Disorder

2009 ‘现实是过去的未来’ Directed by Huang Weikai

A "city symphony" full of dark humor that weaves together a collage of absurd sounds and events.

Alternative Title

Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai

documentary

58 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★½

City of chaos
The flows of dirty water.
Political protest
As Kafkaeqsue absurdism.
Beetle in the ramen.
Opening on a fire hydrant raining down in startling black and white, where the digitized grain is so blown out it feels like an alien city ("Forget it, Jake. It’s Guangzhou."), Disorder doesn’t take long to set up its major theme as “chaos.” Played with a double feature with the non-Boxd San Yuan Li, which only feels trite in its “wow look at how our city has improved”-tone compared to this revelatory work. Film collects its mini-narratives - the highway dancer, the roaming pigs, the flood, etc – and slowly transforms from Kafkaesque absurdism into a very grueling portrait of daily life. Shots…
Review by Glenn Heath Jr. ★★★★½

Society held together with string cheese. It's just a matter of time before those pigs fly.
Review by AEC ★★★

Accumulation cacophonique de scénettes sordides (pattes d'ours et pangolins trouvés dans un resto ; arnaques quelconques ; inondations ; arrestations musclées et brutalités policières ; porcs en cavale sur l'autoroute, la découverte d'un bébé abandonné dans les buissons, ou encore le sauvetage d'un alligator égaré), DISORDER obéit à une logique de papparazo, de mondo, assemblé de vidéos amateures, transformée en matière granuleuse, captivante, proche du 8mm. Hyper-pertinent comme document du chaohuan -- cet « ultra-unreal » de la société chinoise qui deviendra un genre (principalement littéraire) en soi -- et comme alternative transgressive aux images consensuelles de l'État (surtout!). Mais le film perd néanmoins de son impact quelques 11 ans plus tard tant ses images ont intégré l'imaginaire: au même…
Review by Lawrence Garcia ★★★★

Belatedly excerpted from my MUBI review:
From a certain vantage point, Disorder is as disjunctive an experience as one is likely to find beyond the fringes of the avant-garde, a lineage to which it could certainly be linked. And yet, seen today, Huang’s film—and here the Chinese title, which roughly translates as “Now is the Future of the Past,” becomes relevant—is valuable not just as a time capsule of China's (too-)rapid development, but also as a prescient instance of a now-common approach to audiovisual media. In particular, Huang's full-fledged engagement with the lexicon of amateur videography, a currently ubiquitous fact of life given the proliferation of various social media platforms, is what registers as so forward-thinking. (Despite featuring an actual…
Review by Doug Dillaman ★★★★★

I am surprised this filmmaker is not in jail in my opinion but perhaps China sees this differently than I do - at any rate, I'm shocked it's not banned. Would be one of the great 21st century screen dystopias were it not documentary, and perhaps it is anyway. A black and white grainstorm of unquiet desperation, a post-Merzbow "city symphony" that grabs you by the throat when it's not turning your stomach. Watched by myself which left me free to say some variant of "holy shit" or "what the fuck" about twenty-five times. This probably oversells it - it's not *that* transgressive - but I can't imagine anyone coming away unmoved.
Review by Andrea Beni ★★★★

Non sentivo un maiale strillare in quel modo dal giorno in cui sono venuto al mondo.
Review by arielletoub ★★★★

intriguing
Review by Kenji Fujishima ★★★★½

One of the most remarkable documentaries, from any country, I've ever seen—and hey, it's only about an hour long! I wrote about it here on the occasion of "Chinese Realities/Documentary Visions," a series devoted to the independent Chinese-documentary movement that's currently going on here at New York's Museum of Modern Art (Disorder is screening twice later in the month).
Review by Kyle Faulkner ★★★½

I'd hate to think what Weikai Huang's Sesame Credit rating is.
Review by 🦉🐰🐰🦉🦉🐰 ★★★½ 1

1. Feels strongly connected with '85 New Wave.
2. I like the original Chinese title better, which translates as the present is the future of the past.
Review by ablackie ★★★

Footage from the wilds – the dark, farcical China you don’t see on the avenues of Beijing or Shanghai, or in the outward face it projects to the world. It’s fitting that this parade of images is all filmed in grainy, strain-your-eyes handheld: a cockroach in an evening meal; pigs running amok; a vicious beating devolving into a riot; snapshots of the quotidian edging into the apocalyptic. All of it does eventually summon the intended symphony effect. And yet… modern China is a strange place, and ultimately I don’t think this goes far enough. For me, the underground documentary Fortune Teller is a far better survey of China’s bawdy underclass.
Review by Theresa Wang ★★★

The Chinese title of Disorder is 《現實是過去的未來》, or "reality is the future of the past". I dislike this premise as it is not really accurate and it also takes on this gussied up notion of the "future-past." Writing about the long take, Pasolini argues that reality is always in the present tense. Disorder wholly revels in the present tense, exposing corruption and chaos within modern-day China. Perhaps the future-past is meant to invoke that same chaos, but it feels like a misguided promise.

