Present.Perfect. (Shengze Zhu, 2019) (Patreon)

This compilation film, which won the Tiger competition at Rotterdam, is subtle in its construction, so you might not immediately notice that it actually proposes a radical new relationship between spectator and performer, something that takes us beyond mere film. Present.Perfect. is composed of segments of live streams from various individual's web channels across China, "anchors" who host their own "showrooms" for fun and profit. We typically associate live stream with pornographic performance, but Zhu instead focuses on hosts who emphasize the mundane. As we watch the film, we are at a remove from the live experience, but we are engaging with people who are using the computer screen as a direct window onto their lives. They are "performing," but also being themselves, all in real time. 

Live streams obviate the anteriority of cinema in favor of immediacy; they are more like video art, if anything. Cinema is always doomed to make convincing "presents" out of material we know is long past. In the live stream format, people are packaging themselves as personalities, and they are actually doing things that simultaneously become representations. The traditional contract between a cinematic performer and a spectator is collapsed in (to borrow a recent title) a "spectacular now."

There are some folks who use the medium for what we might consider conventional performance modes. One guy featured in Present.Perfect. is a dancer who likes to bust moves for the camera. Another guy (pictured above) documents his "hobby" of cutting, showing his viewers the real blood from his arm as a kind of guarantee of authenticity. But other people are just going about their business: a 30-year-old man with a disease that halted his sexual maturity, for example, or a man who survived a fire and sustained burns over half his face. They use the medium to connect with the outside world. Others emphasize labor, such as the young woman live-camming her factory work, or the farmer who calls his hoeing show "agri-tainment." These individuals are chatty hosts, engaging with the folks who text them. But otherwise we would be watching something akin to Warhol or Sharon Lockhart.

There are other works to which Present.Perfect. can be reasonably compared. Dmitrii Kalashnikov's The Road Movie (comprised of Russian dashcam footage) or Dominic Gagnon's Of the North (made of YouTube videos of Canadian First Peoples) have elements in common with Zhu's project. But both of those films lean toward the sensational, if not the outright exploitative. Present.Perfect. never makes judgments about the live-cam phenomenon. (She just takes it for granted, as "how we live now.") And in her editing and selection of subjects, she has clearly taken care to display a real cross section of Chinese society, tending somewhat toward those who are marginalized due to illness or injury. This is a film about the use of technology to assert selfhood. There are no tragic victims in Zhu's catalog of humanity. Rather, everyone onscreen exemplifies a burgeoning, decentralized China, where individuals showcase their imperfect lives and find, if not community, at least the sense of having been seen.