‘Contact Prints of Baileng Canal,’ a Taiwanese documentary screening until Mar. 10, is 80 minutes of quiet meditation.
The News Lens
Date: 2019/02/28
By: CJ Sheu
Credit: 印樣白冷圳 / Facebook
“Contact Prints of Baileng Canal” (Yinyang Bailengzun / 印樣白冷圳) is playing on a loop as part of the “Post-Nature” exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum through Mar. 10.
An art museum may seem like an unusual place to see a film, but then again, this isn’t just another film.
Baileng Canal, a manmade tributary of the Dajia River in Taichung County, Taiwan, was built by the Japanese colonial government in 1927 in what was a huge undertaking at the time. This 80-minute documentary, written, directed, shot, and edited by Huang Hsin-yao (黃信堯) (known in the West for “The Great Buddha+” (Dafo Pulasi / 大佛普拉斯 2017), follows the Dajia, the canal, and the terminal uses of the canal’s water using a mostly unbroken series of static shots (and the occasional pan), sans score or exposition. The largely voiceless film is meditative and beautiful. Only one scene, of four women harvesting cultivated mushrooms, has the sound of human voice; in another we hear a barking dog.
The film starts off in the mountain mists, before presenting the first of eight postcard-length poems addressed to the eponymous waterway; the title of each section hints at an underlying thematic organization, but some (1. Departure, 2. Chance Encounter, 5. Expedition, 8. Long After) are more explicable than others (3. Rest, 4. Confusion, 6. Unfinished, 7. Reunion). The film’s title, ‘Contact Prints’, refers to these postcard intertitles, but can also be taken as a pun: The photons of each idyllic shot are imprinted onto the (digital) film, and when reflected off the projection screen form prints on our retinas, too. [FULL STORY]
