Cinema surveillant
The image is so low-resolution that it could be old animation. The walking near-cartoon figure has dark, shoulder-length hair and a shape that suggests: young woman. She? stares at a dark oblong in one hand while wandering ever-closer to a dark area. A swimming pool? A concrete river edge? She wavers away, and briefly it looks like all will be well. Then another change of direction, and in she falls, with a splash.
This scene opens Dragonfly Eyes, which played this week at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. All I knew going in was that the movie had been assembled from fragments of imagery gathered from Chinese surveillance cameras. The scene described above wasn't *quite* the beginning - first, the filmmaker, Chinese artist Xu Bing, provides a preamble explaining that he originally got the idea of telling a story through surveillance camera footage in 2013, but it was only in 2015, when the cameras began streaming live to the cloud, that it became a realistic possibility. There was also, if I remember correctly, a series of random images and noise that in retrospect seem like an orchestra tuning up before launching into the main event, but at the time were rather alarming. Alarming as in, "They're not going to do this for an hour and a half, are they?"
They were not. It was when the cacophony briefly paused to watch a bare-midriffed young woman wriggle suggestively on a chair, pushing down on the top of her jeans (I think) that I first thought, "Hey, did these guys get these people's permission?" A few minutes later, watching the phone?-absorbed woman ambling along the poolside seemed less disturbing, as her back was turned to the camera. Until: after she fell the splashing became fainter and fainter, and after a little while she did not reappear and the water calmed. Did we just watch the recording of a live drowning?
Apparently so. At various times during the rest of the movie we return to a police control room where officers puzzle over that same footage much the way we in the audience were puzzling over Xu's film. Was it suicide? the police ponder while replaying the footage.
Following the plot was sufficiently confusing that I'm grateful that Variety explains it. Ke Fan, an agricultural technician, meets a former Buddhist-in-training, Qing Ting, while they bare both working at a dairy farm and follows her when she moves to a new city. There, she gets fired from her job at a dry cleaner's for failing to be sufficiently servile to an unpleasant, but wealthy and valuable customer. Angered by the situation, Ke Fan repeatedly rams the unpleasant customer's car; this footage is taken from inside the car being rammed, so he appears to be attacking you directly. Three years later, when he gets out of prison, he finds (or possibly just believes he finds) that Qing Ting has had plastic surgery and under a new name is now a singing webcam celebrity who makes her living by soliciting gifts and compliments from her viewers, who turn nasty when she insults a more popular rival...
The characters and narration are voiced by Chinese actors, but the pictures, as one sees from the long list of camera locations and GPS coordinates included in the credits, are taken from 10,000 hours of real-world found imagery, which Xu and his assistants edited down to 81 minutes. Given this patchwork, it's understandably hard to reliably follow the characters through the storyline; the cues we usually rely on - actors and locations that become familiar - simply aren't clear. Some sequences are tagged with the results of image recognition and numbering; very Person of Interest. About a third of the way through, however, the closer analogue that occurred to me is Woody Allen's 1966 movie What's Up, Tiger Lily?, which Allen constructed by marrying the footage from a Japanese spy film to his own unrelated dialogue. It was funny, in 1966.
While Variety calls the storyline "run-of-the-mill melodramatic", in reality the plot is supererogatory. Much more to the point - and indicated in the director's preamble - is that all this real-life surveillance footage can be edited into any "reality" you want. We sort of knew this from reality TV, but the casts of those shows signed up to perform, even if they didn't quite expect the extent to which they'd be exploited. The people captured on Xu's extracts from China's estimated 200 million surveillance cameras, are...just living. The sense of that dissonance never leaves you at any time during the movie.
I can't spoil the movie's ending by telling you whether Ke Fan finds Qing Ting because it matters so little that I don't remember. The important spoiler is this: the filmmaker has managed to obtain permission from 90% of the people who appear in the fragments of footage that make up the film (how he found them would be a fascinating story in itself), and advertises a contact address for the rest to seek him out. In one sense, whew! But then: this is the opt-out, "ask forgiveness, not permission" approach we're so fed up with from Silicon Valley. The fact that Chinese culture is different and the camera streams were accessible via the Internet doesn't make it less disturbing. Yes, that is the point.
Illustrations: Dragonfly Eyes poster.
Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.