The Gay Critic
26:11 / single channel video / colour / stereo / 2K / 2015
*audio description available
The film shares intimate moments of friendships, in between time for various forms of labour, with groups of men amidst urban infrastructures in Chengdu, Sichuan. The working group whose stories the filmmaker’s father identifies strongly with, are engaged through the songs of vocaloid singer Oliver, narrating excerpts of Yukio Mishima’s “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion”, while omitting symbolic enunciation. Accompanied by friends and families’ journeys through parts of Portugal, the filmic time extends into life forces who emerge on site and are already apart of.
Text: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima
Translator: Zoénie Liwen Deng
Proofreader: Patrick Davies
Vocaloid: Oliver
Camer, Score, Edit: Shen Xin
Music: Kristian Møller Johansen
Animation: He Jiayin
With special thanks to Nuno Direitinho, Ricardo Ferreira, Cezar Sperinde and Sara Varandas
general notes for the sonic
The Gay Critic uses singular musical elements with two main components. The first one is the voice of a vocaloid named Oliver, who sings the selected passages from The Golden Temple written by Yukio Mishima, omitting the words “Golden Temple” consistently when uttered in English. Oliver’s voice is childlike and androgynous, sung through notes mapped by a score written on piano by Shen Xin, that can be described as spontaneous, emotionally evocative, at times filled with shadows, and at times hitting a height of the winged. The second component is original music written for the film by Norwegian musician Kristian Møller Johansen, also known as Melkeveien. His music can be described as built upon structures of synthetic textures; he had described his own music as “funk with a sinister edge”. Listening to his music filled with spirits of acceptance towards the impossibility of dark tunes and stories, led to his creation for this work, meditating on the journey of love through agents of life, death, and labour.