VERDICT: An elderly couple retreats from the outside world in preparation for the launch of three artificial moons in this strange and meditative experimental documentary.
Time has come untethered in Yuyan Wang’s hybrid science fiction documentary The Moon Also Rises.
In Wang’s short film One Thousand and One Attempts to Be an Ocean, she sought to use the editing of internet videos to evoke the wavelike deluge of online content. Here, there is a similar attempt to wrestle with a temporal anomaly, this time in a world somewhere between documentary and fiction where two people remain ensconced in their home at the inception of a new era – when day and night will no longer be distinguishable. As the man and woman go about their ritualistic behaviours, The Moon Also Rises creates a kind of mesmerising rhythmic statis.
This effect is managed by a robotic voice that seems to be ever-present in the rooms of their homes, providing a variety of scientific information and wellness guidance and a smooth artificial register that seems calibrated to reduce stress. It’s also this ephemeral intelligence that gives the science fiction context of the pair’s situation to the audience alongside two news reports about the initiative.
The television warns of potential amnesia caused by observing the new mechanical moons, but the lines between past and future – as well as fiction and reality – are already so unclear as to be indecipherable. As the man sits and watches a spectacular fish in an aquarium, both lit only by a neon light, it is questionable who is the captive. “Time is just a feeling,” the voice intones. In Wang’s eerie hermetic world, robbed of any sense of external chronology, it seems to be just that.
Director, screenplay, cinematography: Yuyan Wang
Producers: Thomas Hakim, Julien Graff
Editing: Clement Pinteaux
Sound design: Nicholas Verhaeghe
Production companies: Petit Chaos
Venue: Berlinale (Berlinale Shorts)
In Mandarin
24 minutes
