Wang Bing's Filmmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses and Marginal Spaces 9789048551156

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Wang Bing’s Filmmaking of the China Dream

Critical Asian Cinemas Critical Asian Cinemas features book-length manuscripts that engage with films produced in Asia and by Asian auteurs. “Asia” refers here to the geographic and discursive sites located in East and Central Asia, as well as South and Southeast Asia. The books in this series emphasize the capacity of film to interrogate the cultures, politics, aesthetics, and histories of Asia by thinking cinema as an art capable of critique. Open to a wide variety of approaches and methods, the series features studies that utilize novel theoretical models toward the analysis of all genres and styles of Asian moving image practices, encompassing experimental film and video, the moving image in contemporary art, documentary, as well as popular genre cinemas. We welcome rigorous, original analyses from scholars working in any discipline. This timely series includes studies that critique the aesthetics and ontology of the cinema, but also the concept of Asia itself. They attempt to negotiate the place of Asian cinema in the world by tracing the distribution of films as cultural products but also as aesthetic objects that critically address the ostensible particularly of Asianness as a discursive formation. Series Editor Steve Choe, San Francisco State University, USA Editorial Board Jinsoo An, University of California, Berkeley, USA Jason Coe, Hong Kong University Corey Creekmur, University of Iowa, USA Chris Berry, King’s College, London Mayumo Inoue, Hitotsubashi University, Japan Jihoon Kim, Chung Ang University, South Korea Adam Knee, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore Jean Ma, Stanford University, USA

Wang Bing’s Filmmaking of the China Dream Narratives, Witnesses, and Marginal Spaces

Elena Pollacchi

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Ta’ang (Copyright courtesy of Asian Shadows) Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 183 7 e-isbn 978 90 4855 115 6 doi 10.5117/9789463721837 nur 674 © E. Pollacchi / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

To my parents Maria Teresa and Rolando To my mentors and friends Susan, Gina, Federico, and Alberto



Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

9

Editorial Note

11

Foreword by Alberto Barbera

13

Introduction The relevance of Wang Bing’s filmmaking Themes, form, and narrative structure: A linked approach to Wang Bing’s filmmaking Wang Bing à la Wong Kar-wai The book’s genesis and structure

19 19

1. Wang Bing’s Cinematic Journey: A Counter-Narrative of the China Dream The centrality of space in Wang Bing’s narrativized reality Chinese marginal spaces and uneven development Wang Bing’s counter-journey of the China Dream Spaces in Wang Bing’s oeuvre: An overview of the films and the issues at stake 2. History in the Making: The Debut Epic Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks The debut epic Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks and its context Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks as a contemporary cinematic reportage Filming ‘history in the making’ and the legacy of the Lumière films Towards an epic of labour: From Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven to Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks 3. Spaces of Labour: Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Bitter Money Filming spaces of labour and cinema as labour The transition from the industrial space of the Tiexi district to rural and marginal spaces Three Sisters: An epic of survival reminiscent of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath Duration in Wang Bing’s cinema: The case of Three Sisters and Alone

24 28 30 37 38 44 48 53 63 65 68 72 78 87 90 92 96 104

No Way Out: From Three Sisters to ’Til Madness Do Us Part ’Til Madness Do Us Part: The camera work between ‘madness’ and ‘love’ Reaching the new centres of labour: From Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks to Bitter Money Earning money in hardship: Bitter Money 4. Spaces of History and Memory: The Works on the Anti-Rightist Campaign



PART I – A Space Too Much: The Ditch The genesis of The Ditch (2003–2010) The Ditch: Carving out a space for documenting the past Historical spectacles: Wang Bing’s The Ditch and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò Ghosts of the past: Wang Bing’s The Ditch and Brutality Factory and Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth PART II: Spaces of Memory: Dead Souls From Fengming, A Chinese Memoir to Dead Souls The genesis of Dead Souls Spaces for survival: Archiving audiovisual witnesses The act of filming and spaces of death Wang Bing’s Dead Souls and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah

106 110 114 117 127 133 133 137 141 145 151 151 154 157 162 165

5. Collective Spaces – Individual Narratives Man With No Name: Individual spaces of self-isolation Father and Sons: Individual spaces and deteriorating family structures Mi Niang and Ta’ang: Spaces of refuge and escape Mrs Fang: Individual spaces of death Beauty Lives in Freedom: Individual spaces of exile

179 181 186 193

6. Concluding Remarks: Spaces of Exhibition and Spaces of Human Practice

199

Filmography

213

Bibliography

221

Index

233

171 176

Acknowledgements Filmmaking is never an individual act as it implies a set of shared processes. This is equally true for this study on Wang Bing’s work, which culminates many years of research, writing, and film viewing. I am indebted not only to a number of people for their trust and help, but also to a range of institutions that have supported my research since its start, more than a decade ago. I am particularly grateful to Amsterdam University Press for having welcomed this project and to Maryse Elliott for carefully guiding me through the publication process. Through these acknowledgements I wish to express my sincere gratitude to all the people who have helped me bring this monograph to light, first and foremost to filmmaker and artist Wang Bing. His generosity in sharing his views and his ongoing projects, together with his passion for world cinema, have constituted both an incessant drive and the most rewarding moments throughout the writing of this book. I owe a special thanks to my mentors, colleagues, and friends. In particular, Susan Daruvala, who was a wonderful supervisor during the years of my PhD studies at Cambridge University and continues to encourage my work as a friend and colleague. She kindly read through the final version of the manuscript making invaluable comments. Gina Marchetti at Hong Kong University has been supportive of this project since its early phases. I have benefitted greatly from our conversations, from her wonderful feedback, and from her final reading of the text. Chris Berry also shared his inestimable comments on the manuscript, providing essential insights, including on the many occasions we had the chance to discuss topics related to cinema, festivals, and the sinophone world. Alberto Barbera has not only allowed me to enter the world of film festivals as a young collaborator during his f irst mandate as the Venice Film Festival director back in 1999, but he continues to grant me his professional trust and personal friendship. His knowledge of film history, expertise in film programming, and his attention to contemporary cinema are always enlightening. Wearing the two hats of scholar and festival programmer, I am greatly indebted to my colleagues at various institutions. At the Venice International

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Wang Bing’s Filmmaking of the China Dream

Film Festival, organized within the framework of La Biennale di Venezia, I wish to thank Angela Savoldi, Silvia Menegazzi, Annalisa Montesi, and Daniela Persi for their professional and friendly support during many years and many festivals. I also want to acknowledge all my colleagues in the Programming office and the administrative management of La Biennale di Venezia. I have had the pleasure of co-organizing and participating in many events dedicated to Wang Bing. Some of these were co-curated with two internationally renowned film experts, Nicola Mazzanti and Stefano Francia di Celle, to whom I express my gratitude. Furthermore, this work would not have been possible without the support of those producers, sales agents and film professionals who have shared my passion for Wang Bing’s cinema. A warm thank you to Wang Yang, Isabelle Glanchant, Vincent Wang, Kong Lihong, and Zhu Zhu. I cannot imagine what shape this study would have taken without the precious feedback received from many scholars and university colleagues at symposia and conferences around the world. While not being able to record everyone, I wish to express my gratitude to Alessandra Aresu, Silvia Casini, Serena De Marchi, Dina Iordanova, Marina Svensson, Sebastian Veg, Paola Voci, and Valeria Zanier. I also wish to thank all my long-term colleagues at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, first and foremost Federico Alberto Greselin, for many constructive discussions since my early years as a researcher, and Laura De Giorgi and Nicoletta Pesaro for their encouragement. I am also grateful to my colleagues at Stockholm University and at the University of Gothenburg, including Johan Lagerkvist, Fredrik Fällman and Martin Svensson Ekström. I am indebted to many friends for their contributions to this volume. Peggy Kames and Tobia Maschio have patiently taken care of images and charts and read through several chapters of the manuscript. Eddie Bertozzi has always been my ‘perfect discussant’ when I have questioned certain passages, and Jonathan Sellers has responded to my incessant requests for language revisions. In addition, my undergraduate students Carlotta Andrea Telloli and Giacomo Pozzi have kindly assisted me in locating last-minute material. Finally, and on a more personal note, I wish to thank Riccardo Castagna for having patiently supported this work; and Neil Robbins for always being on Susan’s side and for providing a model for how to embark on book projects. Many friends have shared precious words with such generosity and without knowing how invaluable their friendship has been to bring this long research to its final writing stage. They include Arianna Calzà and Li Zhenkai, Nicola Callegaro, Alberto Casadei, Olaf Gehrke, Stefano Franceschi Ragghianti, Giulia Rosmarini, Elena Vianello and Davide Locas.



Editorial Note

This book follows the Chinese convention for Chinese names, that is, family names precede personal names (i.e. Wang Bing, Tsai Ming-liang). However there might be exceptions for the names in the English-language sources of authors who have adopted the English convention of the personal name preceding the family name (i.e. Yinjing Zhang). The Chinese pinyin system is adopted for the Romanization of Chinese names (i.e. Zhang Yimou, Zhao Liang) unless the individual is already well-known with a different Romanization (i.e. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Wong Kar-wai). Pinyin is also provided after the first occurrence of the English translation for important Chinese terms and phrases that are directly relevant for the discussion (i.e. Chinese Dream/Zhongguo meng, re-education through labour/laodong jiaoyang). When a Chinese film is referred to for the first time in the book, the film’s international title in English is followed by the Chinese original title in pinyin and the year of distribution or world premiere. Non-Chinese films are indicated with their international title in English followed by their original title in the first occurrence. Film titles and references in French are not translated in English as they are mainly known with their original titles. All references in different languages are followed by their English translation (i.e. Gaobie Jiabiangou/Farewell to Jiabiangou). A full filmography of Wang Bing’s works is provided at the end of the book for easy identification.

Foreword Just over fifty years have passed since François Truffaut encapsulated, in an evocative image, the prevailing presumption of contemporary theoretical reflection on film history and criticism. According to this presumption, film history could essentially be traced back to two main currents, harking back to the two different approaches of the Seventh Art’s pioneers: on the one hand the ‘ontological’ realism of the Lumière Brothers – progenitors of documentary cinema; on the other hand, the spectacular inventiveness of George Meliès – progenitor of narrative and fictional cinema. Truffaut described these two currents as vast rivers originating from the same source but flowing in parallel and with little chance of intertwining and even less of converging. Such a divide seemed to be confirmed by the attitude of an audience that was passively accustomed to giving diverging receptions to works belonging to these two diverse currents. Moreover, the production system, and the filmmakers too, considered documentary and fiction film as two neatly separate types of cinema, with a qualitatively different impact on the collective imaginary. Accordingly, this presumption continued to govern the prevalent approach of viewers, critics, producers, and film directors at least until the end of the twentieth century. Thus, it persisted until the deep formal and aesthetic transformations that characterize contemporary cinema finally dismissed the strict divide that had previously defined the semantic spectrum of each term – documentary and fiction – and embraced a more sophisticated articulation frame. Albeit without entering into detailed analyses of individual works and experimentations with film language that contributed to the convergence of these traditionally separate approaches, the proliferation of more sophisticated and complex expressive modes – now for all to see – is indebted to the mutual interaction of these two for long distinct worlds. On the one hand, ‘fiction film’ has progressively adopted ways of representing the pro-filmic event that are part of the most advanced experiences of the ‘cinema of the real’; on the other hand, the line of cinema that is conventionally and persistently called ‘documentary’ has increasingly developed a more conscious use of its own cinematic language. Going

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beyond traditional understandings of the ‘realistic’ image, the latter, too, has appropriated stylistic and narrative features that have long been the privilege of fiction film. Filmmakers such as Werner Herzog, Fredrick Wiseman, Gianfranco Rosi, Joshua Oppenheimer, and Roberto Minervini among others, have got us accustomed to works based on challenging yet fascinating assumptions. Their hybrid signature style – blending reality and fiction, documentary material and dramatic ambitions, facts, and narration – has shaped a film language that feels both ambiguous and captivating and, at least partially, unprecedented. These filmmakers take reality as their starting point in order to transcend it. They innovatively advocate a cinema that, while aiming to represent reality, or segments of it, does not conceal its own device behind the supposed absence of mise en scène, storytelling, and narrative processes. In brief, they testify to what makes each creative act possible, even when it seemingly refers, more or less straightforwardly, to the mere indexical reality. Each of them, and thus many other contemporary filmmakers, pursue this goal through a broad variety of original forms. Together, they shape a fresh understanding of ‘documentary cinema’ that Aline Caillet has defined as “a hybrid practice blending film, theatre, video and performance departing from the direct take on reality. By prompting certain conditions and creating new experiences, it has often emancipated itself from the sheer relation with reality which it should maintain nonetheless” (2014).1 Against the definitive collapse of the long-established, and somehow reassuring, framework according to which image production was a strictly regulated and ring-fenced process, each of them guarding the stronghold of a specific genre or mode, a new film configuration has taken shape. In Marco Bertozzi’s definition, this may be a “‘cinema of thought’ which is able to encompass cognitive processes and the acts of viewing, shifting the attention from the overabundance of reality effects to the meaning-making process of its production. And, in questioning what appears natural and obvious to most, it actually turns into a vivid act of creative resistance” (2018). Or, by borrowing the definition used by another contemporary film scholar, Dario Cecchi, in this new form of film expression “the documentary instance combines with a set of other needs (including ethics, politics, narrative, and re-elaborating instances), so that its own preconditions have to be thought anew” (2016). It is hard to resist the temptation to state that Wang Bing’s oeuvre not only represents one of the many epitomes of this fascinating trend in contemporary cinema, but it also stands out as one of its most radical 1

Translations from the quoted texts by Elena Pollacchi.

Foreword

15

and groundbreaking expressions, as testified in Elena Pollacchi’s compelling in-depth analyses of Wang’s corpus. Wang’s cinema is still largely unknown to a broader audience, mainly due to the shrinking space for non-mainstream and art-house cinema in film exhibition. However, his stature is well-established among critics, curators, and scholars with an eye for innovative creative stances, also as a result of his regular presence at major international film festivals (Venice, Cannes, Berlin, Locarno). His works have also been featured at important art institutions worldwide, such as the Parisian Centre Pompidou and at the international art exhibition Documenta 14 in Kassel, in addition to his solo gallery exhibitions at the Paris-based Galerie Chantal Crousel and Galerie Paris-Beijing. What characterizes Wang Bing’s approach to filmmaking and makes him one of the most relevant filmmakers of our times, is his ability to push the boundaries of the experimentation with form and contents, film after film, in a conscious development of his filmmaking’s potential. In addition, his work expresses the underlying ambition to build the most impressive audiovisual archive of contemporary Chinese society and its contradictions against the ongoing mainstream narrative of the China Dream, a catchphrase launched by President Xi Jinping in 2012 that encompasses the waves of economic policies that have shaped China’s development until today. This challenging critical and aesthetic project with its multiple articulations has progressively taken shape during the course of the filmmaker’s career spanning over two decades, from Wang’s 554-minute triptych debut f ilm Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) to the most recent 330-minute documentary/installation Beauty Lives in Freedom (2018). No other filmmaker has been able to grasp with the same depth and understanding the transformation of Chinese society in the last two decades, its uneven development and the impact of state economic policies on the population. Yet, the significance of Wang’s work also resides in his emphasis on the very act of filming as a means to develop his own unique approach to reality. It is impossible to summarize Wang’s craft, his method, and the importance of his cinematic achievements in the space of a short introduction. Pollacchi’s essential and in-depth study sheds light on the complexity of Wang’s work by detecting the features of his creative evolution. As she has noted in the introduction, “Wang’s use of the handheld camera [is] a way of turning filmmaking into a process of creating knowledge about the world. He testifies to witnesses of the recent past as well as reports, archives, and provides tools to reflect upon certain phenomena such as labour issues, the position of intellectuals, the absurdity and violence of certain political campaigns”. As Pollacchi has remarked, Wang’s way of filming is based

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Wang Bing’s Filmmaking of the China Dream

on the tight relation between an immersive experience of space and the extended duration of it, so that the final viewing can significantly mirror the filmmaker’s exploration of that very same space. The filmmaking process becomes an experience to be shared between the director and the social actors in their living and working settings; likewise, by watching the film, the viewer is ultimately involved in an active process of understanding the spaces, people, social conditions, or historical facts as they were first encountered by the filmmaker. To put it differently, Wang Bing’s works originate firstly from the identification of a specific context and its social actors, and then move to share their daily routines for an extended period of time (and often for several years). In this process, the camera becomes a tool for an ongoing process of understanding and does not merely follow a predetermined shooting schedule or narrative structure as it might be imposed by a script, which actually does not exist. As Pollacchi notes, “Wang’s increasing proximity to his social actors over time allows the audience to familiarize with spaces so as to engage in an active process of understanding.”. Furthermore, “[f]ar from any anthropological or ethnographic approach, Wang’s works connect spaces and human practice” to go beyond anthropological investigation, documentary activism, as well as narrative cinema. To conclude, I note Pollacchi’s observation: Wang has used his camera as a way to connect, register, and eventually share this process with the viewers in the diverse conf igurations of screenings and viewing experiences. […] Wang Bing has been able to break the divide between narrative films, documentaries, anthropological investigation, and critical filmmaking in order to embrace them all in a personal interpretation of cinema. In Wang’s vision, social inequalities, political injustice, or other historical wounds come to the fore by means of a painstaking process of observing, f ilming, editing, and, f inally, exhibiting, either in theatres or art exhibition spaces.

The originality of his craft, the richness of his human and social exploration, and his ability to trace an alternative trajectory with his works to that of the mainstream state narratives and economic policies, confirm the importance of Wang’s achieved position in contemporary cinema. Together with the relevant self-reflection on the role and the position of the filmmaker vis-à-vis the society, they also highlight the political and aesthetic significance of his incessant cinematic search. Alberto Barbera (Venice Film Festival Director)

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References Bertozzi, Marco (2018) Documentario come arte. Riuso, performance, autobiografia nell’esperienza del cinema contemporaneo [Documentary as Art. Re-use, performance, autobiography], Venezia: Marsilio. Caillet, Aline (2014) Dispositifs Critiques. Le documentaire, du cinéma aux arts visuels, Rennes: PU Rennes. Cecchi, Dario (2016) Immagini mancanti. L’estetica del documentario nell’epoca dell’intermedialità [Missing Images. Aesthetics of documentary in the age of intermediality], Cosenza: Pellegrini.

Introduction Abstract The introduction focuses on the relevance of Wang Bing’s f ilmmaking and his international profile. His stature as an acclaimed documentary auteur has been conf irmed by many important international awards both in the field of cinema and the arts. He has a reputation for bringing the lives of marginalized people and the spaces of their daily life to the screen in uncompromising ways. In looking at Wang’s poetics of cinema, this study closely links form, theme, and narrative structure in Wang’s work in response to China’s social and economic transformation. Wang’s work is also discussed in light of other f ilmmakers and world cinema classics. Keywords: Documentary cinema, China, Spaces, Poetics, Witnessing, Subaltern, Labour, History, Wang Bing

The relevance of Wang Bing’s filmmaking My long-term investigation of the filmmaking of Wang Bing, now defined as one of the major documentarists of our times, was prompted by a set of questions to be outlined below.1 Born in 1967, in Xi’an, the capital city of Shaanxi province, one of the central regions in China, Wang studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts and cinematography at the Beijing Film Academy, before beginning his career as an independent filmmaker in 1999. Since his international debut with the nine-hour epic Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (Tiexi qu, 2002),2 Wang’s name has gradually 1 The French art and culture magazine Transfuge dedicated its cover to Wang Bing in November 2018. In an article on Wang Bing’s cinema published in the same issue, François Bégaudeau declared him “today’s greatest documentarist” (Transfuge no. 123, November 2018, p. 46). 2 The international title of the film Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks is abbreviated as West of the Tracks throughout this book as is common practice in English-language literature on the film. An initial editing of 300 minutes was f irst screened in the Forum section of the Berlin Film

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become a major and recurrent presence at film festivals, museums, and art institutions worldwide. He has completed a significant number of works including a dozen major full-length documentaries and several shorter documentary works, the full-length feature film The Ditch (Jiabiangou, 2010), and one short feature film. He has also been active in several video installations and photographic projects and continues to work on ongoing projects so that these figures are constantly subject to change. Controversial in the People’s Republic of China, Wang has dealt with spaces and people usually neglected in the current circulation of China-related images. He has built a reputation for bringing the lives of marginalized populations to the screen in uncompromising ways. His works have chronicled the stories of China’s heavy industry workers, migrant labourers, rural children, and others left behind by a rapidly modernizing nation. Wang’s relevance as a filmmaker has been confirmed by the major awards he has received at film festivals worldwide, including the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2017 for Mrs Fang (Fang Xiuying, 2017) and the Best Film (Orizzonti Section) for Three Sisters (San zimei, 2012) at the 69th Venice International Film Festival in 2012, followed by many other international film awards.3 Since early on in his career, Wang Bing’s works have also featured in art galleries and art exhibition spaces, confirming the broad spectrum of his moving image outputs and expanding his international reputation across the film and the visual arts scenes. Retrospectives of his works have taken place at major international art institutions, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Royal Belgian Film Archive in Brussels in 2014, Documenta 14 in Kassel (Germany) in 2017, and the Museo Reina Sofia and Filmoteca of Madrid in 2018. In 2017, he was awarded one of the most prestigious contemporary art awards, the EYE Art & Film Prize in Amsterdam, for his entire filmography and he has had solo exhibitions at the CCA Wattis Institute (San Francisco) and at the Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris), among others. In 2019, Wang Bing held a teaching post at the Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains – the French institution for higher artistic teaching. In the context of such high international praise and, at this crucial time in history as China is recognized as one of the world’s economic and political Festival in 2002 but was then replaced by the 554-minute version screened in Rotterdam in 2003. 3 Three Sisters was first screened in Venice on 7 September 2012. Subsequently, it won top awards in Dubai, Fribourg, Lisbon, and Nantes. While very little of Wang Bing’s oeuvre has been publicly screened in the People’s Republic of China and Chinese literature on his work remains limited, the news of major prizes has widely circulated in the Chinese media.

Introduc tion

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superpowers, this thorough discussion of Wang Bing’s cinema aims to shed some light on the role and the potential of filmmaking in relation to transforming spaces, social issues, and the legacy of sensitive historical facts. First and foremost, Wang’s works document ongoing processes while, at the same time, allowing a discussion of how the camera becomes a personal tool in the hands of a f ilmmaker. Wang’s immersive handheld camera delivers an experience involving the viewers on a global scale, regardless of their knowledge of China. This experience, which has evolved along with Wang’s craft over the course of the filmmaker’s career, involves watching images and being imbued in a soundscape while, at the same time, learning something in the process. This something might be something about China, about issues shared by contemporary societies, and even about our own positioning as cinema-viewers facing such issues on a screen. We must now ask what makes Wang Bing’s films so special when compared to the hundreds of documentary films, and films in general, made in China and elsewhere every year? Or, why do his works appear so distinct from those of other Chinese documentary filmmakers, some of whom have prestigious resumés and participate at major international film festivals, such as Du Haibin, Zhao Liang, among others, and even the internationally celebrated artist Ai Weiwei, whose work includes a set of documentary films? Yet, in terms of circulation and reception, only Wang has had most of his films presented at the three most established international film festivals Cannes, Venice, and Berlin – often with awards. Moreover, his works have also been supported and presented at major art galleries and museums around the world. Wang’s ways of filmmaking have therefore granted him increasing relevance, not only in film circles, but also in the art scene. Some of his films have also circulated in cinemas and on DVDs in several European countries and in the US. Although not officially screened in China, some of his works were accessible through pirated DVDs and a very few screenings have been organized within the framework of international cultural institutions such as foreign cultural institutes. 4 This leads to another question: who is the audience for his cinema? Although Wang’s work does not openly challenge the structures and film authorities of the People’s Republic of China, they do not conform to the pattern and ways of state-approved Chinese film production. The filmmaker has never sought official approval or gone through the process of obtaining censorship certificates, so that domestic circulation of his works is not 4 Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks was available in China as a pirated copy of the French MK2 DVD edition.

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possible. Yet, he does not seem inclined to make the effort to change this situation. As he has often stated, his cinema is made for everyone who is interested in it, either now or, maybe, in the future. His audience might therefore be a prospective audience in the near future, or in years to come. Recalling Benedict Anderson’s introduction to his discussion of nationalism as the creation of an imagined community (1983[2006]: 5–7), we could say Wang Bing has turned the contemporary notion of ‘Chineseness’ upsidedown while still being connected to it. This notion includes the image of China promoted by the state and the informal notion of China as a successful country, which is disseminated together with diverse images of China’s economic growth. What is made visible in Wang Bing’s films lacks any ‘oriental flavour’ and is precisely the opposite of exoticism. There is nothing that recalls the beauty of the ‘Orient’ and nothing for the audience to connect with in terms of the ‘exotic’. Yet, some post-Orientalism can be found in the way Wang Bing’s cinema testifies to what is usually unexplored in China, while belonging to a different world than the ‘West’. Wang’s film practice, therefore, somehow responds to the need of the imagined community of film-viewers, film professionals, festival delegates, and gallery curators for whom China can still be defined, or at least better understood, by means of its cinema. Furthermore, as I will point out throughout this book, Wang Bing’s cinema manages to raise questions that go beyond the specificity of the Chinese case to embrace issues related to global development and contemporary societies. As a final preliminary question, what makes Wang Bing’s filmmaking viable to so many different audiences, across different exhibition spaces, and through different screening formats? Or, to put it differently, why has Wang Bing come to occupy such a prominent position within contemporary culture so as to deserve the attention of festival programmers, art curators, and scholars alike, despite his fairly limited public visibility? This is the crucial question that has encouraged me to transform my long-term research on his cinema into a monograph. My interest was prompted by the showing of Wang’s debut film West of the Tracks at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2003. The screening of this groundbreaking documentary on the dismissal of workers in the large industrial districts of Liaoning in Northeast China was also the first of many occasions on which we met regularly in the following two decades. In this time, in addition to our many professional encounters related to my activities as a festival programmer and as a Chinese studies scholar, we have developed a close friendship. During these nearly twenty years, Wang’s position in the world of contemporary culture has become solid enough to enable him to become one of the leading

Introduc tion

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documentary filmmakers of our times, as the many interviews, articles, and catalogues published in different languages and at different stages in his career have confirmed. I myself have published a string of articles on his work. However, no research has so far examined Wang’s oeuvre as a whole, systematically analysing his entire output in a study that reveals how Wang’s films speak to each other in not immediately obvious ways. While scholars and film critics agree in praising his uncompromising perspective on contemporary China, his work has not yet been discussed as a coherent and evolving cinematic and visual enterprise. By looking at his career as an informal yet consistent project, I hope this book can contribute to a better understanding of Wang’s work as that of a contemporary auteur aiming at recording, archiving, and exposing the contradictions of contemporary societies with China as the focus. Moreover, Wang Bing also prompts a set of challenging theoretical questions related to pivotal relationships such as filmmaking and the social context, filmmaking and history, and filmmaking across different exhibition circuits. Here, I address some of these relations by looking at Wang’s films as a corpus with a shared aesthetic, some common production constraints, and the consistent though ever evolving approach to the filmmaking process as a way of ‘extracting narrative from reality’ and presenting it through a viewing experience. As the filmmaker has often declared, the camera should move around the space and towards the subjects without a preestablished structure, so that the context and the social actors come to define the structure of the narrative, and not the other way around, as in the case of films with a script.5 Furthermore, none of his films, installations, short films, commissioned works, or even photographic oeuvres, is a one-dimensional or ‘stand-alone’ work. Works-in-progress and completed works talk to one another by referring to previously approached topics or featuring intertextual connections or presenting connections in relation to the productive structure. Together, they compose a constellation comprising different audiovisual outputs in which China is the main object of analysis but the issues at stake relate to contemporary societies on a global scale. Since most of Wang’s works share an interest in China’s interplay between past and present, its ongoing contradictions, and some hidden pages in Chinese history, I have encompassed them under the heading of a ‘counternarrative of the China Dream’, which is associated with post-Mao China 5 Wang Bing has also explained his views on storytelling and the nature of history in a video interview, ‘The True Nature of Story – A Conversation with Wang Bing’ https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=X_EenguA7Og [accessed 20 October 2016].

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and even more with the outcome of Chinese economic reforms that were launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. The China Dream (Zhongguo meng), or the Chinese Dream, is one of the most effective catchphrases circulating both domestically and internationally.6 It is the image that China is projecting to the world as a successful, welcoming, and ever-growing country. As such, it is also part of the narrative of Chinese ‘soft power’. Yet, where current leader Xi Jinping has coined the phrase ‘China Dream’ as part of his domestic and international political strategy, Wang’s films can be understood as a response that shows the less ideal aspects of China’s rise. This conceptual framework contributes to a more fruitful reading of Wang’s oeuvre as it puts the basis for connecting his aesthetics to the subject matters of his films against current socio-economic and political contexts. In particular, this notion allows a discussion of his cinema within the broader framework of Chinese history, politics, society, and culture and, more specifically, against the uneven landscape that China’s economy has shaped in the forty years of reforms. This investigation takes Wang’s filmmaking as a holistic system, in which individual works bear some connection while simultaneously relating to current discourses on China, how the country is perceived, and how it is presented to the world. Furthermore, insofar as China’s growth implies a rapid engagement with neoliberalist economic structures and the parallel reduction of welfare supports, Wang’s works also speak to a much larger global audience, albeit without losing their Chinese distinctiveness.7

Themes, form, and narrative structure: A linked approach to Wang Bing’s filmmaking This book has two intertwining points of entry: the first is related to Wang Bing’s choice of material and his subject matter; the second to the evolution 6 For a thorough review of the slogan China Dream, or Chinese Dream, and related scholarly debates, see Callahan (2015). The webpage of the China Daily – the only English daily paper officially published in China – provides an updated outline of the elements and policies connected to the Chinese Dream http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/Chinese-dream.html [accessed 28 September 2017]. The video by CGNT ‘The Chinese Dream is a Global Aspiration’ describes the China Dream in a short English informative message https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=BgB1LBQec08 [accessed 8 March 2020]. The topic of the China dream in relation to screen and literary culture was largely discussed during the international conference ‘Exploring the China Dream. Trajectories and Articulations of Soft Power in the Sinophone World’ held at Stockholm University on 15–16 August 2016, co-organized by the author of this book. In this volume, the terms China Dream and Chinese Dream are used interchangeably. 7 I am indebted to Chris Berry for this comment.

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of his filmmaking over the course of his career. I believe a parallel discussion of these aspects, namely linking themes, form, and narrative structures, helps further clarify the relevance of Wang’s cinema to both the knowledge of contemporary China (and its recent history) and to the rapid development of documentary filmmaking practices. Therefore, the tight connection or interdependence between his work and the historical processes that have shaped today’s China in the last two decades is the essential assumption upon which this book is grounded. Hence, rather than highlighting specific aesthetic features, I discuss Wang’s uses of the handheld camera as a way of turning filmmaking into a process of creating knowledge about the world. He provides the testimony of witnesses of the recent past, and supplies the tools to reflect upon certain phenomena such as labour issues, the position of intellectuals, the absurdity and violence of certain political campaigns. Taken together, this might encourage us to look at Wang Bing as an activist, a definition that he generally refuses, as it risks overlooking the importance of cinematic construction in favour of subject matter. On the contrary, Wang’s images and his character- or space-driven narratives are constantly imbued with a tension between the immediate visual pleasure resulting from the viewing experience and their encouragement of reflection and thoughtful consideration. In most cases, the beauty of Wang’s moving images is drawn out of unattractive spaces, uneasy social settings, marginal areas, and marginal people struggling in their daily life. Furthermore, this tension underlying Wang’s aesthetics helps connect his cinema to a line of filmmaking that can be defined as ‘cinema of engagement’, or described as cinema exposing the contradictions imbued in the relationship between the individual and society. This includes the works of film masters such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Terrence Malick, in addition to contemporary filmmakers such as Pedro Costa and Claude Lanzmann, among others. It also harks back to pioneering days of documentary cinema with the Lumière brothers. By connecting the Chinese filmmaker to these film directors and documentarists, I aim to insert him into a line of film history that goes beyond the two traditional distinctions, the first one between filmmaking in the East and West of the world, and the second one between non-fiction and fiction film. Moreover, this comparative dimension can be understood as a further way to connect to the audience that is currently most engaged with Wang’s work, the film festival- and gallery-goers. This is also in consideration of the fact that Wang’s work is not submitted to Chinese censorship and is therefore neither distributed, nor well known in China.

