Black Cat White Cat It’s a Good Cat if It Catches the Mouse

“Taking its title from a quote from Deng Xiaoping, ‘Black cat white cat – it’s a good cat if it catches the mouse’, this film was shot during a visit to the People’s Republic of China. Rimmer’s impressionistic, experimental travelogue is a dizzying dialectical portrait of the enigma that is modern China: an ancient society of a billion souls rushing headlong into modernity. “The measured, quiet grace of the traditional art of T’ai Chi gives way in Rimmer’s film to increasingly rapid sound and image montages. Western movie posters, ‘Surfin’ USA,’ burger stands, pre-recorded English lessons, Scientology advertisements, and modern traffic frenzies whirl past our eyes and ears. As the immutable is overwhelmed by the modern, Rimmer slows down to quote Deng Xiaoping, ‘To get rich is glorious.’ The speed of Rimmer’s images escalates again, and they rapidly burst into abstractions, just as the contradictions and paradoxes they expose will explode in the momentous event that gives Rimmer his coda: the massacre in Tiananmen Square.” – Jim Sinclair