The Glass Essays
The Glass Essays
4K, Color, 16 mins, Sound, China / UK
A young man cannot sleep. He ventures into the forest guided by the trace of a sound. A truck moves through the darkness of the night; it stops, unfolding into a stage in the woods, its red curtains billowing in the wind. The young man follows the sound across the river, across the woods, past the shadows of the trees. His torchlight lands upon the stage where an older woman starts her performance. Fireworks explode above the stage like drumbeats. Morning slowly dawns upon the silent woods of Nanxian, Southern China.
Taking inspiration from Anne Carson’s skeletal image, The Glass Essays experiments with the ritual of mourning as a psychoanalytic method in filmmaking, and a mode of exploring fluid identities and queerness, especially my own personal experience of growing up queer in a small Southern Chinese town.
The film arose from artist’s own memories of his grandparents working in funeral processions in his hometown in Nanxian, Hunan where they would travel and perform with a mobile truck-stage across the region. The Glass Essays re-examines the performative role of lamentation in regional Chinese cultures through a queer lens, a process of fluidity and ritualisation as a way to confront the past and its ghosts.
The Glass Essays is supported by Arts Council England, and the FLAMIN (Film London Artists’ Moving Image) Fellowship. Additional support from Forma Arts and Media.
