Screening – Cut Out The Eyes

The Smithsonian's Museum of Asian Art presents a screening of Xu Tong's documentary "Cut Out the Eyes" which presents a vibrant portrait of folk and popular culture in lnner Mongolia. Er Housheng is an itinerant performer presenting boisterous, musically infused epic poems recounting his life's travails. A survivor of many hardships (the title provides a hint), he is a folk hero to rural audiences, who respond heartily to his roguish charisma and sung summations of universal human foibles.

Er Housheng is a cantankerous character worthy of the best fiction – a Cormac McCarthy novel or an Agnès Varda film – but in Xu Tong's discomfiting documentary, he is an itinerant performer of Inner Mongolian er ren tai. Er offers his audience and this film’s spectators a combination of lust and loss as he narrates in both song and word the peaks and valleys of a simple life. With a handheld camera sometimes as bumpy as Inner Mongolia’s rutted roads and with quirky subtitles that jerk you around almost as much, Xu has achieved a rough and captivating film. Equal parts ethnography, biopic and melodrama, Cut Out the Eyes documents Er’s tale all the while sharing with us the compelling pleasures of live performance, carved out of the flesh of lived experience.

Performed at family ceremonies, on temporary stages, and in makeshift cinemas-turned-nightclubs, the folk opera that is er ren tai feels far more folk than opera. The Chinese name refers to two people standing on a stage, and though the wandering troupes include more musicians, it is the bawdy banter, sung back and forth between Er and his performing partner, Liu Lanlan, that serves as the film’s backbone. The er ren tai duets are accompanied by the dizi transverse flute, by the stringed Mongolian khuurchir (or sihu, in Mandarin) and by the yangqin (Chinese hammered dulcimer) among other instruments. The more studious viewer will learn about the tradition’s two schools, the Eastern and the Western. While the Eastern was popular among the invading Japanese and is now promoted in the casinos and clubs of a penetrating capitalism, the Western School seems tied more closely to the sun-burnt farmers and herders who keep it alive as local entertainment and tradition. This is no hallowed sphere of ethnomusicological purity, however, and the sounds of Psy’s “Gangnam Style” trickle in from offscreen. Xu’s talking heads are weathered and creased, and the quick lessons will pass you by before you know it to reveal the protagonist’s life, enmeshed as it is between sexual bravado and a fundamental precarity.

Er, the horror of whose very real experience is alluded to in the film’s title and fully conveyed in an extended black-and-white montage only in the film’s riveting conclusion, enthralls the men of Inner Mongolia. They suggest the reasons – perseverance, aging good looks and, of course, voice – that Er is even more adept at captivating his female fans. We see the latter – ruddy, chubby cheeks of the young ones alongside the toothless grins of their elder kin – as they nod, sway and snap cellphone shots of their passing star. Film scholars sometimes lecture about the overarching narratives embedded within documentary cinema or the fictions cultivated within reality TV. But there are times when no lecture is needed, when we see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, and feel with our own hearts, a world that is both truthful and fictional, real and imagined. Sometimes, it would seem, the real world is already a fable. When this happens within cinema, the results are extraordinary. Conversant with the newest forms of ethnographic filmmaking, Xu Tong’s Cut Out the Eyes is an example of this brilliance.