Xu Tong fortune-telling

Recently, I learned about Xu Tong's documentary through this article: A Northeast woman who refused to accept her fate.

I went to the oil pipeline to see the wheat harvest, fortune telling, soup stock, and later the movie "Digging Eyes" and other tramp trilogy. I admire this director very much. He can go deep into the lives of prostitutes, street fortune tellers, underworld and theatrical troupes, make friends with them, make them willing to show their faces in movies, and show their miserable lives to audiences all over the world (except us, for well-known reasons).

These movies let me see another world, the theme is like ants, their positive and optimistic will to survive, all kinds of vulgar language that casually appear, and all kinds of rules of mixing the world, which are far more shocking than the documentary channels I usually watch, such as Arrow Factory and Aha.

What's even more rare is that these films are not only the simple stacking of materials, but also the director's expression techniques. The use of lens, the interspersed organization of stories and the images contained in some seemingly idle pens give these dark stories a unique artistic sense, but they are not the small fresh art of Arrow Factory and Aha, and they are also different from Jia's overly melodramatic art.

The last paragraph of Digging Eyes is the best. The protagonist sings his experience of being gouged out into a play for everyone to consume. Singing, interspersed with photos of the crime scene and photos before the protagonist. The lyrics are too vivid, and the atmosphere created by the camera is too tense, which makes the audience feel seriously uncomfortable and the impression is comparable to that of a horror film. At the same time, I had a strange idea: art should not be divided into high and low, but should be divided into high and low. Such a thick and rustic performance makes people feel surprisingly shocked, but artists can only make ends meet, while the works of so-called pop artists such as Murakami Takashi and KAWS are empty, but they are sought after by hipsters at high prices. What kind of world is this?