Bruce Takes Dragon Town

Emily Chao’s Bruce Takes Dragon Town is a meditation on displacement, historical disembodiment and the power of cinema to immortalise lost souls. The whirr of a film projector at a lonely outdoor screening, the rhythm of bustling nighttime crowds and scenes of dilapidated futurist architecture meld with clips from a film directed decades earlier by the filmmaker’s uncle in Taiwan. Shot digitally, this early work predates Chao’s process-based celluloid work, but it shares an interest in materiality through the footage of the outdoor 35mm film screening and incorporation of the 16mm-to-DVD transfer of her uncle’s film. The film’s first person commentary (delivered through on-screen text) creates a disjunction with its static cinematography, resulting in a perspective that feels both interior and disembodied. This unique viewpoint becomes an appropriate positioning for the film. Bruce Takes Dragon Town feels restless and free-floating, just like the lost souls (both ghostly and corporeal) it takes as its subject.