ART COLLEGE 1994: An Anti-Nostalgic Trip Back To College

There is a cliché about films on art and youth that generally make their aims at grasping profound revelations an act of futility. So many movies try to evoke the intersection of young artists discovering their artistic voice that they tend to create a false sense of art in itself. Liu Jian’s Art College 1994 rejects these clichés and instincts, instead seeing youth in the face of art for what it is: blowing a lot of hot air. There is a stillness to Liu’s imagery and animation that brings forth a mundane and aimless sense of loss. It’s a movie that turns nostalgia for the discovery of artistic voice into what the reality is – realizing you don’t know shit but you talk a lot anyway to convince yourself and others that you might trip onto something profound.

Ambition and Naïvete

The film begins with an animation of a beetle trying and failing to climb up a wall. The small footsteps, like the pitter patter of grains being dropped onto a table, set the stage for the kind of sounds we hear throughout the movie. They’re subtle, minimalist, they evoke the sense of quiet and awkwardness that permeates throughout the characters in the movie. They are confident in the abstract but totally lost in society.

Many of the elliptical conversations that occur in the film about art are deliberately meant to evoke the idea of “word vomit”. These are college kids after all, with grandiose ambitions about what they could potentially become and at the same as naïve and jaded as ever. I remember being in college and the most accurate statement I heard about it was walking down drunkenly in downtown hearing a man saying to a group of my rowdy drunk compatriots “you’re living in a fake world right now but you’ll soon get to the real one.”

Resisting Motion

It was certainly a corny and uncalled for comment, we were just having fun, but being about 15 years removed from then, I get it. Liu’s film doesn’t have much music other than when Nino Rota’s score from The Godfather briefly plays or when a college girl is practicing her piano piece. The dissonance between characters is emphasized through long pauses and silence within the movie. This is coupled with Liu’s distinct animation that resists motion. Instead it revels in abruptness and subtlety. The voice cast also does a remarkable job and features a few famous filmmakers including Jia Zhangke and Bi Gan.

Conclusion:

The deliberate choices to pick artists to voice these college kids seem to lend to the idea that like Liu, many other successful artists in China come from the same place of doubt, unknowing, and fumbling imposter syndrome. Art College 1994 resists nostalgia by making clear that college is a time of aching intellectual embarrassment. These characters are painful in the way they are relatable, totally without a clue, but talking anyway, trying to see if any of the words that they blurt out end up forming an idea.

Art College 1994 released in select U.S. theaters on April 26, 2024.