In a small city in upstate New York, a Chinese film student struggles to navigate many kinds of loss after actually losing his tuition money.
CROWS GATHERING BEFORE WINTER(2024)
It is a story about a young man finding himself in a strange land. Crows Gathering Before Winter(2024) explores the beauty of slow cinema - a strand of international art films renowned for their decentralized and understated storytelling, sluggish narrative pace, and minimalist aesthetics—I shifted my focus beyond mere plot development during its creation. I delved into elements such as the portrayal of urban space. These "peripheral elements" played a pivotal role in vividly illustrating the protagonist's internal and external circumstances. In a sense, they became the unsung "protagonists" of the film. The objective is to elucidate the aesthetics of slow cinema within my short film Crows Gathering Before Winter(2024).
From a narrative perspective, although the protagonist’s main purpose is to retrieve his lost money, the script's focus is not merely on the act of “finding money,” but rather on developing many seemingly unrelated subplots—such as Liu Nian’s interactions with his roommate, his relationship with his parents, and his experiences working on set—to depict the protagonist Liu Nian's state in everyday life, in various spaces (private, public). This is not a mainstream, goal-driven narrative style. Instead of using dramatic twists and turns to grab the audience's attention, I intentionally took a different approach, requiring viewers to immerse themselves in the quietness I created to experience a young man's struggles and confusion.
My emphasis on the concept of time lies in the action of “waiting.” What Liu Nian does regarding “finding money,” and the only thing he can do is “wait” for notification. At the beginning of the film, he sits in the police station waiting, then stands outside the police station waiting, and at the end, when he sits in a truck waiting for crew members to unload equipment, he receives a phone call from the police notifying him that his money cannot be found. Meanwhile, during such long waits, Liu Nian is surrounded by “meaningless” conversations among the people around him—some are idle chatter among police officers, and some are crew members talking on the phone or even talking to themselves. Those conversations have no connection to Liu Nian, and he cannot relate to the people around him: there's a sense of isolation, of alienation. I believe this can deepen the sense of “prolonged” time sensorially—we feel time passing slowly when we listen to people talking nonsense. I used similar methods when he cleaned the living room alone; I repeatedly filmed his sweeping action from several different angles and accompanied it with mechanical, repetitive sweeping sounds, making people feel the “stickiness" (I said) of time when observing this behavior.
Now I consider slow cinema as the overall aesthetic style of this film, imbuing the imagery with the meaning of waiting through the portrayal of urban spaces. Places, through their insinuating power, engage in a multifaceted interaction with the content of the film. To my interpretation, the significance of the presentation of place in the film is also that it defamiliarizes the real place. When we humans wander in the place, everything we observe is three-dimensional, and when these places are projected on a flat screen, there is a lack of depth. Even though the appearance of 3D technology can provide a three-dimensional illusion, we will still feel unfamiliar when we perceive it through our senses. This kind of "unfamiliarity" allows us to re-examine our own lives. When I see Liu Nian drafting in the space of a cold building, I can't resist thinking about the space and place that I have experienced. It seems that Liu Nian and I have reached a "divine friendship," that I project the image of mine onto this character as well as into this space.
Throughout the film, Liu Nian is mostly in a state of alienation, but when he climbs to a high place to record sounds from the city, he gains a sense of subjectivity. At that moment, he seems to reach a meditative state of "egolessness" (where external objects and internal self are forgotten together, representing to some extent the integration of self and the world), and the visual language becomes poetic and subjective. His auditory senses extend to every corner of the city through his imagination, and he for the first time establishes a connection with this unfamiliar city—merging his flesh into the cold flow of buildings and traffic—steel becomes his bones, traffic becomes his veins, wind becomes his antennae, and he becomes one with the city.