THIS WEEK’S FEATURED FILM PREMIERE: “The Obscurers' Steps”

CLICK IMAGE ABOVE FOR THE FULL MOVIE

The Obscurers' Steps

Description

The Obscurers' Steps is a single-channel video work composed of archival footage drawn from historical materials related to China and North Korea. I treat these images as “training material” for power narratives: built upon mass formations, synchronized rhythm, and monumental tableaux staged for an audience, they repeatedly compress individual difference and render “the people” as an orchestrated, visible body.

Through repetition, cutting, and looping, the work dismantles the mechanism by which an image is made to “hold together,” turning spectacle into a process that can be re-entered and re-experienced. As the narrative expands into grandeur, power itself becomes increasingly invisible. Here, the video is not documentation, but training—forcing the viewer to oscillate between immersion and distance, and to sense how concealment produces a loss of self.

Runtime: 20 minutes, 33 seconds

Director Biography - Guannan Liu is interested in the production of historical image narratives and their relationship with the body. Their work begins with research into widely disseminated narrative knowledge, and through this research, they discovered how image narratives intervene in social disciplinary activities, ultimately affecting our bodies. In recent years, their work has focused on rediscovering social relationships within image interactions.

Liu practice uses installation, video and sound to examine how historical image narratives enter social discipline and shape embodied experience through spatial organization and temporal cycles. Recent work focuses on training, ritualized environments, and “unreachable structures” as models for understanding obedience, endurance, and collective alignment.

Credits & Specifications:
Completion Date: May 2025
Production Budget: ¥10,000
Country of Filming: China
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Shooting Format: Digital