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An anecdote from the presentation of Wang’s Bitter Money (Ku qian, 2016) at the 73rd Venice International Film Festival in September 2016 serves well to introduce the collapse of the f iction/non-f iction divide. The screening material of the documentary was received only 48 hours prior to the f irst screening – an extremely tight timing for testing and verifying the DCP (Digital Cinema Package), the material currently used in theatres instead of traditional film formats. The selection of Bitter Money had been confirmed just a few weeks earlier on the basis of a rough cut that gave us programmers an overall idea of the film but was not yet the final cut. When the DCP reached Venice, no one, not even the filmmaker and his own staff, had yet seen the entire film in its complete version on a big screen. The press screening, the f irst one of three, was scheduled on 9 September 2016, the last day of the festival. The jury members were actually the f irst ones to watch the work in its f inal version. They had a private screening the day before as they needed to discuss it before the awards ceremony. Despite such a last-minute schedule, the film was awarded the Best Script in the Orizzonti section, a section Wang Bing had already won with the Best Film Award for the documentary Three Sisters in 2012. That year was also the first in which the festival featured no distinction between fiction and non-fiction films in all the different sections of the programme.8 Right after the jury had decided to give the Best Script award to Bitter Money, the festival came to me as the programmer for Chinese films in order to find out the name of the scriptwriter, so that it could be correctly engraved on the awarded lion statue. This question created a paradoxical situation, such that when Wang and his team heard about the award, they felt more surprised than happy. In fact, the question about the scriptwriter would have been perfectly legitimate for a certain line of documentary cinema, including works such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea (Fuocoammare, 2016) for which the filmmakers are also credited as writers, but this was not so in Wang’s case. He had often insisted on the prominence of the way actual facts unfold in real life over the use of a pre-defined text or script. Even during the press conference for the Venice awards, Wang declared that stories are always part of the reality the filmmaker has the chance to observe during the shooting process. And he went on to say that stories have to be presented to the audience in such a way that the audience can have 8 The year following the presentation of Three Sisters, was the first year documentary was included in the Venice main competition with the Golden Lion to Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Sacro Gra (2013).

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a close perception of how the filmmaker had discovered and approached them in the f irst instance. Like most of Wang’s documentaries, Bitter Money had no preliminary script and the ‘storyline’ did not exist before the filmmaker started his own exploration of that specific industrial area in Southern China. The f ilmmaking process was actually conceived as a way of sharing the experience of investigating spaces and people in an area of China entirely devoted to the production of garments. This implies establishing a relationship with the social actors and their milieu in such a way that the viewers can also establish their relationship with the film. The filmmaker’s use of the camera becomes a tool in an open process of learning, rather than being a process pre-established by the filmmaker and relying on a pre-defined script. After some discussion, the Orizzonti Award for the Best Script was eventually listed as awarded to ‘Wang Bing’s Bitter Money’ with no scriptwriter’s name engraved on the statue. The Venice episode points to one of the notions at the basis of Wang Bing’s cinema. Stories are ‘extracted’, selected, understood, and singled out from China’s surrounding human and social landscape rather than previously conceived on paper or in the filmmaker’s mind. Through the audio and visual experience – and often thanks to its extensive duration – the viewer becomes familiar with spaces, people, social conditions, and historical facts in a way not dissimilar to that of the filmmaker when he first approached the area and the social actors. Such a notion implies a shared process through which the filmmaker activates an epistemological process in which the audience is encouraged to explore, connect, and reflect upon the filmed material. As a final methodological note, this monograph aims to unpack the dynamics of such an epistemological process. It is also a critical reflection on how films produce knowledge and communicate this knowledge to others. The aesthetics connected to it has somehow become the trademark of Wang Bing’s cinema. His journey across China capturing rough images of the subaltern, his vivid human portraits, and his ability to detect traces of hidden pages in Chinese history are closely connected, or rather juxtaposed and opposed, to the images of China as a superpower. Starting from such premises, Wang Bing’s film practice is far from being simple and straightforward. Dealing with the uneasy relationship between the current social spaces, human conditions, and China’s marginalities implies a set of challenges for the filmmaker, from financing to shooting and distributing. This book hopes to shed some light on Wang’s film practice as a way to deal with such challenges – including filming actual places and actual people against the current limitations of independent film production in China

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and abroad. With David Bordwell’s concept of a poetics of cinema in mind, it also aims to connect close film analyses to their historical contexts.9

Wang Bing à la Wong Kar-wai My discussion of Wang Bing’s oeuvre adopts a bottom-up approach similar to that of Gary Bettinson’s analysis of Wong Kar-wai’s films, which takes the films’ particularities as its start (2014). In line with Bordwell’s approach to a poetics of cinema, Bettinson proposes a close analysis of Wong Kar-wai’s cinema in which he takes the denotative level as a starting point and then brings into the discussion issues derived from, yet not limited to, culturalist and postmodernist approaches as well as references to other filmmaking traditions. That is a way to look at each film ‘in context’ and in relation to other works. Although juxtaposing Wong Kar-wai and Wang Bing might appear hazardous, some commonalities can be found. Both Wong Kar-wai and Wang Bing are strenuous cinephiles with a passion for film history that cuts across genres and film traditions. They are also conscious of the importance of the festival circuits and how their presence within the circuit has contributed to their auteur status. Moreover, their work shows a fascination for spectacle. This implies that formal elements – mise en scène, sound and, editing – are used as key features to articulate the narrative, rather than the use of scriptwriting. In both cases, and with no distinction between feature film or documentary, the narrative is beautifully constructed in terms of visuality but, at the same time, is not easily given to the viewer, who is required to maintain an active role throughout the whole viewing process. This viewing process is never just visual but makes use of sound so as to create an immersive dimension in which the viewer is progressively absorbed. The spectacle, which bears a connotation of passive observation turns, in Wang Bing’s case, into an experience and an epistemological process. However, for both Wang and Wong Kar-wai, the construction of the cinematic spectacle implies a dedication to the act of filming that is almost turned into an obsessive act from the side of the filmmaker. This is demonstrated, for example, by the legendary long shooting process of Wong Kar-wai whose films take years to be completed with scenes being re-taken incessantly. In the case of Wang Bing, such devotion to the act of filming 9 Bordwell’s theory of a poetics of cinema is presented in detail in the volume Poetics of Cinema (2007).

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reached its apex when he fell ill during the making of Three Sisters, in 2011, due to his incessant shooting in the strenuous conditions and high altitude of the Yunnan mountains. Finally, the filming method and the production modes of these two filmmakers are the foundations of their visual output. The words Bettinson used for Wong Kar-wai can apply to Wang Bing as well, for “without his unique production methods, [his] films would lose their distinctive aesthetics” (2015: 2). Referring back to the opening paragraphs of this introduction in which I discussed the relevance of Wang Bing’s f ilmmaking, if there is now a general agreement as to the stature of Wang’s oeuvre, its relevance is not only related to Wang Bing’s film aesthetics, but also to its context. His distinctive and narrativized use of documentary material shot in specific areas of China – far from the classical documentary modes – speaks to the general instability and social uncertainty that are shared concerns at all latitudes. It is against our current historical juncture that Wang’s documentaries – approached here through the lens of the counter-narrative of the China Dream – are seen as critical statements and discussed as a way of exposing social contradictions or sensitive pages of recent history. An interdisciplinary perspective bringing together film and social studies, as well as cultural geography, can be extremely useful in addressing issues such as marginalization, labour issues, and the post-socialist turn towards neoliberalism. However, such a perspective bears the risk of losing sight of the denotative level of the films, their cinematic surface, and their visual pleasure. Although culturalist paradigms in film and documentary studies are crucial for pinpointing the relevance of recurrent social issues, they tend to have a top-down approach in which films are seen as illustrative of certain topics and theories. They risk downplaying (or reducing) the filmmaker’s search and struggle to improve the poignancy and effectiveness of his own aesthetics. As a response to that, I argue that Wang Bing’s aesthetics – or poetics, to use Bordwell’s terminology – cannot be detached from the discussion of the subject matter and its context. When looking at Wang’s work, image composition is as important as the socio-economic background of actual spaces and social actors, and so is the visual and emotional impact on the viewers. Therefore, it would be difficult to prioritize either a top-down culturalist approach or a sheer formalist approach. In order to encompass all aspects, the aesthetics and the socio-economics ones, close film analyses and broader cultural discussion are equally needed. My readings of Wang’s films aim to highlight aesthetic features, production stories, and intertextual connections, or allusions, among different

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works as well as among Wang’s oeuvre and other filmmakers. As part of his poetics, by establishing such connections, this discussion also hopes to move away from an investigation of Chinese documentary filmmaking as a ‘Chinese’ or ‘local’ practice. This contributes to the debate on a transnational film aesthetics (Bordwell 2001; Zhang 2014) that has now become an even more crucial feature against the production and circulation of independent audiovisual works. In fact, Wang Bing’s works, regardless of their medium, format, duration, and exhibition platform and despite their geographical and cultural distinctiveness, have proven universally appreciated and operate across cultures. His first groundbreaking work, West of the Tracks, not only managed to expose issues pertaining to the Chinese context at the turn of the twentieth century, but also addressed global themes such as laid-off workers, migration, and deterioration of social structures. His cinema has talked to audiences across the globe without any specific Chinese connotations but rather recalling the many cinematic experiences of workers and factories in films, with the Lumière brothers as the first case in point.

The book’s genesis and structure This monograph is the result of nearly two decades of personal and professional contacts with Wang Bing and his close collaborators. As mentioned above, I started looking at his cinema on the occasion of the first screening of West of the Tracks at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January 2003. I was then working as a programme advisor for Chinese film for the Turin International Film Festival in Italy and, together with the festival directors at the time, Roberto Turigliatto and Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, we decided to invite Wang Bing to present his long documentary at the following festival in November 2003. Since then, our meetings have been regular, either in Europe or during my visits to China. In 2004, I started serving the Venice International Film Festival as consultant for the selection of Asian films. This position has allowed me to travel frequently to China, and to many other film events worldwide, while granting me access to first-hand information. I was also able to have regular meetings with Wang Bing, either in Europe or in China. Our long conversations have spanned all subjects, yet we have often focused on the complex interplay between Chinese cinema, international film festivals, and the socio-political context in which film practices are inscribed in today’s China and globally. Since 2012, when Alberto Barbera took over direction of the Venice festival, I have also had the chance to contribute to the presentation of Three Sisters, ’Til Madness

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Do Us Part (Feng ai, 2013), and Bitter Money and have been able to follow their making from an early stage.10 Thanks to this long friendship, I have also been able to access Wang’s many different projects at various stages and look closely at their making. Furthermore, I have benefitted from being able to access material that has not publicly circulated (and therefore will not be extensively discussed here), yet which informs this book. Having known Wang Bing since 2003, I believe that a discussion of his cinema through the lens of his own personal life would not prove particularly illuminating. Therefore, biographical notes are limited to this introduction. As a scholar, I have previously approached Wang’s oeuvre in a series of journal articles discussing some specific aspects of his work. They constitute the basis of this monograph and some of my earlier considerations are here reworked and expanded (Pollacchi 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2017, 2019). In those analyses, I have looked at his cinema from different perspectives, in particular at the interplay between history and spaces, labour issues, documentary cinema, and witnessing, film exhibition in gallery spaces, as well as Wang’s admiration for Italian f ilm masters such as Pasolini, Visconti, and Antonioni. Here, I hope to bring my previous work into a more extensive and organic discussion so as to connect these different aspects in the light of Wang’s aesthetics as an auteur and its evolution during the course of his career. Nonetheless, this monograph is not specifically intended as a catalogue of the entirety of Wang Bing’s output, including full-length, medium-length, and short films, video installations, and photographic series. Although I hope to shed light on his production as a consistent project, he is indeed a prolific filmmaker and, thanks to his strenuous shooting process, he has collected hours of shooting material, some of which has been reused years later for projects other than the one for which it was originally filmed. He often digs out and completes projects that were started years earlier, thus making the task of providing an exhaustive investigation of his oeuvre an over-ambitious task. Moreover, after having completed his only full-length feature film so far, The Ditch, in 2010, Wang’s production pace has significantly increased and he has also worked on more than one project at a time. Partly for this reason, this investigation does not follow a strictly chronological order but is organized instead across three major focuses, which are also Wang’s recurrent 10 Alberto Barbera served as the director of the Venice International Film Festival for the first time during the editions 1999–2001, followed by Moritz de Hadeln for the 2002–2003 editions and Marco Müller from 2004 to 2011. Barbera received his second appointment as the Venice festival director in 2012 and the third (ongoing) in 2020.

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themes: labour; history; and the experience of the individual in today’s China, in particular marginal people. Another reason for not looking at a strict chronological development of Wang’s career is the fact that he returns to certain topics at different times with a particular emphasis on certain spaces. As I will point out in the next chapter, which helps locate the actual, geographical trajectory of Wang’s cinematic activities, the broad concept of space and its diverse articulations play a central role in Wang’s cinema. By looking at the film locations over a map of China, the first chapter also aims to set Wang Bing’s cinematic travelogue against the ongoing state narrative of the China Dream. Although this catchphrase epitomizing the success of Chinese economic reforms was only launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2012, shortly after taking the position of General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, it also summarizes the process of marketoriented reforms that Deng Xiaoping started in 1978. This transformation continued through the leaderships of Jiang Zemin (1993–2003) and Hu Jintao (2003–2013).11 In all his works, Wang has testified to the many contradictions and the uneven impact of the rapid transformation on different areas of China. In that sense, his cinema can be read as an informal counter-narrative of the current political line with space as a key concept. The second chapter discusses Wang Bing’s pivotal debut West of the Tracks as the starting point of his approach to filmmaking and it engages with both history and labour issues. It was the result of almost two years of editing from more than 300 hours of material shot during three years and pointed to Wang’s way of observing ‘history in the making’ and extrapolating narratives from an extensive process of shooting. This extensive analysis also forms the basis for connecting Wang’s cinema to world film history by referring on the one hand to the Lumière brothers’ early documentaries, and on the other hand to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978). The following chapters take different articulations of space as their entry points. An in-depth discussion of Wang Bing’s documentary filmmaking in relation to spaces of labour is provided in the third chapter through close analyses of Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, and Bitter Money. This chapter also offers a comparative reading of Three Sisters and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940). The fourth chapter revolves around one of the central concerns of Wang’s work: history, and deals with spaces of history and memory. How does the 11 For an in-depth analysis of the Chinese recent leaderships, see Fewsmith (2008). The dates reported here correspond to the years in which the leaders were in office as President of the People’s Republic of China. Xi Jinping became President in March 2013.

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past affect the present? How is the past still part of ordinary people’s lives today? How do spaces – both physical and social spaces – preserve traces of the past? Moreover, how do they do it when the past relates to sensitive pages of the country’s history? This chapter focuses on Wang’s works related to the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–1959. It is divided into two sections. In the first, I give a close reading of his only full-length feature film so far, The Ditch, and a comparative reading of it with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975). I also connect Wang’s work to that of contemporary filmmaker Pedro Costa. In the second part of the chapter, I discuss his mature work Dead Souls (Si linghun, 2018) as a visual archive of witnesses to this particular campaign and as a way to testify to historical injustice. In fact, Wang’s distinctive filmmaking has enabled him to turn this extensive collection of interviews into a cinematic experience bearing witness to hitherto unaccounted historical junctures. In particular, Dead Souls rescues collective memories of the Anti-Rightist Campaign that would otherwise soon disappear with the passing way of those who experienced it. In addition to the relevance of each individual narrative, Wang’s emphasis on space helps put each individual witness into a larger mosaic. Filmed interviews thus compose and provide space for the viewers to reflect upon the contradictions imbued in the Chinese state system since an earlier stage of modern history, and upon the broader dynamics of historical events. A brief discussion of how Wang connects with but also moves away from the work that Claude Lanzmann did with his large documentary project Shoah (id. 1985) is also offered. The fifth chapter expands on the interplay between collective spaces and individual narratives over the course of China’s transformation. It testifies to Wang’s concern for how individuals came to be exposed to social inequalities as the welfare system declined. After Fengming, A Chinese Memoir (He Fengming, 2007), focusing on the elderly lady’s narrative of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the filmmaker has continued looking at individual stories as a way to zoom in on certain processes. In most cases, these individual narratives relate to a larger collective space that has been transformed or affected by top-down policies and economic changes. These intimate portraits of men and women by means of the camera bring to the fore the collective spaces against which they are singled out. This is the case of Man With No Name (Wu ming zhe, 2009), Father and Sons (Fu yu zi, 2014), and Mrs Fang together with the unfinished work Mi Niang (id. 2014) and Beauty Lives in Freedom (Mei shi ziyou de xiangzhen, 2018). It should be noted that many of these individual narratives are commissioned works and were first presented in art exhibition spaces together with photographic series or on the occasion of retrospectives and homages. They also help introduce the

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diversity of Wang’s output and how he has been able to connect to both the film festival and the art exhibition circuits. The sixth and final chapter approaches Wang’s work from the perspective of exhibition spaces. It looks at how his career has evolved and partly transformed certain festival exhibition practices. It also briefly examines the diverse modes of meaning-making of works exhibited at film festivals and art galleries. By discussing festival exhibition and the broader yet crucial question of how Wang’s oeuvre resonates with the viewers in different spaces across the globe, I look at the virtuous circuit of his regular presence across film festivals and art exhibitions. In fact, film festivals have served the essential function of providing a prestigious platform from which his work could first travel at a time when their domestic visibility is not possible and theatrical release of art-house films or documentary films is limited in Europe like elsewhere. The screenings and awards in Venice (The Ditch, Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Bitter Money), Cannes (Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, Dead Souls), Berlin (first short version of West of the Tracks and Ta’ang/De’ang, 2016), and Locarno (Mrs Fang,) among many others, have contributed to the confirmation of the importance of Wang’s cinema internationally. This has happened at a time when documentary cinema has gained more prominence for a set of reasons, including the greater accessibility of digital technologies and their rapid evolution in terms of image and sound quality. This has further contributed to the collapse of the divide between fiction and non-fiction works on a global scale. Against this global scenario involving the film industry, the diversification of production and distribution modes, not to mention the fact that most of the issues at stake in Wang’s work are of global concern, Wang Bing has emerged as a filmmaker – auteur and artist – with the ability to develop a distinctive film language worth of worldwide appreciation.

References Anderson, Benedict (1983) [2006], Imagined.Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bégaudeau, François (2018) ‘Wang le dengue’, Transfuge, 123, November. Bettinson, Gary (2014) The Sensuous Cinema of Wong Kar-wai. Film Poetics and the Aesthetic of Disturbance, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Bordwell, David (2001) ‘Transcultural Spaces: Toward a Poetics of Chinese Film’, Post Script, 20: 2/3, 9–24.

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— (2007) Poetics of Cinema, London: Routledge. Callahan, William A. (2015) ‘Identity and Security in China: The Negative Soft Power of the China Dream’, Politics, vol. 35, 3–4, March 16, 216–229 [doi: 10.1111/1467-9256.12088]. CGNT (China Global Television Network) (2018) ‘The Chinese Dream is a Global Aspiration’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgB1LBQec08 [accessed 8 March 2020]. Fewsmith, Joseph (2008) China Since Tiananmen: From Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Pollacchi, Elena (2012) ‘Wang Bing’s The Ditch: Spaces of History between Documentary and Fiction’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6: 2, 189–202 [doi: 10.1386/ jcc.6.2.189_1. July 2012] — (2014a) ‘Bodies and Spaces: the Legacy of Italian Cinema in Contemporary Chinese Filmmaking’, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2:1, 7–21 [doi: 10.1386/jicms.2.1.7_1]. — (2014b) ‘Wang Bing’s Shared Spaces of Labor’, Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society (vol. 2 Special Issue ‘Film, Labor, and Migration’), 17:1, 31–42 [doi: 10.1111/wusa.12092]. — (2017) ‘Extracting Narratives from Reality: Wang Bing’s Counter-Narrative of the China Dream’, Studies in Documentary Film, 11:3, 217–231. — (2019) ‘Porous Circuits: Tsai Ming-liang, Zhao Liang, and Wang Bing at the Venice International Film Festival and the Interplay between the Festival and the Art Exhibition Circuits’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 13:2, 130–146. Wang Bing (2014) ‘The True Nature of Story – A Conversation with Wang Bing’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_EenguA7Og [accessed 20 October 2016]. Zhang, Yingjin (2014) ‘Comparative Film Studies, Transnational Film Studies: Interdisciplinarity, Crossmediality, and Transcultural Visuality in Chinese Cinema’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 1:1, 27–40.

1.

Wang Bing’s Cinematic Journey: A Counter-Narrative of the China Dream Abstract This chapter helps locate the geographical trajectory of Wang’s cinematic activities. It also introduces the broad concept of ‘space’ and its centrality in the discussion. By looking at the shooting locations over a map of China, the investigation of Wang Bing’s cinematic travelogue is set against the ongoing state narrative of the China Dream. This is a slogan that frames China’s rise. The author argues that Wang’s films can be understood as a counter-narrative that shows the less shiny side of China’s growth. They can also be loosely grouped according to different definitions of space: spaces of labour, spaces of history and memory, collective spaces, exhibition spaces, and spaces of human practice. Moreover, without losing their Chinese distinctiveness, the issues at stake in Wang’s films speak to a much larger global experience of marginal spaces and uneven development. Keywords: Documentary cinema, China, Spaces, China Dream, Subaltern, Inequalities, Wang Bing

I am convinced that the politics right now is heavily influenced by concerns about the quality of daily life and I think any program should be trying to theorize the problems of daily life against the background of dynamics of capital accumulation, the typical configurations of state power […] So I would always want to concentrate on how we deal with the politics which is coming out of the discontents with daily life in the contemporary city. ‒ David Harvey (2015)

Wang Bing’s filming of China’s uneven economic development can be read as a counter-narrative of the China Dream through the lens of the digital camera. The filmmaker has not conceived his cinema as an a priori long-term

Pollacchi, E., Wang Bing’s Filmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses, and Marginal Spaces. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463721837_ch01

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political project, yet his works can be approached as an incessant exploration of the interplay between politics, economics, and people’s everyday life, from the border areas to the economic centres of China. In the first part of this chapter, the centrality of space and Wang’s process of narrativizing reality are introduced as a way to de-construct, or nuance, the current normative state narrative of the China Dream. Wang’s cinema is described here as a counter-itinerary of the dream images of successful China. In fact, Wang’s cinematic journey has explored a variety of marginal spaces, geographical and social areas across the vast country where the transformation towards a market-driven economy has shaped a broad range of living conditions. His documentaries can be fruitfully read as a corpus addressing the contradictions imbued in China’s rise as a superpower. In the second part of this chapter, his work is set against a map of the People’s Republic of China, marking the stages of its transformation during the last two decades. This is the time frame in which the nation has come to present itself to the world as a winning superpower while, at the same time, the dichotomy between central areas and marginal areas, or rich and poor areas, has grown significantly. From the north-eastern region of Liaoning, which was the location of West of the Tracks, down to the southwestern territories of the Yunnan region for Three Sisters, and then to the more central region of coastal Zhejiang province for Bitter Money, Wang’s documentaries highlight from the periphery a trajectory that tackles political and social issues at the core areas of China’s economic success. By looking at the journey of Wang Bing’s shooting across the country, the geographical and intertextual connections between the films also emerge. The spatial interconnections among his works, his insistence on labour, as well as on other issues, offer the opportunity to derive from his cinema an overall vision of the nation. In the final section of this chapter, which also provides a summary of the films, his works are loosely grouped according to different definitions of space. These preliminary considerations on the entire corpus of Wang’s work aim to bring to the fore the relationship between the films, their spatial settings, and the socio-economic contexts. They constitute the basis for the film analyses given in the following chapters.

The centrality of space in Wang Bing’s narrativized reality Space occupies a crucial role in Wang Bing’s cinema. In line with David Harvey’s reading of the complexity of space, the spatial frame “depends on the nature of the phenomena under investigation” (2006: 126). However, as the

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cultural geographer noted, there is always an interplay, a tension, between spaces and the set of events, phenomena, inhabitants, and geographical conditions that have shaped them (Harvey 1973: 13). Wang Bing’s films appear to be able to capture both the interplay and the tension. They bear witness to inequalities, uneven development and – as most of Wang’s works do – testify to the changing conditions of labour in today’s China and how this affects people’s lives. In addition to these large projects embracing collective spaces, the filmmaker has also paid attention to individual voices as in Fengming, A Chinese Memoir and Mrs Fang, among others. These individual stories further highlight Wang Bing’s concern for people who, in different ways, have endured the hardships of a society that has been hostile or indifferent to their needs. At the basis of Wang’s film practice, there is always a concern for ‘humanity’ as such. Human beings – in most cases, ordinary people in marginal spaces – are the focus of all of his images. As Harvey further noted, the term “space often elicits modifications,” such as social space, urban space, or living space, providing a context that helps “render the meaning of space contingent upon the context” (2006: 119). His discussion of space highlights phrases such as “spaces of History,” “spaces of labour,” “collective versus individual spaces,” which are also used in this volume to denote the different perspectives that Wang Bing adopted in relation to the different spaces his camera has filmed. These phrases provide a “terrain of application defin[ing] something so special as to render any generic definition of space a hopeless task” (Ibid.: 116). Furthermore, space can by no means be disconnected from time, as noted early on not only by Deleuzian film theories, but also by contemporary geographers supporting relative and relational concepts of space (Deleuze 1983, 1985; Lefebvre 1974; Harvey 1973, 2006). In Harvey’s reasoning, “[t] he relational notion of space-time implies the idea of internal relations; external influences get internalized in specific processes or things through time,” as in the case of Tiananmen and Ground Zero, where the meaning of space can only be sought in relational terms (Harvey 2006: 125). This implies looking at such spaces in relation to time and its impact. I find Harvey’s intertwined notion of space-time a good entry point for encompassing Wang’s use of extensive duration and his interest for ‘spaces of history’, in which the impact of the past has remained significantly visible. Watching Wang’s documentaries requires time, because it is only by means of time that spaces can be fully understood.1 When looking at his works on the 1 Contributions of other theoreticians, such as Henri Lefebvre (1974) and Fredric Jameson (1991), have also fruitfully shaped the debate on the interaction between space, culture, and global economic processes, in particular with reference to uneven economic development.

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Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–1959, the potential of his filmmaking in relation to sensitive political topics becomes evident. These works, including his documentary Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, the feature film The Ditch, the collection of interviews Dead Souls, and the video installation Traces (Yi zhi, 2014) on the human remnants of the labour camps, are different yet intertwined works that compose an audiovisual archive of the campaign’s violent impact. They also compose a thorough investigation of memories related to a sensitive page of Chinese history that state authorities have not yet fully acknowledged. Finally, Wang Bing’s focus on space over time points to the social milieu in which social actors are inscribed at a given moment in history. As Raymond Williams pointed out in his discussion of literature, the relationship between culture and society recognizes the interpenetration of culture, society, and economics as part of “a whole and connected social material process” (1990: 140). The interaction of these elements also frames Wang’s filmmaking. His way of observing the social and human landscapes by means of sharing time and spaces with social actors has continued to be an essential component of his cinema. In fact, fourteen years after his groundbreaking debut West of the Tracks, the three-hour-long Bitter Money was based on the similar process of immersive observation in a workers’ district. It was edited from more than 500 hours of filmed material shot between 2014 and 2016, a period during which the filmmaker lived and shared the lives of the people in the textile factory district of Huzhou in Zhejiang province. In-between these works, he travelled across the country bringing his craft of “extracting narratives from reality,” which would become the distinctive feature of his oeuvre. In Wang’s own words, storytelling unfolds as part of the process through which the filmmaker observes actual facts and people’s lives.2 That determines the extensive duration of his works, which is intrinsically connected to his way of looking at and documenting physical and social areas. By doing so, the filmmaker ‘extracts’ stories and characters while observing a broader space. In the long duration of his films, segments of a ‘broad space over time’ are presented to the viewers. Thanks to its duration, Wang Bing’s cinema also turns itself into a shared experience. Furthermore, this connection between the filmmaking process and the viewing experience appears as one of the driving forces of his cinema, as well as one of the traits of his unique oeuvre. If subjects and places should appear to the viewers as close as possible to the way they first appeared in front of the filmmaker’s camera, staged scenes or 2

Press conference of the Award Ceremony, Venice Film Festival, Venice, 10 September 2016.

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post-production interventions should be limited. They might occasionally enhance the perception of the actual shooting conditions, as I will discuss in the case of the only full-length feature The Ditch. This is inevitably a contradictory element as even the basic action of shooting implies a certain degree of staging or ‘intervention’. The editing process alone affects and changes the nature of the rough shooting material. As Patricia Aufderheide noted in her introduction to documentary cinema, documentaries are “portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material, constructed by artists and technicians who make myriad decisions about what story to tell and to whom” (2007: 2). Furthermore, as film theoreticians have argued, documentaries are not real life and not even necessarily the best way to represent real life. Nonetheless, since West of the Tracks, Wang Bing has aimed at re-thinking (documentary) cinema in order to make China visible to the world. Not so much the ‘real China’, as it is too simplistically stated, but rather his own interpretation of it. As Bill Nichols has pointed out in his Introduction to Documentary, “[f]or every documentary there are at least three stories that intertwine: the filmmaker’s, the film’s, and the audience’s” (2001: 61). Interpretation is a key term as it privileges one or the other of these stories. For the filmmaker, it implies a process of shooting, editing, and turning the profilmic into something visible, which can be shared to the public in the viewing experience. Every screening thus implies a shift from some of the personal, subjective, and authorial dimension towards a public experience. As noted earlier, Wang’s craft primarily denotes the filmmaker’s own dedication to the act of filming, sometimes almost an ‘obsession’ for it, as the sickness he experienced while undergoing the strenuous process of filming Three Sisters testifies. In addition to his prolific and diversified production, this emerges from the way his shooting is organized, mainly as a way to share with the viewers the same proximity that he has managed to achieve with the social actors and their living environment. His drive for capturing ‘real’ images – or collecting voices and faces of survivors from past political campaigns – results in an uncommon combination of beauty and horror, spectacle and reflection, absorption and consumption of images that often escape the classification fiction/non-fiction. They contain something of the two forms, as the documented social actors are turned into narrative characters, and actual spaces become their backdrops just as in feature films. Moreover, such images are not recorded impromptu or simply ‘on the spot’. This ‘on-the-spot realism’ has been described by film scholars as the ‘here-and-now’ (xianchang) approach, which characterized some post-socialist Chinese independent films such as the early works

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of Zhang Yuan and Jia Zhangke, among others, as well as most Chinese independent documentary cinema at the turn of the last century (Berry et al. 2010; Robinson 2013; Pickowicz and Zhang 2016). Over the course of Wang’s career, one can observe an increasing awareness towards this process of correlating social spaces, human conditions, and history by means of the camera. Similarly, one can also observe his effort to move away from the immediacy of the images to arrange them in a sort of narrativized structure through the editing process, thus going beyond contingency in order to achieve a cinematic construct of more universal value. From a comparative perspective with other documentary film traditions, seeing Wang Bing as a practitioner of Direct Cinema would be over-simplistic. He is not aiming at Frederick Wiseman’s model or at Jean Rouch’s cinéma vérité; rather, he positions himself as an attentive observer of reality and, from there, he departs to collect and narrate stories. His oeuvre remains different from cinéma vérité or Direct Cinema, even if just for the re-enactments and fictional moments that somehow – and although limited – pertain to all his works. He relies on the camera movements, on the editing process, and on time as ways for the viewer to get involved in the process of becoming familiar with spaces and people. His presence as a filmmaker is occasionally manifested in the film. Yet, although his observational process is also a way to engage the viewer in a form of epistemology fostering awareness, therefore producing knowledge, he rarely uses his own voice in order to make comments. He limits his own interventions in posing questions to the people he is filming. He rejects voice-over commentaries presenting any little extra-diegetic explanation given by means of rare introductory or closing credits. If specific information is offered about the areas where the films were shot, such information often appears at the beginning or at the end of the film once the viewing process is completed. Simple white-on-black credits provide basic data about the location, the characters, or historical facts and figures. The reading of Wang’s documentaries as snapshots of the current reality of China should therefore be rejected as very limited. Realism is a term that should not be neglected when looking at his corpus; it should, however, be seen as a starting point rather than the final goal of his cinema. Although his images are frequently more than rough, barely intelligible at times due to the actual shooting conditions, as in the case of Ta’ang in which the darkness of the night shots makes it difficult to distinguish people in space and the dialect spoken was unknown even to the filmmaker, what ultimately emerges is a powerful aesthetic that pushes viewers into a more active process of seeing, decoding, and understanding. Wang’s craft goes beyond

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either capturing beautiful images or reporting issues, it actually reverses the roughness of often unpleasant settings into mesmerizing cinematic landscapes full of universal stories. He uses a multiplicity of narratives – the many life stories of his social actors – to nuance the normative state project while testifying to the many contradictions of today’s China. With his aesthetic choices and thanks to the evolution of his craft, Wang Bing has revitalized and reinterpreted the concept of documentary cinema not only as a tool of investigation, but also as a way to connect individual stories to the universal narrative of the subaltern. As he has noted, “for me, the image is a recording of the reality of human existence in a given historical, socio-economic and political context, but at the same time it contains emotions, beauty, something more abstract that is perhaps Art. Why limit cinema to only one thing?” (Guarnieri and Wang 2017). Despite the fact that his works are far from being ‘crowd pleasing’ due to long duration, rough images, and sparse explanatory comments, his ability to create a visual experience resonates with filmgoers and art critics worldwide. The political connotations of Wang Bing’s oeuvre emerge more clearly during the slow and demanding viewing process, which contrasts with the vast number of rapidly consumed images of the prosperity of China: urban development, fashion, and glittering cities that proliferate on any media and mobile devices. Alternative voices, when not silenced by means of state control, tend to be overshadowed by the overabundance of positive pictures in domestic film circulation. Wang’s work, although not openly political, engages in fostering awareness. This reminds us of Giorgio Agamben’s observations, according to which a canted angle is never neutral and every aesthetical decision is an ethical decision.3 Wang’s combination of unpolished shots and powerful images carved out from stories of everyday life in the peripheral regions of China, defines a consistent aesthetic evolution in search of a more meaningful approach to filmmaking. Additionally, Wang’s aesthetic conjures up the lessons of film masters such as Antonioni and Pasolini, who have managed to achieve unforgettable shots even from ordinary locations. With different levels of critical interest in exploring the harsh relationship between the individual and society at different times in history, these masters have shown how aesthetics is as important as subject matter. Additionally, if aesthetics goes hand in hand 3 This comment is related to the review of Ta’ang published in The Art(s) of Slow Cinema, 2016 (https://theartsofslowcinema.com/2016/09/02/taang-wang-bing-2016/). For an in-depth discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s ethics of cinema and the interplay between ethics, aesthetics, and montage, see Gustafsson and Grønstad (2014).

