Wind Songs
2015
Blu-ray disc．black & white．sound in selected portions．23’ 17”．single-channel video + documentation
Introduction
On the night of January 18, 2015, Realm of Reverberations returned to Losheng Sanatorium as part of a film projection ceremony in the style of a temple festival parade. Audience members were invited to follow a truck outfitted with a projection screen which then climbed Danfeng Mountain. A section of Chen Chieh-jen’s film Realm of Reverberations was continuously projected, which features musicians performing Melody of Wind in the Pines, a folk song in the traditional Beiguan style. The parade eventually stopped at an open area next to a columbarium on the mountaintop. Here, the audience listened to a brief introduction of the Losheng Preservation Movement by sanatorium residents, and then everyone watched a four-channel video version of Realm of Reverberations. The truck was then driven from the Losheng site on the city periphery to the remains of the old Taipei Prison in the city center as the Melody of Wind in the Pines video was continuously screened. The fourth section of the video Realm of Reverberations, titled Tracing Forward, was then screened at the prison, thus ending the ceremony.
Wind Songs is a film about the screening ceremony. A simplified reenactment of the ceremony was recorded to create a post-documentary style film. The film does not contain any documentary images, but rather focuses on portrayals of Sanatorium residents and others, and their subtle emotions and observations while watching the Realm of Reverberations. Wind Songs presents the polysemy arising from watching and being watched, still and dynamic, condensed and floating, projected and developed, smooth and noisy, artificial light and natural light.
By choosing not to create a documentary testifying to the existence of the Realm of Reverberations screening ceremony, but rather shooting a reenactment, Chen not only diverges from the original, but also indirectly points out that the fluid process of bodily perceptions, memories, and consciousness of the attendees, whether at a social movement or a screening ceremony, can not possibly be fixed or defined by video documentation.
Wind Songs takes this notion of the impossibility of documenting as its point of departure neither to negate the importance of on site documentary recording, nor to raise the issue of reality or fiction. Wind Songs attempts to raise the issue of multiple dialectics between film and the impossibility of documenting by staging a reenactment that has been arranged. When we see the audience concentrating on Realm of Reverberations in the reenactment, it does not matter if they seem calm, to be feeling some deep emotion, or are emotionally distant from the film, because we cannot know what they are thinking. But these ineffable states that cannot be expressed with words, can only be recorded with a camera using long closeups.
The intention behind Wind Songs is to ask how ineffable states that always exist but are often overlooked can be brought from the fringes of the event and developed into images that do not fix their meaning. And how the ineffability in these images make it such that the audience can only imagine infinitely and experience their bodies, which in turn causes intersection and singularity to emerge. This is because ineffable states exist within us at any time, and we are potential agents of intersection and singularity.
