Atmosphere and Experience: Bi Gan’s The Poet and Singer

Criterion Channel

The Poet and Singer is over in a flash, less a movie than a brief dispatch from a world you’ve been dropped into. You can almost feel the story existing beyond the confines of this vignette, time wobbling out before and behind you and showing where the story’s characters came from and where they’re going. The twenty-minute piece slides between the knowable and unknowable, at one moment wholly nonspecific and absorbed in nature and in the next rendering this mien of Chinese small-town desperation, doing so with little more than fragments of personalities and behaviors and locations. The particulars of the plot and characters and setting get swept up in the cosmic allusions of the frequent voiceover narration, positing these small people and forgotten places as a part of centuries-old narratives, part of the long cycle of ruins and wreckage and men left with ashes that has been told and retold from ancient Rome to Angkor Wat to the Summer Palace.

The film starts with actual flashes, of lightning, glimpses of a pink sky and silhouetted telephone pole as the shocks crack across the screen, interspersed into the otherwise black-and-white film. It’s revealed later to be a visual representation of the toothache of one of the men, but prior to that it’s just one of many environmental elements grounding the film. Taking place in the Chinese countryside, the film’s POV begins drifting along on a river, then viewing the mountains and fields from the back of a flatbed truck, makes a stop in the smallest of small villages, and ends back along the river. It is slow, and quiet, and you feel these places, the high-contrast black-and-white making it all elemental, stripped to pure light and shadow, forms as un-muddied as possible. The simple plot, in which the two men, murderers, take a ride to Dangmai Village and then down the Dangmai River, serves a similar purpose.

Criterion Channel

The natural is paired with the sacred, beginning with a phone call heard in that first river scene, a conversation with someone who calls himself “False Monk,” telling the men that they can retrieve the money from their hit job near a pillar carved with the Diamond Sutra. A seemingly religious town–Buddhist chanting is heard as they make their way to the Diamond Sutra pillar, and the driver gives one money to make an offering to Buddha–these two small-time crooks are the corrupt intrusion into this otherwise unmarred space in which the natural environment and the spiritual world are both felt, heaven and earth forming an all-encompassing atmosphere. You wonder, as they drive through the expansive fields, mountains rising around them, scripture chanted as soundtrack, one of them fiddling with a knife, if they’ll ever reach that knowledge, reach even if not enlightenment, then awareness, or remain in the darkness, only concerned with small human things.

There is some awareness heard in the intermittent voiceover narration, ruminating on decay, the fate of men, heaven and hell, pain, memory, chaos. It conjures up the image of a wasteland, a place visited by the apocalypse and now in survival mode, of men fighting each other over piles of dirt. Maybe that is this place they are in, desolate with rural poverty, bleak and stoic, craggy mountains and an ever-flowing river apathetic to what’s happening around them. Or maybe it’s the narrator, the “poet” of the title, seeing this small-scale, forgotten decay and thinking of the magisterial kind, the kind from long ago that gets written about in poetry, that becomes dignified as it’s mythologized.

But any judgment, any connections, are left unsaid. Here things are as they are, people act as they do, nature exists as it does. The twenty minutes of the film wash over you; an experience rather than something to interrogate, it is very soft and non-tense. It thinks about the sacred and the sublime and the corrupt, but does not give itself over to the heaviness or angst that these concepts could impose, the compulsory moral knots and rigors of thought. Rather, the viewer is just there, in tune with the sights and sounds, getting to know the quiet, the space.

It’s earthy in this way, and in its cultivation during its short runtime of a sense of just being, phenomenological. Phenomenology, the experiential mode of movie-watching, not expecting anything from the work onscreen, meets art on its own terms. It takes its cues from neo-realism, but goes a step further, turning that mode’s tenet of presenting things as they are into a thing more felt, that does feel sensory in a way though it remains separate from you, not through the direct evocation of, say, natural phenomena in a realistic sense, but through the cultivation of an atmosphere, an ethereal mood that suffuses both the film and you, watching it. In its indefinability it is a bit of the unknown, inexpressible in its totality. There’s a transcendence to it. The Poet and Singer itself is short and insignificant in the feature-focused scheme of things, but in its openness and simplicity it does tap briefly into this larger tradition and become special.