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with the filmmaker’s urgent need to witness and record the contradictions of China, the outcome is a distinctive sort of cinema in which documentary and spectacle converge. What Wang Bing ultimately explores, often by means of small digital cameras, is not something that the viewers have never seen before, but rather a cinematic process of exploration, a journey through narratives extracted from the surrounding world. This conflation of unexpected visual pleasure and human struggles, and also the incessant struggle of the filmmaker in creating it, is one of the distinctive features of Wang’s work.

Chinese marginal spaces and uneven development Along his cinematic journey, Wang Bing’s documentaries have explored different geographical, social, marginal, and central areas across the vast Chinese land while economic transformation was impacting on people’s living conditions. Far from any anthropological or ethnographic approach, Wang’s works connect spaces and human practice. Moreover, they have observed the lives of people at the margins of Chinese prosperity, eventually reaching the core of Chinese productive areas. In contrast to the majestic dimension of the government projects, and its top-down discourses, the marginality of Wang’s spaces allows alternative perspectives that deconstruct the utopian vision of Chinese state institutions. They give voice to the subaltern so that the individual narratives of Wang’s social actors nuance the grand narrative of the state. They detect and single out the tiles of Xi Jinping’s authoritarian dream-like project and add extra tiles that do not exactly fit into the ideal mosaic of the China Dream. The concept of marginality offers a useful entry point into the discussion. According to Mayntz’s def inition, “processes of marginalization are the recurrent social mechanisms which prevent full and exclusive integration and maintain existing social inequality, discrimination and/or stigmatisation” (2004). This conceptual framework looks at marginality and marginalization with the national state as a point of reference. It focuses on the distinction between the social core and the periphery, as it is shaped by state policies and regulations. This distinction can be differently related to uneven access to social participation, to groups with a lower social status, often in relation to structural forces such as the changing labour market (Wu and Webster 2010:1), or in relation to minority groups that are “at once part of and alternative to society” (Cheung et al. 2009:3). In particular, the concept of marginalization is introduced here as a useful,

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encompassing perspective from which to look at Wang Bing’s work. By looking at how the films engage with this conceptual framework and how they talk to each other, also in their production stories, I aim to set the bases from which to discuss the evolution of Wang Bing’s f ilmmaking and aesthetics. Wang’s set of documentaries, in particular, can be approached as a cinematic travelogue among marginal areas and social groups, from peripheral regions to the centres of the country. This itinerary is also a journey along the lines of Chinese economic development since the turn of the century; from the poorer regions at the borders to the core of Chinese economic power located in the central and coastal provinces. The scope of Wang’s exploration is far from being a discovery of Chinese hidden marvels, and equally far from being an openly critical statement against state politics. When one starts looking at the shooting locations and while detecting the set of occasions and human connections that have shaped this journey, the potential of Wang Bing’s work to expose the contradictions imbued in contemporary China comes to the fore. These contradictions include deterioration of social structures, internal migration, depopulation of rural areas, as well as the creation of new industrial areas in different parts of the country with a massive migrant population lacking social security. These large working areas often constitute new centres with poor infrastructures, poor living standards, and precarious working conditions. This can also be seen as a consequence of China’s uneven economic development as it has unfolded in the last two decades of economic reforms. All these issues are connected to the socio-economic changes that were prompted by the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s era of reform and opening up (gaige kaifang), first defined in 1978. The impact of such policies became more tangible in the late 1990s and even more so after the turn of the century. By the early 2000s, the gap between those who benefitted from the reforms and those who had to pay a high price for China’s success was becoming increasingly evident. As Armin Müller has poignantly summarized, “Deng Xiaoping’s dictum according to which ‘some will get rich first’ (yi bufen xian fu qilai) lacked any specification regarding how the others would later catch up” (2016: 3). With the turn of the century – under the leaderships of Hu Jintao (2003–2013) and Xi Jinping (2013–) – China saw a further boost of the modernization process with an expanding consumer culture and an even more evident concentration of wealth in coastal areas, the major cities, and the regions that first experimented with the introduction of a more liberal economy. Meanwhile, the conditions of labour also changed rapidly, and on a large scale. As a response to the transformations

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in the economic system and the increasing private intervention, the welfare state in place since the early days of the People’s Republic of China started vanishing. China’s massive transformation from a socialist country into a postsocialist country with a free market economy (the so-called free market with Chinese characteristics) also contributed to re-connecting China to the world’s economy. The most evident step being the entrance of China to the World Trade Organization in 2001. However, as China turned into one of the top players in the global scenario, its economic rise generated increasing inequalities between poor and rich areas, as well as broadened the gap between rural and urban centres (Fan 2006; Morrison 2018). Further, while the economic growth took millions out of poverty and improved the social and living conditions of a significant segment of the population, it also “increased the social distance between different groups of the population” (Müller 2016: 3). In terms of civil society, Xi Jinping’s political line also implied a set of increasing restrictions in terms of cultural expression and individual freedom (Lagerkvist and Pollacchi 2016), which was only partly mitigated by the narrative of the China Dream. This complex process resulted in new dynamics of exclusion as the concept of ‘marginalization’ came to include new and old issues, such as the question of residency registration, or that of the ‘left behind children’. The household registration system (hukou), a kind of national passport system, was first established under Mao Zedong’s leadership in 1954 as a way to contain the movement of the Chinese population and therefore limit potential challenges to the Chinese Communist Party. It was also a system through which the Chinese population could access education, health care, and public services in the area of origin stated in the hukou certificate. This was a crucial element in the planned economy as it provided the basis for controlling internal migration as well as for the allocation of goods and social services. And so was the classification of ‘minority nationality’ (shaoshu minzu), which aimed to limit claims of political autonomy mainly for the border regions of China, in particular the Western regions towards Xinjiang and Tibet, which have traditionally been more unstable (Müller 2016: 3). These structural elements gave rise to a set of problems when China’s economic growth required massive movements of the labour force from rural areas to concentrate in urban centres, bringing about waves of internal migration. In the different waves that arose according to economic policies, people moved from areas where living standards were hardly bearable to areas where work was available. Although the flows of Chinese internal migration are rarely counted as part of current global migration,

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they nonetheless involve millions of people and are an integral part of the current global economy. Moreover, if, during the socialist decades, the family, the work unit (danwei), the neighbourhood organizations, and, ultimately, the state, had provided the structure of social security and welfare in urban areas while the role of the state in rural areas was already much more limited, the gradual decline of such structures – as pointed out by Müller (2016: 10) – has put larger segments of the population at risk. Those who migrated could not transfer their household registration, with the result that they (and their children) became ineligible for basic public services, such as health and education. As a further complication, parents tended to leave their children with elderly family members in their native villages thus creating a new segment of the population, that of the ‘left behind children’. As a cheap and largely available workforce proved to be an essential component of China’s economic growth, the flow of this workforce became an indicator of the location of the new centres of economic power. This flow from rural areas to major cities started as early as the 1980s (Zhao 1999). Since 2015, new state policies were announced as a way to encourage migrants to return from the cities to their hometowns and start new businesses. In fact, the increasing living costs in most Chinese cities were already forcing migrant populations to move out of the urban centres, either towards their hometowns or towards the new centres of production. At the same time, the government encouraged segments of the population to return to rural areas in order to make these areas productive once again. These different phases in economic development not only led to massive displacements and relocations of workers, but also to an increasingly uneven distribution of wealth (Xie and Zhou 2014). Wang Bing’s documentaries look at groups of workers, left behind children, and ethnic minority groups, among others, in various areas of China at different moments during this transition. This cinematic ‘counter-journey’ of Wang Bing’s cinema points at the impact of government policies on groups and individuals excluded from economic development, rather than on the overall economic outcomes and state performance. Moreover, Wang’s ability to trace connections between geographical areas and intertwined phenomena makes his work even more relevant. His cinema contributes to a deeper understanding of these top-down state driven measures, how they result from the interplay between politics and economics, and how they impact the lower levels of the social scale. By looking at people’s everyday life in different areas of China, Wang’s work testif ies to those large segments of the population excluded from

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the narrative of success and from any dream-like perspective. While Xi’s China Dream encourages “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” and the pursuit of individual’s dreams (Xi 2012), the f ilmmaker voices the disillusionment of the workers and the diff iculties of children and young people.

Wang Bing’s counter-journey of the China Dream When Chinese President Xi Jinping launched the slogan ‘China Dream’ as an epitome of the country’s success, Wang Bing was approaching the Western regions of the country. At that time, he was working on a set of projects in the border region of Yunnan, where Three Sisters was shot. More precisely, he was exploring the enclosed space of a mental asylum that would be the focus of ’Til Madness Do Us Part. He was also occasionally travelling to the border territories between China and Burma, which would later become the focus of other works, namely Ta’ang and the work-in-progress Mi Niang, which was shown at the Wang Bing retrospective held at the Royal Belgian Film Archive in Brussels in October 2014. 4 Since Xi Jinping’s speeches in November 2012, just after his election as the General Secretary of the Communist Party, the China Dream has become an essential component of the state narrative, and an integral part of the discourses on Chinese soft power. Such a catchphrase evoked not only the collective dimension of the national rejuvenation, but also encouraged the pursuit of the individual’s dream. As Yinjie Guo has noted, “most China watchers have dwelt on the economic, political, social and military dimensions of the China dream, while few have paid much attention to its critical cultural dimension, which was left implicit in President Xi’s early speeches and articulated with increasing clarity and certainty later” (Guo 2016). This cultural dimension has conjured up traditional Confucian concepts, often by means of neo-Confucian readings (Zhao 2006; Tu et al. 1992), which have imbued President Xi’s rhetoric of a ‘cultural renaissance’. In fact, in his 2014 speech at the Forum on Literature and Art Work, Xi stressed that cultural forms are essential to represent the spirit of an era in addition to the Chinese dream of national revival, economic prosperity, political power, and military strength (Xi 2014). This emphasis on culture has also brought 4 The retrospective at the Royal Belgian Film Archive in Brussels was promoted by the director Nicola Mazzanti and took place in October–November 2014 with a masterclass of Wang Bing that I moderated on 22 October 2014.

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cultural forms, including literature and f ilm, under close government attention. Scholars have debated state strategies of control ranging from internet censorship to the restricted circulation of film and documentaries, including the closing down of independent film festivals and film related events.5 Against the backdrop of these state policies, it is important to recall that Wang Bing’s films have never received public distribution in China. Despite the tightening of state control, when approaching his work as a counter-narrative of the China Dream, we should also keep in mind that Wang’s cinema has had a very limited domestic impact and that, to date, his audience remains an international one. In view of the fact that Wang has never applied for a state certificate for public distribution – the so-called dragon certificate (longbiao) that all Chinese films require in order to be entitled to public screening – his work has never officially existed on state records. Nonetheless, Wang has never encountered major obstacles while filming across China. Only the feature film The Ditch, dealing with the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–1959 – presented as a competition entry at the Venice Film Festival 2010 – had to be publicly announced as a late addition to the festival programme in order to avoid potential reaction from the Chinese state authorities. This creates a paradoxical situation in which Wang’s work is now mainly appreciated by an international audience who do not always fully understand the ongoing Chinese processes, whereas the Chinese audience – who would be more familiar with spaces and issues at stake – is generally unaware of his cinema or unable to access it. This is also what clearly distinguishes Wang Bing from other activist filmmakers or worldrenowned artists, such as Ai Weiwei, whose filmmaking has been frequently discussed in terms of its oppositional stances to government policies or as a way to expose certain social or political issues and is widely known both in China and internationally. In fact, Wang’s cinema provides an exceptional example of filmmaking that both acts as witness and is socially engaged, yet without showing any open criticism towards the Chinese state. However, all of his works convey pictures that question the mainstream narrative, or even the historical narrative provided by the government of the People’s Republic of China. His films offer a visual archive of marginal areas and phenomena that are usually left outside media reports, news, and even simple photographic coverage. At the same time, they provide visible evidence of the contradictions imbued in the Chinese system. Therefore, 5 The volume Chinese Film Festivals (2017) approaches the debate on the expansion of film events in China. In particular, Yu and Wu’s article discusses independent film festivals in China (2017).

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Figure 1. Film shooting locations of Wang Bing’s major works.

Wang Bing can be seen as a critical witness of our era, an archivist in his own way, and also a ‘cultural mediator’ since his cinema decodes today’s China to world viewers. A review of Wang Bing’s movement through the different shooting locations provides a bird’s-eye view of the geographical and social spaces, and the major issues at stake. When the films are viewed as a ‘counter-narrative’ of China’s economic success, this trajectory through the shooting locations, with reference to how the Chinese income per person is distributed in China, is illuminating. In fact, the rhetoric of the China Dream is also an economic rhetoric that fosters the individual’s pursuit of success. The map above shows Wang’s journey across the Chinese regions in relation to the estimated GDP (gross domestic product) per person. His movement across the country also parallels the chronology of how state and economic policies have transitioned the centres of production from certain areas to others with related movement of workforce. Wang Bing’s debut work West of the Tracks on the Tiexi industrial district was shot in the north-eastern province of Liaoning during 1999–2001. He then moved to the western province of Gansu, where Fengming, A Chinese Memoir and The Ditch were filmed, mainly in 2006 and 2009 respectively. These documentaries, both dealing with the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–1959,

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approach a sensitive period of Chinese history and are less concerned with the current socio-economic conditions of the Gansu area. Nonetheless, these historical works are an important illustration of how the Chinese Communist Party has long prioritized its own overambitious economic goals while limiting individual expression and achievement, particularly in the case of intellectuals. From Gansu, Wang Bing moved to the border regions of Yunnan and Sichuan. The Yunnan mountain area is the shooting location of Three Sisters. Sichuan is the region where the mental asylum of ’Til Madness Do Us Part is located. This itinerary was not only prompted by the filmmaker’s interests which, as noted earlier, were not born of a pre-conceived long-term project, but took shape thanks to some occasional encounters with people he had met on his shooting journey. In 2013, in an extensive conversation that was later included in a collected volume of interviews with contemporary filmmakers, he declared that his encounters with shooting locations and social actors were based upon two major considerations (Fumarola and Momo 2013: 418-423). The first one was their potential to express and expose social contradictions, the second their connection to Chinese history in a very broad sense. At the time of the conversation, after the Venice premiere of ’Til Madness Do Us Part in September 2013, Wang Bing had in mind a journey towards the coastal regions of China, the economic centres of the country. This preliminary idea took the shape of the project on the textile district that started in 2015 and resulted in Bitter Money. It was also related to what Wang described in several interviews and conversations as a journey along the course of the Yangzi River, which he sees as the a literal and metaphorical route to cultural, human, political, and economic change (Péron 2014). Yet, whereas the economic change started first in Shanghai, which is where the river enters the China Sea and from there moved upstream towards other major cities including Nanjing, Wuhan, Chongqing, and Chengdu in Sichuan, Wang’s itinerary went downstream starting from the source of the river in Yunnan (Three Sisters) and then moving towards Sichuan (’Til Madness Do us Part) and Zhejiang (Bitter Money). In relation to the second element – history – the filmmaker made explicit his interest in the gap between differing perceptions of history in China; in other words, the gap between the historical narrative of the country as it is commonly perceived, or experienced by Chinese people, and the grand narrative of history as narrated by the State. This concern for history, in particular how it was experienced by ordinary people and the historical traces that are still visible in some actual spaces has remained unchanged since 2004, when Wang began working on the project on the Anti-Rightist campaign

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and through a set of works and installation including The Ditch; Fengming, A Chinese Memoir; Traces; and Dead Souls.6 If Wang’s projects unfolded because of his own travels in the different regions and thanks to the stories he encountered, not all of them have been fully developed. On some, he spent long periods of observation, others remained as works-in-progress, and yet others turned into completed f ilms. Among the latter, a few projects were developed several years after the f irst shooting material was collected, as in the case of Dead Souls. A few others took their f inal shape fairly quickly as a result of a certain urgency, due to the specific circumstances of the location or the limited time given for the shooting, as in the case of ’Til Madness Do Us Part. Wang got to know about the asylum featured in the f ilm while he was shooting in Yunnan in 2012, as the two areas are relatively close. He knew that he could not stay in the hospital for a long time and therefore the shooting period was relatively short and the editing took place immediately afterwards. At the time, Wang had already planned to move to the coastal areas of Zhejiang, where he shot Bitter Money, having met some of the workers in their native villages while shooting Three Sisters in Yunnan. This group of workers had migrated to the Huzhou textile district in Zhejiang – more than 2,000 kilometres away from Yunnan. However, like most Chinese migrant workers, they used to travel back to their home villages for the New Year and that is when they introduced their own stories to the filmmaker. In 2015, he managed to start working in the south-eastern region of Zhejiang, the core of the Chinese textile industry, thanks to such personal connections. In line with studies that emphasize interconnected narratives of migration and migrants’ social networks (Gaetano 2015; Lau 2012), the movement of Wang Bing’s social characters, and the implicit intertextual connections in his documentaries, also testify to the human flows that continue to sustain government policies generation after generation. Later, in Huzhou, he got to know the daughter of Fang Xiuying, the elderly lady with Alzheimer’s disease who is the focus of Mrs Fang, a documentary that was also shot in Zhejiang. A similar situation occurred at the start of his career, when he had the opportunity to learn about the Tiexi district and to shoot there for three years thanks to his own family connections in Shenyang. The works on the Anti-Rightist Campaign are also somehow based on a network of interpersonal connections. The Ditch and Fengming, 6 I joined the conversation that took place in Venice on the occasion of the presentation of ‘Til Madness Do Us Part on 5 September 2013.

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A Chinese Memoir began as early as 2003 when Wang read Yang Xianhui’s collections of reportage literature and documents related to the campaign. Thanks to his regular contacts with the network of witnesses that had grown since his first works on the subject of the campaign, the project continued to develop in subsequent years until the completion of the documentary Dead Souls, which was presented in Cannes 2018. Even the hermit figure of the peculiar 90-second film shot on the occasion of the project ‘Venice 70 Future Reloaded’ for the Venice Film Festival 2013 was the result of a chance meeting when Wang was working in Gansu for The Ditch.7

Spaces in Wang Bing’s oeuvre: An overview of the films and the issues at stake Given the fundamental importance of space in Wang’s works, it is useful to realize that they can also be loosely grouped according to different ‘spaces’. The following chapters and f ilm analyses, with the exception of West of the Tracks, are titled according to a term or a phrase related to space: spaces of labour; spaces of history and memory; collective spaces; to conclude with exhibition spaces and spaces of human practice. In line with Harvey’s approach to space, modifications or phrases related to space are used here to avoid a general conceptual framework and aim to denote the different perspectives that Wang Bing has offered in relation to his cinematic approach to different human practices (Harvey 2006). Each articulation of space is intended not so much as a way to classify Wang’s works, but rather as a way to highlight the connections between the films and how they relate to concepts of space, which testify to a set of concerns in Wang’s filmmaking. As a final note on Wang’s trajectory, his films can also be interpreted as a critical approach to ‘history in the making’. The extensive analysis of West of the Tracks in the second chapter looks at it as such. On the one hand, Wang’s movement across the country follows the workers’ flow across China. On the other hand, his cinema never looks at groups or at the workers’ masses as such, but rather picks and re-tells individual 7 This short f ilm is untitled. It is part of the 70th-anniversary project of the Venice Film Festival for which 70 filmmakers were asked to contribute a short visual work. It is available on the DVD entitled Future Reloaded, published by the institution La Biennale di Venezia within the framework of the project ‘Venice 70 Future Reloaded’ [https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_Q6HSHzo4uY].

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narratives. These narratives are those crucial tiles that seem to be missing from the grand historical narrative of China, just as the voices of witnesses are lacking from the off icial narrative of certain political campaigns. This attention to the individual is an essential feature of his filmmaking. I would argue that it is through these individual stories, and thanks to the interconnections between many of the social actors in his films, that Wang Bing’s cinema has been able to travel across the country and from China to the world. History in the making: Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) Wang Bing started his cinematic journey with the debut epic work West of the Tracks, set among the heavy industry workers of Liaoning province in the north-east. They were about to be laid-off in the Tiexi district of Shenyang, the provincial capital, an area that had been one of the core centres of China’s heavy industry. Their dismissal was announced because the chemical and smelting plants were deemed outdated under the new guidelines for economic development. It took three years for the area to be entirely abandoned so as to be redeveloped into a residential district. The decommissioning of the area was first made public in 1999 and completed in 2002. The Tiexi district was then developed as a major residential centre in Shenyang. When looking at images of the same area a decade later, journalist Christina Larson reported, “[Shenyang] now has new four-lane roads, upscale apartment complexes, a Carrefour store, and Shenyang’s first Ikea (the sign outside reads: ‘No dream too big, no home too small’)” (2011). Within a decade, the city of Shenyang had become a pioneering city for its sustainable energy production and its clean air while remaining the biggest industrial city and communication hub in Northeast China. The price for this urban renewal was that the factories, which had represented China’s industrial core during the Maoist decades, were closed, while an increasing flow of laid-off workers (and their families) had to move towards other areas of China in search of work. West of the Tracks addressed the massive dismissal of workers not only as a visual record, but also as evidence of the implications of China’s fast-paced modernization started by Deng Xiaoping two decades earlier. As Wang Bing has noted, he decided to shoot the film “from a perception about our time: there was a feeling of desolation that reminded me of Tiexi district – the sense that a history which used to be important was now slowly declining, dissolving in front of our eyes” (Wang 2013). He filmed this process ‘in the making’.

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Spaces of labour: Crude Oil (2008), Coal Money (2009), Three Sisters (2012), ’Til Madness Do Us Part (2013), Bitter Money (2016), 15 Hours (2017) After having shot the set of works related to the Anti-Rightist Campaign in Gansu, Wang Bing moved to the Yunnan mountains for the shooting of Three Sisters and then towards the border with Sichuan where the asylum of ’Til Madness Do Us Part is located. These two documentaries constitute Wang’s further elaboration on labour issues. They connect to the debut work not only in terms of their focus on different kind of labour, but also as an expansion of Wang’s approach to filmmaking. In these two works, he managed to fully apply his concept of cinema as “a way to enter the reality of our time, to present the many facets of human life in a holistic way” (Wang 2013), and at a given time in history. He moved from the immersive observational process of West of the Tracks to what I call here a ‘shared experience’. Wang’s increasing proximity to his social actors over time allows the audience to become familiar with spaces so as to engage in an active process of understanding. This also translates into a concept of ‘cinema as labour’, in particular when the shooting takes place in harsh conditions, such as the high Yunnan mountains or the enclosed asylum of ’Til Madness Do Us Part. With this idea of sharing the physical experience of space and the living conditions of the people in mind, Wang Bing pushed himself to his own limits on the Yunnan mountains. The prolonged and strenuous shooting at over 3,000 metres altitude made Wang Bing ill. He developed a physical condition that forced him to interrupt the shooting for nearly a year in 2011. In Three Sisters, the three little girls – part of the ‘left behind children’ of China – live almost by themselves, their parents having moved to the city in search of work. Three Sisters also exposes the deterioration of family and social structures, as well as the conditions of rural labour, not only in the Yunnan areas, but also in other parts of the country. Rural areas have long remained populated mainly by old people and children, or by other social groups deemed unsuitable for a productive working life, although this started to change with Xi Jinping’s call for a revitalization of rural areas in 2017. Three Sisters also served as the trigger to explore other labour spaces and marginal groups in the same area. Not coincidentally, on his many travels to Yunnan, Wang Bing encountered the asylum where ’Til Madness Do Us Part was shot. Its inmates are also among the groups excluded from the active workforce of today’s China due to their mental, physical, or social unsuitability. Yet, the asylum creates a microcosm where the activity of the staff and medics contrasts with the passivity of the inmates.

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A few years later, and in a trajectory re-connecting to his debut work, Wang’s Bitter Money – as part of a larger project on the textile districts of Huzhou in the coastal Zhejiang region – again took the issue of labour as its focus. Bitter Money focuses on migrant workers living in one of the world’s largest areas for the production of children’s clothing. In 2016, Bitter Money testifies to the results of more than a decade of economic transition, the decade that has followed the process presented in West of the Tracks. In the same district, Wang Bing also f ilmed the one-shot 900-minutes documentary installation 15 Hours (15 Xiaoshi). The work was conceived for the art exhibition Documenta 14 in Kassel (Germany) in 2017 and captures one working day inside one of the garment laboratories of the textile district where Bitter Money was shot. In the fourteen years since the shooting of West of the Tracks, Wang Bing’s growing confidence in his own process of filmmaking has allowed him to encompass a set of intertwined phenomena. They include changing conditions of labour and the development of new centres of workers’ aggregation, as well as new waves of internal migration and the parallel deterioration of family structures. When looking at the workers in the two films, individuals appear increasingly detached from any family and social structures and often in a violent environment. By approaching the textile industrial district of Huzhou, the filmmaker has also entered for the first time one of the richest and most productive regions of China. Yet, even there, the imbalance between those who benefit from the growing wealth and the workers who are producing it remains evident, thereby pointing out how liberal economies continue to imply an increasing exploitation of labour even when such labour changes and the free market expands, albeit under state control as in the case of China. Wang Bing’s works on labour should also include the installation Crude Oil (Caiyou riji, 2008) and the documentary Coal Money (Tongdao, 2009). These are commissioned works and therefore are of relatively minor relevance in comparison to his major documentaries. Crude Oil is an 840-minute installation, also shot in the Gobi Desert, on the daily routine of a group of oil-field workers and, due to its extensive duration, has been presented without subtitles at few exhibitions. Coal Money was shot in Inner Mongolia and deals with the transportation of coal from mining areas to urban centres. Wang Bing considers this work unfinished. Regardless of their occasion, format, and duration, all these works deal with different kinds of struggle for survival in today’s China, against the backdrop of the country’s rapid transformation. These films talk to each other and compose a visual record of China in its historical evolution. Wang’s

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films also relate to previous pages of Chinese history in which people were equally exploited, although mainly for political reasons. Spaces of History and Memory: Fengming, A Chinese Memoir (2007), The Ditch (2010), and Dead Souls (2018) The interplay between past and present – as the legacy of the Chinese past into people’s present or the present taken as a way to speak to the past – connects the set of films related to the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957–1959, one of the most violent Chinese political campaigns. The narrative of those who experienced it is also ‘marginal’, as they have no space in Chinese history books and their ‘space’, that of memory and history, has also been one of Wang Bing’s main concerns throughout his career. The documentary Fengming, A Chinese Memoir and the feature film The Ditch, both set in the north-western province of Gansu, were developed between 2005 and 2009 with the former a preparatory work for the latter. Gansu was the space for dealing with history, in particular for approaching the traces left by China’s recent past and yet not entirely accounted for by the Chinese state. In 2004, upon reading Yang Xianhui’s book published the previous year, Wang Bing started working on his project on the Anti-Rightist Campaign and, in particular, on the labour camp at Jiabiangou. He moved to Gansu and continued working in the area, initially for a period until 2008. In 2005, in Lanzhou, he shot Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, a first-person recollection of one of the victims of the campaign. He Fengming is the widow of one of the victims of the Jiabiangou camp and the author of a memoir (He 2001). In her biographical narrative, labour and forced labour played a major part. He and her husband were both accused of being ‘rightist’ and sent to a labour camp. They were based in the capital, Lanzhou, but He Fengming’s husband was sent to the camp of Jiabiangou, in the northern part of the region, in the Gobi Desert. On the basis of He’s story, Wang and his team recreated the labour camp of Jiabiangou in an area very close to the original site for The Ditch, his only full-length feature film to date. It was an attempt to re-enact the past by shooting in a physically demanding location such as that of the desert. With this project on history, the filmmaker started developing the concept of a ‘shared experience’ for the first time, so as to make the physical space something that the viewers could better understand by means of the camera. The same harsh area was also the location of the short video installation Traces and of the documentary The Man with No Name together with the untitled 90-second short film shot on the occasion of the 70th anniversary

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of the Venice International Film Festival. The latter uses the same material as The Man With No Name. Against the barren landscape at the edges of the Gobi Desert, with no word or added sound, a skinny old man is shown in an isolated cave, which is very similar to the ones used in the labour camps during the Anti-Rightist Campaign. The short documentary connects issues of labour and the impact of history on spaces and people’s lives. How many millions of people are currently living in those conditions in China and elsewhere? In order to make such concerns even more explicit, Wang Bing returned to Gansu on a series of trips after 2016 so as to be able to develop his project on the memories of the many labour camps across the country. Dead Souls (2018) revolves around the same political campaign and uses part of the material shot at the time of the first two works by adding extra material shot after 2016. Dead Souls, just like He Fengming, provides a recollection of memories of those who survived the labour camps, not only in Gansu, but also in other parts of China and constitutes the first part of a larger project conceived as a three-part documentary film that takes Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah as its reference, although taking different perspectives. By means of the witnesses’ voices, Wang offers a multiplicity of narratives. They testify to what historical records usually ignore: the spaces of the camps; what is left of them today; and how people have turned them into spaces of daily life.8 In addition to these works dealing specifically with the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Wang Bing approached the violence of politics and history in the short fiction film Brutality Factory, which was included in the omnibus work State of the World (O Estado du mundo 2007). Collective spaces – Individual narratives: Mi Niang (2014), Ta’ang (2016), Mrs Fang (2017), Beauty Lives in Freedom (2018) From his debut, Wang Bing has also shown a strong concern for marginal groups excluded from China’s rise. Ta’ang and the work-in-progress presented at the Royal Belgian Film Archive in Brussels Mi Niang deal with ethnic minorities; Three Sisters takes ‘left-behind children’ in rural areas as its focus; and ’Til Madness Do Us Part engages with people that society marginalizes as unfit for being part of the active population of China today. These narratives are located along the border areas. Here, in addition to the Chinese Han population, ethnic minority groups also experience all 8 Information collected in conversation with Wang Bing at the Cannes screening of Dead Souls on 9 May 2018.

