Water Margin

Dawei Zhang: "Recovery of the ordinary."

In 1981, French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, published his treatise on signs, symbols and reality: Simulacra and Simulation. In his work, he speaks of a dis-order of the post-modernity situated in societies of late capitalism, wherein the signs and symbols constructing the shared reality of a given society precede and eventually do away with the original objects and people which they seek to represent. This form of society causes the distinction that previously divided reality and its signifiers to vanish, and heightening the absurdity of the individuals relation to the Real, or even, towards ones own works (or even the self,) to a point wherein there is little hope for meaning in any shape or form. Thus, Baudrillard instructs us, following the work of Jorge Luis Borges, that this given society makes such use of the signs and symbols it uses, that the 'maps' of reality themselves replace the Real we sought to navigate by way of these particular details. In this 'reality,' individuals labor is re-oritented towards establishing and securing a place in the representation itself, and as they devote themselves to this representation, the Real itself gets one step further towards complete annihilation.

It is with this in mind that one enters Dawei Zhang's directorial debut: Water Margin, which is itself a mournful meditation on this very cultural logic in contemporary China and simultaneously the passion which drives the film is that very refusal to let the hope of undoing this paradigm die. This film is standing on the shoulders of giants, for those films from which it seems influenced, as well as those few films who fit within the same intersection of micro-categories are nothing short of strokes of incredible genius unto themselves. The films which are most strikingly related towards Water Margin are Liu Jiayin's Oxhide and Tsai Ming-Liang's Walker series. In Oxhide for example, we find a portrait of the director's despe...