What are the criteria for a good film: should he entertain? Be original? Technically brilliant? On the right side of morality? Some films do not meet any, others – and so you can then derive a star rating from it more or less objectively. But very rarely does a film exist so much in its very own universe that it escaped all conventional standards. Such a film is “Resurrection“, A 155-minute, surreal overbording fever dream, with which the Chinese director Bi Gan goes far beyond the limits of conventional narrative cinema. After one-off seeing, it seems hardly possible to see what the individual episodes are about.
The individual episodes are located in different phases of Chinese history, but above all they play with various narrative and stylistic set pieces in film history. That reminds of an expressionist silent film, sometimes of an abstract film Noir, sometimes of a sunny 70s gear film. The highlight is a 35-minute plan sequence without cutting, which begins with a fireworks and then only put it on it-filmed with a breathtaking technical brilliance, this night-red vampire story is the most spectacular that has long been seen on a cinema screen.
The second episode is reminiscent of a film Noir from the 1940s-with a MacGuffin case that contains the secrets for the end of all wars.
In the future, people have finally found a way to immortality: as long as they don't dream, they don't age either. But there are people, so -called fantasmers who prefer to flee the fantastic worlds of dreams and accept, age and die. But because they mess up reality and dreams, the Fantasmers can also mess up the flow of time. Therefore, there are beings that should find and wake up-only it is not that easy, because the Fantasmer can hide in every corner of (cinema) history …
From silent film to the OneShot
“Resurrection” begins in the almost square 4: 3 mutour film format: a Fantasmer who with his bald head and his hump to the bell from Notre Dame, but also to Nosferatu or to the sleep hiker from Dr. Caligari is reminiscent of nightmarishly beautiful backdrops that clearly remind of the expressionism of the German cinema of the 1920s. The parameters of this world explain the intermediate title, a photographer has pity with the being, feeds his brain with 35mm film, but the celluloid burns, the Fantasmer wakes up. Now the being lies on a meadow and plays with a water hose, which is reminiscent of one of the early short films of the Lumière brothers.
And so it goes on, with always changing figures, across the film history and in parallel through the Chinese history. Film genres from the war film to spy stories to the melodrama are quoted, some passages seem to be established during the Second World War, others during the cultural revolution. The huge OneShot final finally played on New Year's Eve 1999, when the Millennium was just around the corner, some even feared the end of the world-and China, after caught up, was ready to take on a leadership role in the world at the beginning of the new century.
The most spectacular cinema sequence of the year!
Anyone who was lucky to see BI Gans “Long Day's Journey Into Night” in the cinema will probably never forget the long-lasting, 60-minute-long OneShot sequence in the second half of the film. And now Gan even goes one step down (albeit without a third dimension): The sequence begins at a pier, a young gangster and a beautiful woman after a shooting, flee through a dilapidated building, out into narrow streets, illuminated by a penetrating red light. The camera follows them fluently, into a club with the meaningful name Sunrise. In phases, the camera occupies the perspective of a gangster boss as if you were traveling in an ego shooter-it is danced and karaoke sang. For a good 35 minutes, this setting takes no cut – and without tricking it with digital methods, something amazing happens during the already breathtaking visual intoxication:
The camera looks out of a window, out of a centrally run backwards, on which people suddenly move like in time. It works for minutes, in the background a black and white film can be seen on a canvas. Finally, the canvas is broken down, the street empties, the camera moves out of the window and follows the two main characters again. All of this is sensational, but it goes on. The lovers find the way back to the pier, climb onto a barge that now runs down the river. And as if that would not be enough, this incredible sequence ends with the fact that the image format suddenly opens, changes from 2.35: 1 to 1.85: 1 and in the last moments of the scene on the horizon the sun is perfectly teased.
Pure overwhelming
What exactly does that have to do with the sequence reminiscent of silent films? Or a sequence in which another gangster teaches a young girl to recognize cards with their sense of smell? Any explanations can certainly be constructed, but above all it seems to be about exploring the possibilities of cinema, establishing the cinema again in times of fragmented TIKTOK attention as a place that works as an overwhelming machine. In the last moments of “Resurrection”, the image format shrinks back to silent film size, on the canvas there is a small canvas that people gather to experience a film together. The end appears on the canvas in the film, at the end of a film that evades conventional categories of criticism, which has an exuberant and excessive effect, which looks into the past of the film because he believes in the future of cinema.
Conclusion: On paper, Bi Gans sounds like a normal fantastic story, but what the only 35-year Chinese dares here is a stylistically from all corners of film history, which breaks borders and makes film again a spectacle that must be seen in the largest possible cinema.
We saw “Resurrection” at the Cannes Film Festival 2025, where he celebrated its world premiere as part of the official competition.