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Constant + The Making of Crime Scenes

Constant

This essay film by Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner interrogates moments of change within the history of measurement standardisation. Complex social and political contexts are traced: land surveying, the invention of the metric system at the time of the French Revolution, and more recent digital innovations. Radical and democratic forms of knowledge are possible in this new landscape, but this is problematised by the accompanying possibilities of control and demarcation.

LiDAR scans portray the omnipotent possibilities of digital measuring systems. These point cloud visuals are set against staged speculations and live action performances of Enlightenment scientists at work in French fields, and early mapped projections of the earth from above. Corporeal embodied forms of measuring shift from tangible space to a newly quantified and abstracted landscape. The resulting film explores how systems of measurement radically alter our lived experience of the world.

The Making of Crime Scenes

Contemporary forensic scanning software begins this film as a way to reconstruct the murder scene of Taiwanese American writer Henry Lu in 1985. Set against this footage is testimony from Wu Dun, a Wuxia film producer and member of the United Bamboo Gang, the largest of Taiwan’s three main Triad societies. Wu Dun was implicated in the assassination of Henry Lu ordered by the Kuomintang Military Intelligence bureau.

The core visuals of the film relocate us to an abandoned film set where Che-Yu Hsu restages scenes of the murder for an imagined Wuxia production. Overlaid is the voice of Wu Dun revealing the involvement of criminal gangs in the film industry and his own personal involvement in the death of Henry Lu. Ambitious tensions are generated as the film sets out to explore the implicit relationship between filmmaking and politics.

Followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers