Rumors | 2017 | 06:19 min
Director Qunyuan WANG
Subdirector Di YANG
Linjie SHENG
Writer Qunyuan WANG
Producer Qunyuan WANG
Key Cast Chong ZHANG
Bo WANG
Yuan ZHI
Hanhan YUAN
Gary WANG
Cun LI
Cinematographer Di YANG
Editor Qunyuan WANG
Special Thanks To
Di YANG Hanhan YUAN Linjie SHENG
Zhuo LI
Rumours is a film about memory, how memory works and how we save our memories. visualise something abstract and created in this first half work by collecting of video footage. These materials include surveillance videos, amateur street photography videos, documentaries and Actual shooting. Most of our memories pass like time; they become vague memories of broken pieces and emotions.They can make us do great things or terrible things. I tried this film, gives us a glimpse at how our brain works. we see a montage of video and audio, noise. Just like our brains, they manage to find a memory based upon a perfume we smell by passerby. Memory is like a hybrid between physical and digital world.This only running at almost 7 minutes film gives us a glimpse at negative things in life can affect us.
— FILM REVIEW by Kosice International Film Festival
Director Qunyuan Wang's short experimental film focuses on recreating a pattern of how human memory functions, as well as the complex structure of the relationship between memories, emotions and behavior that result from them.
The structure of the film is unconventional, non-linear and follows the same logic like dreams or memories, where single elements are connected by associations, emotions, coincidences and where their combination and merging create new sensations which become entangled into the entire web of memory. In order to achieve this, the applied form is complex, with a large number of different elements and techniques for combining them, such as collage, picture in picture, repetition, reverse speed, slow motion, glitch, black and white image... By author’s own words, surveillance videos, amateur street photography videos, documentaries and actual shooting was used in creation of this project.
This enormous material, seemingly connected only by coincidence, evokes above all the instability of human memory, its variability, adaptability and selectivity, which are increasingly coming to the fore as time passes. The title of the film is completely adequate considering the topic it deals with: the term rumor always implies suspicion regarding the content that is transmitted. The quality of rumors varies from guesswork, assumptions, partial truthfulness, to complete untruthfulness of information and pure fantasy, where data is invented and passed on as truth. With the chosen title, the author suggests that human memory works on the same principle: while some information remains only partially memorized like unverified rumors, others arise from the interaction of different memories, mutate under the influence of related emotions, or simply arise where the gap needs to be filled.
All elements of film have an equally important role in building this pattern, and this includes visual, auditory as well as the techniques that combine these two levels, because each of these elements exists independently, and none follows the usual laws and typical structures of film language. Through such juxtapositions, each element becomes a creative factor, acquires its own meaning and immediately attracts the viewer's attention, because it deviates from the usual signal and form of film medium. By reinventing the elements of film language, the author successfully imitates changing and volatile factors of human consciousness and memory, which in a seemingly frivolous and chaotic interplay hide deep emotional records, which go back in time and imperceptibly direct and influence the present and future events.
Certain images, their combinations as well as those with different soundtracks, visual effects, montage and transitions between frames, send some information, trigger associations and emotions and create ambiguous impressions that are at the same time subject to fairly free interpretation by the viewer. In this way, the creative influence of the viewer's mind is achieved, which partly manages to sense the emotional states and impressions of the protagonist, and partly awakens his own, so the interpretation is ambiguous, flexible and free. At the same time, the author himself suggestively plays with perspective and angle of observation in one of the shots of the scene in which characters throw a revolver around and where this scene is at some point observed from the angle of the weapon itself. Perspective changes, from a narrow plan to observation from a distance, the experience sometimes seems first hand, and sometimes one gets the impression that only other people's experiences are observed. Images get different quality, from completely personal experiences, where the protagonist remembers the moments when his parents look at him, to scenes that leave the impression of someone else's memory, prefabricated experiences (like a black and white archive footage that seems only a stereotypical notion of the past, childhood…). The images follow each other in an unpredictable sequence, unexpected combinations give elements completely new associations, change their meaning, successfully transform their symbolism into a pure sensory impression, use the viewer's experience to deceive, mislead or betray his expectations. We are witnessing a protagonist sense of guilt that dates back to the past, his channeled dissatisfaction and anger that are now threatening to burst to the surface. At the same time, the viewer himself gets different associations from the offered juxtapositions, he has the opportunity to analyze his own emotions and impressions that are triggered when watching pictures, to compare them with the ones of the protagonist...
According to the author, "Memory is like a hybrid between the physical and digital world", where the boundary between real experience and (re)construction within the mind becomes transparent, and where the question of experience becomes less significant in relation to the construction of memory itself that bears the legitimacy of real (and as such it is accepted and experienced). Reconstruction of this way of experiencing, of the creative influence of consciousness, emotions and the flow of time to already experienced, seems the most appropriate within the film medium, which itself in a way mimics the flow of consciousness and the way we experience the world around us.
— FILM REVIEW by Berlin Revolution Film Festival Head Programmer Andrija Jovanovic