Dragonfly Eyes

How do you make a film without a cast or a cinematographer, a movie without a movie camera? The great Chinese conceptual artist Xu Bing has found a way that offers both unknown pleasures and uneasy challenges. is culled entirely from 14,000 hours of publicly available surveillance video that Xu and his studio collected from online sources over a three-year research period. Xu and his collaborators Zhai Yongming and Zhang Hanyi wrote a script, edited the footage to fit it, and hired actors to record dialogue. The result tells a story about a mad, on-the-run romance between Qingting, a Buddhist adept turned milkmaid turned internet celebrity, and her boyfriend Kevin. It’s also a documentary, at least on a moment-to-moment scale, since every clip (and there are around 1,400 shots) is a record of things that actually happened. Xu has perversely reverse-engineered a commercial narrative, disassembling it to its basic constitutive elements, thrown