Fleshing Out Life in Remote China

A.O. Scott of the New York Times reviews the Lantern Films documentary Ghost Town on the eve of a full week of screenings at the Museum of Modern Art.

There are documentaries that set out to explain the world, to shape the chaos of experience into coherent stories or compelling arguments. This kind of movie — dominant just now in American nonfiction filmmaking — performs the journalistic work of advocacy, investigating problems and engaging the sympathy or the outrage of viewers.

But another documentary tradition is more exploratory, less concerned with the interpretation of life than with the communication of its texture. Zhao Dayong’s “Ghost Town,” a nearly three-hour-long visit to a remote Chinese mountain village, is hardly indifferent to social issues, but it approaches them obliquely, with open-minded curiosity and inexhaustible patience.

Scott’s review follows a strong appraisal of the film by New York Times critic Manohla Dargis during last year’s New York Film Festival.