A Film Made Entirely From Surveillance Footage Asks What "Real" Means

"What is real? In a film built entirely out of real footage, where does the sense of reality lie? And a film that is wholly arranged and performed — how far from reality is it, really? These are questions well worth thinking hard about."

Dragonfly Eyes (《蜻蜓之眼》) is the first film directed by the artist Xu Bing. It has no cinematographer and no actors, and every frame of it comes from surveillance cameras. Abroad, it has caused a considerable stir.

At the Locarno International Film Festival, which closed in August, Dragonfly Eyes won the top FIPRESCI Prize (the international critics' award), a special mention for the Catholic humanitarian award, the Junior Jury Award, and several other honors.

The plot is held together by a woman called Dragonfly, who has plastic surgery. The name works two ways: it belongs to the female lead, and it also borrows the dragonfly — an insect with more than 10,000 compound eyes — as a figure for the surveillance camera. Plastic surgery is in the story because it brings an element of change, which makes up for a limitation of public surveillance footage: disconnected clips cannot push a plot forward on their own.

Spain's El Mundo wrote of the film: "Xu Bing stuns us with the rawness of the images he has chosen. His editing is masterful, and although using them to build a narrative feels somewhat clumsy, it also shows an enviable precision, especially in the moments that lead us to reflect and meditate — from the identity and the weight the individual carries in this violent, undignified world, to the boundaries of evil as a whole." Pradolive, the official magazine of Switzerland's Locarno International Film Festival, said: "This film forces the audience to question its definition of reality."

Pradolive's verdict is close to what Xu Bing set out to do.

"When I first started thinking about the story, I knew I wanted to write one about plastic surgery, because a lot of people felt the film couldn't move forward without a lead actor," Xu Bing said in an interview with QDaily. "Nobody had proved you could build a single protagonist's arc out of different people. So I thought I'd write a story about plastic surgery, because it involves a change in the character's appearance, which makes up for the limits of this particular kind of material. Besides, the core theme of the film is the relationship between the part we see and the part we don't see — or, put another way, between the outside and the essence. Plastic surgery is related to that theme too."

This is the first time Xu Bing, 62, currently vice president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, has worked in film, but Dragonfly Eyes takes a similar approach to much of his earlier art and returns to the same concerns: the creativity comes from paying attention to daily life, and the aim is to get the audience thinking by asking questions.

Xu Bing's breakout work, Book from the Sky (《天书》), is made of more than 4,000 fake Chinese characters that he designed, carved, and printed himself — characters that do not exist and that say nothing when you try to read them. Through it he hoped to probe, break down, and rebuild the way people think. So did his later work writing English in the visual form of Chinese characters, Square Word Calligraphy (《英文方块字书法》).

Another of his works, Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? (《何处惹尘埃》), was his response to 9/11, made while he was living in New York. The day after the attacks, the moment Xu Bing stepped out of his Brooklyn studio he felt the world had lost its balance: "I felt something was missing from my field of vision. It turned out that the ecological relations I had grown used to had been changed."

He then went down to lower Manhattan and collected dust thrown up by the collapse of the Twin Towers. The lines from an old Buddhist verse — "Fundamentally there is not a single thing, so where would dust collect?" — later led him to build an installation out of the bag of dust he had gathered. Through the collapse of the towers, he wanted to look at order and change.

"I have always held that my whole way of working, or the source of my inspiration, doesn't come from the art system itself," Xu Bing said. For him, Dragonfly Eyes was mostly a change of medium. "The styles, schools, and techniques that already exist inside the art system are a language artists of a given era created to say what they wanted to say in that era. But people living today have to express how today feels, and that has to be something no one has said before. To say it well, you have to find a new language, one that can say what needs saying today more exactly and with more feeling."

"Take Dragonfly Eyes. People used to judging art by its form will ask why Xu Bing has gone off to make a film this time. But to me any form is just language and a tool. I think all of it can be borrowed, taken apart, put back together, and used in new ways."

