How do you describe a work of art that was created for the specific purpose of avoiding any kind of categorisation or broad interpretation? Bi Gan is a genius and a menace, and has seemingly committed his entire artistic career to exploring the human condition in ways that are both incredibly invigorating and profoundly frustrating, both intentional choices that guide every decision he makes behind the camera. His most recent work is Resurrection (Chinese: 狂野时代), a film that resists all comprehension and exists solely as a mood piece, a voyage into the deepest recesses of the human mind, as curated by someone whose fervent commitment to challenging the audience is unlike anything currently being done by his contemporaries. From what we can tell, this is a story set in a version of our world, one in which dreaming has been outlawed (as it was determined that they are the root of our ageing – those who do not dream are seemingly made immortal), and follows Miss Shu, a mysterious woman who leaps into the minds of the Deliriants (the people who still manage to dream), at first to penalise them for going against the rules, but eventually trying to understand what pushes people to find solace in the subconscious fantasies that exist within their minds, and ultimately her efforts to comprehend the very scope of the human condition. This is already a very ambiguous synopsis, and one that is not made any easier by the fact that Bi is very much insistent on his refusal to provide any answers or even allude to the deeper meaning beneath the surface of the film. Resurrection is a film that invites us to step across the threshold that divides the audience from the screen, allowing us to explore a range of settings, tied together very loosely by a narrative that may be extraordinarily opaque and perhaps even slightly impenetrable (both of which are entirely by design), and allowing us to peer into the human mind in a way that we have never seen before, all of which is a clear signal towards Bi’s exceptional skills as both a storyteller and visual stylist, which are fully displayed throughout this extraordinary and daring piece of cinema.

For at least a few decades, there have been active attempts by a variety of filmmakers to craft the ultimate love letter to cinema – tributes to the medium that take on the near-impossible task of condensing the previous century (or more, if we’re looking at more recent works) into a single work – sometimes these are sprawling, multi-hour epics that dig into every detail. In contrast, others tend to compress them into rapid-fire montages or cinematic collages. There’s value in a lot of these approaches, but we find that Bi has one of the most intriguing, which he introduces throughout Resurrection, which is a film almost entirely composed out of cinematic references. However, rather than being a tacky assemblage of images taken directly out of existing works, Bi is a lot more careful in how he crafts this film. He does wear his inspirations on his sleeve, but rather than creating a film in which the only information we receive is that he is fond of certain films and filmmakers to the point where he’s willing to outright copy their style, he is a lot more subtle – he casts a very wide net in terms of influences, ranging from the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, Orson Welles and Wong Kar-Wai, to entire film movements, such as German Expressionism, 1970s science fiction and the character-based European dramas of the 1990s, all of which are woven together to create this extraordinary, challenging work that is not just about showing reverence to the medium, but paying tribute to the moving image in a way that unsettles and provokes, stirring conversation on both the meaning of art as a means to filter our creativity, and a vessel through which we reflect not only our immediate surroundings, but the very nature of humanity, compressed into a singular 160-minute existential odyssey that attempts (to great effect) to describe the full spectrum of human emotions, the nature of memory and the mosaic of small, intricate ideas that make up existence, something we have been striving to understand for as long as we’ve been sentient, but are no closer to understanding today as we were thousands of years ago.

There is a very important question that needs to be asked when looking at Resurrection: What is this film actually about? On the surface, this feels like the most obvious answer to give, but when even the most fervent and fawning devotees have to simply say “I don’t know, it becomes clear that Bi has made something very special, a film that luxuriates in ambiguity in a way that we’ve never truly seen before. This is a film of beautiful contradictions, the primary one being that it is somehow both about everything and nothing at all – depending on the angle at which we approach the film, it’s possible to assert some interpretation or deeper meaning, but this is all a matter of individual opinion, since Bi is not at all interested in providing much clarity. We can attempt to rationalise some of its choices, in the sense that this is essentially a film that consists of five or six short films, episodic vignettes that share a few common actors and circle a couple of shared themes, and which are bookended by some of the most ferociously reverent commentary on the role cinema plays in defining our identities – but even looking at it as such feels somewhat reductive, since it removes the very aspect that Bi is most interested in exploring: the fact that life simply does not make sense, and the sooner we accept that our existence is nothing more than a stream of moments that make up something much larger than our minds could ever comprehend, the sooner we’ll reach a state of inner peace. Resurrection is a film about everything and nothing, as well as being about neither: it’s this precise ambiguity that makes it so extraordinarily effective, and allows the director to make some potent, complex statements that may not always be all that clear in theory, but have a complexity that we simply cannot comprehend – but do we truly want to in the first place? Whatever drove Bi to choose these particular ideas as the foundation of this film is not obvious, and he doesn’t seem to be compelled to give any true clarity, which is why Resurrection is such a masterfully-crafted narrative, since it frequently aims to be a memorable work, rather than one that forces the audience to dwell on ideas that ultimately don’t seem to have as much relevance as we may imagine at the outset.

