Better Life

Better Life explores desires and fantasies, examining the ambitions and dreams that drive people to risk everything for a “better life”. The film does this through three interweaving “ghost” stories, unwinding simultaneously: scenes of contemporary Shanghai and the Shanghai Film Studios are intercut with a telling of the 15th-century Chinese fable, The Tale of Yishan Island featuring Maggie Cheung as the Goddess Mazu. Within these strands, Julien brings in a reworking of the famous 1934 Chinese silent film, Shen nu (The Goddess). With poems by contemporary Chinese poet Wang Ping, Julien has created his own cinematic meditation on China’s ancient past and present. –Venice Film Festival

Isaac Julien’s Better Life is a single screen reinterpretation of Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves, a nine screen installation that recently premiered to critical acclaim at the Sydney Biennale, and at the ShangART gallery during the Shanghai Expo and is now showing at the Helsinki Kunsthalle. The Ten Thousand Waves project is multivalent and organic in nature, refusing through its original use of nine screens to offer any single definitive articulation. Removed from the gallery setting, the different renderings of the work hope to retain this ephemeral quality using different platforms and collaborations as a means to discreetly shift the thematic and formal focus of the work. Following a collaboration with composer Maria del Alvear at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid which brought the sonic element of the work to the forefront, Better Life might be understood as the product of the oldest of cinematic pairings: The Director, Isaac Julien and the Editor, Adam Finch. Translating the work from an art context to the cinema, the pair faced a unique and rewarding set of challenges from the practical to the theoretical. The result is a dynamically re-edited film that succeeds in using the classical tools of narrative cinema to translate complex matrices of ideas in the manner of the most experimental multimedia artworks.

Following ideas surrounding death, spiritual displacement, and the uniquely Chinese connection with “ghosts” or “lost souls”, the film links the Shanghai of the past and present, symbolising the Chinese transition towards modernity, aspiration and affluence – The so-called Better Life. Here, Julien employs the visual language of ghost stories, with recurrent figures and images appearing and disappearing. Mazu’s spectral figure traverses time and space, serving as a guide through the interlocking strands of the work. Mirroring the goddess of the fable, a ghostly protagonist (Zhao Tao) leads us through the world of Shanghai cinema via the Shanghai Film Studio, to a restaging by Julien of scenes from the classic Chinese film The Goddess (1934), and finally to the streets of Modern and Old Shanghai.

Julien is as equally acclaimed for his fluent, arresting films as his vibrant and inventive gallery installations. Better Life, as a further rearticulation of the Ten Thousand Waves project, demonstrates Julien’s ability to craft a project that can itself move deftly between the worlds of film and art. –IsaacJulien.com