Fiction Cinema As an Alternative Sociological Tool for Exploring the “Pluriverse”: The Example of Kaili Blues (Bi Gan, 2015)

Our work is part of a general framework of critical reconceptualization of sociological theory in connection with decolonial perspectives (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018) and the ontological turn (Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017), taking the visual arts of the Global South as a possible alternative non-Eurocentric methodology for exploring the worlds of subaltern minorities, beyond the modern global world. It follows the model called “ethno-cinematographic rhizomes” (Malaina, 2020), inspired by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), applied to independent film productions in Southeast Asia.

In our paper we want to expand its application to the film Kaili Blues (2015) by Bi Gan, for the study of the Guizhou region, southwest of China, where alongside modernizing processes coexists a local culture that combines Mahayana Buddhism and animism of ethnic minorities such as the Miao ethnic group. This low-budget film combines narrative techniques of an almost documentary realism with dreamlike and surrealist irruptions. We are shown a rural reality with intertwined times and spaces that is especially visualized in a sequence shot of more than 40 minutes. In this diegetic universe, people perceive time in a non-linear way, past, present and future coexist at the same time, thus showing the notion of circular time characteristic of traditional agricultural societies in East Asia, different from the Western conception of linear time. This film, like others by directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Malaina, 2022), shows us that fiction cinema can be a very effective aid to the decolonial social scientist who seeks to study the “pluriverse” (Escobar, 2018). With its immersive qualities, it allows us to explore other non-modern “worlds” in a sensorial and emotional way, constituting an innovative and alternative sociological approach to orthodox Eurocentric methodologies of rational and formal representations.