A Film That Leaves You Baffled, and a Man Who Wants to Invent a World | How I Became a Director ④

A scene like this could probably only happen at something like the FIRST Film Festival — the problem is that once you step outside, the meaning left in it belongs to the director alone.

After the screening of Walking Guide (《步行指南》) at the FIRST Youth Film Festival, the festival's chief curator, Duan Lian, walked onstage and asked anyone who felt they had understood the film to raise a hand. The audience sat silent. Duan Lian smiled and said that one viewer had raised a hand. Then he passed the microphone to Chen Xi, the director of Walking Guide, and asked him to explain to a room full of baffled viewers just what kind of film this was.

Before we get to Chen Xi's explanation, let me describe, as an audience member, what I actually saw. Walking Guide is an animated film, and because Chen Xi made all of it himself, the 3D modeling looks rough. The story seems to begin with a green sphere. It starts moving outward from the place where it was born. As it walks, it comes across a skeleton made of steel rebar. The sphere puts the skeleton on, and now it looks something like a robot.

The robot walks on, and what appears ahead of it looks like a construction site. A pig-shaped creature turns up beside it and hands it a gun. Carrying the gun, the robot meets a group of girls in watermelon-patterned skirts on one floor of the site, raises the gun, and kills the girls one by one. Black spheres rise out of the girls' bodies, and the robot collects them — the way a player, having killed a monster in a game, picks up the gear it drops.

At this point I thought Walking Guide was a political allegory. The pig-shaped creature was the pig from Animal Farm: they run the whole society and get others to do their killing for them. But then a girl leads the robot to the top of the construction site. In the distance a giant robot suddenly appears, shouldering a laser weapon, and sweeps the area with fire. The robot is killed just like that.

The pig-shaped creature reappears, picks the gun up off the robot's body, and walks into a room that has never appeared in the film before. There are two giant robots in this room as well. It sets the gun on one of them, pilots the other itself, and starts fighting the giant robot that killed the earlier robot — and loses. I began to realize that Walking Guide was not the political allegory I had imagined.

What follows gets stranger and stranger. My memory of the film also starts to blur, because the film itself is so hard to read. The plot afterward seems to go like this: the girl who led the robot to the top of the site picks up its wreckage and puts it into a repair pod to be restored. She climbs into another repair pod herself. Once the repairs are done, the two of them walk together through a tunnel toward the sea. Another robot appears at the shore and fishes a strange creature out of the water. The two of them walk in through the creature's mouth, into another space.

By this point in the film I was completely lost. I'd bet only about ten minutes had passed since it began, and I remember clearly that the ticket gave Walking Guide's running time as more than 80 minutes.

What happened after that I can barely describe, because I had no idea how to make sense of it. That patch of blue I took for the sea — was it really the sea? Could it have been some other blue thing? Was the girl who came out of repair the same girl as before? Or was the thing I understood as repair not repair at all, but simply a girl walking into a space that can be sealed shut and then, some time later, walking back out of it? Unable to form any whole understanding of the film, I began to doubt my reading of every single element on screen.

Chen Xi later answered my questions. The blue really was the sea, the repair really was repair, and the gun I saw was in fact a collector for the particles on the watermelon girls' skirts. But he did not think that was the point. In the second half of the film, Chen Xi designed a wooden man who gets eaten into by a bug, so two other characters show up to help him kill it off.

I asked Chen Xi, "At the time, I understood that bug to be the wooden man's control center."

"That bug just gnaws wood."

"But look — after they catch the bug and take it away, the wooden man goes off with them obediently. Because through the bug, they've taken control of him."

"Oh! That works too!" Chen Xi said, appearing to accept my reading. Excitedly, he grabbed a bucket of popcorn someone had left beside the seats and started explaining the principle. He piled a few kernels into one heap, then piled another heap on the other side.

"When you design a game, the designer lays out a series of nodes, and the player is bound to go from A to B." Chen Xi then used the popcorn to lay three paths linking the two heaps. "The audience thinks, this feels great, this game is so well made, it's a sandbox. That's the game's mechanics."

