MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W304222591

Fruit Chan's 'Excremental Vision': Public Toilet

2003· article· en· W304222591 on OpenAlex
Susan Signe Morrison

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueCineaction! · 2003
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicHong Kong and Taiwan Politics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsShitHollywoodTrilogyToiletArt historyMedia studiesArtMovie theaterAdvertisingSociologyVisual artsHistoryEngineering
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

What can you say about a film that sticks your nose in public toilets, literally as well as metaphorically? As Fruit Chan proclaimed at the Question and Answer session after the screening of Public Toilet at this year's Toronto International Film Festival this is my shit movie. Fruit Chan's reputation as one of the most interesting directors of the new Hong Kong independent film scene was firmly established by two highly acclaimed 'neo-realist' films that critiqued the 'hard-scrapple' life in Hong Kong after repatriation. Little Cheung (1999) and Durian Durian (2000) were both screened in 2000 at the TIFF, although due to an unfortunate mix-up the version of Durian Durian had Italian subtitles only. The third film in his 'prostitute' trilogy, Hollywood Hong Kong (2001), not shown in Toronto, continued in the same realist vein as the previous two, with the addition, however, of one of the most ingenious yet off-putting pre-film title sequences that I have ever seen.... the titles and credits stamped (branded?) onto the pink flesh of slaughtered pigs being transported in a truck by 2 overweight men and an equally fat young boy. While the grossness of the imagery prepared the viewer for the coarse realities of the narrative of Hollywood Hong Kong, in retrospect, it also gave promise of the more scatological effects to come in Chan's next film. Public Toilet is undeniably about toilets: in Beijing, where the most primitive kind of public toilet ... an open room with seats facing each other ... serves as a communal centre for socializing as well as birthing and dying; in Korea, where the toilet in an outhouse becomes the home for an 'Ocean girl' ill from eating polluted fish waste; in the Indian city of Benares, itself a public toilet whose inhabitants relieve themselves freely in the streets; its river, the Ganges, revealed as a conduit for human dirt and waste, notwithstanding its purported powers of healing; in Hong Kong, where an Indian family tends a public toilet; and in a public washroom in New York City, where a homeless man inadvertently intervenes in a mob hit with tragic results. In fact, much of Public Toilet appears to be intentionally distasteful, in an 'epater le bourgeois' kind of way. We are confronted with shots of rivers of urine through which people swim; a glass of urine which a young man is coaxed into drinking; discussions of 'virgin's golden urine' as a potential cure-all; a story recounted of a court doctor who diagnosed health by observing and sniffing the patient's bowel movements; a hand pulling a newborn baby (a very obvious doll, thank goodness) out of the pit of a public toilet; documentary-type shots of people in the Indian sequences bringing their dead down to the river and burning them, with the camera lingering on the shreds of burned flesh. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.930
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.043
GPT teacher head0.336
Teacher spread0.293 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it