Not Too Close, Not Too Detached
Gan Xiaoer
Release year: 2005
Run time: 35 mins
Film type: Fiction
Synopsis
One boy, one girl. One close space, one silent night. What is the relation between them? The great works in art history structure, influence their relations, and show us something. At the same time, the boy and the girl convey their experience and taste on these works. Usually, a boy and a girl will make love to end a scene or a film, but it didn’t happen. It seems that they spend the night clearly, but the tomorrow is still unknown.
Director biography
GAN Xiao'er (1970) studied business but then attended the film academy in Bejing, where he produced several short films during his studies. Raised From Dust is his second feature.
Director's statement
The film is about the director’s experience on the great works of art history. Some art works are thought by people to be unsuitable for daily use. They are distant for me, they come from art prints. I try to import these art works into our daily life. The experiment becomes a very mechanistic “Historical Materialism”, it means to eat Van Gogh’s Sunflower seeds. But the last shot of the film shows the experiment’s failure. The shot(my thought), comes from Michel Foucault’s analysis on the relations between our knowledge system and the real world. In his Les Mots et Les Choses, Foucault analyzed Velazquez’s Las Meninas and asked: “Where is the position of the King?” We changed the famous mirror into a real one, from where you can see our cameraman and our camera. The camera means another knowledge system, it belongs to “Les Mots”, not “Les Choses”.