One Second from filmmaker Zhang Yimou was TIFF’s closing night Gala presentation, and whether viewed at home or Roy Thomson Hall or the Princess of Wales, the film was a reminder of the power of cinema to bring people together. A resonate one this year. Though, the film is cognizant of the limitations of film, which is alluded to in the title.
Set in China in the 1970s near the end of the Cultural Revolution, the centerpiece of the film is the traveling cinema headed by the projectionist, Mr. Movie (played by Fan Wei). The film’s dual protagonists, and man (played by Zhang Yi) and a girl (played by (Liu Haocun), both have specific goals connected with the screening. The man escaped a labour camp to watch the film’s accompanying newsreel, which features his daughter, whom he hasn’t seen in years. The girl needs to steal a reel to make a lampshade to replace a damaged one so her brother will stop getting beat up. The reel she steals happens to be the one with the man’s daughter on it, and the two engage in a back and forth, cat and mouse, game for a while. The film does a good job of showing that while they both needed things from the reel itself, the experience together provided them with something more lasting, filling a greater void. He had lacked a daughter in his life for years, and she acted as a surrogate. She similarly lacked a parental figure, and him standing up for her filled a void.
The film reel itself got damaged and the process and the community efforts to restore it so that movie night would go on showed how much people looked forward to the cinema. It’s easy to forget now with the ability to download content with the press of a button, but a film used to be an event, and a traveling cinema was a huge event. In this film for the man with the one chance to see his daughter, the stakes were high, as if he missed this screening there wouldn’t be another of this newsreel, but the director Zhang Yimou talked in his intro about how it was normal for people to walk over the previous night to get to a town for a screening the next evening.
The girl needed to get some film because the celluloid lampshades were popular, she borrowed one so her brother could study, and it caught fire. It makes sense they would’ve been popular, they look cool, and from a business perspective, they’re smart because celluloid is likely to catch fire, it’s known for doing so. That’s one of the reasons you need skilled projectionists, as seen when Mr. Movie has to stop a small fire during the evening screening. So, by making and selling lampshades made out of celluloid, they are likely to catch fire and need to be replaced. The girl was set up for failure when she borrowed the lampshade. However, I did find it weird that Mr. Movie would have a celluloid lampshade himself because he was knowledgeable of its inherent flammability.
The man eventually does get to see the reel with his daughter in it, but as Mr. Movie says, it was little more than “one second,” and even if he watched it 100 times, it would never be enough. This is the limitation of film. It might be able to capture, to preserve, but it’s still just an image; it’s not the real thing. This version of the film may also be a sanitized version of the film as originally intended. It was set to premiere in spring 2019 at the Berlin International Film Festival but was pulled two days before due to “technical problems.” As the film has always featured state propaganda in its core story, the reel the man spends the majority of the One Second trying to view fits that bill, the assumption is it was pulled due to content combined with the early buzz it was receiving as an awards contender. A sadly fitting outcome for a film with its themes.