Periphery is a strange word. It automatically suggests a border and that the speaker is on one side of it, yet unlike a horizon it implies an end point beyond which there is something or perhaps nothing. The periphery is where one kind of authority begins to fade out, a place where you can no longer quite say you are proximate to another place but now definitively at a distance from it and within a liminal space between one place and another. In the vast emptiness of the Gobi Desert, where and how could anyone really draw this line?
Distance and abstraction are at the centre of Zhou Tao’s experimental documentary Periphery of the Base (基地之侧, jīdì zhī zhāi) as his camera roams around the edges of a construction site somewhere in the desert. We don’t know what they’re building or why they’re building it, only that industry continues mindlessly as if it were almost automatic. The people, fractionally seen, are like worker ants busily beavering away on an unknown purpose. We observe two workmen on a break chatting idly about a dissatisfying work environment, swapping stories about the hatching of a baby goose and the supernatural powers of snakes which one of the men blames for the death of his mother after he killed one and abandoned it at a crossroads. They become excited about such an ordinary thing as cucumber to enliven their working day while sitting alone in a concrete trench as trucks rocket by in front of them and disrupt our ability to overhear their conversation.
Zhou captures other people talking about various ordinary things like the price of sheep, but otherwise follows figures in the landscape often obscured from view like shadows on the horizon. Some of them wear military uniforms, though the vastness of this environment and the dehumanising nature of the construction project seem to rob them all of identity. As the film continues, the sandstorms intensify and it becomes increasingly difficult to see through the mists and darkness. The figures lose their form. We only discern their general outlines as if this landscape had swallowed them or we were standing on the periphery of some other world gazing across a hazy horizon almost impenetrable to us.. We catch their voices on the breeze, but cannot quite discern their language while the camera remains at a distance in the permanent periphery of photography.
But the camera is also part of this world too. The images become hazier, as if the camera itself had sand in its eye, its gait less steady as if it stumbled against the wind. Having begun in documentary realism, Zhou soon descends into abstraction. The darkness is broken by the flashing red beacons of the construction machine and we are blinded by its light to enter almost another world of dust and shadows that takes on a dreamlike and hypnotic sensibility until we once again discover a figure to lead us out of the darkness and step back from the periphery. What we see now is only blue skies and white birds, a vision of peace and serenity in which the eerie sounds of construction are absent. The camera turns and looks in another direction. We exist on the periphery of destruction, a vast human machine busily undermining its foundations for no clear purpose while wandering through the desert alone beaten by wind and sand in search of the blue sky on which we in our foolishness willingly turned our backs.
The Periphery of the Base screens at Museum of the Moving Image 15th March as part of this year’s First Look
Trailer
Windows on Worlds 