THE SHADOWLESS TOWER: GALWAY SCREENING, INTRODUCTON BY Jimmy Tianxiang Wang
Directed by Chinese Filmmaker Zhang Lü, The Shadowless Tower has received multiple accolades at major international film festivals in 2023. It was nominated at the Berlinale for the Golden Bear Award, and, as one of the biggest winners at the Beijing International Film Festival, it was awarded many honours including Best Screen Writing, Best Cinematography, Best Actor, and Best Supporting Actor.
As a prolific arthouse film director with a unique cultural and identity background, Zhang Lü's career trajectory distinguishes itself among many Asian and East Asian filmmakers. Rather than coming from a professional film background, he initially taught literature courses at Yanbian University in Jilin Province, mainland China, while also writing a series of novels and short stories, only embarking on his debut feature film at the age of forty. His early works focused on themes such as borderlands, immigration, North Korean defectors, and the cultural and political identity dilemmas of ethnic minorities. Later, Zhang Lü moved to Seoul, South Korea, to teach film at Yonsei University, where he directed several Korean-language films. It was not until recent years that he returned to mainland China, shifting his focus to metropolitan life and urban middle-class. The Shadowless Tower is his latest film, in which Zhang Lü turns the camera towards Beijing, the capital city of China, where he once spent the longest period of his life. The story of the film unfolds around two intertwined plotlines: the romantic relationship between the protagonist Gu Wentong, a middle-aged food blog writer and a young photographer Ouyang Wenhui; and Gu Wentong's tentative reconciliation with his long-lost father, who was cast out of the family by Gu's mother after being falsely accused of sexual harassment on a bus.
The seemingly simple tale is imbued with a certain richness and vitality by its setting in Beijing, a city whose spaces carry profound historical, cultural, and political significance. According to director Zhang Lü's repeated emphasis in numerous interviews, his creative motivation and inspiration for all his film work primarily stem from his perception and observations about space and place. In each of his films, what he endeavours to depict and capture is the traces of time and history within space, as well as the flow of emotion, the authenticity of which is highly dependent on the presence of spatial materiality.
Set primarily in Beijing's Xicheng District, the film represents the fragmented urban spaces in a palimpsest manner: the layered imprints of history and time in those spaces reveal themselves to us slowly and implicitly as the protagonist and Ouyang stroll and talk in the old city. As we may see in the film, despite being one of the most well-preserved areas in terms of the traditional appearance of architecture within Beijing, the physical spaces in Xicheng District have been incessantly and excessively re-touched, and the rhythm of everyday life here has been continuously disrupted, distorted, and reshaped amid the whole city's dramatic transformations during its decades-long globalization; the deployment of information technology and the subsequent newly emerging mediascape, coupled with the pervasive infiltration of the consumer economy, have now integrated these traditional spaces into the cultural logic of late capitalism or post-modernism, represented by superficial nostalgia.
Additionally, the portrayal of the relationship between Gu and his father in this film suggests that their fractured familial bond is, in fact, a victim of the absurdities of public morality and institutional discourse during a particular historical period. Irrevocably etched into both the two characters, this piece of shared past not only constantly returns through individual memories, but also sculpts their respective home spaces as well as their contacts with these spaces.
The most emblematic spatial element in the film is undoubtedly the Tower, as explicitly indicated by the film's title. The white pagoda, located in Miaoying Temple, was constructed in the 13th century and is well-preserved today, becoming an enduring landmark of the Xicheng District. As a visual motif, the pagoda recurs throughout the narrative, both obscurely and powerfully. In a city that has been undergoing ceaseless changes, it stands there, weathered by time. Its immense sense of oppression and the fluctuating proximity of its presence resemble an eternal force akin to history and memory that are always haunting there, piercing into the protagonist's life and shaping all his dilemmas and opportunities. Meanwhile, the mysterious legend that the shadow of the pagoda can never be seen around it but is projected somewhere on the Tibetan Plateau poetically and subtly resonates with the middle-aged protagonist's state of being, lost in the intertwining of his present and past.
Zhang Lü's fascination and dedication to spaces have always guided his filmmaking. In the same vein, The Shadowless Tower continues his poetic, witty, and philosophical exploration of spaces and the individuals living within them. All of these lend the film a quality of profundity and enchantment.
(May 2024)
Jimmy Tianxiang Wang is a PhD Researcher at Huston School of Film and Digital Media, University of Galway. His research focuses on urban spaces in contemporary Chinese film.