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sorts of struggles. They are significantly marginalized and excluded from the economic and social benefits of the state narrative of success. When shooting in Yunnan and Sichuan, Wang Bing had the chance to travel towards the Burma and Vietnam border where he encountered a wave of migration different from that of migrant workers. This is the topic of Ta’ang, which deals with a group of women of Ta’ang minority with no place to live and raise their children. The armed groups at the border between Burma and China – very rarely mentioned in any news – force them to move towards a no-man’s land between the two countries. A similar destiny is shared by Vietnamese women crossing the border to escape violence and poverty, as in the case of Mi Niang, the work-in-progress shown at the Brussels cinematheque in 2014. Even if their life across the Chinese border meant sharing a daily struggle of hard labour, working on rubber plantations, they would still have more chances to survive than in their home region. A different perspective on the struggles of life is provided in Mrs Fang, the silent narrative of an elderly woman approaching her last days, which offers further confirmation of the deterioration of collective healthcare structures. The elderly woman has Alzheimer’s disease and is cared for by her family – the daughter is one of the Huzhou workers that Wang Bing met while shooting Bitter Money. Only family members can offer the lady their assistance, with no state or medical support, and with no choice other than struggling between family duties and work. Only old people seem to remain in the fishing village where the family used to live as the younger generations are making their own lives elsewhere. Wang’s most recent work dedicated to an individual character is Beauty Lives in Freedom, which was commissioned for art exhibition spaces. The documentary, which forms a diptych with Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, is the only work Wang Bing has so far filmed abroad, in the United States. It reports his encounters with artist, intellectual, and aesthetic philosopher Gao Ertai, who was also a victim of the Anti-Rightist campaign. Having been persecuted for most of his life, after the Tiananmen student movement of 1989 he decided to leave China and has lived in exile ever since. Spaces of exhibition: The interplay between film festivals and art galleries Some concluding considerations on exhibition spaces are relevant as they are related to Wang’s intertwined activities across film festivals and art exhibition spaces. Since early on in his career, Wang Bing has worked with art galleries. Some of his works, in particular those related to individual

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narratives that were produced in recent years, such as Mrs Fang and Beauty Lives in Freedom, are commissioned and were first presented in art exhibition spaces. Wang’s practice across the film festival and art exhibition circuits is an important part of his filmmaking, and a way for him to continue working outside the constraints of the market. Given that his work has limited distribution and is mainly visible internationally, the broad spectrum of his activities provides him with the conditions and financial support to continue with his projects. In some cases, a work commissioned for an exhibition can travel to film festivals and, from there, find some other viewers. This is the case of Mrs Fang, which was first commissioned by Documenta art exhibition in Kassel and then screened at the Locarno International Film Festival, where it was awarded as the Best Film in 2017.

References Aufderheide, Patricia (2007) Documentary Film. A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press. Berry, Chris, Lü Xinyu, and Lisa Rofel (eds.) (2010) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Cheung Siu-keung, Joseph Tse-hei Lee, Lida V. Nedilsky (eds.) (2009) Marginalization in China: Recasting Minority Politics, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deleuze, Gilles (1983) Cinéma 1. L’image-mouvement, Paris: Minuit. — (1985) Cinéma 2. L’Image-temps, Paris: Minuit. Fan, Cindy C. (2006) ‘China’s Eleventh Five-Year Plan (2006-2010): From “Getting Rich First” to “Common Prosperity”’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 47:6, 708–723. Fumarola, Donatello and Alberto Momo (2013) Atlante sentimentale del cinema per il XXI secolo (Parole e utopia) [Sentimental Atlas of XXI century’s cinema (Words and Utopia)], Roma: DeriveApprodi, 418–423. Gaetano, Arianne (2015) Out to Work: Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. Guarnieri, Michael and Jin Wang (2017) ‘Interview: Wang Bing’, Film Comment, 22 February 2017, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-wang-bing/ [accessed 10 October 2019]. Guo, Yinjie (2016) ‘The China Dream: Cultural Renaissance, Cultural Legitimacy and Soft Power’, Exploring the China Dream: Trajectories and Articulations of Soft Power in the Sinophone World (Conference Program), Stockholm University, August 15–16, 2016 (abstract).

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Gustafsson, Henrik and Asbjørn Grønstad (2014) Cinema and Agamben: Ethics, Biopolitics and the Moving Image, Broadway and London: Bloomsbury. Harvey, David (1973) Social Justice and the City, London: Edward Arnold. — (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism. Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, London: Verso. — (2015) ‘We Have to Call off this Capitalist Urbanization Dynamic’ Collective interview, 31 October 2015, https://rosalux-ba.org/en/2015/10/31/david-harvey-wehave-to-call-off-this-capitalist-urbanization-dynamic/ [accessed 6 March 2020]. He Fengming (2001) Jingli. Wo de 1957 nian [My experience of 1957], Lanzhou: Dunhuang Wenyi. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lagerkvist, Johan and Elena Pollacchi (2016) ‘The Politics of Securitization in Contemporary China: Investigating Post-agency and Cinematic Forms of “Migration” from State Control’, Orientaliska Studier, 146, 73–86. Larson, Christina (2011) ‘A Once-Polluted Chinese City Is Turning from Gray to Green’, YaleEnvironment360. Report, 17 October 2011, http://e360.yale.edu/feature/ shenyang_a_once-polluted_china_city_is_turning_from_gray_to_green/2454/ [accessed 30 October 2016]. Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah (2012) ‘Migrant Workers, Women, and China’s Modernization on Screen’, JumpCut: A Review of Contemporary Media, 54, Fall 2012, http:// ejumpcut.org/archive/jc54.2012/LauMigrantWomen/text.html [accessed 30 October 2016]. Lefebvre, Henri (1974) La Production de l’éspace, Paris: Éditions Anthropos. Mayntz, Renate (2004) ‘Mechanisms in the Analysis of Social Macro-Phenomena’, Philosophy of Social Sciences, 2, 237–259. Morrison, Wayne M (2018) ‘China’s Economic Rise: History, Trends, Challenges, and Implications for the United States’, 5 February 2018, Congressional Research Service, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33534.pdf [accessed 26 August 2018]. Müller, Armin (2016) ‘The Margins and the Marginalised: Social Policy, Labour Migration, and Ethnic Identity in Contemporary China’, Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 45, 2, 3–27. Nichols, Bill (2001) Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Péron Didier (2014) ‘Ceux qui travaillent les plus ne possèdent rien’, Libération, 15 April 2014. Pickowicz, Paul G. and Yingjin Zhang (2016) Independent Documentary in TwentyFirst-Century China, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Robinson, Luke (2013) Independent Chinese Documentary. From the Studio to the Street, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Ruby, Jay (1991) ‘Speaking For, Speaking About, Speaking With, or Speaking Alongside: An Anthropological and Documentary Dilemma’, Visual Anthropology Review, 7: 2, 50–67. Tu Weiming, Alan Wachman, Milan G. Heitmanek (eds.) (1992) The Confucian World Observed: Contemporary Discussion of Confucian Humanism in East Asia, Honolulu, HI: The East-West Center. Wang Bing (2013) ‘Filming a Land in Flux. Interview’, New Left Review, Volume 82, July/August, https://newleftreview.org/issues/II82/articles/bing-wang-filminga-land-in-flux [accessed 20 February 2019]. Williams, Raymond (1990) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wu Fulong and Chris Webster (eds.) (2010) Marginalization in Urban China: Comparative Perspectives, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Xi Jinping (2012) ‘Xi Jinping guangyu xianzai Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing de Zhongguo meng lunshu zhaipian’ [Xi Jinping’s speech on the ‘China Dream’ of the great national rejuvenation], http://theory.people.com.cn/GB/68294/388648/ [accessed 30 September 2020]. — (2014) ‘Xi Jinping talks at the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art’ (Translation of summary published by Xinhua, October 15, 2014), China Copyright and Media, October 16, 2014, https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/10/16/ xi-jinpings- talks-at-the-beijing-forum-on-literature-and-art [accessed September 30, 2020]. Yang Xianhui (2002) Jiabiangou jishi [Chronicles of Jiabiangou], Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe. — (2003), Gaobie Jiabiangou [Farewell to Jiabiangou], Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe. Yu, Sabrina Qiong and Lydia Dan Wu (2017) ‘The China Independent Film Festival and Chinese Independent Film Festivals: Self-Legitimization and Institutionalization’, in Chris Berry and Luke Robinson (eds.) Chinese Film Festivals, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou (2014) ‘Income Inequality in Today’s China’, PNAS 13 May 2014. 111 (19), 6928–6933, http://www.pnas.org/content/111/19/6928 [accessed 28 August 2018]. Zhao Tingyang (2006) ‘Rethinking empire from a Chinese concept “All-UnderHeaven” (Tian-xia)’, Social Identities, 12:1, 29-41. Zhao Yaohui (1999) ‘Labor Migration and Earnings Differences: The Case of Rural China’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 47: 4, July, 767–782. Zhou, Xiang (2014) ‘The Rise of Earnings Inequality in Urban China. Increasing Returns to Education, Changing Labor Force Structure, and the Rise of Earnings Inequality in Urban China, 1996–2010’, Social Forces, 93: 2, 429–455 [doi: 10.1093/ sf/sou073].

2.

History in the Making: The Debut Epic Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks Abstract This chapter discusses Wang Bing’s debut Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) and engages with history and labour issues. The film shows Wang’s way of observing ‘history in the making’ and extrapolating narratives from an extensive process of shooting. The film is discussed as an unconventional cinematic reportage. Its structure, extensive duration, and approach make this film a groundbreaking work that intertwines various film modes and connects different film traditions, from the early documentaries of the Lumière Brothers to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1972). Keywords: Documentary cinema, China, Labour, Industrial space, Laid-off workers, Wang Bing, Terrence Malick

The grand epics in history – for example, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Commedia, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Toni Morrison’s Beloved – reconnect us collectively with the past and with the shaping myth that gave that period of history its ground, in the form of its beliefs and values to sustain it. Epics retrieve, renew, and refresh the myth, dust it off and send it back out in the world. Epics, then, are a people’s grand recollections that allow them to remember who and what they are and wish to be. ̶ Dennis Patrick Slattery (2015), Review of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven

West of the Tracks was f irst screened in its full length of 545 minutes at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January 2003. It was the result of a two-year-long editing process based on over 300 hours of material. The rough images of a Chinese industrial area were shot during the years 1999–2002. The f irst version dates back to 2002 and is a 300-minute version, which was only screened at the Forum of the

Pollacchi, E., Wang Bing’s Filmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses, and Marginal Spaces. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463721837_ch02

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Berlin International Film Festival with the title of Tiexi District. Thanks to the support of the Dutch Hubert Bals Fund, the director – then a young f ilmmaker whose only previous experience was as a cameraman in TV f iction and feature f ilms 1 – could rework the f irst editing into the current 545-minute version, which premiered in Rotterdam and was later released on DVD. 2 With this nine-hour long triptych, Wang Bing documented the slow process through which the so-called rust belt of China was closed down and workers in the industrial district of Tiexi dismissed. It brought the filmmaker to the world’s attention and is now considered a pivotal work in the history of documentary cinema worldwide (Aufderheide 2007: 45). However, it took a few years for it to become one of the titles regularly mentioned in relation to the evolution of world documentaries.3 Among Wang’s works, it is also the film with more extensive literature to date (Veg 2007; Sandhu 2009; Lü 2010; Pollacchi 2012; Ramos-Martínez 2015). 4 In this chapter, I approach West of the Tracks as an unconventional cinematic reportage, in particular at the time of its shooting. Its structure, extensive duration, and film approach provide the basis for introducing this film as a work intertwining various genres and escaping the conventional modes of Chinese documentary and film production of the early 2000s. Moreover, I bring the social and economic contexts into the discussion of this documentary. I also look at the film against the revitalization of Chinese documentary cinema in relation to previous Chinese reportage films, as well as to other films of the early 2000s. In addition, I suggest seeing Wang’s filmmaking as a way to record ‘history in the making’, thus connecting it to the early documentary experience of the Lumière Brothers. In addition, a parallel reading of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) sheds light on how Wang Bing’s works make reference to film masters of different eras and traditions. 1 Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks was Wang Bing’s first work as director after some experience as chief cameraman for a TV fiction Campus Affairs (Xiaoyuan xianfeng, 1996) and a feature film Distorsion (Bianxinglun, dir. Zhong Qiang 1999). 2 The Rotterdam Film Festival released a Dutch-subtitled set of three DVDs while, at the same time, the French distributor MK2 released the French-subtitled set. Thereafter a pirate DVD appeared in China with the same layout as the MK2 edition. 3 In 2014, the BFI screened a series of Wang Bing’s works and introduced Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks as “A belated UK encounter with the master documentarian’s debut” (Nayman 2013). 4 Lü Xinyu’s pioneering analysis of the documentary was f irst published as ‘Ruins of the Future: Class and History in Wang Bing’s Tiexi District’ in New Left Review, 31 (2005), 125–136. It was later republished as Lü (2010) .

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The debut epic Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks and its context West of the Tracks takes the factories, the residential neighbourhoods, and the freight railway workers as the focus of each of its three segments. The film is structured in three sections of different length, using three different narrative foci. Each part opens with a few introductory credits providing basic information on the area and the subject of the film. The first part, Rust (Gongchang), evolves around the factory and the relationship between the workers and the industrial space; the second part, Remnants (Yanfen jie), centres on the residential area as the old houses are being demolished and many families are forced to move away.5 The last part, Rails (Tielu), focuses on the changes to the lives of the freight railway workers as a result of the process. A few intertitles help keep track of the various industrial sectors and the diminishing number of workers at different periods throughout the shooting. The opening intertitles describe the location of Tiexi district, in the urban area of Shenyang, long one of the biggest Chinese heavy industrial centres for metallurgy, chemicals, and machine building, with a population of around a million workers at the beginning of the 1980s. Only in the 1990s did the area begin to falter, with production becoming unprofitable. At the end of the decade, many factories were shut down and progressively dismantled as part of a state project to progressively convert it into a modern urban area. The region and its industry were developed under the Japanese occupation of China’s north-eastern provinces. Starting in 1934, as part of the puppet Manchukuo state, the area produced armaments for the Japanese Imperial Army.6 The Tiexi district factories were converted to civilian use after 1949 and later played an important role in the policies of the People’s Republic of China, in particular in relation to the production of steel and other materials. The area became a model area in the Maoist planned economy. In the 1950s, the factories received Soviet equipment, mostly confiscated from Germany at the end of the war, and the area hosted Soviet-financed industrial projects. The district saw an initial reduction with the breakdown of Sino-Soviet relations in 1961, when many factories were relocated to internal areas, but more than a hundred plants remained operational. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, with the workers sent down to the countryside returning to the 5 The first section’s Chinese title Gongchang literally means ‘factories’ whereas the second section’s title Yanfen jie literally means ‘Rainbow lane’, almost an oxymoron to the poor living conditions of the place shown in the film. 6 This north-eastern area of China was also important in the early phases of Chinese film history, when the Japanese occupied regions were often among the crucial claims of the Shanghaibased movement of the Left-wing Writers League (Laughlin 2002: 309–312).

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cities, over a million workers were employed in Tiexi. As a consequence of the impact of Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies after 1978, which led towards a market-driven economy, this large heavy industry centre became unprofitable and workers had to adjust as factories shut down one after the other. The decommissioning of the area was announced in 1999 and finished in 2002. This information is also summarized in the film intertitles. Seen against the backdrop of Chinese film production at the time, the work challenges most of the assumptions used in the discussion of Chinese cinema in the period. These assumptions or expectations about a Chinese film could range from the seductive images of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, Feng Xiaogang, or, in general, the Fifth Generation of Chinese directors who made Chinese cinema known to the world to the rougher images of daily struggles produced by younger filmmakers such as Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, Lou Ye, and Jia Zhangke. In opposition to the first group, this second group of directors was mainly working outside the state studios.7 In fact, in the early years of the new century, Chinese cinema remained polarized between the so-called studio productions of the first group and the second group of independent directors. However, those were the years in which these younger filmmakers had also started negotiating with state authorities in order to produce films that could be approved and distributed in Chinese theatres. Jia Zhangke’s The World (Shijie, 2004) represents a case in point; it was his first film to receive both the support of the Shanghai Film Studio and the authorization for theatrical release in China (Marchetti 2018: 47). In those years, Chinese documentary cinema was still largely unknown to the festival circuit, with a few exceptions such as Wu Wenguang, an artist born in 1956 whose reputation was established thanks to Bumming in Beijing: The Last Dreamers (Liulang Beijing, 1990) showing and interviewing a group of artists and art students in Beijing. He is considered the father of contemporary Chinese documentary, as he moved away from the conventional structure of TV documentaries and reportage by making use of a handheld camera and an approach closer to that of cinéma vérité.8 Wang’s visual record of a critical historical juncture should not be seen as an isolated case on the Chinese film scene of the time. It actually drew upon the revitalized tradition of documentary filmmaking, which was then confirmed by the increasing number of documentary works in China and elsewhere. This was accompanied by a rapidly growing number of studies, 7 For a description of the Chinese film scene at the turn of the century, see Pickowicz and Zhang (2006) and McGrath (2008). 8 A description of the genesis of Wu’s project is provided in Wu (2010).

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articles, and volumes dedicated not only to Chinese cinema, but also, and more specifically, to Chinese documentaries (Lü 2003; Reynaud 2003; Tassy 2004; Voci 2004; Robinson 2013). Moreover, international cultural events had started dedicating attention to documentaries, including an increasing number of Chinese works.9 Interest in Chinese documentaries was not only a Western-driven tendency. Beijing began a Chinese independent documentary festival in December 2004 but police authorities abruptly cancelled the event on its second day.10 Since the early 1990s, when Wu Wenguang, Duan Jinchuan, and Zhang Yuan (the last two co-directed The Square/Guangchang, 1994), among others, pioneered the possibility of shooting independent documentaries in China, and at a time when video recording techniques were still relatively new, the success and the exploration of the form has incessantly evolved. Feature film directors also started using digital cameras for shooting documentary films, as demonstrated by Jia Zhangke’s first documentary In Public (Gonggong changsuo, 2001), which rapidly became a cult film and was screened at several film festivals.11 The film was successfully distributed in France in 2004, experiencing a sort of ‘second life’ three years after its shooting, while Jia’s reputation may have boosted attention towards the film. Jia’s example testifies to the increasing significance of this genre within art circles and for filmgoers. The 45-minute-long video presents anonymous public places in rural China (railway stations, bus stations, dance halls) and conveys a sense of idle time and dull life, which became a motif in Chinese cinema of the early 2000s.12 Its aesthetics provides the viewer a direct ‘authorial’ insight into some aspects of unseen corners of China, or areas that had rarely been seen on screen. Yet, at the time of West of the Tracks, Chinese documentary films were rarely screened at film festivals and far from being considered potential entries for the competitive sections of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. In 2003, when West of the Tracks was presented at the Rotterdam f ilm festival, China was represented by a series of independent films at major festivals. 9 One of the first international exhibitions dedicated to Chinese documentary was Brut de Chine held in Paris in 2003. 10 From a personal communication with critic and film-maker Cui Zi’en who was among the promoters of the event (Beijing, December 2004). 11 In Public was a commissioned short film and part of the project Three Digital Films by Three Filmmakers launched by the Jeonju Film Festival in South Korea. The film was also screened in the non-competitive section New Territories of the Venice Film Festival in 2001. 12 Jia Zhangke’s In Public was shot in the area of Fenyang, Shanxi province, home region of the director.

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Li Yang’s thriller Blind Shaft (Mangjing, 2003) – set among mineworkers on the borders of Hebei and Shanxi provinces in China’s north-west – was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Lou Ye’s period drama Purple Butterfly (Zi hudie, 2003) – starring actress Zhang Ziyi – and Wang Xiaoshuai’s Drifters (Er di, 2003) represented China, respectively, in the main competition and in the section ‘Un Certain Regard’ of the Cannes Film Festival. Although directed by two independent filmmakers, these two films benefitted from relatively large production values. Despite their different genres and approaches, they were still in line with the evolution of what used to be defined as Chinese independent cinema, as carefully delineated by Pickowicz and Zhang (2006). The first documentary to enter the Cannes competition was Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 and only in 2013 did Venice show Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro Gra, awarded the Golden Lion. There are several reasons for this, including what Patricia Aufderheide noted with reference to the early work of American filmmaker Errol Morris: that when documentary films sought to enter the market and enjoy the screening opportunities of feature films, their documentary nature was frequently downplayed in favour of narrative elements, as marketing documentaries was harder than selling feature films (2007: 3–4). Against this complex background, West of the Tracks started its long itinerary after the Rotterdam screening through a series of film and documentary festivals including Toronto, Marseille (France), and Turin (Italy). For most festivals, the extensive duration of the film made it more suitable for special screenings out of competition, however it also received many awards, including those of the Festival Internacional de Cinema Documental in Lisbon (Portugal), Festival des Trois Continents in Nantes (France), and Yamagata Film Festival (Japan). Following this successful circulation, it was also released in a cinema in Paris in June 2004 and received a string of enthusiastic reviews from all major French papers. After these positive reactions, the film received occasional theatrical screenings in Europe, the US, and Asia but, like all other films by Wang Bing, it was not officially distributed in China.

Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks as a contemporary cinematic reportage Portraying the three-year-long process through which the industrial district of Tiexi was progressively abandoned, the film might first suggest a documentary reportage approach. Yet, it differs from both Chinese conventional documentaries and reportage films for several reasons. Firstly, in terms of

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production and distribution, the film was neither supported, nor financed by a TV channel, as was common practice for Chinese documentaries at the time. Wang Bing could cover its post-production costs only thanks to the support of the Hubert Bals Fund, a fund of the Rotterdam Film Festival, usually granted to fiction or arthouse films. It was also thanks to the conditions of the funding that West of the Tracks premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January 2003. As already noted, Wang Bing has never followed the standard procedures for obtaining distribution authorization, so there has never been an official Chinese record of his films. Chinese regulations for filmmaking and theatrical release have seen a series of changes and adjustments throughout the years, however, all titles for public screenings still require the state certificate that is issued upon censorship control. When West of the Tracks was made, such regulations were mainly conceived for feature films but they have become more comprehensive in the last decade and now include all audiovisual products and all manner of screenings. From a film industry perspective, this work, by its very nature, could never achieve wide distribution and significant economic gain. Moreover, it was received with perplexity when it was privately screened at the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts and at the Beijing Normal University in 2003 thanks to its digital video output and its duration. Some viewers even accused the filmmaker of “not having made something that could be called a film,” as, at that time, digital shooting did not correspond to the film standard of a 35mm print, and its extensive length certainly did not.13 In terms of its overall cinematic structure, although the filmmaker aims to immerse viewers in the space and engage them with the social context from the very opening shots, the complex relation between the vastness of the space, the social actors, and the filmmaker observing them makes the viewing a demanding experience. Paradoxically, while the choice of a non-fictional form, its raw material, and the limited post-production interventions pushes West of the Tracks closer to an industrial reportage, which is strongly engaged with the recording of historical events, its final format and the challenging viewing process brings it closer to an authorial work that intertwines documentary, narrative cinema, and visual arts. Not incidentally, Wang Bing has long been in close contact with fellow filmmakers and artists whose activities have often crossed the boundaries between film and visual arts, such as Yang Fudong and Zhao Liang, as will be discussed in the concluding chapter of this book with reference to exhibition spaces. Yang Fudong (born Beijing, 1971) is considered one of 13 From a personal communication with the author in Paris, December 2003.

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the most important contemporary artists and has extensively worked with photographs, audiovisual installations, and filmmaking, although his work has mainly circulated in art exhibition spaces. Zhao Liang (born Dandong, Liaoning, 1971) is a photographer and filmmaker and has presented his works both at film festivals and art galleries. Looking at Wang’s approach to space in relation to his extensive shooting process, we will find that he avoids the sheer observational mode of Direct Cinema or cinéma vérité. Direct Cinema was the North American movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s promoting a documentary cinema that aimed to truthfully capture reality; cinéma vérité had a similar claim and was pioneered by Jean Rouch in France. Rouch used the camera as a tool for ‘sharing anthropology’ and as a way to combine ethnographic research and fiction.14 These approaches suggest some kind of impromptu or an objective, neutral, and observational viewpoint in relation to the social actors. Although Wang has often been loosely associated with these two currents, his camera moves in the space in order to become familiar with it and so as to feel closer to the workers and their lives. As Ramos-Martínez has noted, Wang’s approach remains observational, yet he is “engaged in a practice of becoming witness.” As such, he is not just an external observer but he has to negotiate his position within the space and the social actors by means of his handheld camera (2015: 5–7). I would add that Wang’s inventive practice is that of encouraging close participation with the issues at stake and an increasingly close relationship with the social actors within an observational framework that incorporates narrative stances. With the same purpose in mind, Wang refrains from using a voice-over commentary and, except for a couple of occasions when his voice is off-screen posing questions to the workers, the viewer is never given the impression of watching a conventional reportage structured through questions and answers. Rather, the viewer shares this getting-to-know process by means of time and thanks to the positioning of the camera towards the subjects. In fact, the relationship between the filmmaker and the subjects is underplayed by careful use of editing, so that Wang is present in the film, yet he does not impose his presence on scene but acts as a silent guide so as to turn the images into a tool for better understanding the ongoing process. By doing so, the filmmaker distinctively narrativizes the techniques of observational cinema. When placed alongside the purposes and experience of Chinese reportage, we see that West of the Tracks bears elements of this tradition but adapts them 14 Among the many publications on Jean Rouch and his cinéma vérité, see Joran ten Brink (2008).

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with the aim of creating a visual archive of processes that would otherwise remain off the Chinese historical record. In fact, to date, Wang’s debut work is one of the few visual documents available about the decommissioning process of this industrial area, certainly the only one recording its various phases beginning in 1999 and through to the end in 2002. As Laughlin has suggested in relation to literature, Chinese reportage was first conceived as a form related to the presentation and discussion of industrial areas, factories, and workers’ issues. Up to the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937, the genre was mostly seen as a medium to support worker-oriented initiatives and frequently used to represent the industrial space and the workers involved in the class struggle. It was precisely in relation to the aggressive Japanese expansion in the 1930s, starting from the north-eastern territories, that the publishing industry began promoting the reportage form, so that while the canon of non-fictional writings was yet to be defined, a variety of experiences could be published. Moreover, this form was used as social critique from the beginning and was later adopted by the Chinese Communist Party as one of its mobilization tools. In looking at this literary genre prior to its use in the socialist years, Laughlin emphasized the “literati concerns” of reportage authors, their focus on authenticity as a way to convey the “moral certainty of historical experience in contrast to the quotidian emphasis of the commercial/urban perspective” (2002: 7). This reference to “the moral certainty of historical experience” applies to the period following the May Fourth movement of 1919, which saw the increasing influence of Leftist ideology in the cultural field. However, it can also well describe the experience of West of the Tracks, both from the perspective of the author and for the potential of this work to resist the use of non-fiction (in filmmaking) as a propaganda tool as well as the commercial perspective of Chinese cinema. Despite the fact that the social issue of the laid-off workers and their relocation never becomes a political claim, Wang Bing’s work brings forth a two-pronged resistance. On the one hand, it opposes the contemporary representation of a booming China usually promoted by the traditional TV documentaries/reportages of the time and by mainstream feature films, where urban settings are used as backdrops to promote a successful city life. On the other hand, it opposes the conventional combination of historical events and cinema as established by the long socialist tradition of historical films and industrial documentaries, which used historical facts in order to support a political agenda.15 15 Third Attempt (Disanci shiliang, dir. Zhang Zheng, 1958) and Huang Baomei (Huang Baomei, dir. Xie Jin, 1958) are examples of films on industrial subjects in the 1950s.

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West of the Tracks therefore seems to redefine the ‘canon’ of a cinematic reportage – and, in turn, documentary cinema – by pioneering a new form of engagement in the visual representations of industrial and urban areas, while drawing attention to issues related to ongoing social-economic transformations. This way of selecting topics and approaching subjects in relation to their historical relevance – or as a way to connect historical narratives to the daily narratives of ordinary people – has remained one of the main features of Wang Bing’s cinema. Also, in Wang’s later works, the divide between urban spaces and marginal/rural spaces, which took off from this phase in the transformation of China, continued to be a recurrent topic. Wang’s craft evolved from this work while maintaining his original focus and interest in providing visible evidence of hidden aspects of the country. From this groundbreaking documentary, Wang has also demonstrated his desire to establish a dialogue across different film cultures and traditions.

Filming ‘history in the making’ and the legacy of the Lumière films It is interesting to approach West of the Tracks as Wang Bing’s first epic of labour, his first attempt to merge documentary and narrative filmmaking in order to carve a portrayal of workers, their changing milieu, and the overall context. The film can be seen as part of the revitalization of Chinese documentary that occurred after the turn of the century, also thanks to the accessibility of digital technologies. Yet, it engages non-Chinese film traditions and early films such as those of the Lumière Brothers. Thanks to the potential of the digital camera, which allows longer takes in comparison to traditional techniques (35mm or 16mm) and fewer requirements in terms of spacing and lighting, West of the Tracks offered an unusual viewing experience for the audience of the early 2000s. The digital camera also allowed the long recording process that would have been unaffordable in terms of production costs if undertaken with traditional film techniques. It also enabled the filmmaker to participate more closely and less intrusively in the daily life of the people in the Tiexi district. The proximity of Wang to the subject and his understanding of the workers’ faith further enhances the poignancy of such a viewing experience. It is significant that Qi Wang, in her book on memory and independent cinema, includes West of the Tracks in the loose category of ‘personal documentary’. This theoretical framework, which draws upon Michael Renov’s analysis of documentary film, embraces hybrid works of different sorts all sharing an interest for the intimately experiential and subjective dimensions of human existence (Wang 2014: 134).

