Ai Weiwei: New film by the artist about the lockdown in Wuhan

Icon: enlarge

Artist Ai Weiwei

Sometimes Ai Weiwei's film about dying in Wuhan is just dead boring. You see a man walking along the white corridors of a hospital that was apparently built from containers at short notice. For many seconds you look at the same man, who turns out to be a doctor at some point, then when you put on two protective suits put on top of each other and rubber gloves.

When doctors and nurses do their work on the bed of a seriously ill and ventilated patient, one looks for a long time at infusion bags, cannulas and medical instruments.

Still, "Coronation" is an exciting, poignant, extraordinary film. Made in the Berlin studio of the artist Ai Weiwei and now available as a paid offer online, it shows recordings from the Chinese city of Wuhan that were taken there by the director's helpers during the lockdown between January 23 and April 8, 20202.

Inside views of the world capital of the corona pandemic, which was sealed off by the Chinese authorities and in which the virus was diagnosed in a person for the first time on December 1, 2019, will be presented: scenes from clinics, car trips through the streets of a deserted metropolis, an interview with stuck people , homeless migrant workers in an underground car park.

It is amazing how much "Coronation" restricts itself to observation and retains expressions of criticism of the Chinese rulers. Like Ai Weiwei's earlier documentary films, the new one also comes without commentary; But while the artist's works about the construction of the Beijing Ring Roads or the construction of the Olympic Stadium, which has become famous as the "Bird's Nest", can always be understood as denouncing inhumane working conditions, environmental destruction or state gigantomania, "Coronation" does not seem to have the basic meaning of the one shown here Questioning measures to contain the pandemic.

When I visited Ai Weiwei for a SPIEGEL interview in his Berlin studio in February, his views and intentions sounded a little different. He reported at the time that he was working on several film projects about the corona pandemic and seemed angry about the situation in China at the time. The people in the country are being "fed false information and misleading instructions - for example about what to eat," he said. The number of deaths is "in truth much higher than officially stated".

"Coronation" does not hear about such accusations. The film is not in the least a "metaphor for the characteristic type of oppression in China", as claimed, for example, in a recent review by Deutschlandfunk. Only in the last quarter of the almost two-hour work do some relatives of people who have died of Covid-19 have their say, who complain that they have been denied access to the dying or to the ashes of their dead. But how specific are such lawsuits to China?

Ai Weiwei's film is not a political indictment, but an almost tentative inventory. His most beautiful pictures are drone recordings, similar to those used in his refugee documentary "Human Flow" from 2017. Instead of refugee camps, you can now see ambulances with flashing sirens, a huge train station full of decommissioned high-speed trains, grandiose views of the Wuhan skyline.

In between there are long explanations from an older, well-behaved party member who spreads her medals on the kitchen table and asserts that she feels well protected by the Chinese state: "We are grateful." Ai Weiwei also shows the arrival of helpers from other Chinese provinces in Wuhan, who were crawled by bus, in a scene that could be presented in a similar way in recordings on Chinese state television.

Like an apocalyptic science ficton film

In the "New York Times" the director has just expressed his disappointment that "Coronation" has not been included in their programs either by those responsible for the Venice Film Festival or by those in Toronto. Anyone who watches the film in its sometimes annoying artlessness for a rental fee of five euros on a video platform on the Internet can understand the cinema festival people a little.

The shaky scrabbling videos of food deliveries to people in quarantine, the dead fish in the aquarium of a man who returns to his apartment in Wuhan after a week-long absence are not entirely free from banality. At the same time, the impact of this film arises from the apparent lack of intent with which everyday shots from the city of the world's first corona lockdown are collected.

"Coronation" looks almost involuntarily like an apocalyptic science ficton film, populated by only a few people who know how to face the disaster with nothing better than a vision of total control. The film doesn't want to know anything better, it just watches with amazement and sadness how a virus, completely unknown just a few months earlier, turned the city of Wuhan into a strange nightmare.