Recent reviews

Review by ejonline ★★★

I am as wary of disaster porn as anybody else who watches a lot of documentaries, but I don't think this movie falls into that category. I took this movie to be the work of somebody within China wanting to shine a (highly mediated and subjective) light on aspects of life that run contrary to government-created narratives about progress. Rather than answers, the priority seems to be documenting inconvenient realities.
Review by melisafilem ★★★½

reality is super chaos
Review by PhillyFilmFan ★★★★

I'm just going to steal this description from an anonymous IMDb user: "Footage collected from a dozen amateur videographers woven into a unique city symphony of social dysfunction." The only thing I have to add is that it's Chinese.
Review by momoe_nakanishi ★★★★

Selected and edited, but this isn’t going to help China from seeming like a total nightmare. Overlapping audio and visual rhymes point to it all being a single, inescapable force, coming from a single pathology.
Review by AEC ★★★

Accumulation cacophonique de scénettes sordides (pattes d'ours et pangolins trouvés dans un resto ; arnaques quelconques ; inondations ; arrestations musclées et brutalités policières ; porcs en cavale sur l'autoroute, la découverte d'un bébé abandonné dans les buissons, ou encore le sauvetage d'un alligator égaré), DISORDER obéit à une logique de papparazo, de mondo, assemblé de vidéos amateures, transformée en matière granuleuse, captivante, proche du 8mm. Hyper-pertinent comme document du chaohuan -- cet « ultra-unreal » de la société chinoise qui deviendra un genre (principalement littéraire) en soi -- et comme alternative transgressive aux images consensuelles de l'État (surtout!). Mais le film perd néanmoins de son impact quelques 11 ans plus tard tant ses images ont intégré l'imaginaire: au même…
Review by LMagic ★★★★

Raw. "Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man." --The Education of Henry Adams
Review by Cheunghhhhhxuanwoo ★★★½

“The present is the future for the past".
Review by Andrea Beni ★★★★

Non sentivo un maiale strillare in quel modo dal giorno in cui sono venuto al mondo.
Review by ablackie ★★★

Footage from the wilds – the dark, farcical China you don’t see on the avenues of Beijing or Shanghai, or in the outward face it projects to the world. It’s fitting that this parade of images is all filmed in grainy, strain-your-eyes handheld: a cockroach in an evening meal; pigs running amok; a vicious beating devolving into a riot; snapshots of the quotidian edging into the apocalyptic. All of it does eventually summon the intended symphony effect. And yet… modern China is a strange place, and ultimately I don’t think this goes far enough. For me, the underground documentary Fortune Teller is a far better survey of China’s bawdy underclass.
Review by Lawrence Garcia ★★★★

Belatedly excerpted from my MUBI review:
From a certain vantage point, Disorder is as disjunctive an experience as one is likely to find beyond the fringes of the avant-garde, a lineage to which it could certainly be linked. And yet, seen today, Huang’s film—and here the Chinese title, which roughly translates as “Now is the Future of the Past,” becomes relevant—is valuable not just as a time capsule of China's (too-)rapid development, but also as a prescient instance of a now-common approach to audiovisual media. In particular, Huang's full-fledged engagement with the lexicon of amateur videography, a currently ubiquitous fact of life given the proliferation of various social media platforms, is what registers as so forward-thinking. (Despite featuring an actual…
Review by valvalval ★★★

china is fucked
Review by wulfgar111 ★★½

Over an hour we get to see a city in disorder and disarray from flooding streets and neighborhoods to the treatment of people injured by cars or lying dead in the road. We also see the looting of a store after the owners leave and the discovery of illegal bear paws and anteaters in the freezers.
I'm not sure what I was expecting from this one, but it was not this. These are the sorts of things that you don't normally see out of China and makes you wonder how much our image of them is a very carefully managed facade by the government.
It also shows how quickly the industrial growth in the country has led to a collision with the more rural and farm based nature of many of the people there.
Interesting film.