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In particular, the relationship between filmmaking and the construction of a collective memory, or better, the preservation of a visual archive of a historical process, is particularly significant when approaching this work. Not incidentally, the filmmaker’s careful look into the industrial space and the ongoing transformation draws strongly upon a significant use of witnesses and direct voices. Together with the visual recording of the decommissioning process, they create a visual archive of memories on the Tiexi district. This approach would remain one of the features of Wang’s cinema as in Dead Souls on the survivors of the Anti-Rightist campaign confirmed. Throughout the four hours of the first part, Rust, Wang Bing collects the workers’ voices as they face the closing down of factories. Some of the workers have already been laid-off, others are still active but are being encouraged to leave their homes through incentives and new market possibilities, both very insecure. West of the Tracks documents not just the historical process, but also the daily life and gestures of a whole human universe that is about to vanish: shower time; lunch breaks; games in the common rooms; fights; and pleasant moments that already seem to be a vain repetition of bygone days. As confirmed by the closing shots of the first section, the only traces left are the objects abandoned on the floor or in the lockers when the plants were closed down (everyday objects, certificates, clothing, photographs). The centrality of the factory – and of the life centred on the factory – is about to be forgotten in favour of new economic goals. The viewing experience mirrors the shooting of the film, so that the documentary comes to provide a historical record of a certain social and cultural context in a given space during an extensive time. Through the lens of the digital camera, the smelting and electric plants become a gigantic theatre for a mise en scène with increasingly fewer characters. Wang Bing explores the potential offered by digital shooting both in terms of artistic achievements and in terms of historical record. The absence of a voice-over engages the viewer even more directly with the social context. The sense of emptiness becomes tangible along with the recollection of the past. Time vanishes as the machinery, already badly maintained, slows down and stops. The triumphal declaration that high-tech business is entering the Chinese market, broadcast on a radio in a common room, does not provide any relief to the workers who are passively listening to the announcement. It is the radio that confirms the continuation of the transformation. As the months pass, the workers start feeling anxious about their uncertain future and they even conceive the possibility of stealing some of the equipment in compensation. Once again, the tension is echoed

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by the news that, on 1 May 2000, police were deployed in the factories in order to prevent protests and thefts. Even though the editing process has selected the recording of voices and witnesses, the conversations between workers confirm what other authoritative voices have already denounced. The importance of West of the Tracks is also related to the fact that the events narrated in this visual document were not unique to the Shenyang area. Through the emblematic space of the factory and thanks to the involvement of an entire community of workers, it offers not only a document of collective history, but also manages to evoke similar processes in the rest of China at the end of the 1990s, illuminating the aftermath of market development: laid-off workers; loss of safety measures; abandonment of industrial areas; and migration from industrial districts towards the cities. The legacies of this process, as recorded in the film, are a ghostly landscape full of industrial ruins and a growing number of workers migrating to urban areas all over the country to sustain the new phase of China’s development. This phase required a workforce in the cities to support urban development, infrastructure, and the construction of a new consumption-centred way of life. In 2001, an article published in the Far Eastern Economic Review referred to protests that had taken place that year and published workers’ statements denouncing corruption in the industrial sector. Of 80 million workers employed in state factories, half were unemployed by the mid-1990s. Factory managers sold the equipment and did not pay workers’ compensation, or they organized fires and similar acts to avoid payments (Jiang 2001). In 2000, sociologist He Qinglian discussed the new class structure in China in an article in the New Left Review that underlined the crisis of the relationship between capital and the labour force with a set of related issues including lack of safety measures, reductions in the workforce, and long shifts that increased the number of accidents in the workplace (2000). As a result, the flow of migrant workers towards the urban centres started. This impacted significantly on the composition of the urban population and contributed to dismantling family structures while rural areas entered a phase of decline. Farmers abandoned their lands to join the group of migrant workers from industrial areas but, at this crucial juncture, no critical protest or social movement could successfully limit the impact of state policies. The last period of social protest or public initiative dated back to the end of the 1980s, after which workers were left with very few political tools to make their voices heard. The testimonies collected in Wang Bing’s work confirm all these issues and raise important questions about the workers’ plight as well as on the indifference towards this process expressed by (or imposed

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on) major media. Wang’s subsequent works also expand on the issues of migrant workers and the collapse of family structures, as discussed in the following chapter. The workers’ struggle and the transformation of the industrial space, in addition to evoking similar issues elsewhere, brings to mind early film experiences at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, Wang’s digital camera conjures up contemporary issues and the modernist drive towards exploration of technical devices and faraway realities. Writing about the experience that cinema creates, historian Sam Rohdie has suggested that [t]he history of the cinema belongs to modernism and the history of modernism is shaped by philosophical concepts of time, memory, desire and, the unconscious: areas of uncertainty and instability. […] The cinema’s tense is a present one, an illusionary being-there where truth (authenticity) is less a factor than it is in the photograph. The cinema invites you to enter an experience that is occurring, that includes you, the dizzying track, for example (2003: 3–9).

Furthermore, through the use of digital technology, West of the Tracks on the one hand provides a contemporary visual document that can also be seen as a vehicle for public criticism and an act of engagement while, on the other hand, it harks back to the interest of early twentieth-century cameramen and photographers in railway journeys, remote places, and machinery. Discussing the close connection between modernism and cinema, Rohdie highlights the case of the Jewish banker Albert Kahn who made several trips to Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. In particular, during a trip to China and Japan in 1909, he encouraged his chauffeur Alfred Dutertre to learn how to use the photographic camera and the film camera so that they could record their ongoing experiences. The visual document they created is preserved at the museum Albert Kahn in Paris. Some of Kahn-Dutertre’s images are shot from trains, thus confirming an interest in transportation, as Burdeau (2004) suggested and as Schiwelbuch (1986) discussed in his in-depth analysis of the importance of railway journeys in the perception of time and space throughout the nineteenth century. Film shooting of mechanical rhythms and machines, as well as that of crowds and urban spaces, together with the possibilities of controlling the duration of the shot and the pace of editing, seemed to provide the hallmarks of a modern sensibility and a modern perception. Early film experiments were also imbued with this modernist spirit, including those of the Lumière Brothers, which frequently engaged with industrial

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spaces and workers. In fact, the long opening sequence of a freight train in West of the Tracks could well evoke modernist experiences of cinema such as L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, and La sortie des usines Lumière (1895), which marked the first steps of documentary film history in 1895. Burdeau even relates the third part of the documentary Rails, to the fascination that early cinema has shown for trains and means of transportation, for the potential of trains to connect faraway places, or inner and outer spaces such as stations and factories (2004). These references to early film experiences can further illuminate some features of Wang’s filmmaking. Moreover, the essential collection of essays on early cinema edited by Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker, which aims to nuance the traditional divide between Lumière and Meliès – at the origin of the distinction between documentary and fiction films – provides some useful observations (1990). Firstly, Lumière films should not be seen only in relation to the common and simplistic opposition between documentary cinema (Lumière) and fictional (Meliès) cinema, but rather in terms of the relationship between the given space and the way it is explored over the course of the narration. Lumière films of 1895 including La Sortie des usine Lumière, L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat, and L’Arroseur arrosé, even in their minimal structure of single-shot footage, present the viewer with a plot, thus start to experiment with the potential of the technical device, the camera, through framing and shots that articulate micro-narrative units. By recording outside theatrical premises and in a space that was often outdoor, these early films provide the viewer with a sort of self-contained narrative within the shot (movement of people, means of transportation and the various elements which the frame could include and organize). This was not simply the basis of the later developments of the documentary form, but also the first step towards narrative cinema (Gaudreault 1990). Wang Bing’s debut manages to create a similar tension between the fascination for an industrial space and the articulation of a narrative, as well as between the situation documented in each narrative unit (long take) and the broader context taking shape through the long period of shooting and editing. Thanks to the longer takes allowed by the digital camera, and fewer requirements in terms of space and lighting in comparison to traditional film technologies, the final result is an unusual viewing experience that, perhaps, awakens in the viewer a reinvigorated curiosity both in filmmaking and in the cinematic situation, possibly not dissimilar to that felt by viewers of early cinema. However, the positive and optimistic connotations of early Lumière films fully imbued with the modern enthusiasm for discovery of remote places, as well as for new inventions and technologies, is already left far behind. In

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Wang’s film, the passing of time does not evolve along a ‘positive’ path towards progress and growth but documents the coming to the end of an era, whose death knell has already sounded. The decline is inexorable and any human effort remains vain. Significantly, even the workers of Tiexi district seem to be aware of their fate, already resigned as they see the number of employed people declining day after day. If early Lumière images of workers – seen as a collective body while exiting their factories – were produced to display both the potential of cinema and that of the forming industrial capitalist society, West of the Tracks turns the values and the function of cinema in its early days on their head. While pointing out the factory as the epitome of the Maoist project of massive industrialization and collective economy imposed on the Chinese people, it also highlighted the inevitable consequences of the newly introduced market economy: unemployment; increasing inequalities; the end of a collective welfare system. It records the contemporary lack of confidence in economic forces, presenting the Chinese Communist Party’s policies as just a new imposition from above, with no alternative left to the workers but to passively accept the governmental decisions. When the plants were closed down and turned into ghostly spaces, the workers and their families were relocated. Empty houses were to be demolished, as the workers’ residential neighbourhoods were due to be converted into more profitable businesses. Towards the end of the film, the workers are not even presented as a collective body anymore, but rather as a disaggregated group in which tensions and differences had emerged. By scrutinizing the industrial space in the process of being dismantled, the filmmaker exposed the contradictions of the economic reform and testified to spaces, events, and people that the Chinese fast-paced modernization would otherwise have absorbed without trace. While the government policies were openly encouraging private initiatives and market investments, the social structures, and the family networks on which the workers had relied for decades were being destroyed. In his debut work, Wang Bing starts to challenge the concept of documentary cinema as a recording of events, an ethnographic work, and a journalistic reportage. He rather suggests an emotional engagement thanks to an articulation of time and space encompassing documentary and fiction. By doing so, he also lays the foundation for his future works involving a slow, careful approach to the everyday life of ordinary people, and their memories. In its complexity and richness, West of the Tracks not only constitutes Wang Bing’s epic debut, which marks Wang’s entrance into the world film scene, but also confirms the variety of his cinematic references as well as his way of approaching contemporary China as part of a global stage in which social issues and cultural traditions intertwine.

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Towards an epic of labour: From Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven to Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks If West of the Tracks can be fruitfully discussed in relation to issues surrounding early industrialization as presented in the Lumière f ilms, a comparative reading with Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven – set in the early days of North American industrialization – can illuminate certain aesthetic features. These features, such as the relevance of the editing process, framing and lighting of the characters, and the use of open spaces, are essential components of Wang’s craft and can be brought to the fore through a comparative investigation. As in Wang’s case, recognition of the importance of Malick’s film was slow in coming. Days of Heaven, the director’s second work, was released in 1978 after three years of editing. It is worth noting that, on release, the film was largely praised for its stunning cinematography but took a few years to become one of the most acclaimed films of its decade and Terrence Malick one of the most renowned American directors. As Gabriella Blasi has noted, Days of Heaven’s critical reception shifted over time, in particular after the release of his third film The Thin Red Line in 1998, which also shows how the cinema world had developed (2014: 68). Days of Heaven – starring Richard Gere, Brooke Adams, and Sam Shepard – approaches twentiethcentury industrializing America through the narrative of a central group of characters moving out from the steel-working environment of Chicago to join the flow of seasonal harvest workers in Texas. The steel worker Bill is forced to move away from the factory after having killed his foreman during an altercation. He takes his girlfriend Abby – disguised as his sister – and his actual twelve-year-old sister on the train, full of migrants heading to the South for seasonal harvesting. Days of Heaven opens with shots of lower-class people and workers followed by a series of factory shots. Workers are seen in the factory space as they work with no protection; often, they are close to machinery and open fires. The shots are lit by the smelting fires and the sound of the characters’ voices is muffled by the heavy sounds of machines. This aesthetic choice is quite unusual for an American feature film of 1978, as it provides a strong documentary flavour. The characters’ clothing suggests that the narrative takes place in the early twentieth century. In fact, as soon as the characters jump onto the roof of a train in order to escape the industrial area, we realize that the film is set at the beginning of the twentieth century. Factories, trains, and the mass of workers are in the hands of a few landowners. These industrial and human features are inscribed in an all-imposing natural landscape. The

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landscape and the natural elements are pivotal motifs in the film, and in Malick’s cinema as a whole. The film’s starting point is the life conditions of American workers in 1916, which emerge in the first sequences as full of hardship and labour. Or, even worse, workers might face an unknown destiny as soldiers in World War I, as evoked by the last sequence of the film with young men being recruited. The film closes with the female protagonist Abby, who boards a train full of soldiers heading off to war. The different moments in the troubled life of the characters are connected and narrated by the voice-over of the younger sister. She is seen at the end of the film walking along a railroad with no clear destination in mind. As Gabriella Blasi points out, trains and railroads frame the narrative after the opening sequence in the steel factory (2014: 70). Yet, Malick’s direction embraces more than the travelling of the characters from the city to the field and their gestures against the dramatic landscape of the wheat fields. As Dennis Patrick Slattery reported in his review, “narrative, storytelling, remembering, recollecting, recounting” made Days of Heaven a tragic epic that “extends outward from the cities and farms of America to encompass the wider world’s conflicts that show in large form what the film has revealed on a smaller register” (2015: 116). Moreover, Blasi’s analysis of f igures of nature in the f ilm suggests that Days of Heaven frustrates viewers’ expectations “with long sequences of wind on wheat fields and rivers, very few lines of dialogue, and the beautifully poetic voice-overs of an illiterate twelve-year-old. […] What frustrates is the incessant unfolding of events that are not under human control.” Blasi reads the visual motifs of trains – as well as that of the river and nature in general – as signifying a predetermined course of events against which human efforts are ultimately vain. “Inherently flawed human attempts to escape death and the cyclical patterns of finite existence” are paralleled by equally vain attempts to “live a better life” (2014: 70). The same set of visual motifs can be found in West of the Tracks, which, significantly, opens and closes with a long sequence of a freight train crossing the industrial district about to be dismantled. Here, it is not all-imposing nature that determines the destiny of men and women, but rather the overarching government decisions that lie beyond the workers’ will and capacity of resistance. In Wang’s documentary, the possibility of changing the course of events is never even conceived as workers are powerless against state policies, so an encompassing sense of the futility of any effort against these policies pervades the film. As noted, the viewer is introduced to the Tiexi district by the freight train’s whistle. The film opens with a long take from the front window of the train slowly entering the Tiexi industrial

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district, now covered in snow. The wintry landscape looks quiet, almost abandoned. The only elements of life recorded by the camera are a railway worker stopping a few bicycles and pedestrians in order to let the train pass. Only the long whistle, as the train approaches the area, breaks the regular noise of the engine. As the train moves forward, the camera pans slowly on the workers’ residential neighbourhood, then it slows down and stops inside a huge factory warehouse. The train journey to the first plant offers an overview of the spatial elements of the area (light, location, housing, population). When the train and the camera enter the Shenyang Smelting Factory (13,000 workers in 1999 as subtitles announce) the natural light of the northern regions cuts through the windows into the huge plant and contrasts with the workers’ dark break room. A bunch of workers is shown playing cards, entering the room after taking a shower or just smoking and chatting together. One of them gives a haircut to a colleague. The disturbing effect generated by the industrial background noise is echoed by the rundown atmosphere of the common room: the lockers are old, many of them broken; the room looks empty and abandoned. The speech of the workers is harsh and some of them, having been drinking, seem willingly to get into a fight. There is no sense of social participation in their activities, only a sense of idle time. The fight also evokes some underlying tension, not dissimilar from that of Malick’s opening sequences. Wang’s introductory sequence of the workers’ routine does not encourage any particular empathy. The workers are shown stuck in their dull activities and violence is clearly part of the environment. Similarly, in Days of Heaven, after a series of still images describing labour conditions in early twentiethcentury America, the opening shots take the viewers into the steel plant. The characters are arguing but their voices are covered by the industrial noise. The same off-screen industrial noise accompanies the opening texts of West of the Tracks and provides the continuum over which the whole film unfolds. This creates a sort of natural intradiegetic soundtrack whose notes change according to the progressive transformation and decline of the area. Industrial noise as well as the whistle of the train, which cuts into the images from the very first long take, often cover the workers’ voices as in the opening of Days of Heaven. Yet, in Wang’s documentary, the progressive reduction of such industrial noise through the film provides an index of the reduction of productive activities. The soundscape of West of the Tracks is as powerful as its visual impact and clearly contributes to the entire cinematic creation, and to the recording of a transforming physical and social space at a specific historical juncture. Sound, in particular, evolves along the three parts of the documentary

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and it is constantly enriched by natural sounds (or rather noises) of the industrial space with a clear evolution in relation to the passing of time. Not incidentally, in each part silence becomes increasingly dominant as the industrial activities turn to be part of a bygone era. Each of the three segments opens with a distinct typology of sound: the noise of the factory machinery in the section Rust; the noise of the public gathering in Remnants; and the sound of trains in the last part Rails. They all end up in silence, marking the victory of the absence of life. This dreary silence further highlights the collapse of the socialist core relationship between the workers and the factory, as well as how the dismantling process opens up the uncertainties of the future. The decision to avoid a voice-over commentary in order to maintain most of the sound as it was recorded during the shooting enhances the engagement of the viewers over the course of the nine hours. It also encourages the perception of a shared space that the filmmaker is recording as its decommissioning unfolds. Moreover, the intersection of sound coming from other media enriches the representation offering additional, external perspectives, as in the case of the radio broadcast in which the news of the increasing number of hi-tech companies entering the market is announced. The workers are therefore not represented as an isolated entity unaware of the process of transformation, but are actually directly called into the process by the possibility of listing in the stock market, a relatively recent craze in China in the early 2000s. Workers both young and old seem to share the same attitude of resignation while facing common problems: reduction in wages or wages in arrears; forced sick leave; the prospect of unemployment. This exploration of the industrial space pushing the viewer to engage with the workers’ life immediately leads to the realization that the industrial noise is also the noise to which the workers have been exposed with no protection, probably for years. The slogan ‘safety first’ (anquan di yi) as well as other safety related slogans are clearly visible on the factory walls but this appears paradoxical when looking at the working conditions. The combination of these spatial and sound elements, as Wang’s camera moves through the industrial space, is also a way to narrativize the space and refrain from a sheer reportage mode. There are no more than five short interviews with cadres during the four-hour-long first section and, in these short passages, the workers’ foremen accurately describe the decline of the factories and advance their opinions on the whole process. In the first interview, the spokesman Zhou Dexing emphasizes the importance of protective measures like the use of masks against poisonous emissions, but most of the workers

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do not use masks. Temporary workers, employed by the factory because they are cheaper than ordinary workers, seem to be even less aware of the risks that they incur. As a further comparative note, the risks to which Chinese workers were exposed are not so far from Malick’s portrait of working life in early twentieth-century America. The sound of the whole film was recorded live, rarely added or re-done in post-production, except when needed for technical reasons. However, it is never simply juxtaposed to the images as a fictional/emotional device. In addition to sound, the spatial definition of the area is emphasized by contrasting images of empty unused industrial space and the enclosed space of the workplace common room. The disproportion between the number of people and the size of the rooms is a striking element that recurs throughout the film, together with the long camera movements on the horizontal plan and its panning over the empty plantation area. These are alternated to the vertical movements of the workers from the break room down to the working place, and down again to deeper underground areas. The whole process of filmmaking therefore constructs a visual and sound narrative of the industrial district while, at the same time, archiving its images and sounds. In fact, the central character of West of the Tracks in its over-imposing structure is the factory, as Wang noted in several interviews at the time (Lü 2010: 60). He also remarked that by bearing in mind the configuration of space in the cinema of Italian masters such as Visconti and Antonioni, the film-maker aimed to emphasize the interplay between the industrial space and those who inhabit it (Fumarola and Momo 2013: 419). Such an emphasis, achieved by means of different framing angles that often bring industrial machinery to the fore, and the frequent use of long shots that engrave the workers within the massive space of the plant, encourages a process of abstraction through which the worker is progressively weakened as the factory is closed down. The light of the smelting plants of the first part progressively dims as do the bright red-yellow fires, which are extinguished. Elements of fear and tension are also scattered in the film, not only because of the dreary atmosphere of the declining smelting factory but because of contrasting chromatic effects: the natural light f ills the inside space with greyish, dusty, and some more livid tones, whereas when the camera gets back to the open space the whole surrounding area is immersed in the bright light of sunny winter days of the northern regions. Not by chance in the last part, the regular check-ups on the workers’ health, which are shown on several occasions, become less relevant as the collective dimension of the factory is destroyed. Significantly, the focus on railway workers in the third section

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reconnects the film to its opening scenes with the slow moving train. The individual worker, as well as the emptied collective body of the factory, is finally presented as being at a stage of history that is past. In spite of its limited production resources, when looking at its cinematic features, at the careful use of cinematography and sound, West of the Tracks seems to combine the purposes of literary reportage as described above together with epics of labour in the line of Malick’s Days of Heaven. Wang Bing’s slow and careful approach to the everyday life of the workers pushes the viewer to realize that what is seen on screen is not ethnographic work, nor is it a journalistic reportage, nor a fiction. He rather aims to activate a recollection of memories, both historical and cinematic, by evoking aspects of the diverse traditions. Furthermore, Wang’s epic of labour manages to articulate an uneasy dialogue between the representation of a given space and the unfolding of a complex social process at a specific historical juncture. It also suggests the potential for critical interventions by means of audiovisual recording with no clear-cut distinction between documentary and fiction.

References Aufderheide, Patricia (2007) Documentary Film. A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press. Blasi, Gabriella (2014) ‘Nature and the Unmaking of the World: Reading Figures of Nature in Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven’, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 61: 1, 67–73. Burdeau, Emmanuel (2004) ‘Eloge de Tiexi qu’, Cahiers du Cinéma 586: 34–36. Elsaesser, Thomas and Adam Barker (eds.) (1990) Early Cinema. Space, Frame, Narrative, London: BFI Publishing. He Qinglian (2000) ‘China’s Listing Social Structure’, New Left Review, 5, 69–99. Gaudreault, André (1990) ‘Film, Narrative, Narration. The Cinema of the Lumière Brothers’, in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds.) Early Cinema. Space, Frame, Narrative, London: BFI Publishing. Jiang Xueqin (2001) ‘Fighting to Organize’, Far Eastern Economic Review [6 September 2001], 72–75. Laughlin, Charles A. (2002) Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. — (2003) ‘Language and Literary Form’ in Joshua S. Mostow (ed.) The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 307–314.

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Lü Xinyu (2003) Jilu Zhongguo. Dangdai Zhongguo xin jilupian yundong [Recording China: Contemporary Chinese new documentary movement], Beijing: Shenghuo dushu xinzhi sanlian shudian. — (2010) ‘West of the Tracks: History and Class-Consciousness’ in C. Berry, Lü X., L. Rofel (eds.), The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010, 57–76. Marchetti, Gina (2018) ‘Storms over Asia. Mongolia, Montage Aesthetics, and Jia Zhangke’s The World’, in Citing China. Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’I Press, 26–51. McGrath, Jason (2008) Postsocialist Modernity. Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nayman, Adam (2013) ‘This was China: Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks’, http://www. bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/was-china-wang-bings-west-tracks [accessed 20 February 2020]. Pickowicz, Paul and Yinjing Zhang (2006) From Underground to Independent, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Pollacchi, Elena (2012) ‘Wang Bing’s The Ditch: Spaces of History between Documentary and Fiction’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6: 2, 189–202. Ramos-Martínez, Manuel (2015) ‘The Oxhidation of the Documentary. The Politics of Rust in Wang Bing’s Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks’, Third Text, 29 (1–2), 1–13. Reynaud, Berenice (2003) ‘Dancing with Myself, Drifting with My Camera: The Emotional Vagabonds of China’s New Documentary’, Senses of Cinema – an Online Film Journal 28, http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/ chinas_new_documentary/ [accessed 20 February 2020]. Robinson, Luke (2013) Independent Chinese Documentary. From the Studio to the Street, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rohdie, Sam (2001) Promised Lands. Cinema, Geography, Modernism, London: BFI Publishing. Sandhu, Sukhdev (ed.) (2009) Leaving The Factory: Wang Bing’s Tiexi Qu: West of the Tracks, Hamburg/New York, Text und Töne/Colloquium for Unpopular Culture. Schiwelbuch, Wolfgang (1986) The Railway Journey. The Industrialization and the Perception of Time and Space in 19th Century, Leamington Spa: Berg. Slattery, Dennis Patrick (2015) ‘Days of Heaven (1978). Directed and Written by Terrence Malick’, Psychological Perspectives, 58:1, 114–116. Tassy, Emma (2004) ‘La fièvre documentaire’, Cahiers du Cinéma 586: 36–37. Ten Brink, Joran (ed.) (2007) The Cinema of Jean Rouch, London: Wallflower Press. Veg, Sebastian (2007) ‘From Documentary to Fiction and Back: Reality and Contingency in Wang Bing’s and Jia Zhangke’s films’, China Perspectives, 2007/3, http:// journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/2223 [accessed 20 January 2010].

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Voci, Paola (2004) ‘From the Center to the Periphery: Chinese Documentary’s Visual Conjectures’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 65–113. Wang, Qi (2014) Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wu, Wenguang (2010) ‘DV: Individual Filmmaking’ in C. Berry, Lü X., L. Rofel (eds.), The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 49–54.

3. Spaces of Labour: Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Bitter Money Abstract Wang’s focus on workers constitutes a unique entry point for studying labour conditions throughout China’s economic development. This chapter offers an in-depth discussion of Wang’s filmmaking in relation to spaces of labour and labour issues. Through the close analyses of Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, and Bitter Money, the discussion expands on the topic of labour which Wang first explored with Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks. These works also re-connect to the flow of laid-off and migrant workers of the Tiexi industrial district and evoke the overarching power of the economy in defining people’s lives and destinies. This chapter also offers a comparative reading of Wang’s Three Sisters and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Keywords: Documentary cinema, China, Marginal spaces, Rural spaces, Left-behind children, Wang Bing, John Ford

As far as space is concerned, Bergson’s warning about the temptations of spatializing thought remain current in the age of the intercontinental ballistic missile and the new infra-red and laser system of which we are so proud; it is even more timely in an era of urban dissolution and re-ghettoization, in which we might be tempted to think that the social can be mapped that way, by following across a map insurance red lines and the electrified borders of private police and surveillance forces. Both images are, however, only caricatures of the mode of production itself (most often called late capitalism), whose mechanics and dynamics are not visible in that sense, cannot be detected on the surfaces scanned by satellites, and therefore stand as a fundamental representational problem – indeed a problem of a historically new and original type. ‒ Fredric Jameson (1992)

Pollacchi, E., Wang Bing’s Filmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses, and Marginal Spaces. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463721837_ch03

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Wang Bing’s focus on workers over the course of his career constitutes a unique entry point for studying labour conditions throughout two decades of China’s economic development. In this chapter, I will look at a series of documentaries that expand on the labour issues that were first explored with West of the Tracks. These works reconnect to the flow of laid-off and migrant workers of the industrial district and evoke the overarching power of the economy in defining people’s lives and destinies. They also testify to the economic goals of Chinese modernization. Here, we can also follow Wang Bing’s interest in marginal areas and his trajectory from the periphery to the economic core of the China Dream. The first two works – Three Sisters and ‘Til Madness Do Us Part – were shot in mountainous, rural areas of Yunnan province between 2011 and 2012, and in the enclosed space of a mental asylum in Sichuan province in 2013, respectively. These first two documentaries tackle peripheral spaces where the clashes between Chinese collective life and the outcomes of modernization is more evident. Together with West of the Tracks, they map out Chinese peripheral regions in the transition from a planned economy to a ‘market economy with Chinese characteristics’. They also form part of Wang Bing’s project to explore the impact of Chinese reforms moving along the flow of workers and, at the same time, along the course of the Yangzi River, which is imbued with historical significance. The last work to be discussed here, Bitter Money was shot in 2015–2016 in the industrial district of Huzhou, Zhejiang. This province is considered together with the city of Shanghai to be the starting point and centre of the entire Chinese economic transformation.1 All these works constitute a further and in-depth exploration of spaces of labour. Through the lens of labour – in its etymological meaning of ‘task, toil, exertion’ but also ‘hardship, pain, fatigue’ – Wang Bing’s cinema articulates a poignant analysis of the contemporary Chinese system. Following on from West of the Tracks, in which, thanks to his involvement with and immersive observation of an entire community of workers, Wang managed to provide a historical archive of the dismantling of the factory space, he has continued to illuminate spaces of labour and their transformation at different stages of the economic reforms. Through this process, he has also discovered the domination of the social by the economy and somehow exposed the contradictions of the Chinese system. Moreover, in the spaces Wang’s cinema has approached, social actors are always framed as epitomizing 1 Wang Bing was planning to shoot in the Shanghai area as early as in 2013 (personal communication with Wang Bing, Venice: 6 September 2013).

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a collective history that tends to be overshadowed by the mainstream state narrative. At the margins of the official historical line, Wang’s social actors are unaware of the larger socio-economic dynamics they are part of. Their narrative is mainly a narrative of basic survival – not only a fight for work, but also a struggle for food and for a place to live. As Wang pointed out with reference to Three Sisters and the invisible constraints in which the three girls live: They live inside the economy of our times. The economy has kidnapped every one of us. In this sense, human relations today are essentially economic relations. The economy assigns the positions people occupy and continuously reinforces them. These positions, in turn, are often invisible. (Wang 2013: 12)

Set against this economic and political frame, these individual and collective stories turn into an ‘epic of survival’, which is not specific to China but can be traced as part of human history at different latitudes and different times. This struggle has been represented multiple times in film history and literature alike. With this in mind, in this chapter I also see Three Sisters – and, more generally, the topics touched upon in this set of documentaries – as reminiscent of John Ford’s film The Grapes of Wrath (1940). This American epic – Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s eponymous novel – revolves on the assumption that the economy is the primary driver of society. Changes in the economic system determine people’s destinies. Finally, through a close reading of Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, and Bitter Money, this chapter reiterates my aim of seeing Wang’s documentaries as a corpus with intertwining interests and motifs. His consistent interest in ordinary people’s lives and his way of sharing their life experiences for an extended period of time is a crucial director’s choice. This informal methodology – which also shapes Wang’s aesthetics as a kind of ‘labour’ – has been a constant pattern in his work and enabled him to develop an important network of social actors whose lives unfold in front of the camera. These social actors are representative of the patterns that millions of workers and families have experienced in China in the last three decades and that have helped China to transition from a socialist country to a superpower. By exploring the margins and the subaltern, in terms of geography and social groups, Wang has been able to deconstruct the state narrative of the China Dream. In fact, he has turned this narrative upside down. In order to see how China has become a superpower, he has searched and explored the human flow that has strongly contributed to it.

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Filming spaces of labour and cinema as labour After West of the Tracks, Wang’s spent nearly five years developing his feature film The Ditch related to the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957–1959 and set in Gansu province in the north-west. However, he remained so concerned with labour issues that as soon as this film was completed, he returned to the west of the country, although this time further south. Three Sisters and ’Til Madness Do Us Part, completed respectively in 2012 and 2013, deal with two radically different spaces of labour and ‘marginal spaces’. Three Sisters approaches a remote mountain village in Yunnan mountains, whereas ’Til Madness Do Us Part deals with the enclosed space of a mental asylum in neighbouring Sichuan province. Both films reveal how working spaces, which in most cases are also living spaces for the social actors, remain crucial for observing human relationships within contemporary socio-economic circumstances. Just as the emblematic space of the Tiexi factories evoked similar processes happening simultaneously in the rest of China, from 2010, Wang Bing started to explore the impact of labour and economic policies in other, particularly rural areas. The progressive dismantling of the socialist labour system and the transformation of labour from collective structures into individual enterprises that rapidly led to the so-called market economy with Chinese characteristics, or what is now defined as ‘post-socialist’ China, also came to transform rural areas.2 In the process, traditional social structures, primarily family structures, were also forced to change, giving rise to new social problems including that of the ‘left-behind children’ (liushou erzi), whose parents had moved to cities or other destinations seeking work (Zhang 2015). Awareness of this phenomenon, which involved millions of children in the rural areas, began shortly after the turn of the century. Through his ‘cinema as/of labour,’ his engagement with harsh labour and living spaces – no matter whether as broad as the mountains, or as narrow as a mental asylum – Wang Bing’s filmmaking engages the viewer in an increasingly intense cinematic experience. This experience relies on the camera work and on the narrative that the characters poignantly deliver to the audience without any specific need of theatrical performance but simply by performing their daily life. Furthermore, Wang’s cinema as labour implies an evolution from the distinctive yet primarily immersive observation of West of the Tracks to a more challenging involvement of both the filmmaker 2 For an overview of the dynamics and implications of Chinese economic transition towards a market economy, see Naughton (2007).

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and the viewers with the geographical and social context. With this evolution in the use of film language, Wang’s incessant exposition of the hidden facets of Chinese modernization moves even closer to narrative cinema. Wang Bing continues to challenge not only the official line of Chinese development, but also the traditional typology of documentary cinema. Categories such as observational and expository documentary, as in Bill Nichols’s definition of documentary modes,3 as well as the practices of cinéma verité and Direct Cinema as discussed in the previous chapter, may work well only for certain segments of Wang’s cinema. Even the Chinese concept of xianchang (‘in the here and now’), which has been frequently used to define the aesthetics of a broad range of works concerned with the actuality/contingency of the filmmaking process, can only be partially applied to Wang’s cinema. 4 As Luke Robinson has argued, xianchang aesthetics includes features borrowed from the Direct Cinema of Frederick Wiseman such as “the absence of commentary or extra-diegetic sound; a refusal to stage or re-enact events; a minimization, wherever possible, of the camera’s on-site presence; and a consequent reliance on editing to impose a coherent structure upon the documentary whole” (2013: 29). Although all of these elements are present, Wang Bing’s cinema rather intertwines the different documentary modes, frequently going against the minimization of the on-site camera work and making it clearly visible, for example when using a handheld camera that struggles to keep steady following its subjects on mountain paths, rather than a Steadicam. This makes the presence of the f ilmmaker, and his occasional interactions with his social actors, more evident. Moreover, the filmmaking itself also becomes a demanding physical experience during which Wang Bing and his minimal crew of sound- and camera assistants experienced for themselves the struggles of the social actors in their living and working spaces. Thus, the camera work is conceived as a kind of labour in its own right, involving physical effort and visible fatigue from both the filmmaker and his crew and, in a different way, from the viewer. It is not for reasons of length that the viewing experience is demanding, as in West of the Tracks, but rather because the films return and present to the viewer the harshness of those spaces with no specific search for transparency – that is to say, for effacing 3 Bill Nichols’s typology of documentary modes distinguishes between expository (direct presentation of an argument), observational (a more direct experience of the phenomena), interactive-participatory (the filmmaker interacts with the social actors) and reflexive mode (with a commentary on documentary making) (2001). 4 The use of the term xianchang to define the quality of certain Chinese cultural production of the 1990s was introduced in the late 1990s.