Xu Bing had the idea of making a film out of surveillance footage as early as 2013, prompted by the surveillance clips shown on legal-affairs programs on television. He began collecting footage through friends. The first tape he got had no sound and showed a parking lot outside a hospital ward. Xu Bing tried giving the people in it dialogue and inventing a plot for them. "From then on I was very excited, and certain the idea would work, as long as there was enough surveillance material and footage. But it was hard to come by back then, so I stopped."

As public surveillance footage has grown plentiful in recent years, Xu Bing restarted the project. In interviews he has cited these figures: as of 2015, more than 260 million surveillance cameras were at work around the world, a number growing about 15% a year.

Compared with other films, making Dragonfly Eyes involved far more that could not be pinned down, because no one knew what footage would turn up, or when. Script and footage had to be worked against each other again and again: sometimes a plot point had no footage to match it and had to be rewritten; sometimes new plot points had to be added because of footage that had appeared.

"At first I wrote the script myself, but I found that the script is an extremely central and specialized part of a film, so I brought in Zhang Hanyi to write it, and Zhai Yongming finished it," Xu Bing said.

In the end, out of more than 10,000 hours of publicly available video, Xu Bing and his team cut a 90-minute film.

Besides surveillance and reality, the film touches on many social subjects — violence, sexual harassment, the secularization of temples, among others. Xu Bing hoped Dragonfly Eyes would draw attention to these and get people arguing about them.

A work with no precedent also draws doubters. Some reviews, including one in The Hollywood Reporter, argued that the way the film presents itself is not very credible.

"What I wanted to do with this film was raise a lot of questions. Maybe, as that review says, audiences will feel it isn't real. But what makes it interesting, and what makes it contradictory, is that every frame of this film really happened, while in other films — narrative features — every frame is shot and performed," Xu Bing said. "That gets us to a deeper question: what is real? In a film built entirely out of real footage, where does the sense of reality lie? And a film that is wholly arranged and performed — how far from reality is it, really? These are questions well worth thinking hard about."

As for where the film ends up, Xu Bing said his team is pushing for a theatrical release. "We're working on getting it into cinemas now. This film wasn't made by normal methods, and there's a bit of a parody of the normal blockbuster in it — if it could reach a normal film's destination, that would only make it more taut. A lot of people, abroad as well, are very curious about it. I think its main audience should be arts-minded young people, young people generally, and people who work in sociology. And people whose lives are tied up with the internet may find something in it that interests them too."

One piece of that blockbuster parody is the shot of the "dragon seal" — the government approval certificate screened before commercial releases in China — that opens Dragonfly Eyes. It, too, came from publicly available video.

We talked with Xu Bing about more

Q = QDaily

X = Xu Bing

Q: I saw a lecture of yours a while back, where you said an artist's creativity comes from paying attention to life. Is this film a continuation of that, just with film as the medium?

X: Yes. I have always held that my whole way of working, or the source of my inspiration, doesn't come from the art system itself. The styles, schools, and techniques that already exist inside the art system are a language artists of a given era created to say what they wanted to say in that era. But people living today have to express how today feels, and that has to be something no one has said before. To say it well, you have to find a new language, one that can say what needs saying today more exactly and with more feeling. That, really, is where new forms of artistic expression come from.

So I hold that artists shouldn't spend all their time fiddling with forms inside art, or splitting hairs between them. I don't think there's much point in that. I don't think artists who work that way get very far. What this system doesn't have must be outside the system, and what's outside the system is the site of the world and of society. I've always felt an artist should know how to convert the creativity and energy that gather at the site of society or the world into inspiration of his own, because society and the world never stop defining themselves; there's no end to it. Take Dragonfly Eyes. People used to judging art by its form will ask why Xu Bing has gone off to make a film this time. But to me any form is just language and a tool. I think all of it can be borrowed, taken apart, put back together, and used in new ways.

