Hong Kong-American filmmaker Simon Liu has made several films in recent years that have adopted a frenetic experimental sensibility as a way to capture otherwise unquantifiable aspects of his hometown. Using oblique angles, incandescent electrical lights, breakneck editing, and forcefully shaking imagery, he has found his own mesmerising syntax to convey the unstable psychogeography of a place undergoing substantial change. In his most recent film, Devil’s Peak, which has adorned several festivals throughout 2022, he deploys these same techniques to arguably their most unsettling effect yet.
Perhaps this is primarily the result of the film’s sound design – undertaken by Liu himself – which seems to draw some of his pictorial motifs that already gave a slightly uncanny impression into a realm significantly more perturbing. Often, when his shimmering Super 8 and 16mm photography races by at speed, blurring the populace into a fluid mass, it can feel a little destabilising, but it’s a common enough element of cinematic language. When presented in unison with the Devil’s Peak soundtrack, filled with distorted droning songs, echoed snatches of dialogue, and discordant tones, those same images take on a far more haunting demeanour. Those indistinct faces are suddenly all the more spectral.
There are a series of recurring shots in which colour filter effects are applied to otherwise incidental moments – on the first occasion areas of the images flash with a pulsating fluorescence, but later they are flooded with a darker red, a crimson gore, as a music cue speaks of blood. It’s far from explicit, but it’s difficult not to read these two sequences as the vibrant mutability of social change being replaced with the ominous, violent reality of state oppression. In another scene, military officers pour down a street trampling over road markings that Liu has lit with the same bright colours, as if revolutionary fervour is literally being stamped out by jackboots. An early blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of police in riot gear is followed swiftly by a monstrous voice set to the image of flames reflecting in the window of an unlit building, like the fiery eye of some hulking denizen of the darkness.
The vivid colours are interrupted in several moments by short sequences of monochrome footage – of rundown facilities, a leaking hose, graffitied walls – paired with reverberating sentimental music. It suggests both a nostalgia for a place that is perhaps irrevocably changed and a yearning for somewhere that might never have really existed at all.
Director, cinematography, editing, sound design: Simon Liu
Producer: Rachael Lawe
Venue: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Best of Fests)
In English, Cantonese
30 minutes
