All Movements Should Kill The Wind

****1/2

Reviewed by: Andrew Robertson

All Movements Should Kill The Wind
"This is experimental documentary that seeps, sidles, creeps, cannot be washed off."

All Movements Should Kill The Wind almost reverses the activities it depicts in the act of depicting them. Particle transitions and turbulent chaos, footprints in gravel, what might be falling water and might not be film grain. Clouds, if they are clouds, of the tiny, the gritty, the small, accrete to form an impression. An impression of sculpture, the removal of substance to create form, and in Wang Yuyan's film a finding of form - a cutting away of what is not art to reveal beauty beneath.

This is tone writ across scales, steady dust and motion. It is not desaturated colour, it is colour obfuscated by saturation, a film where light is filtered by further film, the fines of industry. Blocks are brought to the blade, statuary in the vernacular of Soviet Realism are seen from angles new. There is a not garden of not statues, a cliff that juts like the prow of a Star Destroyer, a struggle to remember the colour blue. A noise that might be fireworks is a reminder to celebrate. This is experimental documentary that seeps, sidles, creeps, cannot be washed off.

Given special mention by the Jury of the 2020 Glasgow Short Film Festival they noted that it "makes no statements, asks no straight questions". Nor should it. In hues reduced by labour it hews a portrait of work, and more.

Reviewed on: 19 Mar 2021
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Man shapes his environment, which shapes his brain.

Director: Wang Yuyan

Year: 2019

Runtime: 12 minutes

Festivals:

GSFF 2020

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