Chen Xi has a mischievous side too. "You can also understand this story as the pig wanting to take over the watermelon girls' maid café. That works too."

It reminded me of what Duan Lian said after Chen Xi finished explaining the idea behind Walking Guide: "I believe everyone probably enters and understands this film in a different way. For me, it's a love story, and that moved me quite a bit."

During the Q&A, one viewer said the reason he had managed to sit through the whole film without leaving early was that he kept creatively misreading it — taking the red parts, for instance, as some kind of political allegory. That may work on everyone who watches Walking Guide; myself included, every one of us tries to understand something from this film.

That fits the conventional understanding of film, or the habit of watching one. At the start of a film, the audience first finds a character to feel with. Dim lights, a screen that fills every channel of perception — it is easy for the audience to feel what the character feels, to breathe with the protagonist and share their fate, and then, as the film ends, to reflect on what the character went through and come away with a little lesson about life.

"What we find is that in this film, the audience tries to get in, then follows one character's thread, keeps moving forward and thinks, this must be the protagonist. Then you find that as you follow, you lose them, and it switches to someone else," Duan Lian said. As chief curator of the FIRST Youth Film Festival, he was himself a kind of bridge from ordinary film to Walking Guide. "I think it breaks the customary way films tell stories. I think this is a cinematic language that isn't very cinematic."

Chen Xi said, "I want to push image-based narrative forward."

Every year, the FIRST Youth Film Festival honors some experimental work. In the past, experimental films and animation shared a single award. This year, citing "little exploration of new visual language and little experimental spirit," the organizing committee scrapped that award, but brought Walking Guide in as a narrative feature, giving Chen Xi a nomination for Best Artistic Exploration.

On the day Walking Guide screened, Chen Xi wore a gray T-shirt and black track pants, carried an ordinary backpack and had a close-cropped buzz cut — the picture of the stereotypical engineering student. He did his bachelor's in the fine arts department at Jiangnan University and his master's in the fine arts department at East China Normal University. He lives in Beijing. He is an artist.

In 2016, Chen Xi held a solo show at A+ Contemporary, an Asian contemporary art centre in Shanghai, called ∞ — the mathematical symbol for infinity. He paints, and he makes animation. In its introduction to him, the art centre's website says he gives viewers "a sense of the uncanny and the incongruous, reflecting the unceasing contradictions and conflicts of life, or a sense that conventional values run counter to the principles by which daily life operates."

But if you trace the idea behind Walking Guide back, you may find some of it in the promotional video for that show. Chen Xi said he wanted to paint machines. "I reduce a machine back to the few rules it starts from. I'm like a machine myself, like a program — I set the program's initial state, but I don't know what the program will finally turn into."

This time he put it differently: "I want the audience to see the system behind events directly." Perhaps the machine is the system; the physical laws that keep the machine running correspond to the system's rules, and events and characters are simply what the machine produces as it runs.

A closer analogy might be a video game. You think you are playing the game, but the game may be playing you. The designer sets the rules, and the player can only act inside them.

Chen Xi said this idea is planted at the very start of Walking Guide, and there are at least a few places where it should raise the question for the audience. One is when the green sphere faces two choices: walk up, or walk on. Walking up would let it see the system, but the sphere chooses to walk on, tripping the switch of the game — of the system — and from there the whole film runs according to the rules and settings already in place.

The other is the point of view. When the robot shoots the girls in watermelon skirts, the film copies the first-person view of a shooter like Counter-Strike. That, too, tells the audience: you are being controlled by something.

"Once the audience realizes this, they've understood the film."

But the film is far from that simple. After the girl and her companion walk into the seabed, it pours out plot and detail. There is a battle between a rabbit-man and a frog-man, a siege between a spring-man and the girl, a love story across species, an armored car that fires beams of little hearts. What are any of these actually for?

