Photo: Ying Liang's The Other Half
The fingerprints of multiple hyphenate auteur Ying Liang are all over his video feature The Other Half, and he wants us to know it. "The second feature film of Ying Liang," announces an opening title card; "This movie was made by Me, but thanks to all my friends for their support!" proclaims an end-credits scroll. Ying is likewise credited with script, photography, sound, editing…even art direction, and while I'm more inclined to praise his brazenly hands-on approach than condemn it, the failures of his sophomore effort (after 2005's Taking Father Home) make his authorial ubiquity come off, more often than not, as delusional arrogance. As Phillip Lopate recalled in his essay "In Anticipation of La Notte" when quoting a patron of his ill-conceived Antonioni-esque student film: "The sound was a problem." Boy, was (and is) it ever in The Other Half, so much so that the constant canyon-wide separation between a character's placement and voice seems damn near intentional at points, an almost perfect complement to Ying's low-fi video aesthetic, which suggests Jia Zhangke gone Betamax. Keith Uhlich
The fingerprints of multiple hyphenate auteur Ying Liang are all over his video feature The Other Half, and he wants us to know it. "The second feature film of Ying Liang," announces an opening title card; "This movie was made by Me, but thanks to all my friends for their support!" proclaims an end-credits scroll. Ying is likewise credited with script, photography, sound, editing…even art direction, and while I'm more inclined to praise his brazenly hands-on approach than condemn it, the failures of his sophomore effort (after 2005's Taking Father Home) make his authorial ubiquity come off, more often than not, as delusional arrogance. As Phillip Lopate recalled in his essay "In Anticipation of La Notte" when quoting a patron of his ill-conceived Antonioni-esque student film: "The sound was a problem." Boy, was (and is) it ever in The Other Half, so much so that the constant canyon-wide separation between a character's placement and voice seems damn near intentional at points, an almost perfect complement to Ying's low-fi video aesthetic, which suggests Jia Zhangke gone Betamax. Keith Uhlich
