A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces (Shengze Zhu, 2021) (Patreon)

It's sometimes the case that a given artwork takes on more meaning that it might have originally because of unexpected historical developments, and that is definitely the case with A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces, Shengze Zhu's follow-up to her 2019 internet-culture collage Present.Perfect. The new film, begun in early 2020, is a fairly straightforward portrait of the city of Wuhan, the filmmaker's hometown. She shot most of it prior to the outbreak of Covid-19. Looked at on its own, Zhu's film is a somewhat less accomplished version of the fixed-frame, deep focus "cultural landscape" work best exemplified by Nicolaus Geyrhalter. in fact, Sixth Generation mainstay Wang Xiaoshuai produced a film in 2019, Chinese Portrait, that exhibits some of the same tendencies of Zhu's Wuhan film, albeit with a much stronger sense of editing and composition.

Of course, once Zhu began assembling the film, Wuhan had become ground zero for the global pandemic, and this is addressed in A River in a couple of ways, First, Zhu opens the film with images from a single, central CCTV camera, compiled from footage over about three months. We see the empty streets of Wuhan, then a few maintenance workers in masks venturing out to clean the city square. Finally, there is an extended shot of someone honking the horn of their moped for what feels like an eternity. Since the bike is parked, we can only assume the horn-blowing to be a cryptic form of protest, something the authorities could not specifically isolate for retribution.

At four points in the film, Zhu pauses to introduce text onscreen. In each instance, an anonymous citizen of Wuhan is addressing a letter to a loved one who died from Covid. A young woman wishes she had spent more time with her now-deceased grandmother; a man laments that his younger brother, who had saved a number of people from drowning in the Yangtse River, had no one who could save him when he contracted the virus. And so forth. These moments are of course deeply affecting, and show Zhu's sensitivity to the fact that her film had become a de facto monument for a city in the throes of death. Still, I find myself wishing that the rest of the film -- the one Zhu had actually set out to make -- were stronger. Cynical as it may seem, I wonder whether A River would have gotten as much festival exposure were it not for it being situated at the juncture of global tragedy.