Recensioni de* critic*

This is how you must watch this brilliant documentary. It captures the essence of public life. And this essence is everything that making an iPad is not. Here humans are playful, in love, creative, disruptive, intelligent, curious, perfecting a skill, learning new moves, learning for the pleasure of learning. This is what we see in the documentary's one take, which runs for seventy-seven minutes.

They call it a "structuralist documentary," but its pleasures aren't so heady; there's much to delight in on a purely visceral level. A single, unbroken take — a waist-level dolly shot — spanning a brisk 75 minutes, the film bobs and weaves through the crowds of the sprawling People's Park in Chengdu, taking in a great deal of eating and walking and dancing and generally sopping up the local color.

Although an interesting portrait of the diversity of life and activities in the park, it is also (to this viewer) an example of form either eclipsing or too tenuously connected to subject matter, in spite of the analogy to Chinese scroll painting.

People's Park is an uneven movie. Not everything registered here is equally interesting. It is an obvious consequence of a dispositive such as this, but one of its more interesting aspects is exactly how the film incorporates its own inconsistency into its narrative. We can say it is a film about a camera in search of objects it can rest on.

People's Park", by Libbie D. Cohn and J. P. Sniadecki, is a provocative example of pure cinema and the most dynamic exploration of the cinematic time-space continuum I've seen since "The Clock.

Using a wheelchair, a lightweight consumer-grade digital camera, and a microphone strapped to the arm of the chair, the directors — Ms. Cohn held the camera while Mr. Sniadecki pushed the chair — plunge you into a human tributary on which you drift and flow and occasionally stop dead, only to rise up and up and up in the astonishing, infectiously joyous finale.