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the presence of the camera – and with a loose narrative structure whose elements are up to the viewers to connect. Wang’s cinema turns into a sort of physical cinema that demands effort as part of the process of viewing and understanding. Three Sisters is the epitome of this physical filmmaking as the director himself demonstrated while shooting in the Yunnan mountains in 2011. Wang was hospitalized due to exhaustion and extreme working conditions at high altitude while he was following the three little girls of the title.5

The transition from the industrial space of the Tiexi district to rural and marginal spaces For his debut film, Wang Bing not only filmed, but also lived in the industrial district of Tiexi through the crucial years in which “a fortress of the socialist planned economy,” in Lü’s words, was turned into “a ruin of industrial civilization” (2010: 57). In the three years of shooting, Wang Bing shared the life of the workers and, thanks to the increased proximity to his subjects, he managed to show (and anticipate) the uncertain future faced by millions of Chinese workers. However, the focus on the active workers and their labour in West of the Tracks is mainly limited to its first part, Rust, shot entirely in the plants, in which sequences of the workers’ tasks alternate with their direct narrations. Yet, the striking aspect of this first section is not the expository statements of the workers – five interviews that set the context of the documentary – but the way the filmmaker manages to juxtapose the workers and the factory space. Wang Bing made two more works on industrial labour, the installation Crude Oil in 2008 and the documentary Coal Money in 2009. Crude Oil is an 840-minute installation commissioned by the Rotterdam International Film Festival. While Wang Bing was still working in the north-western territories for his project on the Anti-Rightist campaign, he took the opportunity to film the daily routine of a group of oil-field workers in the Gobi Desert in Qinghai province, during winter. This also reinforced Wang’s idea of filming as a way of sharing the living and working space and, generally speaking, the life struggle of his own social actors. From the beginning, the film is conceived as an installation and it does not have subtitles. This choice, together with its extreme length and the unedited long segments shot in real time, are 5 The shooting was interrupted for a few months as Wang Bing fell ill due to exhaustion from working at such altitudes (Personal communication with Wang Bing, 20 December 2011).

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more suited to gallery viewing, as discussed in the closing chapter of this volume.6 Unable to understand the conversation among the workers, the viewers’ attention is drawn to their space and the sound and visual texture of the film. Changes in the light of the day and other details become the means by which the viewer gets to better understand the labour conditions of the workers. They are forced to share not only their work, but also their life in the narrow space of the oil extraction hangars. While these conditions are common to other oil-field workers in the world, it is also evident that these workers no longer have a connection to their workplace, as had been the case with Tiexi and elsewhere in the former Chinese collective system. As Wang noted in his interview for the New Left Review, “[n]ow there is a contract-labour system everywhere. It is a simple relationship of hiring, often temporary. The oil fields workers are no exception. […] The workplace is no longer intrinsically related to your life” (2013: 7). Coal Money is a 50-minute commissioned work by the French production company Les Films d’Ici, for the French Arte TV channel. It shows the difficult, demanding work of drivers who make their living hauling and selling coal along the roads of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia to the port city of Tianjin. Rather than on the coal mining itself, here the focus is on the energy industry and its effect on hired, precarious, and even illegal labour. All along the road, a myriad of drivers, intermediaries, sellers, and even prostitutes are shown as a microcosm of labour connected to the movement of coal. Although Wang Bing usually does not mention this film among his major works – mainly because it was a commissioned work with an imposed 50-minute format – Coal Money also provided evidence about energy resources, their transportation, and environmental implications, issues of major concern in China and elsewhere. Even if the documentary does not openly address such issues, it connects to the overall debate on the coal industry. Around 2008–2009, it was becoming evident that the fast pace of Chinese development not only had to deal with increasing energy supply needs, but also with bottlenecks in its transportation infrastructure. As remarked in an article published on Energy Economics, “[t]hese bottlenecks likely affected not only China’s domestic coal market, but also global coal markets. […] We find that coal transportation inefficiencies increased the price of Chinese domestic coal at coastal locations and thereby influenced global seaborne coal prices” (Rioux et al., 2016). In subsequent years, Chinese 6 These features, in particular the absence of subtitles, were also imposed by the very limited funding for this project. From a private conversation with Wang’s producer and collaborator Kong Lihong.

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investments in the so-called coal railroad have grown in order to reduce the costs and negative implications of energy transportation. Several other feature films and documentaries have since approached the transformation of industrial space, with Jia Zhangke’s Twenty-four City (Ershisi chengji, 2008) offering a poetic take on a state-owned factory in Chengdu in the process of being turned into an apartment complex. As for documentaries, Wen Hai’s We the Workers (Xiongnian zhi pan, 2017), shot over a six-year period from 2009 to 2015, approaches the emergence of a new working-class consciousness and labour movement in China by looking at labour activists in one of the industrial hubs of the global supply chain in southern China. Wen’s epic three-hour documentary follows labour activists as they find common ground with workers, helping them to negotiate with local officials and factory owners over wages and working conditions. It is worth noting that Wen Hai contributed as director of photography to Wang Bing’s Three Sisters and Crude Oil. However, worker activism and the emergence of social consciousness is hardly visible in Wang Bing’s work. Somehow, it seems as if the dismantling of the Tiexi district took place at a stage prior to the formation of workers’ consciousness. The absence of workers’ struggle and their passive acceptance of events distinguish Wang Bing’s approach from that of other activist filmmakers; yet, at the same time, the film bears witness to the constraints upon workers against forming a collective consciousness at the moment traditional work structures were dismantled.7 In 2008, nearly a decade after Wang first entered the Tiexi district and still in the crucial stage of China’s economic growth, he started exploring the impact of modernization on rural areas. The opportunity arose when he had the chance to travel to Yunnan to pay homage to the tomb of the Chinese writer Sun Shixiang. During his first trips to Yunnan, he shot the short film Happy Valley (Xiyangtang, 2009). This nineteen-minute short was a segment of the project of ‘The Complete Letters, Filmed Correspondence’ promoted by Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), which involved invited filmmakers from all over the world. Wang Bing filmed the daily life of a rural community living in the village of Xiyangtang – also the Chinese title of the film – at an altitude of 3000 metres. An opening credit informs viewers that it is home to a few dozen Han families, whose livelihood comes mainly from potatoes and livestock. The camera records their daily lives of extreme poverty, as they try to keep feeding their animals 7 Leung and Caspersz (2016) discusses the constraints in the formation of a labour consciousness in contemporary China.

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and themselves. Halfway through the film, another credit explains that “in spring, the villagers store pressed grass roots to burn as fuel for the rest of the year.” The last nine minutes focus on a stone house where three girls live, apparently by themselves. Their clothes and their faces are dirty; they seem to have nothing to do. A further credit reveals that, in this family, the mother has left home and the father is in hospital after he hurt his leg cutting wood. So, the girls are left alone with the eldest taking care of the two younger sisters. These are the three girls who will become the focus of Three Sisters, the documentary Wang Bing started working on in 2010. From the first bird’s-eye view of the collective of the Xiyangtang village, Wang started his process of narrativization by singling out the girls’ vicissitudes. Their individual stories ultimately epitomize the narrative of a significant segment of the Chinese population at the time, children like these, whose voice is usually unheard. As noted in the first chapter, with reference to geographical spaces, Wang’s trajectory from the margin to the centres of productions located in the southern provinces also relates to a certain traditional approach to China that sees Chinese civilization evolving around the basins of the two main rivers, the Yellow River in the north and the Yangzi River in the south, both celebrated since the earliest stages of Chinese literature and poetry.8 The Yangzi River in particular is relevant for Wang Bing’s cinema at this stage. It originates from a set of tributaries in the Tibetan plateau. These tributaries connect the Tibetan region, Sichuan province, and the mountainous Yunnan province in south-west China that borders on Myanmar and Laos, all areas where Wang Bing has filmed from 2010 to 2013. Yet, rather than celebrating China’s fast-paced economic growth, which started from the coastal areas, the city of Shanghai, and has the eastern provinces as its centre, Wang has defined his critical journey by travelling downstream. He started from the marginal and poorest areas of Yunnan where first Happy Valley and then Three Sisters were shot and where the Yangzi River has its source. He later moved towards the border with Sichuan – the shooting location of ’Til Madness Do Us Part – and finally reached Zhejiang, in the east, just south of the Yangzi, where Bitter Money is filmed. The Yangzi River meets the sea in the Shanghai area, after crossing the most productive and therefore richer regions of China. Wang followed the human flow towards the east, the core of China’s wealthiest regions and, through this informal journey, he gained a better understanding of the country’s economy. 8 The Yellow river was also celebrated by the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers in their films.

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In the years 2010–2013, the depopulation of rural villages, extreme poverty, and the collapse of traditional family structures became the themes of Three Sisters and ’Til Madness Do Us Part, whereas new labour structures and social dynamics became the focus of Bitter Money, the work that Wang shot in 2015–2016 dealing with a later stage in the development of labour structures. Once again, the catchphrase ‘pursuing the China Dream’ is significant in the way it encourages individual journeys in the pursuit of wealth, yet relies on the collective flow of labour force towards areas where such force is needed. The implicit contradiction of the slogan is therefore that of supporting individual initiatives as long as it remains within the realm of creating enterprises and wealth but, at the same time, this dream-like vision clashes with fading social and family structures and with massive displacement of workers scattered all over China and separated from their families. This economy-triggered phenomenon inevitably recalls another dream, the American Dream, or better, as Jim Cullen has argued, the several American Dreams on which the United States has defined itself throughout the centuries. This concept has proven elastic enough to take on different shapes and narratives at different times in history, yet all converging towards the idea of pursuing a better life or one’s personal fulfilment (2004). I further develop this connection between the Chinese and American Dreams by analysing Three Sisters, reminiscent of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath, while describing how Wang Bing’s experience of rural labour and life moves from the observational mode of West of the Tracks to a more complex narrative dimension. By means of the camera work and through the portrayal of three little girls against the backdrop of a mountain village, Three Sisters manages to evoke the collective dimension of rural spaces. The children and the families become the quintessence of the Chinese rural population, which – at a specific stage in Chinese history – has had no other experience of the ongoing economic growth, still less of the China Dream, from which they were excluded from the start. The three girls’ life of poverty, solitude, and displacement points to the economy, and economic goals, as the overarching force that determines people’s faith in the future. This was also the underlying assumption of John Steinbeck’s literary classic and John Ford’s film adaptation of it.

Three Sisters: An epic of survival reminiscent of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath The 153-minute-long Three Sisters focuses on three sisters’ daily routines while their father is in town most of the time searching for work. He returns

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for a brief visit to the village and takes the two younger sisters with him to the urban area where he works. As we learn from a passing conversation between the father and his own father, the girls’ mother has left the family for another village, probably for a better life. During the absence of both parents, the girls were partly taken care of by their aunt’s family, for whom they also work in the fields and tend sheep and pigs. Most of the time, the eldest girl, Yingying, aged ten, looks after her younger siblings, Zhenzhen, aged six, and Fenfen, aged four. In the final part of the film, the father – unable to earn enough money to provide for the whole family – returns to the village with his two daughters. In their absence, the older sister has remained with the grandfather and attends the village school. The father brings another woman with her child back with him. A closing credit informs viewers that the village in the film is Xiyangtang, at an altitude of 32,000 metres and with a population of 80 families. Wang started shooting Three Sisters in 2010, having begun developing the project after spending some time in the area, which was once populated with lively villages and small towns. They had rapidly turned into ghost areas, as the inhabitants started migrating to urban centres from the first years of the new century. This was the phase in which manual work was in heavy demand in order to develop and modernize Chinese cities. In fact, after the first wave of urban development, which started transforming Beijing as early as 2001–2002, due to the Olympic Games of 2008 – and later Shanghai, due to the Expo of 2010 – the same process of urban renovation and expansion transformed all other major cities in China. This radical metamorphosis demanded not only resources and energy supplies – as discussed in relation to Crude Oil and Coal Money – but also a large workforce. It progressively came to involve migrant workers from all the remote parts of China moving towards major cities or new production centres. As studies on Chinese politics testify, the twelfth five-year plan (2011–2015) focused mainly on urbanization, despite reinforcing the goal of coordinating agricultural modernization, industrialization, and urbanization as a critical part of economic development. Thus, Xi Jinping’s call for ‘rural revitalization’ at the 19th Communist Party Congress in 2017 made it even clearer that, during the first years of the twenty-first century, migration from rural areas to developing urban centres was a side effect of economic reforms and therefore it was time to focus on the repopulation and revitalization of rural areas (Wang and Zhou 2018). Three Sisters explores one such rural mountain area at the peak of the migration flow, but in terms of background and structure, the film does not offer any preliminary information about this political backdrop although

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‘rural revival’ is mentioned during a village meeting towards the end of the film. This is described as a process through which the government aims to build new houses and infrastructures while the villagers complain that they hardly have enough to eat. Extreme poverty is evident in the Three Sisters’ opening shot, which shows the three little girls tending a small fire on the floor of their spartan stone house. It is medium shot at the girls’ height moving around the room. When each of the girls is in focus, their names and age appear as an on-screen credit, as it happens for others in the film when they first appear. While the older girl tends the fire, they chat and argue, as children frequently do, around the tiny flame that should warm them and dry their soaked clothes. This sequence, filmed almost at floor level in order to keep the girls’ perspective, establishes the position adopted by the filmmaker and his approach. This starts as an immersive approach, which results in no voice-over commentary and the unfolding of the film as a process of mirroring the exploration of the space and the socio-human relations the filmmaker first encountered. It also foregrounds the critical statements that echo throughout the film: Who are these girls? How come they are alone? What is their life and what can be inferred about their future? With very few cuts, after showing the girls around the fire, this fiveminute-long sequence cuts to the medium shot of the older girl trying to fix the torn rainboot of the younger one, Fenfen. At the same time, the other girl, Zhenzhen, declares that she has found something that “looks like a house.” It is a small object that she holds in her hand and which is difficult to identify in the shot. Then, one of the girls moves towards the part of the house where they sleep and the camera follows her so as to reveal their living space. At six minutes into the film, the girls are seen for the first time in daylight – as if after a night’s sleep or at the start of the following day. They are ready to start their daily duties in what we later learn is their aunt’s house. From the outset, the girls take the position of the central characters in the film and its structure unfolds according to the narrative of their days. Despite the documentary material, the films evolves as a narrative film rather than a documentary. The opening segment of Three Sisters confirms that, in spite of their young age, the girls are already living a life of hard labour. They collect potatoes and cabbages – the few items that can be cultivated at an altitude of 3,000 metres – they feed the pigs and collect dung for the stoves. These are their daily tasks in the cold and wet natural environment, and it is only at mealtimes that they get some rest. Their routine is interrupted by the temporary return of the father, Sun Shunbao, aged 32, who has come back on a visit. The first part of the film ends at approximately 45 minutes with

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Figure 2: Three Sisters, Yingying and Fenfen (Copyright courtesy of Asian Shadows)

a ten-minute-long sequence showing the father’s return to the village. The sequence focuses on a family meal with the father and the grandfather preparing noodles and the three girls moving around the cooking area. This is a pivotal sequence in which the family situation and their constraints comes to the fore through a passing conversation. The viewers have had the time to become familiar with the characters and their environment thus the conversation that takes place around the fire becomes a revealing moment. The father informs the girls’ grandfather, his own father, that he must raise 2,000 yuan for a matchmaker, who will introduce him to a woman who will live in the family. In this conversation, the grandfather suggests his son that he searches for his wife in order to ask for some money to support the girls, but Sun Shunbao answers that he does not even know her whereabouts. Here, Three Sisters functions even more as a narrative film in which the meal scene is a central and revealing sequence that brings the characters together. In addition, it shows how traditional family structures have to be redefined under such socio-economic constraints. This is achieved only by means of long shots and camera movements. As Wang commented in an interview in relation to this work: A film establishes its connection to its audience through the camera. […] I think what matters is the manner in which the filmmaker works. When you keep on watching, when your attention is continuously trained on something, why is it that you want to look at it, and then to show it to your audience? There has to be something people care about, something that carries on growing. The inner richness of the girls’ characters, all those

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details of their lives – these keep unfolding, offering the audience the chance to reflect on this increasing complexity (Wang 2013: 11).

It is important to note that while this brief family reunion brings joy to the girls, Wang Bing refrains from any easy emotional engagement when documenting the reactions of the sisters. He increases the camera distance when showing family life. In fact, it is not through a simplistic emotional engagement that the film manages to evoke a broader, universal dimension, but rather through the relationship between space, camera, and social actors. In Wang Bing’s cinema, such a transition from individual stories to a collective dimension, and vice versa, is often achieved by means of an increasingly conscious and confident approach to space. This further discourages reading the film as Direct Cinema as the girls’ daily life is not simply ‘observed’ but ‘narrated’. In his review of the film, Thom Andersen defined it as Direct Cinema and used Jean-Marie Straub’s idea, according to which films are of interest when one finds something that burns in every shot. Seeing this feature in Wang’s Three Sisters, Andersen concluded that “the more I watched the film, the more Yingying breaks my heart” (2012: 29). Such an emotional engagement confirms Wang’s ability to extract narratives from reality and points to his challenging intersection of documentary and drama. However, the filmmaker does not stand in the position of the neutral observer looking for the ‘fire in the shot’, nor does he look at social spaces and collect visual data like an ethnographer. Rather, Wang takes the viewers along on his exploration of spaces and aims to share the spatial and social experience for the sake of a better understanding of the economic and social processes at stake. Therefore, in the hands of the filmmaker, the camera becomes an integral part of the space and a tool for involving the viewer. Not by chance, most of Wang’s documentaries are the result of long editing processes, which he has personally worked on or closely supervised. At this stage of his career, Wang Bing was still trying to refine his own methodology. As already pointed out in the previous chapter, the filmmaker brings to mind other cinematic masters, in particular, John Ford’s epic The Grapes of Wrath, firstly, for the predominance of economic forces over people’s lives and secondly, for the focus on a family’s life – in Ford’s case, it is the Joad family, whose structure and solidity is destroyed by economic forces they are unaware of. These forces dismantle in no time their traditions and the life they have maintained for decades. Thirdly, there is a set of details in the mise en scène that are relevant in both films, including the pivotal meal sequences and an early scene in both films featuring a rainboot in Three Sisters and a shoe in The Grapes of Wrath.

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In Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, Tom Joad returns to his rural town after having served time in jail. After an introductory sequence, he heads towards what used to be his home. Ford privileges long shots from either a low angle so as to look at Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) from the level of the soil, or from a high angle so as to inscribe him in the vastness of the fields. The relevance of inscribing the character into the spatial configuration of the film is immediately evident. The rocks, the soil, a few trees, and fences to mark the cultivated land are common features in Ford’s representation of Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. They are also common features in Wang’s vision of the Yunnan village of the years 2010s. As is the centrality of family structures, which is also crucial in Steinbeck’s novel. The trigger in the narrative line of both the film and the novel is that Tom Joad, after having met the former pastor Casy (John Carradine) on his way home, reaches the place that used to be his family’s farm and finds it empty. In the film, this is a night scene lit only by candlelight. Casy reveals to Tom that everyone had to move away after the new owners evicted them and took over the land. These new owners changed overnight the modes through which farmers had lived for decades. A flashback presents the rapidity and the violence with which the new liberal system disrupted the farmers’ living conditions and forced them to abandon their homes. Once again, details reinforce the connection between the two films. Just as in the opening fire scene of Three Sisters, in which the chatting between the girls revolves around a torn rainboot, so the conversation in Tom’s abandoned farm is interrupted when Tom picks up an old shoe from the floor. Tom recognizes it as his mother’s shoe. He then finds a torn hat that used to be his own. Then, a third man, a fellow villager, enters the scene and the three of them – standing around the tiny candle – talk briefly about the forced departure of the people and why each of them is left behind. In the following sequence, the Joad family – from the grandfather to the younger generations – is shown in a long meal sequence. This is the pivotal scene in which Tom joins the family and, with them, embarks on the journey towards California. Just like in the meal sequence in Three Sisters with the father and the grandfather talking to each other, so in The Grapes of Wrath the viewer learns about the family constraints through the dialogues around the meal table. Here is where the family members talk about their goal of heading towards a place where there should be work for everyone. California represents the place of the Joad family’s ‘American dream’, yet Ford’s film – and previously Steinbeck’s novel – deconstruct this dream by showing how economic goals clash with ordinary people’s dreams. As the film moves on, wherever the Joad family stops for a longer or shorter

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stay along the journey, their hopes and dreams confront the reality of the economic crisis at the height of the Great Depression. At every stop, they also realize – as do the viewers – how vast the multitude of people is sharing the same harsh experiences, so that the individual narrative of Tom Joad and his family come to epitomize an entire universe of laid-off workers, farmers left without their land, poor families, and children who have lost their parents. Although the economic background of the US in the 1930s and of China in the 2010s are almost at opposite ends of the scale – China is at its peak in economic performance and America at its lowest – Wang Bing’s exploration of the remote village in the Yunnan mountains and the journey of the Joad family both focus on spaces of labour and overbearing economic forces while, at the same time, testify to the hidden facets of the ‘dream’; in other words, how the dream is articulated differently at various levels of society. Furthermore, Wang’s reference to Ford is not only based upon shared thematic concerns, but it is also connected to the camera work. The Grapes of Wrath ends with an extreme long shot at sunset in which Tom, who has already left the family, walks alone on the mountains at a distance. His tiny profile is set against the open sky. In a similar manner, in the second part of Three Sisters, the children are more frequently shot in the vast open space. After the father has taken the two younger sisters on a bus journey to town, the older girl, Yingying, remains the main narrative focus. The contrast between her minute body and the immensity of the countryside is enhanced by extremely long shots that encompass her within the wide space. In particular, a series of tracking shots following Yingying on the plateau inscribes her figure in this harsh landscape. The choice of low angles, which frequently frame the girl with just the vast blue sky at her back, defines the dominance of this remote area with demanding conditions and, at the same time, her body – carved against the sky – evokes a sense of universality and empowerment. The same universal portrait was that of John Ford’s hardworking farmers whose travelling across the US in search of a better life, was also a way to reinforce the connection between labourers and their living and working spaces. In Ford’s universe, this translates into recurrent scenes of cultivated fields, ploughing machines, and long shots of the vast rural areas so as to inscribe the farmers in the rural landscape of their time. In Three Sisters, there is also an interesting tension between transparency and non-transparency that remains a distinctive feature in subsequent documentaries as part of Wang’s style. In the segment of the film focusing on Yingying alone in the village, after her father has left with the two younger sisters, the handheld camera struggles when following the children’s rapid

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movements up and down the high ridges of the plateau. It often pauses because the altitude is exhausting for those who are not used to it, including the filmmaker and his few collaborators. In addition to the forced pauses in the tracking shots, Yingying frequently gazes into the camera. This makes the camera’s presence even more evident at a time in which the filmmaker had probably become part of the girl’s daily life. As a result, viewers perceive the process of becoming more familiar with the space and its inhabitants. Thanks to shooting angles, lighting, and the positioning of the camera, Wang’s little girls are therefore turned into the characters of an epic of survival à la John Ford. The last part of Three Sisters is introduced by a credit that marks an ellipsis in the narrative. At 130 minutes into the film, a credit states that, in 2011, the father Sun Shunbao – unable to support his family in the city – returned to the village with his two daughters, their live-in carer, and her little girl. The credit appears on a long shot of the snowy landscape. The shot opens from a high angle showing the father as he walks towards the camera from a distance. He then walks past the camera and reaches a higher level of the path before stopping on the edge of the plateau against the sky. This shot is reminiscent of the one in which Tom Joad’s profile is seen walking on the mountains at the close of The Grapes of Wrath. It also represents a crucial passage in the narrative of Three Sisters as it testifies to the father’s disillusionment following his dream of pursuing a better life in town. After this transition, the last segment of the film returns to village life, this time showing the expanded family that now includes the woman who arrived with the father and her little girl. Another long meal sequence shows the family in the spartan house and their passing conversations. A goat is lost and the father goes out to find it. This final part has less camera movements and suggests a sense of stability or resignation. Life moves on despite the extreme poverty, and in spite of family relations, which are constantly redefined. The last few sequences present the woman, her own daughter, and the three sisters, first chatting and playing on the rocks outside their stone house, then washing clothes in a stream. Thereafter follows a close-up of the two youngest girls, Fenfen and the newcomer, playing on the ground as their voices become mixed together in barely intelligible words. The subtitles translate their chatting and singing with the following emblematic sentences: “The nicest mommy in the whole wide world is mine!,” followed by “[k]ids who have a mommy are the happiest in the world.” The final scene is a long tracking shot with the handheld camera that follows the woman and Fenfen from behind as they walk in the harsh, partly snowy landscape of the Yunnan mountains with only the noise of the wind in the background.

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Duration in Wang Bing’s cinema: The case of Three Sisters and Alone Three Sisters has a final duration of 153 minutes. A shorter 89-minute version was conceived for TV broadcast with the French title Seules dans les montagnes du Yunnan (Alone in the Yunnan Mountains); the Chinese title is Gudu and its literal translation is used as the international title Alone. This shorter film was part of the agreement with the French TV channel Arte, which co-produced the film together with the French/Hong Kong company Chinese Shadows. Arte required a format suitable for TV broadcast with a maximum length of 90 minutes. Its editing was completed prior to the first screening of Three Sisters in Venice on 7 September 2012, but it was broadcast on TV after the festival premiere.9 Although the two films are edited from the same material, there are major differences. Wang Bing considers Alone as part of his commissioned works, thus not entirely representative of his own craft. In particular, the two versions differ significantly in the overall mood, or the emotional tone of the film; and in the narrative structure, which is much tighter in Alone due to the time limit. In addition, Alone privileges brighter shots, making the film more suitable for TV broadcasting. For the same reason, the abundance of long shots featured in Three Sisters is significantly reduced. Three different editors worked on the two versions: Adam Kerby and Wang Bing for Three Sisters and Louise Prince for Alone. The editing of the latter was conceived to make the viewing easier, with a clearer understanding of the overall setting from the start. No voice over commentary is added but the title and a set of opening credits introduce the context from the outset: the three sisters live alone in a village at an altitude of 3,200; their mother has left the family and the father works away in town. Alone results into a mosaic of situations through which viewers observe the three sisters’ daily life in the village, with a longer episode dedicated to the visit of the father and how he takes the two younger sisters with him to town. Here, the approach is mainly observational, with some interaction between the filmmaker and the social actors. This is a significant difference with Three Sisters, as the shorter version becomes rather illustrative of the conditions of rural China at the time instead of unfolding along a loose narrative line. From the opening shots of the three girls in their spartan room playing near the fire, exactly as in the longer version, Alone moves on to show the sisters’ various duties and their contribution to the aunt’s family life. It 9

Alone was also shown at some festivals after the Venice premiere of Three Sisters.

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is worth mentioning that even the subtitles in the opening sequence are significantly different from those in Three Sisters.10 Alone then focuses on the children’s attempts at reading and doing homework. With the visit of the father, the film takes a more narrative turn. This includes their bus trip to town and a series of shots portraying the conditions in the coal factory near the city of Kunming where the father works. This piece of geographical information is absent from the longer version. Here, the father’s visit becomes the pivotal scene through which the film transitions from the daily life of the girls in the village to the daily life of two of the sisters in town. The older girl, Yingying, stays in the village with her grandfather. The last part of the film, which can be divided into three narrative segments of approximately 35-40 minutes each, focuses again on the village where the older sister is seen attending the school. From a passing conversation in the open, we understand that she has been arguing at school with another girl. The closing shot shows Yingying from the back. She is filmed from a higher position, seated on a stone against the vast landscape. This shot is similar to those used in Three Sisters, however what is evoked differs significantly. In the absence of similar shots, the one in Alone suggests a sense of loneliness rather than empowering the girl. It emphasizes her life of struggle and hard labour rather than prompting an epic dimension involving a generation of children and rural workers. The comparison between the two versions is relevant as further proof of the filmmaker’s choice of activating a process of learning and understanding by means of time, namely duration of the film and of the shots. As the longer version testifies, Wang Bing’s epistemology is rather that of understanding by means of visual hints, connections, and repetitions so as to engage the viewers in a process of knowledge that uses space and social actors to go beyond the specificity of China and connect to the world. Alone is meant for TV viewers and offers a more descriptive picture of rural life in China, leaving out its universal value and the viewers’ active engagement. By introducing information that aids the viewing process and narrative bridges that link the various situations the film structure is less demanding, but also scaled down. By juxtaposing the two versions, the impact of the editing process becomes even more evident. The duration of the opening shot with the three girls around the fire is shorter by two minutes and similar shortenings affect most of the long shots. Although the structure of the two versions progresses in parallel, the shorter version privileges indoor and brighter 10 As the girls speaks the local dialect, it is difficult even for Chinese speakers to verify the accuracy of the subtitles.

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shots, as well as shots with the girls in focus or at a shorter distance from the camera lens. Moreover, the frequent close-ups on the children encourage an emotional engagement that is absent from Three Sisters. The children are often shown alone, in the centre of the frame, emphasizing a sense of solitude. This is confirmed in a crucial sequence in Alone, twenty minutes into the film, when Wang Bing interviews Yingying about her parents. Yingying is centrally framed against the dark background of the room. She looks up towards the offscreen director in order to answer his three questions about her mother, her father, and who is taking care of them during the parents’ absence. Such a clarifying sequence, which serves the purpose of recalling the information in the opening credits, is totally absent in the longer version. Finally, in Alone, the return of the father, at the end of the first thirty minutes, becomes the trigger for shifting from the village to the father’s workplace. Upon his return to the village, the conversation between the father and the grandfather clarifies how they should deal with the domestic budget so as to sustain themselves during Yingying’s school months. Here, the scenes are edited in such a way that the dialogues are functional to the understanding of the situation. Some scenes look partly staged. Such editing is rather distant from that of Three Sisters and goes against Wang Bing’s concept of narrating stories by means of the camera work rather than through dialogues. In fact, the longer duration of Three Sisters minimizes the dialogues in favour of visual and sound elements. Moreover, duration is a crucial element not only because it familiarizes the viewer with the social context, but also with shooting techniques, the choice of angles, and the overall film aesthetics.

No Way Out: From Three Sisters to ’Til Madness Do Us Part Wang continued to explore the experience of a life of hard labour with little or no hope of escape in ’Til Madness Do Us Part, first shown at the Venice International Film Festival as an Out of Competition entry on 5 September 2013. This film – shot and completed in a relatively short period – is connected to the previous film, Three Sisters, on the basis of space. ’Til Madness Do Us Part was shot in a hospital located at the border between Yunnan and Sichuan, not far from the location where the earlier film was shot. The filmmaker found the hospital during the shooting of Three Sisters. In ’Til Madness Do Us Part, space – as a physical environment – is the element that affects the filmmaking process, in the same way as altitude did for Three Sisters. In sharp contrasts to the previous work, here the space is narrow

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and confined. In addition, space – as a socio-political element – evokes similar constraints in both films, by focusing on people who are excluded from the China Dream narrative. The filmmaker first mentioned the idea of shooting a film in a psychiatric hospital as early as in 2004, during his year’s stay at the Cinéfondation in Paris. He had the chance to visit a psychiatric hospital in the surroundings of Beijing and tried to turn it into a film project. However, this idea was abandoned in favour of The Ditch, whose first concept was also developed at the Cinéfondation.11 ’Til Madness Do Us Part was finished in less than a year, between September 2012 and August 2013. It was filmed in three months in the winter of 2013 and edited by Wang Bing and Adam Kerby, as was Three Sisters before August of the same year. The 228-minute-long documentary engages the viewer in the claustrophobic experience of the mental asylum, which is also a place where people rejected from society for different reasons are kept. As in Three Sisters, no information is provided at the beginning of the film. Only at the end of the viewing process, after viewers have become familiar with the space, the patients, and some of their families, are some details provided by means of a set of final credits. They state: This film was recorded in a municipal mental hospital in the south-west of China. The hospital houses over 200 male and female patients, all of whom were committed involuntarily – some by their families, some by the Chinese police or courts. In this impoverished region, the vast majority of patients and their families cannot afford to pay for their treatment. Violent and non-violent patients are housed together. Some were labelled criminally insane after murdering parents, spouses, children, neighbours, or strangers. Some were committed for drug or alcohol abuse, disorderly conduct, f ighting or vagrancy. Some were committed after suffering mental breakdowns, or exhibiting ‘aberrant behaviour’. Others were committed simply for being developmentally disabled, adrift or abandoned, unable to communicate or to provide for themselves. The hospital rolls list two patients (one female, one male) as ‘Name Unknown’.

