Queer Strategies and Tentacles: Happy Together
The Gay Critic
Shen Xin
2015
26 Minutes
Date
December 9-22, 2024.
The film shares intimate moments of friendships, in between time for various forms of labor, 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 a part of.
General notes for the audio, written by Shen Xin:
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, makes him the ideal musician for this work, meditating on the journey of love through agents of life, death, and labour.
A link to the audio description for screen reader can be found here.
This screening is part of Happy Together, the third chapter of the film program Queer Strategies and Tentacles, curated by Rosa Barotsi and Zairong Xiang, and unfolding in eight chapters between November 25th, 2024 and March 2, 2025, with the films of each chapter streaming for two weeks.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.
