Imaging the Umbrella Movement via Kracauerian Cinematic Realism

The presenter will demonstrate how Siegfried Kracauer’s cinematic realism of everyday life – catalogue of inherent affinities and elements, namely, urban crowds, “the street,” things normally unseen, the small and the big, the quotidian and the marginal, the fortuitous and the ephemeral – can be used as a framework in interpreting his own experimental documentary film on the Umbrella Movement (title withheld at this point, to avoid identifying the presenter).

By juxtaposing footage from Beijing shot around 4th June 2014 with the Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong on the same year, this experimental documentary exhibits a perspective of a foreign student faced with an overwhelming need to understand the intricacies between Hong Kong and mainland China relations. Interacting with the poetry (name of the artist withheld at this point, to avoid identifying the film), the HK-Beijing binary is made complex and nuanced in the film by an interspersion of photographs from Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Macau, Zhongshan, and Suzhou. Ultimately, the film organically opens itself up to the idea of a visually poetic love story – with its share of tensions, quarrels and accusations of betrayal – between the two cities as protagonists, separated by a distance of approximately 1,200 miles.

The concept of juxtaposing the footage from the two cities occurred to the presenter, in the form of an experimental documentary, and guided by the framework that this film, as an art form, should serve society by bringing up discourse as openly as possible. He has envisioned this work not as an advocacy film, but as a fluid artwork that is still in the process of searching not necessarily for answers, but holistic social engagement, a salient condition for the voicing out of opinion, not just for catharsis but a collective dealing with questions and answers – implicating notions of modernity, culture and history – if not closures and resolutions. He intends this film to ignite/re-ignite passion and spark debates, especially coming from those outside established traditional binaries, ultimately, in the interest of harmony, and, dare he say, love – not the blind kind, but an enlightened one.