Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on MUBI. Huang Weikai's Disorder (2009) is showing September 13 – October 13, 2018 in the United States as part of the series Chinese Independents.
A fire hydrant rains down upon the nighttime bustle of a crowded street; a man lies sprawled on the pavement, either reeling from a car accident or just faking an injury; a chest freezer is opened to reveal a pile of (presumably) illegally peddled bear claws; a man fishes a cockroach out of a bowl of noodles. These are some of the first images of Disorder (2009), Huang Weikai’s absurdist, not-quite-found footage documentary about—as much as any single film could claim to be—the rapid urbanization of China as seen through the city of Guangzhou.
The title is no coy attempt at misdirection: Disorder’s dominant progression is that of constant, chaotic bombardment, with scenes—abrasive, shocking and downright stomach-churning—bleeding into each other with the surreal force of an unending, Kafkaesque nightmare. Sound frequently carries over from scene to scene, with hard-cut transitions occurring part-way into each subsequent vignette—though it’s also part of Huang’s formal gambit that such recognition be thrown into uncertainty by canny edits that suggest a spatial linkage between snippets of disparate occurrences. Although the film runs a scant 58 minutes, it was whittled down from thousands of hours of amateur DV footage taken around various locales across the Chinese hub. (In an interview, Huang has said that only about three scenes were actually shot by him.) In a convergence of practical and artistic concerns, Huang processed the raw footage, which necessarily came from different cameras with varying visual qualities, into a uniformly black and white palette, thereby incorporating his background in Chinese ink painting from his studies at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, and ensuring an aesthetically motivated continuity in the film itself. The blown out, digitized grain is such that the images often seem on the brink of disintegrating into a formless mass, as if the city skyline itself, seen at various points in the movie, were threatening to disappear entirely.
From a certain vantage point, Disorder is as disjunctive an experience as one is likely to find beyond the fringes of the avant-garde, a lineage to which it could certainly be linked. And yet, seen today, Huang’s film—and here the Chinese title, which roughly translates as “Now is the Future of the Past,” becomes relevant—is valuable not just as a time capsule of China's (too-)rapid development, but also as a prescient instance of a now-common approach to audiovisual media. In particular, Huang's full-fledged engagement with the lexicon of amateur videography, a currently ubiquitous fact of life given the proliferation of various social media platforms, is what registers as so forward-thinking. (Despite featuring an actual DP, Eduardo Williams’ The Human Surge [2016] is perhaps the most notable recent film to take up the too-rarely-considered mantle of Huang's documentary. In both cases, the aftermath of an unseen storm leaves the streets flooded.)
Here, scenes (or “scenes”) open in medias res; the initial disorientation then quickly gives way to an array of possibilities either corroborated or refuted by the pixelated streams of information. The question of what we are actually looking at at any given moment—frequently accompanied by vaguely identifiable squelching, squealing or aural abrasiveness—dominates the senses, before it's supplanted by the horror of recognition. The effect is not unlike that of the meet-the-parents scene in David Lynch’s cult classic Eraserhead (1977), in which an ungodly, squirm-inducing noise (later revealed to be a litter of puppies feeding) all but drowns out the halting dialogue. Lynch’s debut might be an oblique connection, but it's not an unproductive one, especially given that film’s not-dissimilar, surreal evocation of a desolate industrial cityscape. One of Disorder’s most indelible moments observes a family happening upon what looks to be an infant abandoned in the brush, but it takes far longer than should be necessary to ascertain whether the haphazardly swaddled figure is, in fact, a human child. (Eraserhead again, with the unforgettable exclamation: “Mother, they're still not sure it is a baby!”)
Such descriptions might suggest a free-associative collage of a urban chaos, but that impression disguises the thematic coherence of Huang’s city symphony run amok. Although Huang's form is multivalent enough to resist strict categorization, a political portrait—that is, of a breakdown of society owing to a failure of authority—does emerge across the brief runtime. Visual rhymes abound in the pointedly arrhythmic editing. A casually frightful scene of a man swimming in visibly polluted water—one need only think of Tsai Ming-liang's The River (1997) to imagine the aftermath—alternates with a public swimming event calling for state support of the athletes. (“Open up the government. Serve the citizens,” the men chant before plunging into the bay water.) A small alligator is tied up, carried away and shoved into the back of a truck; later, a woman is wrestled into the a police vehicle for disorderly conduct. Disgruntled citizens clash with ever-present hordes of police; hogs run across concrete highways, while men attempt to wrestle them back into a transport vehicle. “I’m afraid of getting blamed,” says one policeman. The context? A man threatening to jump off a bridge in order to get attention and claim the money he’s owed for a traffic accident.
What’s often so startling about such scenes—and is also source of the film’s considerable force—is not the details themselves, but how casually (relatively speaking) the inarguable deficiencies of everyday life are accepted by the city’s inhabitants. What ultimately registers is not a sense of the catastrophic, but a gradual acceptance of the very same. It's a shift in the baseline, so to speak, which dovetails with the inarguable cognitive shift—particularly with regards to audio-visual media—that has ensued in the years since Huang’s film was first released, with the Internet's encroachment on both individual and collective headspace. Whether the Chinese director will make make another feature remains an open question. (His first feature Floating [2004] is available on DVD through Icarus Films.) What does seem certain is that, given the subsequent proliferation of the film's sui generis pulled-from-the-headlines collage, his achievement is all but impossible to repeat. There’s just no need. To reiterate Huang's chosen title, the future of the past is here—and it's not going away any time soon.