iin the west, government response to the coronavirus has been marked by negligence, miscommunication, and widespread disruption at the highest institutional level. From the Trump White House to Johnson’s Number 10, citizens have been left in the dark as left to die because official policies and implemented enforcement programs offer too little, too late. But in Asia, it would seem that they did everything right. Rapid and sweeping action “flattened the curve” and kept one of the most populous countries on earth to a casualty count below 5,000 – a figure dwarfed by the death toll in the United States.
The harrowing new documentary Coronation, made remotely and secretly by artist activist Ai Weiwei while he is stuck in Europe, conducts a slow-motion cinema investigation into how the wake of this pandemic best happened. An assortment of amateur cinematographers in Wuhan’s viral epicenter captured beautiful and terrifying images of a city in crisis, organizing their contributions under Ai’s sharp, critical vision. In these meditations out of necessity, he regulates a dualistic image of modern China as a force of great power, for better and for worse. The formidable national apparatuses that empowered the Chinese people to mobilize themselves and minimize the damage cut both ways, illustrating the dangers of a very central federal system along with the potential to do good. Ai frames this global cataclysm as an amplifying force, a trial by fire that accentuates and amplifies the already lubricating tensions between the individual and the state. Through this mosaic of ordinary life in an unusual time, he raises the tricky question of whether filing should be the cost of protection.
The film bills itself as the first feature-length documentary on the coronavirus, an up-to-the-minute rush job produced and edited in recent months. And while this almost means sacrificing some of the filmmaker’s accuracy – his favorite drone photography does not show as much of the enchanting mandala quality in his previous doc Human Flow – it’s remarkable how he uses his elements of style maintains despite second-hand shooting. In his signature legatoos long, he takes pieces a big picture of the planet from intimate snapshots of his smallest tragedies. He first trains his gaze on the Wuhan landscape itself, the expanses of ruin bathed in a rigor-mortis gray, and then to the people who survived in it.
Many of them wrestle with a quandary that is now available all over the world because personal freedom and public safety began to feel like an opponent. An early passage follows a couple who try to ride Wuhan back, regulating and restricting their movements. It is easy to understand why these measures were taken in place, and yet it is difficult to accept the side effect of increased supervision, unintentionally if not. Much of the Chinese counter-offensive involves collecting and managing information with unusual precision. The government knows where everyone and everything is at any given moment sounds like a dystopia, but it can also be the most effective and efficient way to deal with a plague.
The scale and authority of the Chinese state have enabled their agencies to deploy street-cleaning robots and set up labyrinthine hospital facilities in practical terms, yet those same qualities make assistance widely accessible on a person-to-person basis. We meet a grieving son, forced to slam through a bureaucratic kettle just to take ownership of his father’s ashes. Even more Kafkaesque, a temporary construction worker leaves Wuhan only to find that he cannot return to his house of Henan or recapture the city from where he came, with no other option but to live out of his car. (A heartbreaking one-line footnote in the press release states that he was admitted to Henan after completing the film, where he then took his own life.)
A more explicit ideological component takes shape in the second hour, crystallized in an argument over politics and media between an older former revolutionary and her more pragmatic son. She dismisses the quarantine immediately as a clear violation of her freedoms, while trying to reconcile his belief in President Xi Jinping’s plan with his healthy skepticism about his messages. Variations on their generational conflict play less directly throughout the film; a cheerful instructor teaches a group of young people a dance routine that encourages hand washing in one scene, and in another, a demonstration mixes loyalty to the party and commitment to the cause of security in one nationalist spirit.
Ai, alternating between a disarming urban beauty and a grim techno-surrealism of hoverboards and thermometer guns, Ai thinks a moment of far-reaching consequence. Even after the destruction of the virus, the effects of its manpower will continue for decades to come. He positions this unnatural disaster as a focal point for the ongoing struggle between obedience and individuality that has spanned his entire career – a glimpse of apocalypse not from random physical ruin, but from an organized campaign. He sounds like a universal alarm: even though we’re just trying to get by, they’re trying to get everything.
