Breathless Animals is a poetic documentary. A kind of photo film where of course, photos move or objects in photos move with the help of editing. So it could rise this question again: What is a motion picture?

The director Lei Lei uses different materials: photos, slides and film in order to tell fragments from her life in the sixties and seventies, and to tell the story of her childhood, of her family and the society that she lived in, in 1970s and 1980s. Through her story, we have a journey through history, that shows a conflict between tradition and modernity and how life has changed over the years in China.

The movie gives informations about Chinese culture and it’s history. It is an episodic film and well structured. You have many photos of different objects that we use or people in China use in their ordinary life from different angles: bicycles, bathrooms, beds, sheets, chairs and then the city: streets, markets, people, sidewalks and so on. From them you can see the architect of the city. The photos have a great sense of aesthetic. The promotional billboards on the walls in streets are something that gets the attention. On one for example we see an ugly image of a happy family with one child. The picture was painted on the wall in one of the main streets in Beijing and below was written: Only one child is enough. The photos actually looked a lot like Chinese paintings.

The director had access not only to an interesting archive but also he had a great amount of old personal photos and materials. I could not of course get all the cultural references. I have to do some research in order to get into details about the political and social events of the 1970s and 80s in China. Weiterlesen „12 frames per second“ →