Cut

’Cut’ takes us along a slow, night time journey through the outskirts of a city, over a heavily travelled highway network. Only at the end do we get a fleeting glimpse of a man, lonely, but walking determinedly along the side of the road. Because of the way they were created, the black-and-white images are unsteady and out of focus, wobbly and deformed, so that the whole is virtually abstract. In the meantime, we hear a woman’s voice telling about a relationship that she had for seven days and seven nights with a Western man, in her native city, Shanghai. The whole becomes a kind of road movie with three protagonists: She, He and the City. The title of the work refers both to essential operations in the cinematographic process – the breaking off of a registration, cutting film during editing – and the break between the characters in the story.