E-Ticket (Simon Liu, 2019) (Patreon)

Simon Liu, who grew up between Hong Kong and the U.K. and is now based in New York City, has a distinctly urban sensibility in his films, even when the spaces he's depicting are not cities per se. They often are, but his films also include rural areas, far flung global locales, and a lot of interstitial "non-places" of modern travel. There are two characteristics that distinguish Liu's cinema above all. One is velocity, a feeling of hurtling through the world at the speed of hyper-perception. The other is a cosmopolitan melancholy, a desire but also a skepticism about the existence of a place we could ever settle down and consider home.

E-Ticket is explicitly about travel, and in particular about the digital image as a kind of surrogate for the experience of global movement. Liu composed the film from thousands of images, still and moving, compiled over nearly a decade. Although many of the scenes on display are clearly shot in Asia, and some others appear to be taken in Europe, there is a rapid-fire collision montage that prevents the viewer from ever really getting his or her bearings. We only catch semiotic glimpses of cultures as they flash by, like pages in a flip-book.

Add to this Liu's highly material treatment of the images themselves. Scratches and pockmarks on the celluloid feature prominently in the mix, along with the "pure" color of cameraless light exposure, developer dots, edge exposure, and other photochemical artifacts. There are also portions of the film which have been painted on or otherwise manipulated. And Liu appears to have also taken filmstrips and photographs and collaged them together, then re-shot them as "new" footage on an optical printer. So E-Ticket is not just about actual images of the past, but also the tangible "past" of the images themselves.

In most cases, Liu has used digital editing to alternate between different single passages of filmed material -- photographic footage, raw exposed stock, or some combination thereof -- to produce a toggling or flicker effect. Since both strands of film are moving along their own trajectory, this editing style can produce gestural or rhythmic difference, as one set of images moves in one direction or at one pace, while the other does something entirely different. Liu eventually redoubles this strategy when he starts to layer multiple images within the frame.

E-Ticket plays with color and solarization, negative and positive images, and other manipulations that produce bold, painterly effects. If there is one dominant tendency that often stands out, it is Liu's layering of deep, saturated colors against dark fields, which produces a neon-at-night ambience reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai. But really, with his interpenetrating frames and transparencies, preference for goldenrod, cobalt, and crimson, Liu's most obvious aesthetic influence is stained glass.

After a couple of viewings, I get the sense (although I am still not certain) that E-Ticket is organized into movements. The first third seems to focus primarily on spaces, the second part on people, and the third on objects. But this is not a strict division. At times, the soundtrack seems to imply a semi-narrative trajectory, as if the crowds of people we see are protagonists of a sort, or the rushing images are indicative of literal travel. I chose to ignore these programmatic nudges.

And, toward the end, E-Ticket seemed to run out of steam, so to speak. A film built on so much forward propulsion can understandably have trouble knowing how and where to stop, and Liu's solution is to move further into abstraction, with frames upon frames multiplying into a kind of televisual tartan. Nevertheless, E-Ticket is a continually surprising film. It successfully dramatizes the phenomenon of genuine consciousness, one that is open to the world without attempting to reduce it to categories or preconceptions. Liu's journey is, in part, a loss of self, and that is a ticket of no return.