Devil's Peak (Simon Liu, 2021) (Patreon)

Hong Kong filmmaker Simon Liu has gained greater exposure over the past few years, and rightly so. In an avant-garde film environment that for some time has favored long takes and minimal camera movement, Liu works very differently, combining agitated handheld cinematography with a breakneck editing speed, often incorporating superimpositions and accelerated motion, all of which contributes to a sense of spectatorial overload. However, Liu's editing is remarkably deft, attentive to the internal rhythms and structural contents of his images. 

Devil's Peak originated as a multi-screen installation, and was shown in this form at the end of 2021. Later, he created the 30-minute single-channel film of the same title which has been circulating among this year's major film festivals. Although I have been a fan of Liu's work for awhile now, I believe that Devil's Peak represents a new breakthrough in his filmmaking. It is, without a doubt, one of the most complex and exhilarating films I have been in the past few years.

In certain respects, Liu's film is a conscious harking back to the great city symphonies in the history of cinema -- works by Ruttmann, Vertov, and Cavalcanti. But Devil's Peak is radically different. A penetrating, multifaceted examination of contemporary Hong Kong, Devil's Peak is both a celebration of the city and a record of its abuse at the hands of the Chinese government. While there is the expected footage of the 2014 democracy protests and their aftermath (city streets littered with open, abandoned umbrellas), Liu avoids mere reportage. Instead, he uses sound and movement, shape and texture, to convey the experience of living in a city that is coming apart at the seams.

That is to say, Liu provides the brisk, celebratory urban poetry that we've come to expect from city symphonies with signs of duress and oppression. The energy that one finds in a film like Man With the Movie Camera is redirected by Liu, showing Hong Kong as a volatile isotope on the verge of violent fission. The style and sweep of Devil's Peak often resembles the work of Marie Menken. But her films aimed to capture urban life as a form of cinematic electricity. Devil's Peak, understandably, takes a much more ambivalent look at power, movement, the masses, in light of who is able to control these forces.

Playing against Liu's propulsive editing is a dense, dazzling soundscape. Chiming musical tones are layered against sound effects, city noise, and the repeated motif of a man's voice, warped and distorted. Liu frequently matches the appearance of the voice with quick images of loudspeakers in public places, suggesting that this is the sound of official authority. But listen closely, and these "announcements" convey memories of Hong Kong, evoked poetically and somewhat elliptically. 

Devil's Peak is a visual powerhouse, no doubt. But it is Liu's skillful collision of sound and image that mark Devil's Peak as a major work of film art. If I were teaching this film, I would show it silently, then play the soundtrack by itself, and then finally show the film in its entirely. Liu's attention to sound craft would be remarkable at any cultural moment. But considering the fact that experimental film has had an audio problem for quite a while -- an irksome predilection for negligible audio, usually in the form of numbing drone and sonic wallpaper -- Devil's Peak is a reminder of what can be accomplished by an artist firing on all cylinders.

There's no question that Devil's Peak is a political film. Liu uses his meticulous technique to thrust the viewer into an unsteady zone of beauty and crisis, rapture and risk. There have been quite a few films about the situation in Hong Kong, including some works by experimental filmmakers. Devil's Peak, which takes its title from a peak in Hong Kong that was treated as a strategic military location by the British, is a work of historical excavation as well as defiant hope. Simon Liu reminds us that the troubling complications of our geopolitical moment -- the overt, unchecked rise of totalitarianism -- require new communicative forms, ones adequate to the task of showing us not only what has been but some of the possible futures we face, depending on our action or inaction. Devil's Peak reminds us that acceleration can lead us in various directions, possibly several at once.