Bi’s deployment of memorial fragments proposes the acknowledgment of all
phenomena as utterly unstable. In fact, the significance of the process of
fragmentation is technically “prolonged” in long takes here and there, while the use of
montage reminds us of the inevitable disruptions in the durations of life. The
understanding of the visual and narrative qualities of fragments hence guides us to the deeper appreciation of the resonant sustaining background, which not only bears the history of the said items, but contributes to their expansion and unfathomableness.
In Phenomenology and Media: An Anthology of Essays from Glimpse,
Publication of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, Sobchack addresses the
issue of the “file cabinet” in regards to the problems of the condensation of time andspace when using the computer, especially Quicktime, a multimedia framework, and compares it with the American artist Joseph Cornell’s works that contain specific
relics in a boxed container. As Cornell himself speaks of the selections of objects for his boxes, the dossiers for him resemble “a diary journal, repository, laboratory,
picture gallery, museum, sanctuary, observatory, key ... the core of a labyrinth, a
clearing house for dreams and visions.” Then, Sobchack considers the database also as a labyrinthine, in which stratified categorization becomes “tenuous threads of
association into the endless teleology and texture of desire” (386). Sobchack proposes that in both Quicktime and Cornell’s works, we can observe the poetic and
phenomenological forces, which
emerge explicitly from their relation to a larger totality of material and
memorial possibilities ... Privileging both the fragment and the slightness and ambiguity of their associational links, both Cornell’s and QT’s memory
boxes thus point to their own presence as the poignant and precious visible
landmarks of an unseen, lost, and incomprehensible field of experience.
What Carter Ratcliff says of Cornell’s memory boxes is equally true of QT’s:
“[T]he mode is enchanted by fragmentariness itself, which serves as an emblem of a wholeness to be found in other times and places.” (387)
Sobchack inspects the technological invention with the artistic creation. Despite the
divergent attributes as two forms of agency, they display similarities in terms of human perceptual experiences of time, space, memories, and the world. Sobchack’s
discussions provide a trajectory here in that she points out the tensions between
“organized” memories and the paradoxes therein in terms of our genuine lived
experiences. As Sobchack suggests, the two different logics are hierarchical classification, such as “file cabinet” and “desktop,” and associational organization pertaining to the “psycho-logic” behind every “hyperlink.” The confrontation is being
“simultaneously framing and framed” (32). In other words, in a situation where the
users claim the dominant place of decision-making, the selections in fact declare at once the ungraspable collectivity of unnamed, vanishing, or missing presences.
From such a dimension, while Kaili Blues represents the very opposite of
technological advancement, it embodies a world activated by imagination through the
exact restraining memories of the characters. Guang Lian keeps an antique box that contains only the three entrusted items, and they “hyperlink” to the “file cabinet” of
Chen and the hairdresser woman. Such a methodology also explains why Bi describes the use of inter-textual relations to create the sense of surrealism, while
simultaneously sticking to the very down-to-earth scenario settings. As Sobchack describes it, “Its search engines driven to the past by a present moment of desire (not utility), this is the eccentric, ever-extensible, yet localized logic of the hyperlink”
(386). It is in this manner that we can further understand the fragments in Kaili Blues as essentially contributive to an associative field enriched by the overlaid links.
