery of Splendour by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. I won't get into any details about the film here (and perhaps you've seen it, anyway). I will just say that I watched it at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, after having lived in Thailand for a year. It was an arresting experience and was no small influence on my decision to return to Thailand. From the long black screen that begins the film on, I was in the dream.