Each film begins with the expected advertisement for the festival sponsors: a man finds an ear while mowing the lawn, a couple see a daisy chain of zombies crossing the road while light eerie music chimes in the background. Each character observes and gets on with their day as if nothing exceptional has just occurred. Two lines fade on screen: “After 16 days of films”, “Nothing will faze you.” This always garners a laugh – even for what I must assume to be second or third viewings at least for festival die hards on the second day of the VIFF.

I have to admit to not having seen much of Chinese Cinema outside the martial-arts-wire-rotoscoped-empire-supporting -epic-North-American-exports. And so I feel less able to give a sound opinion backed by viewing experience.

Dry humour born of almost an innocent observational style pervades Jiang Wen‘s film – it does an admirable job of lightening the heavy load of the grand cinematic vision of The Sun Also Rises.

The film jumps between four narratives of maddness, armouring, rifles and reverie. Each chunk not necessarily linked by linear time. The film does not overly fracture time and so the “where are we now” challenge was actually quite enjoyable. It occurred to me afterwards that the non-linear structure helps to establish a more sound contextual basis for understanding narratives that span both large distances and durations.

So much of our valuation of cultural content is unconsciously and radically affected by the recency effect. It’s a value based memory phenomena where films and books or whatever are appreciated more for the last feeling they evoke than for the collective endeavour.

In pieces where main characters die off or change for the worse, we are left as an audience with that aftertaste in a linear project despite the fact that the end result might very well not be the overriding theme. It might be inconsistent with the mean. In non-linear narratives, the author has more flexibility in manipulating the recency effect so that the mean has more influence. For example, the Mad Mother played by Zhuo Yun although she disappears mysteriously we aren’t left with this sombre sentiment, but rather with her jubilation at the miraculous survival of her son.

In the end, the non-linear structure in combination with or contrast with the recency effect begins to resemble a more intuition-based method of evaluation and memory because intuition is not based on recency but on holistic analysis. Intuition comes across as kind of non-linear.

Tags: film