Mainland Chinese music isn't all erhus and Teresa Teng. Likewise, Mainland film isn't all Zhang Yimou and quasi-political dramas. Like a match made in post-rock experimental film heaven, Are We Really So Far From a Madhouse? is a collaboration between Li Hongqi (who sent me swooning last year at VIFF with Winter Vacation) and underground rock darlings P.K. 14. Pushing the boundaries of a documentary, Madhouse might as well be considered a sound and image collage within a very loose context. Li hangs out with P.K. 14 on tour in China, films them on stage, in the van and in hotels, and sets a dozen of these sequences to their songs and bizarre ambient sound. If that sounds like a glossed up tour video, think again. Li is a director who relishes mundane and monotony to the point of beautiful abstraction.
P.K. 14 has been around for more than ten years and has been an influential band in the growing underground music scene in the Mainland. They cite bands like Sonic Youth, Joy Division, Television and Fugazi as their heroes, and this is reflected in their music. But biography is the last thing you are going to get from Madhouse. As a matter of fact, if you forwent a synopsis of the film you would have no idea that these four guys were any more than dudes hanging out and driving around in their van. You don't see these guys carry an instrument, let alone perform until halfway through the film. What you do see are unheard conversations in hotel rooms, nodding off to sleep between mussing with a PSP, the endless chain of trucks they pass on the road, an occasional truck stop, street curb, lobby and restaurant, and, yes, one magnetic live performance.
Far more important than what you see, however, is what you hear. Li begins his documentary-cum-rock video by denying the audience the simple pleasure of sync sound, divorcing image and audio to a point of absurdity. As we watch the band members hang out in a hotel room (a scene not that dissimilar to watching the often silent boys in Winter Vacation), the soundtrack plays something akin to animal sounds enhanced with someone's guttural vocal exercises. A conversation emerges under this bed of sound but we will never know what it is. The effect is very strange. And although the film underscores what you are not hearing, it is pretty obvious that it probably doesn't amount to much anyway. The opening is an eight-minute trial that eventually transitions into a new sequence of anti-action in the tour van propelled by one of the band's songs. And so the pattern goes¬--alternating segments between cacophonous animals and blissful rock music.
The film is a brilliant setup that automatically heightens everything you see and hear with the most simple of machinations. And, at the heart, is a loving tribute to P.K. 14 that focuses on the banal workhorse ethics of the band and embellishes it with music that blares without politics or nationality to burden it. Are We Really So Far From a Madhouse?, a title taken from the lyrics of a P.K. 14 song, is a blistering, enthralling, frustrating and incredibly engaging doc that defies categorization. It was only a few weeks ago on these very pages that, in light of the documentary about Singapore's rock band I Am David Sparkle titled Ignore All Detours, we forget about Pearl Jam Twenty. I can only second that with a vote in favor of Li Hongqi's oddly effective impression of P.K.14 in Are We Really So Far From a Madhouse?
P.K. 14 has been around for more than ten years and has been an influential band in the growing underground music scene in the Mainland. They cite bands like Sonic Youth, Joy Division, Television and Fugazi as their heroes, and this is reflected in their music. But biography is the last thing you are going to get from Madhouse. As a matter of fact, if you forwent a synopsis of the film you would have no idea that these four guys were any more than dudes hanging out and driving around in their van. You don't see these guys carry an instrument, let alone perform until halfway through the film. What you do see are unheard conversations in hotel rooms, nodding off to sleep between mussing with a PSP, the endless chain of trucks they pass on the road, an occasional truck stop, street curb, lobby and restaurant, and, yes, one magnetic live performance.
Far more important than what you see, however, is what you hear. Li begins his documentary-cum-rock video by denying the audience the simple pleasure of sync sound, divorcing image and audio to a point of absurdity. As we watch the band members hang out in a hotel room (a scene not that dissimilar to watching the often silent boys in Winter Vacation), the soundtrack plays something akin to animal sounds enhanced with someone's guttural vocal exercises. A conversation emerges under this bed of sound but we will never know what it is. The effect is very strange. And although the film underscores what you are not hearing, it is pretty obvious that it probably doesn't amount to much anyway. The opening is an eight-minute trial that eventually transitions into a new sequence of anti-action in the tour van propelled by one of the band's songs. And so the pattern goes¬--alternating segments between cacophonous animals and blissful rock music.
The film is a brilliant setup that automatically heightens everything you see and hear with the most simple of machinations. And, at the heart, is a loving tribute to P.K. 14 that focuses on the banal workhorse ethics of the band and embellishes it with music that blares without politics or nationality to burden it. Are We Really So Far From a Madhouse?, a title taken from the lyrics of a P.K. 14 song, is a blistering, enthralling, frustrating and incredibly engaging doc that defies categorization. It was only a few weeks ago on these very pages that, in light of the documentary about Singapore's rock band I Am David Sparkle titled Ignore All Detours, we forget about Pearl Jam Twenty. I can only second that with a vote in favor of Li Hongqi's oddly effective impression of P.K.14 in Are We Really So Far From a Madhouse?