André Bazin once described cinema as the “mummification of time”: the preservation of reality’s physical body from the ravages of decay and the encroachment of oblivion. If, at the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema was a mechanical apparatus for recording matter, in Bi Gan’s Resurrection, this recording apparatus itself becomes a kind of surgical operation performed on the memory of history. Bi Gan is not a storyteller reliant on words but, in the truest sense of the term, an auteur: a filmmaker who liberates cinema from the yoke of literature, conventional narrative plotting, and popular melodrama, returning it to the authentic and magnificent realm of “pure cinema.” Resurrection is not a simple allegorical tale; it is a visual manifesto concerning the truth that memory is an optical and acoustic substance, and that history is nothing more than the continual trembling of shadows across the darkness of the screen.
The film begins at a threshold of suspense, a liminal space between death and awakening following brain surgery. Bi Gan creates this experience not through cheap computer-generated effects, but exclusively through découpage, the refraction and disruption of light, and a mesmerizing control of depth of field. The world before the woman is not a physical, material wasteland born of some apocalypse, but the geography of her damaged mind: a cracked landscape that seems simultaneously to reflect the history of an entire nation. In the midst of this deathly silence, the woman encounters a strange sculpture: the motionless body of a human-robot. The camera’s encounter with this cyborg resembles the discovery of an unfinished statue in a sculptor’s workshop. The woman begins speaking to this metallic figure, but these monologues never resemble theatrical dialogue; they are streams of photons projected toward a dark screen. In Bi Gan’s hands, the robot becomes the cinema screen itself: a white, expectant, lifeless surface that will come alive only through the projection of image and sound. Through her narration of cinema and history, the woman switches on the projector, and the ritual of resurrection begins.
Bi Gan’s cinematic genius is revealed in the way he aligns the evolution of the body’s five senses with the history of cinema’s formal development. At first, everything depends on vision and the raw light of the silent era: stark contrasts, soft lenses, coarse grain, and visual compositions that evoke both early Shanghai cinema and Expressionism. The woman speaks of the catastrophe of the Opium War and the gradual decline of the empire, while the frames come alive through abrupt camera movements and audacious shifts of focus. It is at this moment that the robot’s eyes begin to move, as though the first ray of light has just been cast inside the Lumière brothers’ screening room.
Soon after, as history moves into the middle decades of the century, the film’s sonic form undergoes a transformation. The texture of the soundtrack fills with deep resonances, the crackle of gramophone records, and heavy silences, and hearing returns to the machine: cinema has become sound cinema. As Robert Bresson once beautifully observed, “Sound cinema invented silence.” With a profound understanding of this proposition, Bi Gan employs silence not as an absence of sound, but as a tangible, resonant, dramatic substance. His intelligent and inventive use of the tension between naked silence and the sudden eruption of sound lends a transcendental dimension to the resurrection of the senses: each sound is born within the void of the preceding silence, placing the weight of existence upon both the spectator and the robot. The camera glides in fluid, uninterrupted movements across the cold metallic skin of the cyborg, reviving what Jean Epstein called “photogénie”: making the invisible palpable upon the surface of the negative. The robot does not experience the world through programmed data, but through watching the aesthetic evolution of cinema.
Yet in the midst of this journey of revelation, the film reaches a vortex, an ontological crisis: the woman’s paralyzing hesitation over whether to continue or halt the story. Like a modern Scheherazade, she realizes that if the chain of narration continues and the robot’s senses reach their final stage of evolution, the story will inevitably connect to the “present,” which means arriving at the end of the age of cinema’s and myth’s innocence. This hesitation is precisely bound to the moment when the film enters New Year’s Eve, 1999: a historical turning point at which China opened its doors to the logic of the free market and capitalism without abandoning its old political structure.
Bi Gan does not reduce this ideological intersection to a slogan; he injects historical transformation directly into the spectator’s field of vision. The film’s color palette, which until this point has relied on monochromatic, brown, and gray tonalities, undergoes a transformation. The image comes alive with the aesthetic of the 1990s and the warm, grainy density of Kodak color, only to be suddenly suffocated beneath the assault of harsh lights, saturated neon, and fluorescent reflections. The arrival of capital signifies the collapse of visual harmony and the contamination of the dream world. The woman realizes that awakening this creature on the threshold of the new millennium means casting it into an order in which the image becomes a commodity and the dream becomes an instrument of alienation.
This crisis reaches its visual climax in the final sequence, in a place whose name is itself richly ironic: a nightclub called Dawn. The film’s ending is a masterpiece of the conquest of time through space: a continuous, dizzying movement among dancing bodies, blue laser beams, thick smoke, and light reflected across liquor glasses. Dawn nightclub, on New Year’s Eve 1999, is the Platonic cave at the end of the century, a limbo in which identities dissolve. The woman and the cyborg remain suspended within this space, while Bi Gan, courageously refusing to provide a straightforward answer, keeps the image in a state of absolute suspension. The neon sign reading “Dawn” flickers in the darkness, but this illumination does not promise daybreak; it is a bitter glimmer marking the end of a century that sold its dreams at the price of reality.
With Resurrection, Bi Gan demonstrates that cinema, for him, is not an ordinary instrument of storytelling, but a machine for awakening sleeping souls. Refusing any compromise with the hurried sensibilities of the present, his film proves that cinematic form, when it is authentic and radical, possesses the power to exhume the past and give history a body once again. Resurrection is less a story about a human being and a machine than it is an opulent and magnificent requiem for the apparatus itself: cinema reborn from the ruins of time.
© 2026. Phoenix Review