Yang’s approach is to cinematically
echo this aesthetic, from a squared-off
aspect ratio matching these canvases to
color-timed images so ripe, so out-
landishly spectral, that they’re basically
beyond compare outside of a Paradjanov
film. This is not raw, happened-upon
footage, but rather deliberately, painstak-
ingly realized imagery. And yet it’s derived
from observed reality. The film takes a
formal approach that allows us to recog-
nize factual resonances between amateur-
ish expressions and an observed natural
landscape, and furthermore asserts,
through its own color-drunk scheme,
that such expressions are loyal to the spec-
tacle that appears up the mountains. The
painters represent the landscape, and the
film represents the paintings and the land-
scape, as well as the cultural and practical
alchemy that brings the two together. We
watch food as it is prepared for eating,
we listen to conversations develop, per-
sonalities emerge, scenes play out bothMAKE IT REAL The wide, wide world of cinematic nonfiction
C
onflating nonfiction and realism in film may be understandable,
but it’s as much of a historical and cultural conjoining as it is a formal
or practical one. Before the advent of portable sync sound in the late
1950s and early ’60s, recording spontaneous audio coterminous with
observed imagery wasn’t possible. What that meant was that half the
presentation of documentary was expressive or editorial in nature—not
the domain of dramatic realism. But it hasn’t stopped us, in the decades since, from
equating style with truth, from considering footage captured and presented in a realistic
fashion as more legitimately nonfiction. Such assumptions don’t hold up when a longer
history of art and documentation come into consideration.
Painting provides one nonrealistic mode of observation and documentation, and two
new Chinese films approach painting not as a pure expression of an imaginary world but
as an adept mode for documenting the real world. One has been programmed as a docu-
mentary, the other is destined not to be, but both draw their formal and aesthetic models
from paintings, enriching the cinematographic enterprises while also implicitly reassert-
ing the medium’s notational value in new ways.
In Up the Mountain, which premiered at the International Documentary Festival of
Amsterdam and was featured in this year’s Film CommentSelects (I caught it at True/False
Film Fest), veteran hybrid filmmaker Yang Zhang collaborates with painter Shen Jianhua
to represent his life and community in a remote village in Yunnan Province, where Shen
instructs local artists in a particular style of painting. These paintings are largely pre-
occupied with the stunning mountain landscape, employing vibrant, often primary
colors to match the natural spectacle therein. The results are expressive, leaning toward
primitivist, and yet are entirely concerned with representing the evident world.14 | FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019Stretching Out the Canvas
Painting opens out other ways of seeing in a pair of panoramic Chinese films |BY ERIC HYNES
Up the Mountain (x 2)Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (x 2)