Kaili Blues is certainly nostalgic in terms of its aesthetics on antiquity. However,
we should also detect those fragmental details that not only cast the magic on their own in the said realms of agedness, but deviate as references, signs, or clues through repetitions with differences (the delayed answers through the additions of the content in the same scene). The sense of intimacy firmly interweaves with a certain extent of defamiliarization, which then leads to the wandering, searching, and bodily adjusting
in a world of endless choices. In fact, Kaili Blues can be considered as a film about
“interrelations.” Each of the fragments emerges pertinent to the background of the characters, and yet we can observe Bi’s cinematic visions in the incessant
spatial-temporal bodily drifting in and out of the “slow influence” of those selected objects, hence the qualities of fragmentation and corporeality in response to the mystery of memories. The correlations thus proclaim transformatory exchanges and also fractures in the diversity of explorations. In this manner, Kaili Blues produces
unique characters that embody the nomadic modality of existence. In the realms of ambiguous encounters, Bi inserts the characters’ movement in constant long walks
and motorcycle rides, where symbolic objects permeate the physical and spiritual boundaries. While the process of fragmentation involves a human perspective, it is
meanwhile precisely due to such an attribute that the extensibility of things and human perceptibility together enliven the shared spatial-temporal horizons. To put it more precisely, the inherent paradoxes of the fragments emancipate the characters from conventional problem-solution formula. They radiate curious fields that embrace pure perceptual investigations without any default answers, while simultaneously hinging upon the uncanny conjunctures of history and fantasy. It is in this dimension that Dangmai manifests a marvelous form of dialogue between human and the world.
The gazes and the touches are immersed, and even expanded, in the landscapes of Kaili, Dangmai, and Zhenyuan. That is, the fragments can be detected in the scenes where Chen strolls along the trails, revisits the shelter attempting to purchase bananas, and rides through the misty mountain roads; these scenarios are further interspersed
with constant long takes of the foggy skyline, the acts of smoking and city roaming, and the characters’ conversations. The poetics of the fragments thus reveals the
narrative and visual profundity through their connotations to the organic bodily relations with the surroundings in the film.
In Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema, Ma questions the cinematic poetics of temporalities and corporeality through the discussions of movies from Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, among others. In the words of Ma:
Navigating a landscape of shifting temporalities and mutating identities,
their films eschew the legitimizing assurances of a “search for origins” ...
The indeterminate circuits of this drift among remainders result in open-ended narrative trajectories that elude conventions of closure and rely upon intervals of arrest, inaction, silence. (14)
By addressing on their cinematic signatures of intertexuality, long takes, voice-over, etc., Ma details the power of the spectre and the absence on their overall plot and visual development. Now, even though Kaili Blues has not yet been discussed academically due to its comparatively new release, we can detect immense
resemblances in their methodologies, not to mention both Hou and Tsai have considerably influenced Bi’s film philosophy. In this manner, the poetics of the
fragments will further point to the continual constituting-constituted processes that not only affirm what we have already noticed, but unravel the potentiality of the debris.
Even more, through creative or artistic activities, the buried or the abandoned may well be added with new significance through the exact indeterminacy and the inexhaustible nature of our identity and the world. Much in the same way Tsai requires the minimum of dialogue in his films and stresses more on the intrinsic flow
of the bodies, Kaili Blues manifests “traces” voiced by silent objects and the
characters’ almost-reflective interactions with them. While its narrative openness may
give rise to inescapable perplexity, it creates massive rooms for constant
problematization, which is in fact the answer or the ultimate concept behind the film.
One of the cores in the explorations of the film thus lies in detecting the manners through which a modality of poetic dwelling is actualized within the assemblages of varying nomadic activities from the characters. That is, when we approach how the narrative threads form the compensatory and encroaching relations, the landscape of fragments in Kaili Blues should be further comprehended not only in terms of the plot entwinement, but its revelation of a universal Being that we all belong to. The parties and objects involved become ultimately enveloped in this cinematic geography of dream, where the gravity of indefiniteness reversely assists us in the completion of an odd wandering trek. The constant walking and traveling of the characters, especially Chen, eventually unveil the cruciality of the land upon which they drift, and by virtue of such a nomadic vision, the primordial relationships with the world reveal their sustaining power to our openness to the multi-faceted structures of worldly phenomena. In this manner, to suggest that the film embodies a landscape of fragments and represents a distinct nomadic style of dwelling is to recognize it as a dynamic and co-structuring field, and such acknowledge comes precisely from the fact that this landscape can not be fully territorialized. That is, Kaili Blues conveys messages of unity, sympathy, and connection, albeit in a more elusive fashion, and human participations are equally imperative in this human-object-world unity.