Ai Weiwei’s Coronation documents the pandemic from its beginnings in Wuhan
Anger rises in this film by the artist and activist
History will no doubt be littered with hundreds of documentaries chronicling the 2020 pandemic. Ai Weiwei’s self-distributed film may be one of the first but it already has the air of a document from another era. Coronation takes us back to Wuhan and to the genesis of the crisis, the strictures of that first lockdown and a time when the concept still seemed alien to the rest of the world. Assembled by Ai in his European exile from a reported 500 hours of footage, much of it shot clandestinely and smuggled out of China, it offers no guiding voiceover or ready-made conclusions but is grimly fascinating all the same.
Both Ais are here: the artist and the activist. At times his eye is drawn to images that could be mistaken for video art: neglected pet fish floating lifelessly in a tank like Damien Hirst sharks; hospital staff seen repetitively going about their PPE preparations to the point of abstraction; heavily suited workers wielding thermometer guns or lost in clouds of disinfectant as if in a sci-fi fantasy.
But as the film wears on, the activist Ai takes over and the sense of anger swells. The pro-Party convictions of a stoic elderly woman, amusing at first, start to sound dangerously delusional. Later, the indignant despair of a woman unable to accompany a dying relative is palpable as she declares: “For our generation that witnessed this pandemic, its shadow will darken our hearts for ever.” You fear for the safety of all those on screen; you fear doubly for those who dare speak out against the state.
Towards the end comes the film’s most haunting image, one that combines the poetic and the political. A bereaved woman wails heartbreakingly from behind a mask in the middle of a seemingly indifferent street. Her face may be obscured, but no amount of protective layering can obscure the shattering force of her grief.