Sun Xun
Mythological Time
Sun Xun’s lushly illustrated, dynamic short film Mythological Time is a dreamy chronicle of rapacious industrial development, the mythical qualities of state propaganda, and the constancy of change, as experienced by an unnamed coal mining town. While it is not named in the film itself, the town at the center of Mythological Time is a re-imagined incarnation of Sun’s hometown of Fuxin, in the northern Chinese province of Liaoning. Sandwiched between North Korea and Inner Mongolia, Fuxin is a poor coal-mining region that used to contain one of China’s largest open-pit mines and has historically been the site of significant conflict, thanks to its rich mineral resources. In preparation to make the film, Sun, who is well known for his labor-intensive animation techniques and close attention to detail, spent over two weeks revisiting his hometown. Fuxin is cratered with sinkholes and blighted with cone-shaped spoil tips, much like the Fuxin depicted in Mythological Time. Unlike the real-life Fuxin, however, the Fuxin of the film is home to pheasants with human ears, bounding kirins, dragons that transform into trees, flying lumps of coal, and other chimerical beings; pangolins and fossils appear to be frozen in cubes of ice while old-fashioned cinemas project blank images onto nuclear power plants.
The narrative of the film unfolds across two widescreen video images using a panoramic, scroll-like format, referencing the collapsed perspectives and flat narrative structure of Chinese landscape painting as mythological creatures both flee from and act as central characters within an alchemized, fantastical re-telling of a small town’s brutal path to modern industrialization. Borrowing frequently from the language of folklore as well as the visual strategies utilized by the Chinese Communist Party during Mao’s cult of personality, Sun’s work offers a palimpsest of official and oral histories to fill in the gaps carved out by state-administered amnesia. In Sun Xun’s world, time is a relentlessly transforming and transformable being, and the chronicle of human history is infinitely malleable. Human toil and industry exist in the realm of not just the mundane, but also the celestial.