Avis des critiques

Best of all was Yumen (2013), a lysergic city threnody in which the camera roams across an abandoned drilling town, interweaving ambience-heavy archival footage with performance art routines set in contemporary rubblescapes and fragmented voices talking about the past in terms of ghosts. There's a hauntological feeling, the 'ruin-porn' aesthetic accentuated by gorgeously saturated colours and sweet Taiwanese pop songs from the 1970s.

Yumen veers close to ruin porn but does so purposefully, bringing a defiant sense of the poetic and the theatrically absurd to these depopulated spaces. The industry and government may have moved on from Yumen, but here it gets remade into Yumen, an ironic, abstract, campy, homemade art object.

The performances in which "Yumen"'s stubborn stragglers dramatize their own situation suggest the influence of the Portuguese situation-documentarian Pedro Costa as the picturesque industrial ruins recalls the work of Werner Herzog, albeit without Herzog's plummy voiceover.

Tiptoeing around other contemporary works—and even unconsciously sharing a jump cut idea used by Ben Rivers in the similarly-themed Sack Barrow, but in reverse (one is a disappearing act, the other an appearing act)—the poetry of Yumen evokes the spirit of Chris Marker, the command of mise en scène of Jia Zhangke, the creative ingenuity of Herzog (Lessons of Darkness, Fata Morgana) without too closely resembling anything that has come before it.