[Video Essay] Restless City

Title: Restless City

Credits: Shot and Directed by Dai Jiarui (Music: Oil from the film There Will Be Blood)

Description of the theme:

Hangzhou, as a big city that has always been under the shadow of Shanghai, has become panic-stricken after the latter being locked down due to the epidemic prevention policy. Interestingly, in addition to the surging anxiety of the residents, on the surface, the government’s large-scale construction in preparation for the upcoming Asian Olympic Games also demonstrates a kind of restless mood in the city. The aggressive restless on the surface and the secret restless are two faces of the same coin, driving the turmoil in the city together.

This video looks at both the above and below-ground parts of a metro station, observing the construction work above ground and the footsteps of the people underground, in an attempt to document the daily lives and emotions of the people in them. With the recent introduction of a partial lockdown in Hangzhou and the requirement for residents of other areas to provide proof of COVID nucleic acid testing within 48 hours of traveling on public transport, the movement of people has been indirectly reined in. As one of the few places where people still gather, the metro station becomes a point of connection between life and emotions. At the same time, the relationship between the location above and below ground is subtly intertextual with the relationship between government propaganda and residents’ emotions.

Method of research:

I conducted field and internet research before starting the shooting. I searched for MTR stations under construction in the main city of Hangzhou, and after using the Street View function of Internet Maps to look up images of the surrounding streets,I chose an MTR station where a single intersection was surrounded by three construction sites. I then learned about the requirements needed to travel by MTR now through a prevention notice published on the government’s official website and made a field trip to the street where the metro station is located to get a feel for walking experience in the construction section.

Video Production:

For the ground-level section, I chose to record the process of walking from one end of the site to the entrance of the MTR station, interspersed with several fixed-camera shots of construction machinery and the construction site, in an attempt to create an overall impression of the metro station site. The experience of walking through the city streets is one of the most intuitive reflections of the living conditions and emotional experiences of the residents, and for this reason, I have adopted a method of ‘city scanning’, whereby the camera is placed at a low angle close to the ground and moves smoothly to ‘scan’ the street in which it is placed to simulate the process of walking. At the same time, I recorded the sound of construction machinery at work and the original sound of the loudspeakers in the underground stations informing of the epidemic control, in order to reproduce the sounds that the residents walking in front of the stations would hear.

For the recording of the footsteps of residents in the underground section of the MTR station, I used a long shot depicting the process from the middle section of the lift to the queue at the security gate scanning travel codes, capturing the emotions of the residents as the anti-epidemic measures were introduced. I kept the ambient sound of the recording to try to recreate the cacophony that filled all parts of the station when people were in the station.

Reflection:

The process of filming the video made me rethink the role of the underground station in urban life, as both a public construction project for the city government and a regular place for residents to travel, dividing the “above ground” from the “below ground”, and at the same time dividing the official and the private experience of the residents. Whether it is the disruption of residents’ daily lives due to the construction of the Asian Games or the anxiety caused by the restrictions on the movement of people due to the epidemic prevention policy, the division between public values and private experiences may have placed the interests of the public in opposition to those of the people and left the city in a state of restlessness.

(724 words)

References:

De Certeau, M. (1984). Walking in the City. In The Practice of Everyday Life (pp. 91- 110), translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

4月30日起 杭州9城区这些场所需持48小时核酸阴性证明进入-光明网. Retrieved April 28,2022, from https://m.gmw.cn/baijia/2022-04/29/1302923611.html

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