Coming to VOD via iTunes today, Tuesday, November 11: PEOPLE’S PARK
Libbie D Cohn and JP Sniadecki’s single-take tour through a Chinese park debuted at Locarno in 2012. Its fest circuit has included Vancouver, Beijing Independent, Doclisboa, Viennale, Punto de Vista, Cinéma du Réel, New Directors/New Films, It’s All True, Edinburgh, Margaret Mead, RIDM, and the Whitney Biennial, among others. After its iTunes exclusive release, the film will be released on other major VOD platforms next Tuesday, November 18.
A project of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, Cohn and Sniadecki’s film aims to bring an immersive aspect to traditional models of ethnographic documentary. In this case, the method employed is a continuous take which lasts for the entirety of the film’s 75 minute running time, absent the brief end credits. Shot in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, the film presents the various goings-on within the bustling titular public space, bookended by the spectacle of public dancing. Along their measured, circuitous path through the park, Cohn and Sniadecki – the former shooting while seated in a wheelchair pushed by the latter, creating their own low-cost dolly, and in the process approximating a child’s perspective, perhaps intentionally, so as to engender a sense of exploration and wonderment – capture the anonymous masses enjoying their State-sanctioned leisure time, pouring drinks at picnic tables, rowing boats in the lake, buying shish kabobs, sitting for a chat, or, more often, acknowledging the presence of the filmmakers, whether by averting their gaze, flashing a quick peace sign, or simply looking back quizzically. As a result, the sense of immersion is constantly questioned, the camera a brief disruption to the everyday activities it attempts to document. Calling attention to itself, the film underscores its status as an experiment more than a genuine experience of immersion, which seems to be its point. Now, whether the film needed over an hour to establish that is the bigger question – it makes for a diverting virtual tour for a short jaunt, but isn’t quite commanding enough to prevent the mind from wandering away from the park and into other terrain.
what (not) to doc 