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Searching for Manzhouli
A Film Review of Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still
Humans, according to philosopher John Gray, seek silence as an escape from their inner commotion. “By nature volatile and discordant,” Gray writes, “the human animal looks to silence for relief from being itself while other creatures enjoy silence as their birthright. Humans seek silence because they seek redemption from themselves, other animals live in silence because they do not need redeeming.” The blissfully silent eponymous animal of Hu Bo’s poignant and stirring four hour film, An Elephant Sitting Still, is the talisman in which the damned characters of the film, all in woeful need of redemption, seek refuge. By the time they finally approach the mythical animal, however, the film has drained us completely of any hope that they will find what they are looking for.
An Elephant Sitting Still is a cinema of despair. The film unfurls over the course of one day in a creeping and cold tapestry of subdued grays, following the protagonist’s bleak peregrinations amongst the rubble-strewn and broken industrial landscape of a small city in northern China. This day starts rather inauspiciously for each of them. Local small-time gangster Yu Cheng (Zhang Yu) opens the film in the bed of his best friend’s wife. When the cuckold friend unexpectedly returns home Yu Cheng watches as he tosses himself…