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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
There is a moment—roughly seventeen minutes in, just after the intertitle dissolves into sand—when Lark Bronlee’s pupils reflect not the camera but the void behind it, and the entire nineteenth-century project of empire collapses into a single grain of nitrate. Beyond the Great Wall is that rare silent relic which refuses to be curated; it curates you, rearranges your synapses into a topographical riddle where every contour is a scar and every scar is a border you can’t cross twice.
Director-scenarist William Crowell (pulling double duty as the haunted general) has fashioned a palimpsest that makes The Vow look like a valentine and Arizona like a postal postcard. The film’s very title is a misdirection: there is no “beyond,” only an ontological Möbius strip where the Wall is both perimeter and perforation. Cinematographer Frank Brownlee (also the taciturn trapper) shoots the dunes as if they were the fur of some slumbering leviathan, each ripple a vertebrae twitching in aborted dreams of flight. The resultant chiaroscuro is so erotically desolate that you half expect the film itself to die of thirst mid-reel.
Bronlee’s cartographer enters the narrative cloaked in a robe stitched from confiscated love letters; the envelopes still bear wax seals shaped like miniature imperial dragons. Her first act is to sketch a river that erases itself faster than she can draw it—a visual gag that metastasizes into metaphysics. Compare this to Die platonische Ehe, where maps are mere stage props for marital ennui; here they are shrouds, curses, promissory notes written in disappearing ink. The stylus she wields is rumored in the publicity rags to have been carved from the femur of a eunuch who once mapped the Emperor’s dreams; whether myth or marketing, the prop possesses an eerie gravitas, its jade tip leaving trails that look suspiciously like coagulated starlight.
Mid-picture, the caravan stumbles upon a salt flat where mirages solidify into glassy replicas of the travelers. Bronlee confronts her doppelgänger—an apparition wearing the same cartographer’s robes but with eyes gouged into cartouches—and the two trace invisible borders around each other like fencers who’ve forgotten the protocol for surrender. The sequence lasts barely ninety seconds yet compresses the entire colonial anxiety of the century: to map is to possess, to possess is to blind, to blind is to become the very negative space you once sought to fill.
Crowell’s general carries his own archive: a breastplate hammered from the medals of soldiers he once ordered to die. Every clang of metal on metal in the soundtrack (a new 2023 restoration adds a prepared-piano score that sounds like bones being tuned) reverberates with the echo of those posthumous decorations. In a daring departure from the square-jawed heroism of Hearts of Oak, Crowell plays cowardice as chromatic gradation: a twitch of cheek muscle here, a hesitation in the swing of a scabbard there. His final duel with Martin’s patrol captain transpires inside a dust-devil that functions as a terrestrial wormhole; the two men appear to fight simultaneously in the past (as comrades) and the future (as ghosts), their silhouettes flickering between 35mm and double-8 formats spliced into the same frame.
Joseph S. Chailee’s eunuch-archivist arrives astride a Bactrian camel whose humps have been tattooed with excerpts from the Analects—a visual pun on the Confucian injunction to “ride the doctrine.” His scrolls, reputedly inked with arsenic, unfurl like tongues licking the poison of history. When he reads them aloud (via intertitles whose font corrodes from serif to san-serif as the toxicity seeps in), the very act of literacy becomes a biohazard. One thinks of The Secret Game, where documents are MacGuffins; here they are venomous relics, each character a micro-dose of slow-acting remorse.
The eunuch’s death scene—he swallows a map rather than let it be confiscated—renders ingestion as inscription: the paper dissolves into his intestinal parchment, turning his body into a living palimpsest whose next reader will be the vulture circling overhead. The camera lingers on the bird’s eye, which reflects the eunuch’s final thought: a lattice of borders that spell the word “return” in a language that no longer exists.
M.A. Kelly’s smuggler is the film’s carnivalesque chorus, a lantern-jawed trickster who quotes Mencius while pushing tar-black opium wrapped in rice-paper proverbs. His comic timing is so precise that when he finally betrays the caravan, the stab arrives with a smile still glued to his face—a grin that lingers like a grease fire on the retina. Compare this moral slipperiness to the binary virtue of Her Husband’s Honor; Kelly’s character is honor’s negative, a black-hole integrity that warps everyone’s orbit before imploding into a singularity of guilt.
The penultimate reel crescendos when Bronlee snaps her stylus. The fracture is captured in macro: jade splinters hover like a miniature asteroid belt, each shard reflecting a different possible ending—one where she redraws the world sans Wall, one where the Wall redraws her out of existence, one where cartography itself is abolished and nomads inherit the sand. The audience, denied a decisive montage, is abandoned in a liminal swoon, the projector’s clatter morphing into the sound of distant masonry being mortared by ghosts.
Though shot monochromatically, the film achieves chromatic hallucination through tinting: sequences veer from umber (the Gobi at dusk) to a sickly citrine (opium dens) to a cadaverous aquamarine (the Wall’s interior). The restored print amplifies these tints until they feel like ideological weather patterns. When the citrine bleeds into aquamarine, the opium smoke appears to calcify into the very bricks of the Wall, implying that addiction and architecture are fraternal twins separated at birth by nothing more than bureaucratic whim.
A recurrent falcon—trained by Brownlee off-screen—functions as the film’s unwilling oracle. Its POV shots, achieved via a rudimentary body-cam of feather and brass, swoop over caravans until human beings shrink into punctuation marks on a sentence the desert never finishes. In one bravura instance, the falcon’s flight is intercut with the eunuch’s scrolls, so that the bird appears to read the arsenic-laden text mid-air, squawking a subtitle that simply reads: “No return.” The metatextual gag lands like a slap from antiquity.
Bronlee’s gender is never remarked upon within the diegesis; her competence as cartographer is accepted with the fatalism of those who’ve already been erased from census records. This silent acknowledgment feels radical beside contemporaries like Cinderella’s Twin, where femininity is a plot twist. Here, womanhood is premise, not payoff. The camera adores the angular severity of her jawline, lighting her as if she were a compass needle forged in starlight—always pointing toward a true north that relocates each time you glance away.
The 2023 restoration by Europa Filmarks excavates a lost reel: four minutes of pure abstraction—salt crystals, stylus nibs, and intertitles in Manchu that no surviving linguist can translate. Some scholars argue it’s a micro-ode to linguistic genocide; others claim it’s merely a discarded camera test. Either way, its inclusion ruptures narrative continuity like a hairline fracture in a Ming vase, forcing viewers to confront the colonial hunger that devours even the grammar of storytelling.
Where Zapugannii burzhui satirizes bourgeois dread through slapstick, Beyond the Great Wall weaponizes silence until it becomes a sovereign entity. And while Mistress NellIsobel or the Trail’s End, for all its frontier nihilism, grants catharsis; Beyond offers only the echo of a stylus snapping, a sound that replays in your skull long after the house lights dilate.
The coda, rumored to have been shot in a single take beneath a lunar eclipse, shows the surviving travelers walking away from the Wall—yet the camera pirouettes 180 degrees to reveal the Wall stretching endlessly behind and ahead, an ouroboros of masonry. The implication is blunt: exile is not a trajectory but a Möbius strip, and every step forward is a step deeper into the parchment of no-return. Fade to ivory. Then, a flash-frame of Bronlee’s original map, now blank, before the projector hiccups and the acetate gives up the ghost.
Verdict? Beyond the Great Wall is less a film than a geological event; it grinds your certainties into loam from which new, inhospitable histories may sprout. Watch it if you dare, but pack water—celluloid isn’t the only thing that can dehydrate into dust.
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1929
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