Berlinale Chinese Reviews Reviews

Documentary Review: Breathless Animals (2019) by Lei Lei

Breathless Animals Review Asian Movie Pulse Lei Lei

Developed in the 1940s but properly finding itself two decades after, musique concrète refers to a genre of music where its individual components are deliberately distorted from their origins and is seldom concerned with the rules of traditional music composition. Instead, those who work within the genre exploit those components and, according to one of its pioneers Pierre Henry, mould them as if their final form were that of a solid sculpture; a new form that just is.

Whilst the sounds of animator 's debut feature certainly contains elements of this just one viewing of ‘' is enough to wonder if such terms can be applied to that of cinema. A hypnotic and postmodern entity built upon the breaking down of mediums, Lei's piece is more art than story, more artefact than film, and might just be the poster-child for a cinéma concrète.


Breathless Animals” is screening at Berlin Film Festival

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Cut into chapters, ‘Breathless Animals' is a jumbled culmination of abstract narratives: its first, charts the visual development through the growth of a nation across several decades; its second, a seemingly non-linear interview with an elderly woman (the creator's mother) as she recollects memories and dreams involving her dissociate reaction to television, bicycles, and her association with the killing of animals.

Coagulating the two is the frequent rewinding of a tape, discordant strings, and an amalgamation of others sounds and noises, providing less of a soundtrack and more of a sonic skeleton. With images and clips discovered by Lei by various flea-markets around China and the recollections from his subject, there lies an exhibition of the tales of others, juxtaposing a familial history with the histories by hundreds, potentially thousands, people long forgotten.

Breathless Animals Review Asian Movie Pulse Lei Lei

Whilst not the most refreshing take on a stripped mode of storytelling, ‘Breathless Animals' will find itself pleasing to structuralists and art enthusiasts all over the world and certainly one of the more perplexing ‘films' you are likely to see in 2019. Its jarring and sometimes epileptic visual narrative perfectly counters both the rhythmic dissonance of its sonic backdrop and the jumbled intimacy of the interview between Lei himself and his elderly subject. These three dimensions are as inseparable as the personal and national history of China during the 20th Century, as intertwined as the individual was to the state; this juxtaposition constantly bombards, even during the few and sparse breathers, demanding its audience's undivided attention.

This is not just some static piece of conceptual art to gawk at with faux wonder: every photo, every second of slowed down footage, every piece of cut-out animation has a story to tell within the grander narrative. At the same time, there is a limit to how much the human brain can absorb at once and, despite the little preparation it requires to attempt to take it all in, ‘Breathless Animals' is bold enough to push this limit to its perceptive extreme.

Breathless Animals Review Asian Movie Pulse Lei Lei

Though its displaced interview offers a unique and, at times, startling account of dream and memory during the rule of Chairman Mao, Lei's technique is what elevates this brief flurry of sound and image from falling flat. On their own, each layer makes little sense and their purpose escapes all rationality and even at the hands of a capable documentarian, this simply would not work. It is Lei's artistic capabilities of fitting together each discovered moment as an enigmatic puzzle that recreates and reconstructs the whole picture from scratch, blurring its realities as if it were a dream, albeit a bizarre one. There are abrupt doses of whimsy dotted amidst the relentless repetition – the cut-outs spinning across the miniature trees comes to mind – and there is an unsettling eeriness behind both the anonymity of the images and cut-throat splicing, but this only feeds the film's baffling existence.

Many might argue ‘Breathless Animals' stands as a “style-over-substance” exhibitory piece but one would retort the style is the substance and vice-versa. It goes far beyond an oral history and instead finds itself as a unique cultural artefact. There is much to learn about Lei's process and his vision of history; here, his feature debut makes for a distinctive leap to fundamentally develop this further. Whilst it adds little to the discourse of Maoist China, it is foolhardy to approach this as a documentary of any kind. Simply put, it is a reinterpretation of a past passed down the generations, recycling it until it bears little resemblance to its constantly-evolving original. Its enframing definitive, and its style as left-field as one could ask for, making it an uneasy watch for some and an intriguing experience for others. But it cares little for your thoughts, your understanding, your interpretations – it just is.

Breathless Animals Review Asian Movie Pulse Lei Lei

About the author

JC Cansdale-Cook

A series of (fortunate) events led this writer-of-sorts to Battle Royale and he's never looked back since. A lover of Japanese cinema in all its guises, JC has developed a fondness for emerging, underrepresented cinemas as well as a growing love affair with the cinema of Taiwan. He's also a sucker for cinematography.

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