Person (2022)

To bear witness, tell the story, to re-examine history, the things that have been forgotten and those that are left unsaid. The task that Wang ChuYu tackles with Person, his first film, is ambitious. The story is that of Taiwan's history, revisited through a man, Mo-lin Wang, founder of the Taiwan Artist Theatre. The film is made up of two alternating scenes composed of two visual and narrative registers. First, we hear Wang's narrative, in which he recalls his political career and its twists and turns - from Taiwan to mainland China via Japan. It is the journey of a left-wing man, a utopian, who was a Communist for a time. As his story unfolds, on screen a group of workers is busy erecting a wooden structure. The other scene is built on a text by the same Mo-lin Wang, The Waste Land - a title taken from T.S. Eliot's famous epic poem - which two figures glimpsed at behind a canvas are reading and commenting on. The screen becomes both a veil and a page, a surface for inscriptions. This staging bias plays on the contradictions of a text in which the author primarily returns to years past. Filter? Scenery? Scaffolding? Metaphors, one suspects. The readings link together, the words echo each other or go out of sync in a fascinating pas de deux. History has multiple movements, like the ways in which it is presented. The author's questioning jostles from one scene to another: the recent political history of Taiwan, Mao's China and the triumphant capitalism of the 1980s, the history of nationalism, martial law, communist utopia, socialism and the defeat of Tiananmen Square. A reflection on the possible role, from this point on, of the notion of the person. A story with fiery echoes, which "little by little is becoming the dog turd that everyone's avoiding", in the words of Mo-lin Wang. Wang ChuYu sketches it out as a drama of talking ghosts and mute bodies - those of the workers in action, in counterpoint to the speech emanating from an absent body.