Undoubtedly, the aspect of Resurrection that helps tie everything together – since it is quite unwieldy as far as narrative goes – is the filmmaking itself. Bi is not only a tremendous storyteller, but someone whose approach to the visual and sonic aspects of a film is beyond description. He’s a true craftsman, and someone who approaches each of his films as a multimodal project, an assemblage of several bold ideas that work together to create something quite beautiful and also deeply unconventional. Many films market themselves as sensory experiences, but this film is perhaps the most ambitious example of this that we’ve seen in many years. Each of the vignettes that make up the film is built around one of the five senses (with the bookends being based around the human mind), and while the specific sense being targeted is not explicitly stated, it doesn’t take too long for us to understand which of them is the focus of a particular segment. This is done through careful and deliberate directorial decisions, each one provoking one of our senses without us even realising it. Examples include the segment on sight being a single, unbroken shot, the segment on touch set within a snowy landscape where every snowflake and drop of water can be felt, the segment on hearing making extraordinary use of sounds, and those based around taste and smell seemingly shattering the boundary of the scene to evoke the fragrances that we would encounter if we were present in these scenes. To create a film that not only provokes conversation and thought, but also feels like the viewer is being transported into the moment shown on screen is an incredible and daring decision that feels so much more engaging than we would have expected based on a cursory glance. The cinematography by Dong Jingsongand the haunting score by M83 not only enrich the film, but actively guide it – there are so many intersecting styles and aesthetic approaches that make up Resurrection, each one of them so deeply meaningful and compelling, coming together to form a film that is made up of so many complex layers. Bi once again shows that he is someone whose work is going to be definitive of this generation, and this film in particular presents itself as a far more engaging experiment than any of the more overwrought attempts to capture certain intangible sensations that we encounter on occasion, many of which lack the nuance and creativity that make Resurrection such an extraordinary work.

Attempting to understand and decode the many layers of Resurrection is a fool’s errand, and we can once again look towards Thomas Pynchon’s timeless statement of purpose, where he boldly dared to ask one simple question: why should things be easy to understand? Bi seems to be very much driven by the same principle – the idea that a work of art needs to expend any energy clarifying its existence and making its meaning obvious is such a hopelessly outdated concept, and one against which he actively rebels. Even the act of trying to put this film into words feels impossible – it’s a voyage into the past, present and future, handcrafted by someone who refuses to look at this medium as a one-dimensional form of entertainment, and instead sees it as one that contains endless possibilities, of which only a fraction have ever been explored. There are compositions and ideas embedded in Resurrection that seem to be unique, which is a bold statement against the belief that originality has been extinguished in cinema, proving that in terms of both narrative detail and practical work, there is always room for ambition, the kind that we don’t witness very often in contemporary art. Bi’s ultimate thesis statement is not entirely clear, but we can glean a few key ideas – firstly, art is a living, breathing entity that changes depending on the person guiding its creation. Secondly, every work exists in dialogue with those that have come before and those which are yet to come, a stream of creative ideas that morph together to create truly unforgettable ideas. Finally, it proves that audacity is a powerful tool, and few filmmakers have shown as much commitment to reinventing the form as Bi, who is establishing himself as someone whose vision is undeniably important. A film that somehow manages to be both plotless and extremely detailed in how it explores certain ideas, handcrafted by a director whose wholehearted commitment to his craft and everything that it represents has always been one of his most intriguing qualities, and the reason he stands as one of the most undeniably promising young voices in contemporary cinema (for someone who has only made three feature films in the last decade, it feels like he’s already forged an indelible mark on not only Chinese cinema, but the global artistic landscape as a whole), and Resurrection is certainly a contender for not only his crowning achievement, but one of the greatest films of the 21st century so far.