In terms of space, Wang Bing focuses mainly on the male section of the hospital, which is located on the upper floor of the two-storey building. This area has a barred corridor that overlooks an inner courtyard. The patients can leave 11 I have been able to discuss this idea with Wang Bing on several occasions since 2004 and how the idea of the shooting in a psychiatric hospital came about is also referred to in Burdeau and Renzi (2014).

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their tiny rooms only to access the corridor, from which the lower floor with the female section is partly visible. Their only other space is the courtyard where they receive their meals. The corridor and the courtyard are the two spaces from which the outside is perceived. The neat exclusion of the outer space, together with the emphasis on the microcosm that is defined by the rooms of the hospital, evoke another facet of the social transformation: the ‘collective dimension’ of those put aside by China’s rise. If Three Sisters takes the contrast between the vast open rural space and the little girls as its focus, ’Til Madness Do Us Part explores a different kind of opposition, that of the barred space in which inmates are secluded from the outside world. The two films talk to each other in relation to space, focusing on the two opposite sides of the scale. Whereas Three Sisters made considerable use of the mountain landscape in order to engrave the minute bodies of the children, in ’Til Madness Do Us Part the multitude of the inmates occupies the limited space of the asylum, making it claustrophobic with little or no perception of a possible way out. In approaching such spaces, the filmmaking process encounters an almost opposite set of constraints. If in Three Sisters the director and his crew had to chase and follow the children up and down the mountains, here they must share the space of the inmates of the asylum with very few possibilities to move around. The camera is often forced to take odd angles in order to shoot the corridors or to follow the characters up and down the staircases. Yet, Wang Bing’s methodology remains the same in the two films, that of sharing the experience of those who inhabit a space and understanding the human relationships that unfold in it. This process is then returned to the viewers in a demanding viewing experience, at least in terms of extensive duration and repetitions, which is, once again, a process of learning and understanding by means of the camera. For most of its four hours, the film offers a visual experience of ‘confinement’, as physical detention, mental isolation, and constraints of different sorts. In such a limited space, human actions are simple, they are often idle actions repeated incessantly. Yet, they occasionally explode into violence. The production notes of the film clarify that some of these inmates have committed crimes while others “are simply outsiders, forsaken by the local government for having upturned the rules” with no other specification about such rules. As Justin Chang observed: The decision to omit such details – in keeping with Wang’s silent observational approach, unspoiled by context or commentary – serves only to strengthen his tacit critique of a system that seems so undiscriminating in its mistreatment of such a large swathe of humanity. Saddest of all is the

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realization that some of the men have been dumped here simply because they have grown too old, too slow and too difficult for their families to take care of them any longer (Chang 2013).

By moving around the corridor and the rooms of the asylum, Wang Bing’s exploration takes the collective body of the inmates as its focus. The building is home to about 100 men, a simple credit onscreen identifies some of them by their name and the length of their confinement. The camera progressively introduces the viewers to some of the patients: some with different kinds of mental illnesses, others imprisoned for having committed various crimes, and some others simply rejected by society or by their families. Many have been imprisoned for as long as ten or twelve years. As familiarity with the patients of the hospital increases, some of them become the leading characters in the repetitive narrative of the hospital daily routines. Only the visits of relatives or occasional meetings with the female patients offer some variation. A snowy day can represent a special day for the inmates. The medical staff remains at a distance from this set of minimal individual narratives. In a few sequences, we see the doctors giving injections and in one sequence a patient is handcuffed, which inevitably suggests that coercive methods of control are also applied. The asylum is clearly not a prison yet not a free space either. Nonetheless, these few scenes do not suggest any opposition between inmates and doctors, so as to avoid any association between the doctors and some sort of ‘police force’ or ‘guardians’. Even if the doctors could be easily taken as representatives of the authorities, they are hardly seen. As Wang Bing has pointed out in interviews, the doctors and employees were not willing to be part of the film as they felt that their work was hard, yet they had to perform it. In fact, although not comparable to the conditions in which the patients live, the doctors also find themselves in a difficult place. Rather than being an effective component of the power structure, the medical staff is simply at another level in the system, and also has to deal with a life of labour in the demanding conditions of the hospital. They must carry out their functions with very limited resources, and it is likely that their salaries are just enough to support their families with little left for savings. Once again, the forces of control are outside the hospital and are intangible. What is tangible is the lack of resources, the supposed absence of any investment in the hospital, and, ultimately, the fact that those who seem unable to fit into the main (economic) narrative of the China Dream are simply left behind. A further expansion on the contrast between individuals and the officially promoted dream-like collective narrative is provided by scenes in which

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the hospital comes to the fore as a space with no exit. Its regular, squared shape with the corridor as the only possibility for the inmates to move around in a loop offers no alternative. A crucial scene is that of a patient running around the corridor like a madman with no hint on whether his running is related to a mental illness or to another condition. Yet, he runs in a loop and pauses in search of a potential exit. The camera follows his steps, mirroring this sense of confinement. Both Three Sisters and ’Til Madness Do Us Part deal with the question raised by Fredric Jameson in his analysis of cinema and space or, rather, ‘world order’: “Under what circumstances can a necessarily individual story with individual characters function to represent collective processes?” (Jameson 1992: 4). Wang Bing seems to respond by mobilizing the same elements evoked by Jameson: space; representability; and allegory. And if Jameson redefines allegory on the global scale as the “minute, or isolated landscapes to function as a figurative machinery in which questions about the system and its control over the local ceaselessly rise and fall,” in the same way Wang uses the space as a theoretical and analytical instrument through which narratives and meanings are articulated in order to point to individual versus collective dynamics. In other words, Jameson’s focus on individual-world system relationships comes to the fore in Wang’s films through the focus, or the incommensurable gap, between individual stories and the overarching dimension of China’s current global image. The asylum functions as the allegorical space for these hopeless people in a country that has basically abandoned them. Once again, the fact that some of these people are simply ‘left behind’, just like the children in Three Sisters, confirms that the ongoing Chinese transformation impacts on different segments of the population. Families are forced to redefine their structures in order to respond to increasing economic constraints with no support for the weaker subjects. These people do not appear in any official statistics, nor are they accounted for. Just like for West of the Tracks, when Wang filmed the process through which workers were laid-off, here he provides a witness to those who are not suitable for the China Dream image that China is presenting to the world.

’Til Madness Do Us Part: The camera work between ‘madness’ and ‘love’ With direct reference to the Chinese title of the film, which juxtaposes the terms madness ( feng) and love (ai), madness – whether as mental illness or as a society deviating from its collective concerns – ’Til Madness Do Us

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Part opens up the basic human feelings of love and affection. If the first part of the film is dominated by night shots of the rooms, in the second part some sequences in the bright winter light look at the relationships of the inmates. These include the wife and the son of one of the patients, who bring tangerines and share them with other patients. In another sequence, a young woman visits her father in the asylum. Although separated by the gate bars, the daughter calls her mother so as to allow her parents to have a brief conversation on the phone. These sequences remain the few signs of a connection between the world of the asylum and the outer world. At three hours into the film, the camera follows Zhu Xiaoyan, one of the inmates who has just been released, as he returns to his village. This sequence opens the film to a brief sense of freedom. Yet, the man is shown wandering in isolation through the countryside and then disappearing into the night. As for ‘madness’, the film is not about mental illness but deals rather with a broader deviation from a stable and focused human condition, a condition at stake when ‘enforcement’ is imposed on people, something Wang has explored in all his works on the Anti-Rightist campaign. In line with Lucie Garçon’s discussion, ’Til Madness Do Us Part is very much about the impact of an enclosed space on human beings. A space that has nothing but graffiti to identify the different rooms, as is the case in almost any other hospital or prison architecture (2015). Against these assumptions, it becomes interesting to look at how the camera enters the forced relation between the space and the bodies. The presence of the filmmaker is made increasingly visible. Yet, we do not see Wang Bing entering the space. The film starts when the camera is already there and the viewers never see the full building from outside or its façade, and the space maintains its claustrophobic impact throughout the film, recording corridors, doors, beds, the barred courtyard. As the filmmaker becomes more familiar with the patients, he seems to be able to access even the most private moments of the inmates’ life although they appear mainly unaware of his presence. Wang deconstructs the basic relationship between the space and those who inhabit it and he observes how forced living conditions affect the body and the mind. In this context, the camera’s increasing proximity with the inmates is taken to the extreme – as when the patients are shown naked or urinating – and goes beyond simple observation of the space. The camera articulates a loose narrative that Wang extracts by observing and living the space, yet he leaves out the epic dimension of Three Sisters. The narrow space of the hospital severely limits the camera movements. The lighting is equally affected by the impossibility of setting any extra light in an enclosed space,

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which is often too dark. The result is a set of scenes with a fairly uniform blueish lighting, framed with unconventional angles. Together with the repetitive gestures and behaviours that the inmates perform, this further enhances the overall despair and squalor of the hospital. In the end, these limitations and the relatively short time in which the film was shot and edited translate into a sense of immediacy. The film mirrors the underlying urgency of the filmmaking process very well. Wang Bing knew they could only work in the hospital for a limited time, having been given a three-month permission during which they shot as much material as possible. As Wang explained, they were shooting ceaselessly everyday with only one camera with a built-in microphone. They could not take more equipment with them and Wang had no time to think about a film structure prior to the shooting: “I hardly thought about the frame. I followed characters or feelings. Day after day, I kept on filming patients without any idea of when to stop. It was nerve-wracking” (Burdeau and Renzi 2014).12 The constraints Wang experienced in filming the hospital gave him the opportunity to clearly define his own method. At the end of the shooting, when reorganizing the material in his mind, he realized he did not have enough. He then had the chance to return to the area and filmed the sequences of the return to the village of one of the inmates. Only once he had the structure in mind could he move on to the editing phase, which became a fairly rapid and also very personal process that mirrored his own experience of the asylum. With ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Wang Bing gained more confidence in his own filmmaking craft. Even though he had used this approach before, this particular project also raised questions about how cinema should approach the inmates bearing in mind issues of privacy and human respect. I was able to discuss these issues with Wang Bing in the summer before the film premiere in Venice. In a long conversation at his studio in Beijing, upon viewing a rough cut with many long sequences involving patients, I approached the subject of what should be visible onscreen without risking the dignity of the patients. Interestingly, most of the sequences that we discussed were not the ones related to nudity or affection between the patients. They were mainly sequences in which the mental disease was more evident, as in one where a patient is shown seated on his bed rocking compulsively back and 12 Burdeau and Renzi’s conversation with Wang Bing, first published in Alors la Chine (2014), was translated in English by Sis Matthé and re-published in Sabzian, 29.05.2019, https://www. sabzian.be/article/alors-la-chine [accessed 20 February 2020].

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Figure 3: ’Til Madness Do Us Part, inmates inside the asylum (Copyright courtesy of Asian Shadows)

forth. Rather than the shot itself, it was the duration that risked creating discomfort in the viewers. An over-extended insistence on the patient’s condition felt unnecessary. In this way, time – here in terms of the duration of the shot – was confirmed as a crucial element, as in all of Wang’s film. In fact, the filmmaker was less interested in achieving an emotional impact on the viewers than in providing the inmates with their own identity. As Renzi has noted in his discussion of the film, “[t]he patients in every psychiatric hospital in the world do not exist. Their identity is denied. They have no name. […] Focusing on five or six characters, the film gives itself time to make them exist. And offers us – the audience – the time to get rid of the filters through which we are used to conceive images” (2013). Moreover, Wang Bing could highlight some individual identities not only by supplying their names and details, but also by providing some inmates with enough time onscreen to establish their condition as part of their identity without encouraging an over-emotional reaction. Making use of extended time in the shots and as the overall duration of the film becomes a more conscious method. As Wang has frequently declared, his films require time because viewers need to become familiar with the space and the characters in it. With ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Wang’s filmmaking moves further away from reportage documentary, as well as from any provocative audiovisual work dealing with aspects of China that were rarely seen onscreen. This absorbing experience composes a cinematic mosaic in which every person embodies a story and each story evokes the offscreen narrative of power structures, economic constraints, and injustice.

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Extended duration has become recognized as one of his stylistic features. This is important as his works start circulating more easily in the film festival circuit and sometimes even find theatrical distribution despite their challenging length. In turn, his recognized international stature helps Wang Bing continue his work. Not by chance, Wang’s production pace has increased significantly since then. In the decade between his debut film and ’Til Madness Do Us Part, he had mainly worked on the three major documentaries on labour, a small set of commissioned works, and on the films related to the Anti-Rightist campaign that are discussed in the next chapter. After the presentation of ’Til Madness Do Us Part, he continued to explore the two main themes of labour and history with Bitter Money and Dead Souls, respectively. He was also able to complete an additional set of commissioned works, video installations, and photographic series. He started working at more than one project at a time, occasionally returning to and completing projects that he had started earlier. Moreover, he continued to travel across China while, at the same time, increasing his presence internationally, both in the film and the art exhibition scenes.

Reaching the new centres of labour: From Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks to Bitter Money Having started with West of the Tracks in the former ‘industrial belt’ of China, dismantled at the end of the 1990s, and then travelling across the north before exploring the borderlands of Yunnan and Sichuan with Bitter Money, Wang Bing entered one of the richest and most productive regions of today’s China: the Huzhou district located in the eastern province of Zhejiang. This area is one of the largest manufacturing areas for the production of textile garments and Zhejiang is one of the regions fostering an integrated development of urban and rural areas in line with the principles launched during the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012 and the guidelines issued in May 2019. These aim at “promoting rural revitalization and speeding up the modernization of agriculture and rural areas” (Xinhua 2019). Wang came to the idea of approaching this textile district following casual encounters during his earlier work in Yunnan. A significant feature of Wang Bing’s cinema is that his films talk to each other and by looking at their internal references, the portrayal of China, its overall narratives of transformation becomes more evident. After West of the Tracks, Three Sisters introduced us to the situation of the rural areas and to the flow of farmers

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moving to urban centres. In fact, some of the people Wang met in Yunnan during the 2013 Chinese New Year, when he returned to the area for some extra shooting for ’Til Madness Do Us Part, were also migrant workers. They had travelled to the Zhejiang region in search of work and had returned to their villages to celebrate the festivities. The shooting took place between 2014 and 2016 and resulted in more than 500 hours of filmed material. The final documentary Bitter Money was presented in the Orizzonti competition of the Venice Film Festival on 9 September 2016, just a few days after its production was finished. When Wang started working on Bitter Money, fourteen years had passed since his debut work, during which, as we know, the pace of China’s economic growth kept increasing while, at the same time, workers’ life underwent a set of significant changes. Workers’ issues have remained a major focus of Wang’s cinema over the course of his career. We can fruitfully see Bitter Money as a follow-up to his previous films with the following questions in mind: What happened to the workers of West of the Tracks upon being laid-off? What has become of their families and children? The collective socialist system was already in its final days when West of the Tracks was finished, giving rise to the first wave of migration involving laid-off workers who first moved from decommissioned state industries to urban centres in search of new employment. Soon afterwards, an increasing number of rural workers also started moving towards urban centres in search of better wages to support their families as agricultural work became less remunerative. This phase was connected to the macro socio-economic structure that took Chinese cities as the first and main focus of modernization while rural areas were left behind and became less productive. According to reports from the International Labour Organization, internal migration towards cities and urban areas increased significantly after 1999 with an estimated number of nearly 230 million rural migrant workers by the end of 2009.13 This internal migration flow followed two different directions: the first one from rural to urban centres where a labour force was needed; the second from interior areas towards coastal, and/or from central and western regions to eastern areas. Those are exactly the two flows dealt with by Wang Bing in Three Sisters and Bitter Money, respectively. Wang’s focus on labour spaces has provided visible evidence of the contradictions opened up by the process of economic reform launched by 13 The pages of the International Labour Organization related to China can be accessed at: http://www.ilo.org/beijing/areas-of-work/labour-migration/lang--en/index.htm [accessed 2 October 2019].

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Deng Xiaoping in 1978, deepened after Deng’s Southern Tour (nanxun) in 1992,14 and further promoted under his successors through to the current leadership of Xi Jinping since 2012. Deng Xiaoping’s tour of southeast China began in January 1992 and aimed at bustling coastal development and Special Economic Zones. Zhejiang was one of the provinces involved and one of the first to benefit from the economic reforms.15 When Wang Bing started exploring the Huzhou textile area, in particular the Zhili district, 110 kilometres east of Huzhou in Zhejiang, the whole system of labour had changed while the socialist welfare system had already been superseded. Not only were collective socialist structures long gone, but also workers’ life and expectations had changed completely. Moreover, by reaching the Zhili district, Wang Bing managed to tackle the core of the Chinese paradox: What is the price that Chinese people have to pay to be part of the impressive Chinese growth that has made the country the second largest economy in the world? Descriptions of the Zhili garment district are widely available, as are narratives of those who made their wealth out of the clothing business. As most of these stories go, entrepreneurs started opening their own small manufacturing laboratories in the second wave of reforms and privatization around the mid-1990s. The development of private initiative was particularly encouraged in this area with poor agricultural resources and as a test of the policy of reforms and opening-up first launched by Deng in 1978. By the time of Deng’s Southern Tour, local governments were called in to take more measures to deepen economic reforms and, by the end of the 1990s, nearly every household in the area had become a small family workshop. Yet, development in this phase was intensive and haphazard. In many small workshop enterprises, workers lived, worked, and stored materials in the same building. “The first floor was used as the shop, the second and third floors as dormitories and warehouses, which brought huge safety risks,” as Sheng Ge, Deputy Mayor of Zhili, reported in an article published in the English-language Chinese online magazine Beijing Review (Wen 2018). Since then, the textile business has further expanded, making Zhili one of the leading centres for children’s clothing with a complete industry chain from design and manufacture, to storage, logistics, and retail. As the final credits of Bitter Money specify, the workers of the Huzhou district come from different provinces across the country – the majority 14 For a thorough description of Deng Xiaoping’s policy, see Baum (1994), 341–368. 15 The Third Plenum of the Party Congress under the leadership of Xi Jinping (9–12 November 2013) has highlighted the relevance of fostering reforms mainly in the economic-financial system in line with his predecessors, see Rosenfeld (2013) (accessed 15 November 2013).

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from Yunnan, Guizhou, Jiangxi, Anhui, and Henan – to work in 18,000 textile workshops with an estimated number of more than 300,000 employees. Even though this number is hardly comparable to the one million workers who were employed in the Tiexi industrial plants in the 1980s, the actual number of manufacturing workers in the Huzhou district is also difficult to calculate as they are not state employed and many are not accounted for. The workers of Bitter Money represent the young generation of workers for whom a stable salary and a lifetime employment, which their parents or grandparents had during the socialist decades, are neither guaranteed, nor even expected. These migrant workers heading to Huzhou aim to make as much money as possible in the shortest time by working long hours in the textile laboratories. In a way, this is their interpretation of the ‘China Dream’ as an individual narrative rather than a collective goal. Although these young people probably do not pay as much attention to the government catchphrase, their willingness to travel far from home in order to make money also reconnects them to the many different narratives of migration and survival exemplified by John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. However, there is no sense of extreme poverty in comparison to the films so far discussed. New issues, such as domestic violence and worker exploitation, come to the fore, relegating the motifs of lack of food or poor living conditions that featured in Three Sisters and ’Til Madness Do Us Part to the background.

Earning money in hardship: Bitter Money As in many of Wang Bing’s works, the conditions of migrant workers is the focus while the viewer is immersed in the observation of laboratories, residential areas, and small shops, all related to the production of garments. In Bitter Money, the large area is explored through multiple characters and their families. Wang observes and intertwines their vicissitudes, starting from their journey from Yunnan towards Huzhou. His camera focuses on their daily routines and their interactions. As the filmmaker has explained in relation to Bitter Money, “[a]ge aside, the life of the workers in my film is more or less the same: they work in the factory, they eat in the factory, they sleep in the factory. They have no life in the outside world. They all work endlessly, they save every penny made from sewing clothes” (Guarnieri and Wang 2017). The film never offers a bird’s-eye view of the district. The audience is encouraged to perceive its vastness by means of another long and demanding

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viewing experience, as the camera moves around the different living and working spaces. This focus is a precise editing choice for Bitter Money, as the film is apparently the first project based on the material shot in Zhejiang between 2014 and 2016. Another project with the title Shanghai Youth (Shanghai qingnian) is on-going, with the same producers and the same production structure and focuses on some other Yunnanese migrant workers of the textile district.16 The confidence Wang Bing has gained with his filmmaking approach is evident from the beginning of the film, and also the solidity of his production. This was also the first of Wang’s documentary films to have solid financial support. A number of European companies whose producers had long known the filmmaker, had gathered sufficient funds to allow Wang to work without too much pressure. These include the Hong Kong/Paris-based Chinese Shadows, together with Gladys Glover and Vincent Wang’s House on Fire, also based in Paris, with a set of international co-producers and the support of Arte France. In ten minutes and with no introduction, the focus on labour is immediately clear from the first three sequences. The film opens on a sort of family reunion, the camera positioned at the height of the TV set that the family members seem to distractedly look at. As stated in the press material accompanying the film, this is the village of Baogunao in Yunnan (Ku qian 2016: 2). In three static shots, the young girls, who were born around 1998–1999, discuss their age, and their need of documents – real or fake ones – in order to be able to work and make enough money to eventually continue with their school studies. The second sequence takes place on a bus, the camera being at close distance from one of the girls, Xiao Min, aged fifteen. She and her cousin Chen Yuanshan discuss the consequences of a recent earthquake with little emotional engagement. With the third sequence, the camera is taken on a train. There is no transition between the shots and the position of the camera is always positioned close to the characters and at their height, so that the viewers share the same portion of visible space. A young man in the same carriage talks to another passenger about how dangerous it is to work in a certain factory where toxic gases are emitted. No explicit connections are made between the three sequences, although it is clear that most of the passengers are workers. Even if the viewers assume the two girls of the first sequence are the main characters, in those first ten minutes, the camera frames a flow of people moving to the same destination. 16 From a private conversation with Wang Bing and his producer Vincent Wang in Venice, September 2016.

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Figure 4: Bitter Money, girl workers travelling to Huzhou (Copyright courtesy of House on Fire)

Once on the train, Wang’s camera starts moving in the space of the carriage in order to reveal how all the passengers have something in common. Nearly all of them are young people, girls and boys, some of them carrying babies. They are seated everywhere, in the carriages but also in the corridors. Some of them fall asleep wherever they happen to be. No further information is needed by anyone familiar with Wang Bing’s cinema, as it is clear that the train is full of migrant workers. The journey resembles that of the father in Three Sisters and these young people are the ones that populate marginal areas in China, not dissimilar from the few people seen visiting the patients of ’Til Madness Do Us Part. When the train eventually stops – at eighteen minutes into the film – the passengers get off at their common destination. As presented in the press material, the journey from Yunnan to Huzhou lasts two days and two nights (Ku qian 2016: 6). The camera focuses again on the two girls and follows them as they head to their living space, a room on an upper floor of an ordinary, tall building. For the first time – at 22 minutes into the film – the first wide shot of the view from the roof of the building gives a sense of the overall environment. A series of urban blocks surrounds a fairly small and partly cultivated green area. The sky is grey and the landscape could be in any of the Chinese urban centres. As in previous works, simple credits help identify some of the characters who return more frequently in the film. In his statement for the Venice festival premiere, Wang declared that Bitter Money follows three young people leaving their Yunnan hometown to go to work in one of the busiest cities of China’s east coast, a place with the highest number of part-time workers. Yet, there is less of a sense of individual narratives in comparison to

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Wang’s previous films. Here, the structure progressively takes the shape of a circular narrative in which the three main characters remain in focus but the many social actors surrounding them connect to one another in different ways, composing a broader mosaic of migration, relocation, and ill-paid labour. Wang further declared that “[t]he camera follows each character closely, capturing the true emotions of their daily hard work and their disappointments upon receiving their wages” (Ku qian 2016: 4). This broader picture of the Huzhou textile district was made possible thanks to larger productive support, which allowed the filmmaker longer time in the space and a better organization of the shooting. After a few sequences in the bedroom shared by the two girls, at 24 minutes into the film, the camera cuts to one of the girls who is busy folding children’s clothes in a textile laboratory. Only the light, which changes from day to night, gives the sense of the long working hours. The editing of the film maintains a relatively fast pace with fewer long shots in comparison to Wang’s previous documentaries. Here, the filmmaker introduces us to the labour space with confidence. He has no hesitation in showing his presence when one of the social actors, Ling Ling, asks him to follow her into one of the alleys at night. A middle-aged woman who was seen in the textile laboratory, Ling Ling is looking for her husband. When she finds him in a small shop playing with other men, the camera stops outside the shop-window. The man reacts brutally to her, confirming the violent behaviour she had earlier described to the girl in the laboratory. The argument between the two is all about money, as the man is not willing to contribute to his wife’s needs. This is a pivotal sequence both in terms of the social issues at stake and in terms of cinematic approach. In relation to the latter, Wang Bing does not seem to pay particular attention to moments in which the camera becomes part of the scene. Although this had occasionally happened in his previous documentaries, here it appears as a statement on the role of the camera since it happens quite early in the film. In fact, the camera is the only means through which the audience can perceive spaces and people in spaces. Transparency or non-transparency become only secondary issues, without affecting the preliminary assumption according to which the filmmaker is sharing his approach to space and subjects with the viewers. In terms of content, the long sequence about family violence, or violence related to money concerns, is new in Wang’s films. This hints at a further deterioration of social and family relations in relation to money becoming the only goal. When the husband hits the woman in a violent outburst, people are looking at them, yet nobody intervenes with the exception of the shop’s owner who tries to stop the husband. None of the witnesses show

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Figure 5: Bitter Money, textile laboratories in the Huzhou district (Copyright courtesy of House on Fire)

any concern and they remain at a distance. They testify to the absence of a shared living and working space. In Bitter Money, as the title suggests, the quest for money is the drive of all the social actors’ involved. These people do not seem to hold the family network as a priority but rather their economic gains. In Wang’s words, “[m]oney has never been more important in Chinese society. As now everyone wishes to become wealthy. However, the reality is that everyone lives in a daydream.” (Ku qian 2016: 4). The documentary moves on to show other characters working in the textile laboratories. This group of people becomes increasingly indistinguishable, as they all seem to erase their identity behind their sewing machines. The workshops as well as the dormitories where the workers live look all the same. Significantly, graffiti are clearly visible on the walls of these textile workshops, just like in ’Til Madness Do Us Apart, as if this space was also a space of forced confinement. Male and female workers are shown together in tiny rooms with the noise of the sewing machines mixed with some radio pop songs in the background. They do not talk to each other since their goal is to produce as many pieces of clothing as possible. Once again, Wang Bing refrains from encouraging any emotional engagement when looking at the conditions of these workers. There is no judgemental stance either on whether these workers made their choice of career freely or whether society has managed to impose it on them. Wang Bing’s role is not that of the critical activist, but rather that of the witness providing evidence about an ongoing situation and its context. When the workers talk to each other, they talk about work, which one of the workshops pays better or which one offers better conditions. Yet, it is clear that they are only talking about different levels of exploitation. The few,

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rare moments in which the workers seem to have a social life is at night, as shown in the sequence of the two girls showing images of their village – most likely a village on the Yunnan mountains – to the filmmaker on their mobile phone. When compared to the workers’ conditions at the time of West of the Tracks, exploitation now seems even harsher. Private employers take arbitrary decisions about workers’ lives much more quickly than the socialist state. A worker can be laid off at any time simply because the owner of the workshop does not like him or her. Only one of the workshop bosses is shown, appearing in the last twenty minutes of the film, when two girls get paid before the holidays. He does not look much better off than them and it is not clear whether he is the owner or perhaps just one of the many intermediaries in the business. The film does not reveal how many layers of hierarchy are involved. In the last segment of the film, the quarrelling couple is shown again under pouring rain. Still fighting yet still together, they are preparing the shipment of their products. Huge amounts of folded children’s clothes, wrapped in plastic are left in the middle of the road, awaiting collection. The scene is set against a dark, urban landscape, almost a hallucinatory reality with little left of humanity but the human capacity to work. With Bitter Money, thanks to the better production structure, the quality of Wang’s image achieves a degree of sharpness never achieved before. Both indoor and outside spaces are filmed in extremely high definition yet with a warm colour palette that enhances the proximity to the subjects. More than in previous films, the title of Bitter Money – in this case a literal translation from the Chinese bitter (ku) and money (qian) is relevant. As Wang clarified in interviews, the expression has become a slang expression among workers coming from northern China to say “Going away from home to work.” The term ‘bitter’ implies the hardship and sadness people have to endure when away from home with no personal life or family relationships. The Chinese Wikipedia (baidu) describes it as a slang expression in Yunnan dialect to indicate “Earning money in hardship” and locates its usage among the workers of the Zhejiang region.17 In the fourteen years from West of the Tracks to Bitter Money, labour has not only remained a core subject matter of Wang’s cinema, but has also become the very essence of it. In a country that has long maintained the highest GDP growth rate, Wang Bing has been able to trace an alternative narrative with workers, migrants, and marginal people as his focus. The industrial machines of his debut film have been replaced by sewing 17 An explanation of this term in Chinese can be found on the website Baidu (https://baike. baidu.com) [accessed 10 October 2019].

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machines, but the hardships endured by workers have not changed and include long shifts, lack of safety measures, and little time left for any kind of fulfilling life. By means of the camera, through framing choices and proximity to his subjects, as well as thanks to the strenuous editing process of each film, Wang made his social actors the protagonists of non-staged narratives of survival across China at different phases of its socio-economic transformation. Moreover, through the focus on labour, which involves both his social actors and his own work as a filmmaker, the relationship between politics, a market economy, and the film language unfolds in a coherent trajectory connecting all the works discussed in this chapter. If his debut film provided the visual recording of a massive industrial area turned into a ghostly space, Three Sisters and ’Til Madness Do Us Part address issues of increasing inequalities, of extreme poverty, and alienation created by the later stages of the Chinese reforms. It is worth noting that the literature on all these films frequently uses terms like ‘ghost’ and ‘ghostly spaces’, as if Wang wanted to shed light on invisible segments of the society, overshadowed when not erased by the mainstream state narrative. As if obsessed with fear that these historical traces will disappear, Wang has recorded spaces and people that the fast-paced economic growth has dismantled, ignored, or hidden away. Like the tiles of a mosaic in its making, Wang Bing’s cinematic itinerary from the factory space of West of the Tracks to the high Yunnan mountains of Three Sisters, to the tiny rooms of the hospital in ’Til Madness Do Us Part and, finally, to the textile workshops of Bitter Money, composes a striking picture of China in its on-going historical development. By doing so, the f ilmmaker has also been consistent in providing visible evidence of the traces of the past that are still unaccounted for in the official reading of Chinese history. This approach is confirmed in his set of works on the Anti-Rightist campaign, including the documentary Fengming, A Chinese Memoir (2007), the feature film The Ditch (2010), and his latest work so far Dead Soul (2018), which are the subject of the next chapter.

References Andersen, Thom (2012) ‘Fire in Every Shot: Wang Bing’s Three Sisters’, Cinemascope, 54. Baum, Richard (1994) Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Burdeau, Emmanuel and Eugenio Renzi (2014) Alors, la Chine, Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires.

