By Joseph Gilson
“Even if we don’t define them, they still exist behind the scenes.”
Midway through Cheng Ran’s cinematic odyssey, In Course of the Miraculous, these words are spoken as a young man drifts, serenely lost, on an empty ocean. The words wrap themselves around the concepts of time and of space, but they have already come to define much more; it is nature, it is people, it is life. It is hour five of my experience of this journey in the Sunken Gallery of The Mac in Belfast and I am wondering whether it is the delirium kicking in or whether this film is as sublime as it seems. As it turned out, yes, it is everything and more than I thought it was.
I had come here yesterday too, sitting for half an hour and witnessing the film as a fragment of a lucid dream, a patchwork of sensational images whose connection was just out of reach. I was woken too soon, just before the blooming of some inaccessible truth. I felt an unyielding need to plunge deeper into this monument to mystery.
Ran plays with time. Not simply in his duration but in his threading of three stories, based on true events, years and years apart. There is the legend of George Mallory and his ill-fated mission to become the first man to conquer Everest, and his disappearance on one June afternoon in 1924. There is Bas Jan Ader, a young Dutch artist who vanished some time in 1974, searching for his own miraculous as he attempted to cross the Atlantic in his pocket vessel, the Ocean Wave. And there is the case of the Lu Rong Yu no.2682 fishing boat which set out from Shandong in 2010 and returned 8 months later with just one third of its crew still alive. Ran intertwines these stories throughout, the film acting like the imaginary line you draw with your finger pointing up to the night sky, joining the dots to make constellations. It is indeed a temporal constellation; the three stories like the shining stars that were once independent, now linked by an overarching myth, or by a smaller instances of human nature; reaching out to a loved one, finding companionship in a book, having a nightmare, or simply savouring a bite of food. These minuscule moments become monumental in the course of the film; anchored to the emotional weight of the myth.
As we surge introspectively into hour six and as Mallory stands on a jagged ridge somewhere deep in the Himalayas, I’m reminded of the great George Bernard Shaw quote from when he saw a photo of Mallory and his fellow voyagers on that infamous expedition in 1924, standing before Everest. “A Connemara picnic surprised by a snowstorm,” he quipped. Here Mallory is, in fitted jacket and pleated trousers, staring longingly at his own photo, a portrait of a loved one, back home. Mallory cries. The film chronicles a self-imposed male loneliness, and in turn a feeling of inadequacy in themselves – Mallory, Ader, the crewmen on the fishing boat – for perhaps not finding what they were searching for. They are constantly looking back over their shoulders, rather than to the horizon, to the peak, into a crepuscular past that is all but vanished. And to women. Through these men’s eyes, women are unreachable, relics of a past life to feed their misguided romanticism. They are a photo on a ridge deep in the Himalayas, a disembodied voice crackling through the radio static, alluring figures in a magazine. Can I ever leave this room?
Mallory’s tears beget the emotional centrepiece of this experience. As he broke down nearing the pinnacle of his journey, so then does Bas Jan Ader. I can only guess at the length of this shot – all external world time, by this point, has become obsolete – that holds on his face as he slowly descends into turmoil; his miraculous still allusive, his old world gone, and his new one crashing in on him. And what we can only assume is a life-shattering storm hanging significantly just over his shoulder. The camera lingers and lingers, showing us the moments in time that we never see, the ones we would only experience in our own isolation; the pointed desperation after the tears, the silence of night after the murderous commotion aboard the Lu Rong Yu no.2682, the newly uninhabited landscape of Everest. Ran plays with time.
Surviving in a room of indefinite temporality, I somehow sense the end. After the Lord of the Flies like scenes aboard the fishing boat, the ring leader stands on its deck, before the camera, and begins to perform a maniacal dance. Music swells up and down, in and out, like the waves against the side of his vessel, or the competing forces of chaos and order in his delirious head. His arms rise and fall with the swell, as if he were conducting his own madness. From here on in, the film, the journey, the experience, sails towards a delirious but euphoric horizon, feeling somehow incomplete. Because, perhaps, like these three intertwining stories, it was always destined to be. They just add to the monument of mystery. Or so it goes.
Gustave Flaubert once said, “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” Cheng Ran’s In Course of the Miraculous manipulates time but never abuses it. His film doesn’t become interesting because of time, time becomes interesting because of his film. And as you read this, it is still existing behind the scenes.
In Course of the Miraculous runs from 5th October – 14th January in The Sunken Gallery, The MAC, Belfast.
Daily Showings: 11am – 7pm.
FREE.
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