Black Dog: A Chinese Story from Dystopia to Utopia
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Director Guan Hu’s Cannes-winning film Black Dog is set in a desert city in North West China. A man returns home after years in prison for being responsible for someone’s death. He is well known in his hometown. Before prison, he was a motorcycle acrobat who worked in the circus and his act was very popular at the time. Although those who knew him treat him with respect, returning home is not easy… The house is not the same as he left it, and the relatives of the deceased are not at ease.
Guan Hu is a sixth generation Chinese director. The 6th Generation, as it is known, made films in the 2000s. Unlike the 5th Generation, it tells the story of today’s China instead of the glorious China. We see the effects of the economic transformation in China in the background, even if we don’t always see it as the main story. It can be said that this generation made an urban cinema and focused on the common man.
Black Dog opens with a scene of a bus driving through the desert. There are only stray dogs in the Gobi desert, and a nylon bag flapping in the wind…The date is early summer 2008. China, which has made an economic leap in the 2000s, is excited about the Olympics, and the Summer Olympics are less than two months away. The choice of the movie is to tell the story of those who remain in the shadow of this light. The director says he chose 2008 for a special reason:
“That was a period when China’s economy was developing rapidly, and the whole country was both joyous and sorrowful. The 2008 Wenchuan earthquake also happened then. It was a significant year. I felt that placing the character’s fate against such a backdrop of upheaval would amplify the power of their story. Instead of focusing on the bars and young people of Beijing or Shanghai in 2008, I chose to focus on someone more distant, someone left behind by the times, someone forgotten. These are the people who, when placed in such a tumultuous era, reveal even greater strength in their stories.”(1)
Since the coal mines were abolished, the city has experienced a high level of migration. Empty workers’ apartments are being demolished to make way for new ones. In order to attract capital to the new factories to be opened, it is necessary to get rid of stray dogs. Lang, the protogonist, who joins this extermination team to earn money, meets a black dog while sabotaging the extermination out of pity for the dogs. The friendship he establishes with this dog will cause him to reconnect to life and get up from where he fell.
Imagine such a main character that throughout the movie he says nothing but “ya”, which means yes. Director Hu doubles his success in working with animals by narrating the main character without dialog.
The 2008 earthquake makes the chaotic city even more chaotic, but this chaos is actually a resistance against the shaping of the city by capital as it wishes. The peacocks entering the houses, the tiger coming out of its cage, the dogs regaining their freedom, the snakes roaming around… are metaphors for this resistance.
Black Dog is related to a Turkish movie: Körfez (Emre Yeksan, 2017) in that it opens from dystopia to utopia as much as its main character who speaks little and returns to his homeland. It should not be surprising that the stories of the resistance of cities forced by capitalism to become the same are similar.
- https://thepeoplesmovies.com/interview-guan-hu-discuss-black-dog, Robert Ewing , 27 August 2024