"Take the maze in the film" — a passage that looks a lot like Pac-Man, in which a character (I've forgotten whether it belonged to the frog-man or the rabbit-man) carries a gun and picks off the monsters floating in the maze one by one. I asked Chen Xi, "What would happen if you cut this part?"

"You'll notice that every time you kill a monster, a bit of music plays, like the game rewarding the player," Chen Xi said. "Is that a reward for the audience? For the character? A reward for whom?"

"Does every scene have a design like this?"

"Yes," Chen Xi said. He built two or three moments into the film to let the audience rest. "Are you overwhelmed?"

He was quiet for two seconds — rare, in the middle of his otherwise nonstop talk — and then said: "If I don't make something complex, I always feel there's nothing to talk about at all. You have to let the audience see something complex. People live in a complex world."

Chen Xi seems to want Walking Guide to be a metaphor for the world. You can feel the film's system, the thing manipulating you. You can also see your own behavior under its control. So the next question is: in that situation, how should you live?

His answer is walking. In the film, every character keeps walking, facing its surroundings, then acting. "If a person has something they want to do, they do it. They won't stop, not until death pulls them out of their own actions."

That sounds as if it contradicts the theory of the system Chen Xi has built. If action is preset by the system, then action itself is not an individual's choice — so what is the point of acting at all?

"We're devices the universe created to burn energy, so that it can reach a stable state," he said, citing a law of science: the higher the energy, the less stable a thing is. "Humans turn everything into a very stable state, and that's when the universe feels happiest."

He lowered his voice: "Why did humans invent plastic? Because plastic is the most stable thing there is. It turns a lot of unstable things into stable ones — is that the essence of being human?" Then he burst out laughing — the contentment of someone who has just uncovered an earth-shaking secret, or the daze of someone worn past his limit, or the smugness of someone whose prank has just worked.

In that moment he looked a little mad, like an emperor who had crowned himself.

With authority he had granted himself, Chen Xi created the world inside Walking Guide.

He set the laws of that world first: a sphere stands for an individual, a joint stands for an action governed by the system; when a character dies, part of its body is inherited by the next one; the upper layer of the world stands for the system, the lower layer for events. Then he made each character, and from the characters he began writing the story itself. From having the concept for the story to finishing the film, Chen Xi spent a year working alone.

He is pleased with it. "The difficulty was very high, but I could pull it off, and I did. And nobody on Earth has done this — in features, so far, nobody has done this."

I asked him: "Would you consider giving a fuller explanation before the screening next time?" Before this one, Chen Xi had only said that this was a film carrying a lot of information, and that the amount would keep growing. I told him the introduction felt so thin that by the end of the film I was falling apart.

Chen Xi didn't answer my question directly: "The amount of information in the film is exciting. After I finished it, I knew I'd put a lot of intelligence into it, and that the ambition was too big — here you are, actually wanting to push image-based narrative forward."

"I wanted to do this, to solve the narrative problem between actors and directors." He paused, then hurriedly took back what he had said. "Not solve — push them forward."

Is anyone buying it?

Duan Lian used the words "very pleasantly surprised" for how he felt the first time he saw the film, but a companion of mine complained to me afterward that he had no idea what the film meant.

Most people seemed to feel the same. After the screening, reviews trickled onto Douban: "Couldn't get through it," "Didn't understand it," "No interest in interpreting it," "Don't want to comment." And the still larger number of people who simply walked out probably had no wish to leave a review at all. When the screening ended, of a hall that had been packed, only about 70 percent of the audience was still in their seats.

As for me, I still had a vague feeling that the film's English title, Sleepwalking Through The Walk Simulators, hints that the whole thing may be nothing more than a dream. I also have to admit that Chen Xi's explanations gave me the urge to watch Walking Guide again.

Chen Xi patted his bag; the film was on a hard drive inside it. He said he planned to keep submitting it to festivals — maybe some festival would leak it out. "And then all at once everyone on Douban will have seen it, and somehow everyone will have watched it."

Images from film stills and posters.