Cloud · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with what isn't there. Go looking for who directed Cloud and the line is blank. The producer, the cinematographer, the festival where it might have played — gone, or never written down in the first place. What survives is small and human: two actresses, Peng Dan and Deng Jiajia, and a single sentence about a young writer and a college student who fall in and out of love. For a film, that is almost nothing. It is also, as it happens, the most Deleuzian thing about it.

Late in his two books on cinema, Deleuze kept returning to a phrase he took from the painter Paul Klee: the people are missing. He meant that the old, confident cinema — Soviet montage, the Hollywood epic — could assume a people was already there, a public it spoke to and for. Modern political cinema starts from the opposite condition. It addresses a people that does not yet exist as a public, that has no recognized place to stand, and so it has to do something stranger than represent them. It has to help call them into being — to legend them, in Deleuze's word, into existence. He called this fabulation, and it is why he thought the most political films are often the least overtly political: a love story can be an act of invention when the lovers have no public world to be seen in.

Hold that against the record. In 2007, mainland Chinese cinema ran through SARFT, a single approval gate with no rating system and one standard for all audiences. A romance between two women, however quietly told, had no legal public to be shown to. So films like this were made off the books — cheap, on digital video, passed hand to hand on discs and over the early internet. Cloud almost certainly lived in that gap. Which means the missing director's name isn't a clerical accident; it's the signature of a cinema whose people were missing by law. The film had to imagine an audience that, officially, did not exist.

This is also why the usual machinery of drama goes quiet here. In what Deleuze calls the movement-image, a hero perceives a wrong and acts to set it right; the situation provokes an action that resolves it. The synopsis of Cloud — "ups and downs," "lingering love" — describes the opposite. There is no act available. The obstacle isn't a villain you can defeat or a rule you can break; it is invisibility itself, the pressure toward marriage, a society with no slot for what these two feel. Deleuze named this stalling the crisis of the action-image: characters who can see their situation perfectly and can do nothing adequate about it. When acting is foreclosed, all that's left is to look and to wait — what he calls a pure optical situation, an opsign. The protagonist stops being an agent and becomes a seer, someone who endures time rather than spending it on a goal. "Lingering" is the exact texture of that endurance: the relationship measured not in events but in dead time, the everyday simply held, longing that goes nowhere because there is nowhere for it to go.

If the film looks as its tradition suggests — available light, real rooms, a camera close to two faces — then almost everything rides on those faces, and the dossier's one firm dramatic claim is that here "the performances are effectively the film." That is the home of the affection-image: the close-up, where a feeling is registered but never discharged into action. A face that wants, and stays.

None of this is invented out of nothing; it is a craft inheritance. Cloud descends from a clear line. East Palace, West Palace (1996) built queer desire as a chamber two-hander, drama carried by talk in one confined room rather than by action — the form Cloud reuses. Fish and Elephant (2001), the first mainland lesbian feature, shot on DV with non-actors, fixed the available-light, domestic-realist grammar of exactly this kind of film. Lan Yu sets private feeling against social constraint in restrained interiors; that's the emotional register. And the underground method itself — on-location, natural light, patient takes, no official blessing — runs back through Xiao Wu, Suzhou River, and Beijing Bastards. There is a Bazin in this: the long, plain take that trusts reality to disclose itself given time, rather than cutting reality into an argument. The DV camera was the tool that put that trust within reach of people with no studio behind them.

What did such a film do to film? Almost nothing visible — and that is nearly the point. It extended cinema's franchise to a people the state said didn't exist, and then it very nearly vanished, taking its makers' names with it. The time-image's deepest claim is that cinema can hold what cannot yet be acted upon. Cloud lives that claim twice over: once in its story of a love with no public to receive it, and once in its own fate as a film you now have to hunt for. Go looking. Notice that the search is not separate from the movie — it is the last act of the same gesture, a missing people still waiting to be seen.