Resurrection · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

An intertitle floats up, styled like something struck from a 1922 print: people who no longer dream are "candles that do not burn." That single card holds the whole of Bi Gan's film. In its future, humanity has bought immortality by surrendering the ability to dream, and dreaming survives only as a defect, carried by aberrant beings. One of them — a dying "Deliriant" — relives roughly a hundred years inside a film projector, one dream nested in the next, each chapter shot in the grammar of a different era of cinema. The science-fiction premise is a decoy. What Bi has actually built is a theory of film, staged as a fever, and it turns out to be the clearest working model I know of a difficult Deleuze idea: the powers of the false.

Start there, because the film argues it out loud. Classical realist film theory rested on a kind of contract — Bazin's faith that the photographic image bears honest witness, that when you see something on screen it happened in front of the lens. Deleuze's later cinema breaks that contract on purpose. In the powers of the false, true and false stop being a test the image passes or fails and become a creative engine: the image composes a world, then replaces it, and there is no stable original underneath to check it against. Bi says the quiet part plainly. He shoots on a DJI Ronin 4D — a modern integrated cinema rig — and uses it to counterfeit the oldest tricks in the medium: Méliès substitution splices, double exposure, reverse motion, stop-motion. The newest tool forges the oldest ones. He has said he prized "the inspiration of imagination over authenticity," that cinema's power lies not in fidelity but in illusion. That is the powers of the false stated as a production method.

And it needs a body to move through it. Deleuze calls that figure the forger — not a liar but a maker of truth, a protagonist who shifts identity from series to series and generates the real by counterfeiting it. Jackson Yee is that forger, quite literally: he plays the Deliriant across successive incarnations — a musician's companion, a former monk, a con man, the hoodlum "Apollo" — and across the acting styles each era demands, from broad silent pantomime to millennial naturalism. He isn't one character in disguises. He's the false itself, taking whatever shape the dream requires, and the film never asks which face was the true one. There isn't a true one. That's the point.

What holds these forgeries together is a crystal. Deleuze's crystal-image is the moment you can no longer separate the actual from its reflection — present and dream, thing and mirror, fused so that neither is prior. Resurrection makes the crystal architectural: dreams inside a projector inside a dying mind, a self-enclosed world with no outside to wake into, because outside is only the dreamless immortality nobody wants. When the whole film is a reverie glimpsed by a seer who can only relive and endure — not act, never act — you are watching pure optical situations rather than a plot. The Deliriant doesn't change his situation. He passes through it.

But passing through what, exactly? A century, and not in order. This is where Deleuze's sheets of past comes in — the past not as a dated flashback you cut to, but as a whole order you move through, regions of time coexisting. Bi maps his six chapters onto the six senses of Buddhist cognition and lets props migrate between them — a coded suitcase, a theremin, a Buddha, playing cards — so meaning accrues by resonance, not cause and effect. You don't follow the story forward. You sink through strata of it. It is worth naming the newer term some critics use for exactly this shape: the neuro-image, digital cinema that moves through a mind as a recombinant database rather than a line — a whole archive of film history shuffled inside one skull. Deleuze didn't write it; his heirs did. Bi may be its purest instance.

The craft debts are worn openly, which is part of the film's honesty. The dream-as-frame architecture and the painted, buckling sets come from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which Bi names directly. The monster chapter borrows Nosferatu's chiaroscuro and stark key light — pure Deleuzian expressionism, things charged with a non-organic life. The unchained long take gliding through false-perspective sets descends from Murnau's Sunrise, and reaches its extreme in the closing set piece: a roughly half-hour unbroken shot through rain-slicked alleys into crowded clubs, the palette swinging red to blue, that quotes Christopher Doyle's smeared neon from In the Mood for Love. The film's non-causal, durational binding of memory is Tarkovsky's Mirror. Bi doesn't hide the sources; he treats film history as the raw sensory material of one dying dreamer, which is the whole conceit.

And the editing tells its own story about the medium. It runs from the rapid, intertitle-punctuated assembly of silent cinema toward the near-total dissolution of the cut in that final long take — a compressed history of how film has organized time, ending by refusing to organize it at all. That is the wager. If dreaming is what makes us mortal, and cinema is the last machine that still dreams, then Resurrection is less a film about the end of dreams than the medium arguing for its own necessity — a candle insisting, at length and in the dark, on burning.