Q: What did it feel like to work in film for the first time?

X: Film really is something I hadn't done before. I got a lot out of it, because film is different in kind from contemporary art. Film is a flowing form of expression — it fixes a stretch of time for the audience. Whatever you see in that stretch, you see; if you miss it, it's gone. So while working with my team and the screenwriters, I kept noticing their methods and where they put their weight. A work of art just sits there, and the audience can look at it as long as it likes, so when you make it you put more weight on the material itself and on the expression within that situation.

The other thing is that this film really does use a method no one in the history of cinema has used. Even though our team had experts from many fields, film included, none of them had ready-made experience for handling a film made this way. Our film has no cinematographer and no actors — and how do you make a feature-length narrative film with no cinematographer and no actors? They had no experience of that. Then again, although we had no cinematographer, anyone whose surveillance footage was uploaded online became one of our cinematographers. How to use all that abundant material, how to push the story forward with it — these were problems of their own.

Q: Looking back, is there anything you regret, or anything that could have been better?

X: Everyone who has spent years making films reaches the same conclusion: film is an art of regret. There will always be regrets, and parts that don't quite land. But looking at the years we spent on this film, I think we did our utmost to keep the regrets to a minimum.

I've always been very hard on my own work. I like taking on things that are difficult and challenging, things other people may think impossible — but if I can see even a sliver of a gap through which it might be done, I go all in, and I seize on everything that could help, so that nothing is wasted, so that every part sets off, suggests, and supplements every other, and the whole thing goes as far as it can. There are still regrets in it, because a film, unlike a work made alone, runs through many hands.

Q: You collected so much material. Do you plan to use it for other projects?

X: These things can't be planned. Critics abroad have also asked whether, as surveillance networks develop further, this method might be taken up by more people, and they say there's no way to know. For myself, if there is more I want to express, then it's certainly possible.

While making this film I've gone on making and showing other art. I have more than 20 exhibitions running abroad at once, solo shows and group shows both. As an artist, or as someone who hopes to stay creative, I'm always in motion. Making this film has also been a process of opening up our thinking, and in that process there's room to think about the next stage of work and where to go next.

But that plan doesn't exist yet, and if it doesn't exist, talking about it is pointless. What an artist needs to make, or needs to search for, often isn't that definite or clear — but he senses that something is pulling at him. What that something is, he doesn't know himself, and that's exactly why he goes looking, and tries to express it through art, through the visual, or through something else.

Q: From your own perspective and experience, how do you understand contemporary art?

X: On the whole, I think this new mode of expression, contemporary art, is remarkable. Next to other art forms, oil painting or sculpture, it's a very young field — its history isn't long, and it keeps rolling forward by mutating on its own. In truth, humanity hasn't yet had the time or the experience to judge what contemporary art really is.

You could say the field is immature and still developing. On the other hand, its relation to art as a whole is that it sits inside the old, classical art system. However contemporary a work is, in the end it has to enter the classical display system of the museum — a biennale, for instance. That system is classical, castle-like, centered on a place. It runs somewhat against the ways of contemporary people and of the future. The way of the future is diffuse, scattering outward.

There is a lot here worth thinking about — for instance, whether contemporary art as we conceive it can stand level with a world this complicated and still express it effectively. In fact, the creativity of the contemporary art system, as I see it, lags far behind the creativity of the era and of society, even though we all take contemporary art to be the most creative form there is.

Even as I make contemporary art, I'm reflecting on its relation to human civilization as it has developed so far, and on its limits. The reason Dragonfly Eyes interests me so much is that I'm looking for a working method that matches contemporary civilization. As I keep saying: we don't have a single cinematographer, but everyone in China who has ever uploaded footage to the cloud has become one of our cinematographers. It's like the Didi ride-hailing system: that system doesn't own a single car, yet every car in the city is working for it. That is a working method that matches contemporary civilization.

Cover image from Unsplash; images in the article provided by Xu Bing Studio.