Between found footage and collaborative filmmaking.Present Perfect
Shengze Zhu, 2019, Hong Kong/US
genre: structural documentary
Present Perfect has been one of my favorite viewings in a busy couple of weeks of watching festival documentaries. It’s also the one that probably had the most people walking out of the screening early. I could see why, since it is at times a durational exercise. Shengze Zhu, whose Another Year I also loved, followed a number of live streaming “anchors” in China, editing down hundreds of hours of footage into a 2 hour film. I’d recommend this introduction to the film and the interview with Zhu. While the film eventually focuses on a few anchors, intercutting their live-streams, the director preserves a lot of the tedium of the medium… watching someone eat dinner, walk up stairs, or work. The current festival doc style is to preserve moments of dead time in the material, much like art cinema, but Present Perfect goes further in this choice.
That said, I found the material riveting. Partly because I was unfamiliar with the live streaming phenomenon, which seems somewhere between a YouTube star (actual or aspiring) and an internet video chat. The cultural form is interesting in itself, and undoubtedly what drew Zhu to it, but it’s equally the behavior of the on-screen personas, at once intimate and performative.
Present Perfect features a number of anchors with physical conditions or disabilities that mark them as outsiders, and my first impulse was to sense something potentially unethical in this. But it becomes clear that the anchors gain a lot from their participation in live streaming (and I gather the participants are aware they are part of the film). The form allows for interpersonal connection not possible in unmediated life. It is clear, too, the fans of these anchors deal with their own prejudices and reactions to the physical otherness, and the anchors each in their way challenge or deflect these attitudes.
In her interview, Zhu notes, “That’s why I don’t consider this found footage, even though the footage is from the internet and there is no professional cameraperson involved. For me it’s more like a film shot by many different people from across China.” That’s why this film stayed with me after the viewing, a sense that it’s a structural exercise poised between found footage and collaborate or crowd-sourced documentary. It gains from its harnassing into cinematic documentary form (feature length viewing experience, divided into sections, given structure however subtle) but it also is a film of the digital age, in which the unboundedness of the actuality source poses us in a different relationship to time and experience.