Jin is an overarching low-fi aesthetic short film with a humorous touch of absurdity shown via various uncanny camera shooting angles and distorted frames. Its narrative’s multiple spatiotemporal dislocations and nonsensical text and soliloquy shown between nine scenes alternating or in juxtaposition, appearing a total of sixteen times, which picture a dreamlike play of déjà vu and ambiguous plots that are implausible.
The nine scenes are existing artefact-architectural landscapes and a natural landscapes-an unknown planet surface, an octagonal pavilion, a blue-steel public sculpture, a semi-open cellar, a coastal vista, an abandoned swimming pool, a haunting bell tower, an intricate outdoor maze, and a primal depth of a natural cave. An archaeologist dressed in her specialized work attire, conducts the fieldwork that involves prospecting, surveying, excavating with tools made from industrial-processed materials made tools, despite their obsolete function. Also, she documents invalid data records on a future material board. This field work is a slow but verbose exploring process, underscored by ritualistic movements in repeat guided by a divine voice in the background.
The film lights in part of the scenes have utilised rough low-key illumination and hard lighting to emphasize the contour of the archaeologist, creating a serene yet mysterious figure. The background sounds are sporadic, blended by dissonant melodies reassembled by various cultural instruments and object percussion. The arrangement of these lights and sounds evokes atmospheres reminiscent of various historical epochs, echoing to the themes of archaeology embedded within the film.
Conceptually, Jin breaks the general norms of film production and narrative structure. By formulating a unity of visual languages and plots that are separatable, visual language can thus be withdrawn from the plots and then exist as a double. Which means each visual language has been reconstructed several times in the film under different plots that offers multifaceted viewing experience that invites interpretation and engagement. Moreover, the film subtly weaves in a retro-futuristic context through the juxtaposition of modern human labor and low-technological settings, deliberately eschewing scientific grounding to provoke contemplation on the fluidity of narrative coherence and temporal boundaries.
