Bi selects Kaili Blues as the English title for the film for several reasons. In the city of economic despair and perpetual humidity, Chen saunters and observes the state of life as a reformed gangster. He embodies the essences of a blues song when the rejected and woeful sentimentality weaves with a glimpse of hope. Bi once describes his cinematic aesthetics as constant insertions of very realistic elements to create the sense of surrealism by virtue of inter-textuality. In other words, Bi does not aspire to establish the enigma upon an alien or fantastical land, but aims at revealing the sense of wonder in everyday experiences. That is, the elegiac tone of the film ultimately derives from spaces that conjure up the sense of past or the awareness of time. In fact, the immersive urban landscapes in Kaili Blues attract no less attention than Chen’s mysterious journey. The fragments thus relate not only to the symbolic objects, but also the spaces where we witness their existence: the meandering trails, the fairground, the shelters, the shabby factories, among others.
As aptly put by K. Austin Collins in the review from Reverse Shot, “... Kaili is at a crossroads of not only modernity and custom but also industry and nature, with cement caverns and tenements sculpted into the sides and innards of lush, green hills and talk of old rituals and local lore, however mournful or unsettling, striking life into
the film’s dark interiors.” Kaili, Dangmai, and Zhenyuan are associative with a type of
suburban villages under rapid industrialization. Visually, unfinished architectures, suspended constructions, and a number of abandoned buildings erect in a sentiment of mourning to the bygone times. We can thus understand the “magical realism” aspect
of the film as coming from the primitive spatial-temporal settings in which the
“spontaneous displays” of symbolic objects can be observed. Objects of remembrance
foreshadow future events and are revived through the fleeting scenery mixed with buildings from different times and nature. Here, we can notice that while Bi’s
meticulous adoption of objects strings the narrative threads together, he does not import clear meanings into them. In other words, as the term “fragment” may refer to
disruption, discontinuance, or denouement, Bi on the one hand uses its solitary images to establish the filmic composition, while on the other hand utilizes the equal sense of fluidity to weave the characters together in the equally-obscure city landscapes.
As one of the filmmakers that influence Bi’s cinematic aesthetics, Tsai similarly establishes his films in dilapidated buildings and emphasizes on the bodily capacities
to alterations. As stated by Herzog in her identification of Tsai’s movie also as
“becoming-fluid” and “corporeal,” the bodies in Tsai’s films are “bodies adrift in
urban landscapes and the architectural bodies that comprise the city itself ... The spaces of the city are similarly addressed in patient detail, and particular types of
spaces recur consistently ... The pacing of Tsai’s approach heightens the connection between bodies and the environment” (188). Here, in terms of the space settings, Bi
also intends Kaili Blues as a slow exhibition of the cities as layovers, in which the wandering bodies inevitably become the focuses. Moreover, with the narrative functions of the aforementioned fragments, the bodies manifest the attempts to
commingle with the world and join forces with the items from the past to construct the future “everydayness.” Here, to take Tsai’s films as references is to emphatically
point out the sense of bodiliness and our daily contemplation in a larger modern space, presented through different lengths of panning and circling shots as the slow
expressions of modernity, despite other narrative and visual differences.
Now, it is also in this dimension that Bi’s distinct portrayals of the cinematic
spaces and the narrative designs open up the opportunity to inspect the film from the Merleau-Pontian notion of “embodiment,” a concept detailing the “lived” unity with the world through our body as the agency and through the primacy of perception. The freedom of entering in and out of a realm with undefined boundaries not only
showcases that a certain degree of intimacy can be achieved with a mindset of sensitivity, but ultimately the arousal of perceptual interrogations. The potentiality of the fragments and our hold to them for deeper understandings to the world then yield the same non-dualistic approaches toward the modern landscapes in the film. As
proposed by Shelly Kraicer in the review from Cinema Scope, Kaili Blues brings us
“into direct contact with a vividly imagined dream world, but one that’s quite specifically grounded in details of place, biography, and community.” Bi renders the
film as highly involved in various forms of “evaluations.” It examines to which extent we can sympathize with the characters and their situations. Despite the seemingly illogical narratives, the film in fact constructs a world where perceptions are
encouraged through the temporalization and spatialization of memories. That is, the phenomenon of “exchange” emerges within an underlying continuity where our
perception functions to confirm our current stance and questions the pieces of information given by the perceived. Within such a web of irregularly-connected relationships, the wandering visions will oddly solidify our presence by bringing out the confrontations among divergent perspectives.
Otherworldly and strangely intimate, the journey from Kaili to Zhenyuan manifests the geographical and emotional intertwinement that brings up a complex temperament. In the fast-changing world, the objects that speak of possible
revitalizations through the downtrodden economy certainly project cinematic potentiality. The ambiguity of the fragments in the larger modern landscape may possibly raise questions in terms of how we confer upon one another the ontological significance together in the process of becoming, and how such a harmony harbors
differences to allow for the mappings of our individual history. The investigations into the fragmentariness of the memorial objects and the traversing bodies should be
further juxtaposed in the discussions of modern ruins in the following chapter, along with Bi’s editing style and his intentional locale selections. In Chapter Two, modern
ruins will be closely examined in regards to how they emerge illustrative of embodied
spaces through Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, and how such cinematic spaces itself demonstrate the image of “transitions” along with the psychological
development of the characters. Based on the investigations, we should gain a better understanding on how modern ruins exhibit crucial filmic elements that not only deepen the film’s visual aesthetics, but its emotional depths.
Chapter Two
Modern Ruins and Merleau-Pontian Embodiment in Kaili Blues
Bi once stated in an interview that “I have a number of ruinous spaces in my film.
Ruins render illusions more easily. A living place once enriching is now left with nothing.” In Kaili Blues, modern ruins indeed ground the fabric of daily scenarios that
join together locality and poetic sensuality. From everyday residences to the overall landscapes, the cinematic spaces of modern ruins in Kaili Blues can be understood as imperative in terms of the discussions of the ambiguous phenomena in the film. The following explorations will thus begin with the characteristics of modern ruins to argue for the influence of such space settings. The sensorial openness evident in the film will then pave way for deeper elaborations on the heightened sense of bodiliness in modern ruins. Later, through Merleau-Pontian notion of “embodiment,” the essence and necessity of the role of body in perceptual experiences will be accentuated to bring out the underlying profundity of primitive understandings toward the world. The
examinations will incorporate the plot setting, cinematography, and editing style to reveal a form of “ruinous” vision toward self, others, and the world.