by J. X. ZHANG
There is an elephant in the zoo at Manzhouli. It spends its days sitting, perhaps because it’s being poked by a pitchfork all the time, or it just enjoys sitting there. Everyone comes to see it, holding the bars of the cage. Some people throw food at it, but the elephant takes no notice.’ The opening monologue leads us into the 230-minute film An Elephant Sitting Still (2017) by the late Chinese novelist and filmmaker Hu Bo. The voiceover continues through a visual sequence of ‘sitting’, echoing the title of the film. The young man who speaks is sitting on the edge of the bed, half naked, murmuring to the woman lying behind him. An old man, wrapped in a pyramid of quilts, sits with his dog on a glassed-in balcony. A girl wakes and sits up, lost in the dawn light that seeps through the curtain. A schoolboy carefully wraps a rolling pin in duct-tape before sitting down at the kitchen table, where his father is grumbling about the stench outside the flats: ‘yet another lousy day’.
Composed mainly of scenes shot in single extended takes, the film will interweave the stories of these four characters within a single day in a gloomy town in Hebei province. The philosophical young man, Yu Cheng, is a semi-criminal car-dealer, rebuffed by his girlfriend and in bed with his best friend’s wife. The retired soldier, Wang Jin, is about to be dispatched to a care home by his acquisitive daughter and son-in-law. Seventeen-year-old Wei Bu stands up for his friend against the school bully, who turns out to be Yu Cheng’s brother. On the run after the bully falls down a flight of stairs, Wei Bu tries to persuade his classmate Huang Ling to escape with him to Manzhouli. But Huang Ling is having an affair with a senior teacher—and doesn’t yet know that someone has uploaded a video clip of the two of them at a karaoke bar. Meanwhile, Wang Jin’s pet is attacked and killed by a wealthy couple’s big white dog. The stories converge, the characters pushed towards departure by the toxic social relations in which they are enmeshed—but pulled, too, towards the idea of the enigmatic elephant in Manzhouli. Though it will remain unseen, the final scenes of the film show them en route to the frontier city.
In October 2017, the enigma of the elephant was overshadowed by the suicide of the young director. Hu Bo would never know that his film would enthuse critics at the Berlinale and take the Golden Horse in Taipei. When he hanged himself at the age of 29, he was in utter despair. In a file titled ‘The Death of a Young Filmmaker’, found on his computer, he documented his conflicts with the production company Dongchun Films. The producer—the well-known director Wang Xiaoshuai—rejected Hu Bo’s four-hour cut of An Elephant Sitting Still, insisting on halving its length.footnote1 For Hu Bo, this request was unacceptable, not least because it would destroy the integrity of the film’s long takes and dismantle its structure. When Dongchun Films took legal action against Hu Bo, the young filmmaker was presented with two options: either have the contract nullified with his name removed from the director’s credit or raise 3.5 million yuan—around half a million dollars—to buy outright ownership of the film.footnote2 Hu Bo wrote on his Weibo account, ‘Years have gone by, yet I’ve never thought about the question: what is cinema? Well, it is humiliation, despair, powerlessness, which turns a human into a joke.’footnote3 After Hu Bo’s death, Dongchun Films transferred the copyright to his parents.
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