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Chang, Justin (2013) ‘Venice Film Review. Til Madness Do Us Part’, Variety, 13 September 2013, https://variety.com/2013/film/global/venice-film-reviewtil-madness-do-us-part-1200610004/ [accessed 10 October 2019] Cullen, Jim (2004) The American Dream. A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation, New York: Oxford University Press. Garçon, Lucie (2015) ‘À la folie. Wang Bing’, Débordements, 26 July 2015, https://www. debordements.fr/A-la-folie-Wang-Bing [accessed 10 October 2019]. Guarnieri, Michael and Jin Wang (2017), ‘Interview: Wang Bing’, Film Comment, 22 February 2017. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-wang-bing/ [accessed 10 October 2019]. Jameson, Fredric. (1992) The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press and London: BFI Publishing. Ku qian. A film by Wang Bing (2016) (press-book for the 73rd Venice International Film Festival) Paris: House on Fire. Leung, Elly and Donella Caspersz (2016) ‘Exploring Worker Consciousness in China’, Labour & Industry: a Journal of the Social and Economic Relations of Work, 26:3, 237–250 [doi: 10.1080/10301763.2016.1220892] Lü, Xinyu (2010) ‘West of the Tracks: History and Class-Consciousness’ in C. Berry, X. Lü, L. Rofel (eds.), The Chinese Documentary Film Movement. For the Public Record, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 57–76. Naughton, Barry (2007) The Chinese Economy: Transition and Growth, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Nichols, Bill (2001) Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Renzi, Eugenio (2013) ‘L’identità negata delle voci senza nome’ [The denied identity of nameless voices], Il manifesto, 6 September. Rioux Bertrand, Philipp Galkin, Fredric Murphy, Axel Pierru (2016) ‘Economic Impacts of Debottlenecking Congestion in the Chinese Coal Supply Chain’, Energy Economics 60, November 2016, 387–399. Robinson, Luke (2010) ‘From ‘Public’ to ‘Private’: Chinese Documentary and the Logic of Xianchang’ in C. Berry, X. Lü, L. Rofel (eds.), The Chinese Documentary Film Movement. For the Public Record, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 177–194. — (2013) Independent Chinese Documentary. From the Studio to the Street, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosenfeld, Joshua (2013) ‘What Does China’s Third Plenum Suggest About Prospects for Reform?’ http://asiasociety.org/blog/asia/what-does-chinas-third-plenumsuggest-about-prospects-reform [accessed 15 November 2013].

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Wang Bing (2013) ‘Filming a Land in Flux. Interview’, New Left Review, Volume 82, July/August, https://newleftreview.org/issues/II82/articles/bing-wang-filminga-land-in-flux [accessed 20 February 2019]. Wang, H. and Zhuo, Y. (2018) ‘The Necessary Way for the Development of China’s Rural Areas in the New Era-Rural Revitalization Strategy’, Open Journal of Social Sciences, 6, 97–106. Wen H. (2019) ‘Pursuing Coordinated Urban, Rural and Regional Development’ in Pei C., Xu J. (eds.) Chinese Dream and Practice in Zhejiang – Economy. Research Series on the Chinese Dream and China’s Development Path, Singapore: Springer, 209–243. Wen Qing (2018) ‘From Rags to Riches. A Small, Dilapidated Town Transforms Itself into the Promised Land for Entrepreneurs’, Beijing Review, 36, 30 September 2018, http://www.bjreview.com.cn/Current_Issue/Editor_Choice/201809/ t20180903_800140155.html [accessed 10 October 2019]. Xinhua agency (2019) ‘China Announces Guidelines to Promote Integrated UrbanRural Development’, China Daily, 5 May 2019, http://www.chinadaily.com. cn/a/201905/05/WS5ccee7b1a3104842260b9e22.html [accessed 10 October 2019]. Zhang Donghui (2015) ‘Growing Up with Distant Parents: Socialization and Alienation of “Left-Behind” Children in Rural China’, Frontiers of Education in China 10, 505–525.

4. Spaces of History and Memory: The Works on the Anti-Rightist Campaign Abstract This chapter approaches history as a central concern in Wang Bing’s filmmaking. It deals with spaces of history and memory, in particular in relation to the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957–59. It highlights Wang’s interest in unveiling the gaps and the contradictions imbued in state narratives at different epochs. A close reading of Wang’s only full-length feature film so far The Ditch (2010) and a comparative reading of it with Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò (1975) are given in the first section of the chapter. The second section focuses on Wang’s mature work Dead Souls (2018) as a visual archive of witnesses on the campaign and as a way to testify to historical injustice, also recalling Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). Keywords: Documentary cinema, China, Memory, Witnessing, Oral history, Anti-Rightist Campaign, Wang Bing, Claude Lanzmann

The substance of cinema is therefore an endless long take, as is reality to our senses for as long as we are able to see and feel (a long take that ends with the end of our lives); and this long take is nothing but the reproduction of the language of reality. In other words, it is the reproduction of the present. ‒ Pasolini (1967)

The critical praise received with West of the Tracks allowed Wang Bing to travel the world and expand his production network. Festival screenings of his debut film offered him a good opportunity to meet producers from different countries. France, in particular, paid great attention to him as an emerging talent (Bégaudeau 2004; Niogret 2004). He was invited to

Pollacchi, E., Wang Bing’s Filmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses, and Marginal Spaces. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463721837_ch04

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the Paris-based Cannes Cinéfondation, a one-year funded workshop for upcoming f ilmmakers to develop new projects.1 In addition to his focus on labour, during his time at the Cinéfondation Wang Bing conf irmed his interest in history and started working on a feature f ilm project on Chinese ‘reform through labour’ (laogai, or laodong gaizao) set during the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957–1959. This political campaign, which primarily targeted intellectuals, was launched by Mao Zedong in reaction to the so-called Hundred Flowers movement of 1955–1956, which encouraged intellectuals to express critical views on the Chinese Communist Party. Millions of people were categorized as rightists, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, or anti-Party, anti-socialist elements, and were sent to labour camps for ‘re-education through labour’ (laodong jiaoyang). The Anti-Rightist Movement was launched in 1957 and ended in 1960 without any admission of the failure of the campaign. Famine, physical exhaustion, and the harsh conditions in the camps resulted in many deaths, yet the actual f igures of those who died remains to be established. Only a small number of those who were wrongly accused have been rehabilitated. The project took Wang Bing a long time and a significant amount of preparatory research. From the Tiexi district in the north-east, Wang moved to the north-western Gansu province, where some of the labour camps connected to the Anti-Rightist campaign were located. The Ditch, Wang’s only fiction film to date, re-enacts the struggle for survival of a group of prisoners in the labour camp at Jiabiangou. It premiered as a competition entry at the Venice Film Festival 2010 after a six-year-long production process. By the time shooting began, in summer 2009, Wang Bing had already established his reputation as a leading and critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker.2 This was also thanks to his previous work, the three-hour-long documentary Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival at a Special Screening on 18 May 2007. While developing The Ditch, Wang recorded his interviews with He Fengming, wife of one of the Jiabiangou victims and author of a book of her own memories of a separate camp (He 1 The Cannes Festival Residence is supported by the Cannes Cinéfondation and hosts young filmmakers who have directed one or several short films, or even a first feature film, and who are working on a feature film project (fiction project only, no animation). The 8th session was held from January to July 2004 (see http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/cinefondation/theResidence. html, accessed 15 December 2011). 2 After several homages and exhibitions dedicated to Wang Bing’s works, his first complete US retrospective was announced by the Harvard Film Archive in October 2010 (see http://hcl. harvard.edu/hfa/films/2010octdec/wang.html. Accessed 15 December 2011).

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2001). These interviews turned into the eponymous documentary.3 As groundwork for The Ditch, Wang Bing continued conducting interviews with survivors of the Anti-Rightist campaign over three years and returned to interviews with survivors in 2014–2016 to complete his project Dead Souls. Chronologically speaking, these works on the Anti-Rightist campaign were conceived right after West of the Tracks although they were fully developed at different times. By examining these works, this chapter highlights the filmmaker’s interest in unveiling the gaps and the contradictions imbued in Chinese state narratives at different epochs. 4 Wang keeps telling stories of the subaltern, although here his subjects are excluded from the mainstream historical narrative, rather than the economic one. According to Qian Liqun’s analysis, for political, historical, and social reasons, the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement remains a memory gap in the history of the People’s Republic of China, in particular when compared with the admission that the Cultural Revolution was a catastrophe. Wang’s approach is in line with Qian’s discussion. In Qian’s volume, which is also based on the testimonies of a large number of witnesses, the Anti-Rightist campaign was the result of Mao’s declaration of a dictatorship of the masses (qunzhong zhuanzheng), which succeeded in fostering antagonism between the working class and the intellectual class (2007).5 The political struggle behind the campaign is epitomized in a central sequence of The Ditch, in which a professor confesses to having been imprisoned for suggesting a “dictatorship of the whole people” (quanmin zhuanzheng) over the more restrictive expression of a “dictatorship of the proletariat” (wuchan jieji zhuanzheng). Insistence on the topic of the political struggle behind the campaign can also be found in the eight-hour-long documentary Dead Souls in which several former prisoners of the labour camp explain the diverse accusations they faced, accusations that were often groundless but which were used as a way to gain power within the party at all different levels and testify to the ongoing political struggle. These diverse phases and reasons behind the campaign have remained unaccounted for in the official history of China. Wang’s cinema has consistently shown a concern for hidden aspects of society and for merging past events with the ongoing history of China in 3 For a comparative discussion of Fengming, A Chinese Memoir and The Ditch see Veg (2012). 4 Cai (2016) and Veg (2012, 2014, 2018) have approached the works of Wang Bing and the Anti-rightist campaign from different perspectives. Pollacchi (2012) also relates to this topic and is the preliminary work on which this chapter is based. 5 Qian Liqun’s book on 1957 reports some of the stories and characters referred also in Yang (2003).

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transformation. His approach to past historical events is also a way to tell alternative narratives. The way in which he deals with past events has also undergone a significant evolution over the course of his career, from the experiment of a fictional re-enactment in The Ditch to the large archival project of Dead Souls, a monument of filmed oral history. Wang began shooting places and witnesses connected to the Anti-Rightist campaign in 2004 while carrying out preliminary research on the Jiabiangou state farm, one of the labour camps. Since then, he has met and interviewed over one hundred survivors of the camps throughout China. Through their voices and by means of the camera, he has been able to offer a detailed picture of events that helps better understanding of connections between the past and the present. This extensive work with the witnesses who experienced the campaign and the physical spaces of the camp resulted in a set of works: his only full-length feature film so far, The Ditch; the documentary Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, which served as groundwork for the fiction film; and Dead Souls, a documentary, over eight hours long, which collates interviews and material shot at different times. In 2007, Wang directed a short fiction film entitled Brutality Factory (Baoli gongchang, 2007), which deals with the Cultural Revolution, but was also conceived as part of his investigation into violent campaigns, and is therefore discussed in this chapter. In addition, the video installation Traces deals with the actual physical space of the camps and was conceived for art exhibition spaces. This chapter is divided in two parts, highlighting Wang’s concern with spaces of history and spaces of memory as the actual space of witnesses rather than as an abstract space. It also discusses the evolution that has occurred in Wang Bing’s recounting of the past with the purpose of avoiding a simple description of facts. The first part of the chapter offers a reading of The Ditch and investigates the uneasy interplay between documentary and fiction. The Ditch points to the director’s early interest in making cinema a tool for historical investigation and thus for approaching indexicality and truthfulness. In addition to confirming his concern for topics that remain in the background of today’s China, the intertwining of re-enactment and documentary mode in The Ditch provides an example of Wang’s early experimentation with film language. After the workers’ space of Tiexi district, here he approaches spaces linked to history and forced labour. Daringly conceived, the spatiotemporal frame of The Ditch exceeds the boundaries of historical representation and encourages us to inscribe it in a line of film history that draws upon fragmentary narrative and disturbing

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images.6 With The Ditch, Wang Bing engaged not only with a historical narrative, but also questioned the viewing experience, thus establishing a connection with international filmmakers who have, at different times, worked against conventions and provoked viewers while approaching sensitive political and social issues. Specifically, Pasolini’s attempts to push the boundaries of representation are echoed in Wang Bing’s iterative use of horrific images of starvation. Furthermore, Pasolini’s view of cinema as a powerful language to deal with history while engaging with the present provides a relevant theoretical basis for this analysis, together with Comolli’s discussion of historical films. Parallels are also drawn with the work of Pedro Costa, who was a significant reference for Wang Bing at the time of the making of The Ditch. Pedro Costa’s cinema had also moved away from the sheer realism of his first work In Vanda’s Room (No quarto da Vanda, 2000) to challenge the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction with Colossal Youth (Juventude em marcha, 2006). This film also intertwines the present with the characters’ past memories. The second part of the chapter focuses on the importance of memories and of a visual archive of witnesses. Recording the voices and the traces of the past is also a way to connect historical events with the present. This was Wang’s own method for researching and understanding the Anti-Rightist campaign, as early as Fengming, A Chinese Memoir in 2007. Years later, some of the material shot in preparation for The Ditch was included in the extensive documentary work Dead Souls. This ongoing project is conceived as a triptych on memory. The first part, Dead Souls, was completed in 2018 and premiered at the Cannes film festival on 9 May 2018. It is primarily composed of interviews with survivors combined with sequences shot in the space of the camp. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) has frequently been used as a reference to this film and Wang Bing has declared his admiration for this work. However, the comparative discussion of these two works pinpoints the different perspectives that the two films adopt. Wang Bing looks at the survivors’ present rather than at their past; through their daily life we participate in their present life. The present speaks to the past rather than the other way around. As for Wang Bing’s craft, in this chapter we see how his filmmaking has undergone a long trajectory. With The Ditch, Wang Bing wanted to bridge past events and the present. By inscribing the historical re-enactment within the undefined temporality of the natural space, he aimed to encourage the 6 For a theoretical approach to the use of disturbing images and violence in cinema see Grønstad (2011).

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viewers to also reflect upon the present. Furthermore, by means of spectacle and ambiguities, Wang Bing suggests that the horrors of the Jiabiangou labour camp may not relate only to the Anti-Rightist movement of 1957 but can reside behind any authoritarian power structure of any time. In fact, by looking at the texture of Wang Bing’s images, The Ditch provokes more universal questions: what happens to human beings when arbitrarily placed in non-human conditions? How does this question relate to history and to historical memory? And, more importantly, how is the artist supposed to engage with such questions? Wang’s investigation of these questions also informs his most recent works on memory, including Dead Souls. Here, witnesses are not just explaining or recollecting what happened in the camps; they are showing their current lives so as to bring their past into their present. Finally, Wang’s reading of historical events also evokes the early ‘utopia’ of the Chinese Communist Party, according to which a Red China is unified under Mao’s leadership and there should be no critical voice. Should any emerge, it should be ‘rectified’ in the name of the collective socialist society, as pointed out in the short fictional work Brutality Factory. It is worth noting that this is the opposite of the mainstream narrative of today’s China Dream in which what is officially promoted is an individual dream and collective welfare is nearly forgotten. However, the strenuous repetition of accounts of death by famine in the re-enactment of the camp in The Ditch, and in particular in the witness accounts presented in Dead Souls, are in stark contrast to both the Communist Party’s utopia and today’s narrative of China’s economic success. These living voices create an alternative space of memory that Wang’s camera turns into a visual archive. In opposition with images of China as a consumer nation, Wang Bing has collected hundreds of statements of a generation who experienced – and often died from – famine. In the filmmaker’s own words, “this visual archive could be of use for those who will read Chinese history in the future, here they could find what is not currently written in books or historical documents.”7 As François Bégaudeau remarked, this archive of voices is also bringing cinema back to its early, original function, that of recording the experiences of living people and recording actions including the most basic ones (2018: 51).

7

Private conversation, Cannes 09 May 2018.



PART I – A Space Too Much: The Ditch In ten years’ time there will probably be no trace left of these spaces where people died of forced labour. In the process of China’s modernization, the traces of the tragic historical events that happened here will disappear and, like many other events of Chinese history, even if they are not forgotten, no visible evidence will remain. ‒ Wang Bing on the editing of the material shot in preparation of The Ditch8

The genesis of The Ditch (2003–2010) In my discussion of the genesis of this fiction film, I propose that Wang Bing’s engagement with history is to be located first in his handling of cinematic elements rather than in the sheer representation or re-enactment of the historical facts. How to approach history through the camera lens? This was the filmmaker’s main dilemma, as he has noted in a video interview in 2008: When telling a story, the filmmaker is inevitably part of the process and often the narrator [director] has been granted a privileged and influential role in this narrative process. I do not feel at ease in taking this position, as it is very difficult to approach issues such as truth and impartiality. […] Sometimes as a filmmaker I feel I am approaching reality but other times I feel that it escapes, so that my position remains that of a gobetween between my own life and the life in front of the camera. […] In a documentary film, if there is a sense of reality and truth, that does not come out of the contents or the narrative but rather thanks to a certain time during which small things happen, as when looking at a place over time and regardless of how long that time is. The beauty of documentary is the small stories that can happen and are fixed in that space over that time (Wang, 2008).

The high-end film aesthetics of The Ditch had become possible for the first time for Wang Bing, thanks to an international production structure, such as he had never had before. He continued to pursue this aesthetic in the future, along with his concern for the role of the filmmaker vis-à-vis sensitive historical subjects and social issues. 8

Private conversation, Beijing, 30 October 2013.

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In 2004, in order to develop his new project, Wang was invited to the eighth session of the Cannes Festival Residence, Cinéfondation, in Paris. During that year in France, he worked on the adaptation of Yang Xianhui’s collections of reportage literature Jiabiangou jishi (Chronicles of Jiabiangou, 2002) Gaobie Jiabiangou (Farewell to Jiabiangou, 2003). He completed the first script of The Ditch, initially entitled Black Iron Days.9 A group of international producers who had come on board to support the project at an early stage started putting together its financing structure. However, the definition of the production structure also took quite a long time. On the one hand, Wang Bing was not experienced in dealing with the European system of art-house cinema production companies and his sceptical attitude slowed down the process. On the other hand, in order to apply to the possible funding bodies, these European companies needed a script and a set of materials that Wang Bing had difficulty in producing as he was not familiar with such requirements.10 Mostly based on Yang’s work and on survivors’ memories, Wang Bing’s The Ditch selects and re-enacts some episodes of the Anti-Rightist movement, which started in 1957 and had over 550,000 victims, mainly intellectuals.11 The events in Yang’s collection of stories and the interviews conducted by Wang Bing in his strenuous preparatory work often refer to Jiabiangou, one of the most brutal camps for re-education through labour, and its annex Mingshui located 30 kilometres north of the city of Jiuquan. The Chinese title of the film is poignantly the name of the camp, the location of which is at the very heart of Wang’s work. In fact, he recreated the camp at Jiabiangou in an up-to-now undisclosed location in the same geographical area of the actual site, spending several months on location scouting and, eventually choosing an area with similar geological characteristics: a desert site where caves could be dug underground and where the wintery climate would be as unbearable as in the real camp. After a visit to the remnants of the real camp, the filmmaker decided not to use it as a location. This site would have been too sensitive for all those who had witnessed the Anti-Rightist movement, above all, the survivors and the relatives of the victims. Wang Bing noted how the real location still bears tell-tale signs of the persecutions 9 Wang Bing started the project in winter 2003. The agreement for the acquisition of Yang’s book rights was signed in 2004 (personal communication). 10 I had the chance to participate in many of such conversations between Wang Bing and the potential producers either as an interpreter or simply to help out the two sides in understanding each other’s requirements. 11 For a detailed account of Yang’s book and a critical reading of literature related to the Anti-rightist movement see Veg (2012, 2014).

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and rough burials with human bones still visible on the site.12 The material shot in the actual area as preparatory work served as core material for the installation Traces, which was completed in 2014. After four years of pre-production, the project was still on hold, mainly as it had not yet secured its entire production budget. The budget was finally approved only after the project was taken over by the French company Les Films de l’Étranger, owned by Philippe Avril and Francisco Villa-Lobos, in December 2007. They were joined soon afterwards by the Belgian Entre Chien et Loup together with Wang Bing’s Hong Kong-based company.13 The French-based international sales company Wild Bunch also invested in the production and aimed at marketing the film through its participation at a major festival. An advantage of such an international structure was the official non-Chinese nationality of the film that, together with the choice of the remote shooting site, allowed the director to avoid any direct confrontation with Chinese film authorities during the shooting.14 Interest had been shown in an earlier and longer version of The Ditch by the Cannes Film Festival, however, when not confirmed as a competition entry, all parties – including the filmmaker – felt a different kind of pressure. In order to enter the main competition of the forthcoming Venice Film Festival in September some cuts were encouraged. These late editing interventions, done after the completion of the post-production work on the film image, should also be acknowledged as partially responsible for the fragmentary structure of the film. The Ditch was finally exhibited in the official competition of the Venice Film Festival 2010, listed as a ‘film sorpresa’, literally meaning ‘surprise film’, as it was announced after the official announcement of the festival programme.15 The reason for the late announcement was to avoid 12 Personal communication, Beijing, 2006. 13 According to the regulations, the European funds granted to the project since its early stages had to be managed by European companies officially involved in the production, which explains the need for official agreements and presentation material. The contribution of the European production companies to The Ditch was mostly related to the f inancial aspects of the film and to the technical post-production support. My name appears in the final credits of the film as an artistic consultant, however I was mainly helping out with such agreements and involved in informal conversations with Wang Bing and the producers. I was not directly involved in artistic aspects of the film. 14 Similar strategies were adopted in the 1990s by filmmakers like Zhang Yuan, whose early works could avoid responding to Chinese authorities since officially produced by foreign companies. However, the film scene of the 1990s is by no means comparable to the Chinese production scene of the years 2000s and after, as censorship regulations have become increasingly stricter. 15 The label film sorpresa was sometimes used in the 1990s by festivals that aimed at covering films that had not received the approval of censorship authorities or which were transferred to Europe without authorization, mostly Chinese or Iranian films.

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or limit any potential reactions from Chinese film authorities during the presentation of the festival line-up. Despite the rumours that preceded its world premiere, suggesting that the film had been denied the approval certificate from the Chinese censoring body, The Ditch could not have been the subject of Chinese censorship because the material had been transferred to Europe after the shooting ended and nobody in the production ever applied for any authorization. Moreover, it was listed as a French, Belgium, Hong Kong co-production. The film was positively received by international film reviewers and ignored by Chinese reviewers. Although long awaited and officially announced as a fiction film, The Ditch largely draws upon Wang’s documentary approach and maintains an uneasy tension between different cinematic modes, at one and the same time a historical film, a contemporary documentary, and a hybrid narrative film – a work that defies clear-cut categorization between documentary and f iction.16 The plot of the f ilm is purposely fragmentary so that its main concern becomes the observation of a group of men sent to a labour camp in the desert, where they contend with physical exhaustion, cold, and starvation. The interplay between space (the actual shooting location) and the mise en scène provides the tension that constantly pushes viewers to adjust their expectations between a narrative film and a non-fictional work. Even when the viewers have been prompted to accept the assumption of a historical re-enactment, the excessively stylized performances, and the clashing of this with the starkness of the location continue to expose the fictional apparatus so that the process of film-making becomes the real focus of the viewing experience. The acting and the mise en scène, which suggest the historical period by means of props and sparse elements, thereby create another tension, this time with the undefined temporal frame of the location. This is enhanced by Wang Bing’s choice of framing and shooting techniques, combined with a wide use of post-production processes. Wang’s painstaking attempts to unveil the limits of the film-making process allow us to bring a comparative dimension to this study by establishing a connection with some of the most challenging works of contemporary cinema. The Portuguese auteur Pedro Costa is particularly relevant, not only for his search for a high-end documentary film aesthetics but also for his engagement in the debate on f ilmmakers’ approach to their subjects, their viewers, and their multifaceted relation to the current f ilm industry (production and distribution companies, f ilm festivals, 16 For a discussion of hybrid documentary films see Moody (2013).

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alternative exhibition spaces). It is worth noting that one of the producers of Les Films de l’Étranger supporting The Ditch, Francisco Villa-Lobos, had long been Pedro Costa’s producer via his Lisbon-based company Contracosta Produçoes.

The Ditch: Carving out a space for documenting the past Comolli’s article ‘Historical fiction: A body too much’ (1978) offers essential insights on the interplay between history and cinema and provides a relevant starting point for discussing works dealing with history. In fact, The Ditch delves into the paradoxical task of documenting the past and opposes the unquestionable postulate at the basis of Comolli’s article, according to which the past cannot be filmed live and that there can be no film that, “however serious its documentation, does not fictionalize the most referenced historical argument” (1978: 42). In line with the title of Comolli’s article, space will be pinpointed here as the cinematic element that gives rise to the uneasy tension between narrative and document in The Ditch.17 The barren Gansu landscape where the film was shot is an overwhelming space, which informs both the making and the viewing of The Ditch. There must be reasons, or at least certain ambitions, that go beyond the director’s challenging decision to make use of such a remote area, literally digging up holes in the desert soil to reproduce the caves (ku) used as camp dormitories and then filling them with props and objects to achieve a certain degree of historical accuracy. Moreover, the chosen location required daily transportation of technical equipment and people, and preparation and shooting could only be undertaken between spring and autumn to avoid sub-zero temperatures. When asked about his choice, Wang Bing brings up a twofold issue: aesthetic concerns and the need to avoid central control. The second may appear straightforward: no film authority would be prepared to go to such a distant place to verify permissions for shooting and find out about the newly dug caves. As for the aesthetic concerns, the filmmaker would point to his need to be as faithful as possible to the ‘real events’, a statement that may sound idealistic if not naïve.18 To which ‘real events’ would Wang Bing be faithful? To those narrated in the book? To the survivors’ stories, or 17 This comparative discussion of The Ditch in relation to Pasolini’s Salò and Costa’s work was originally published in Pollacchi (2012). 18 Unless otherwise referenced, all information about the film production history is drawn from personal communications with Wang Bing and the producers during the production.

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rather to his own interpretation and to his way of cinematically portraying a historical narrative? Regardless of the similarity of the location to the actual site of the camp, the filmmaker must have been well aware of the impossibility of representing the ‘real facts’ as they happened in the past. By attempting to capture the harshness of the space, which wraps together both the narrative and the filmmaking experience, the director suggests a higher ambition. The inhospitable location provides an actual space in which human beings cannot easily exercise their instinct to control and dominate. As presented in some of the early sequences of The Ditch, their own human nature is put at risk by the severe conditions in which they are forced to survive. In the vastness of the desert, the Jiabiangou camp appears inhabited by a democracy of ghosts rather than a hierarchy of guards and prisoners. Nameless people unreasonably erased from history by the brutality of power literally surface from underground like the living dead. But even those who exercise power, despite living in aboveground barracks, are forced to share the constraints of a sterile emptiness. They are all framed within the fictional display of a historical narrative, but what the camera captures first is the struggle of performing and shooting in a bleak windswept location. Rather than just re-enacting the past to produce a feature film and simply using the location as a powerful backdrop, Wang Bing combines the fictional aspects with an ongoing look at the filming process in action. Space and actors are filmed in their interaction, and the filmmaker – although not visible – is clearly perceived in a constant oscillation between documentary and fiction. His presence through the camera lens becomes actually visible in a few shots taken with a dirty lens. The fictional narrative about the past unfolds together with the non-fictional document about the process of bringing a camera onto a set in the middle of the desert. As such, Wang’s work not only moves away from any clear-cut distinction between the two modes, but also assumes the documentary as being an essential part of his narrative. If documentaries stimulate ‘epistephilia’ (a desire to know) in their audiences, as remarked by Bill Nichols in his introduction to documentary, they also “activate this desire to know when they invoke a historical subject and propose their individual variation of the history lesson” (2001: 40). The Ditch clearly maintains this perspective by activating a visual device able to remind the viewer that something real, and much more horrible than the process of filmmaking they are being exposed to, happened in the past in such an undefined space. Hence, the cinematic space turns into a space of history and memory. Wang’s concern with memory is made explicit by the final and parallel dedications of both Fengming, A Chinese Memoir and

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The Ditch, respectively, to those who participated in the revolution and to those who experienced the sufferings of the campaign. In The Ditch, the historical subject and its connection to the location are introduced in a documentary mode: minimal opening credits; no musical score; but the use of intertitles. The Ditch opens with a static long take of the stunning desert in bright daylight. After the first two central credits naming the production companies, the next one announces that the work is based on Wang Bing’s adaptation of Yang’s book and on survivors’ testimony.19 After the film title and the director’s name, a final intertitle provides the spatiotemporal coordinates of the narrative: China; October 1960; Mingshui; Jiabiangou camp; Gobi desert. Mingshui is the name of the camp where the survivors of Jiabiangou where transferred in October 1960. While the intertitles unfold, a group of men is seen in the arid landscape. They surface from below the ground and quickly walk away into the distance, heading towards the horizon where nothing is visible but remote mountains, much further away than any man could walk. The visual impact of such an astonishing landscape, untouched by the nearly irrelevant presence of those few stumbling men, provide the viewers with a vivid perception of spatial immensity. The bright natural light of the desert and the thin wintery air are so overpowering in the opening shot that, as the intertitle announces the time frame, the viewers must adjust their perception of a contemporary picture to a representation of events occurring in 1960. Only for those familiar with Chinese history will the first shot immediately evoke the coercive campaign that between 1957 and 1960 forced a huge number of intellectuals and citizens branded as ‘rightists’ (youpai fenzi) to re-education camps in remote areas of China. For other viewers, only the cut into the following medium shot, framing the characters at a closer distance, introduces the narrative. A few men wearing heavy coats and furry winter hats are sitting in that desolate land. Two by two, a guard leads them to some caves. The first two men are assigned to their dormitory but the camera does not focus on their faces. It moves to follow them from behind instead. Their worn-out coats, their blankets, and the suitcases they are carrying identify them as belonging to a bygone era, as well as the objects that fill the cave they enter. The two men find their beds inside a narrow dormitory carved into the hardened soil, partially illuminated by 19 The original version of The Ditch is the French subtitled version first broadcasted by Arte France in April 2011. The two intertitles respectively state: ‘un scénario de Wang Bing à partir du roman de Yang Xianhui Adieu, Jiabiangou et des témoignages de Ti Zhongzheng et d’autres survivants’ and ‘Chine, Octobre 1960. Mingshui, annèxe du camp de Jiabiangou. Désert de Gobi’.

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the daylight descending from above ground. No character is, so far, clearly discernible. Only when a second group of men reaches another cave and the guard repeats his gesture of turning back towards the exit, is this person’s face briefly visible. The same leading figure is seen in the following frontal long shot, in which he is walking in the open with a fellow guard. As they get closer to the camera they start discussing how they lack the manpower to achieve the target imposed by the re-education authorities, while to their side dozens of men are working a soil that is obviously too hard to be ploughed. The two guards mention that another 20,000 men will not arrive before the following spring. They then ask a work unit leader to report. Since his unit members are too weak, he is ordered to encourage the prisoners to write to their families asking for food. Rather than strenuous work or harsh living conditions, the major cause of death in the re-education camps was famine, and this is a central topic in the first part of the film. If the subject and the presence of actors confirm The Ditch as a historical fiction, its documentary quality derives from the director’s choice of, and approach towards, the film’s location. Rosen defines historical films as a “construction of film spectatorship as a trans-historical viewpoint on a historical past” and as works that imply reconstruction and re-enactment (2001: 84). References can also be made to the earlier analysis of Pierre Sorlin, according to which a film identifies itself as historical when an “understanding is formed, with no difficulty, between the filmmaker and the audience: for both, something real and unquestionable exists, something which definitely happened and which is history” (1980: 20–21). More cogently for this discussion, Comolli highlights how fiction and history react with one another and how “the cinematic representation of History defies Fiction although it holds only through it” (1978: 42). In The Ditch, the undefined temporal connotation of the natural setting – the desert probably looked similar fifty years ago – contributes to maintaining the tension between the events of the past (the historical narrative) and the recording of the actual space, which connects past and present. This sense of actuality is achieved thanks to the use of a high-definition (HD) digital camera, a preliminary requirement of the director from the early phase of the project. The sharpness and vividness of the HD recording enhances the indexical quality of the image to such a degree that, when projected at corresponding standards, even the dust and the grains of sand in the crisp northern air can be discerned. ‘Indexicality’ was early emphasized in Bazin’s theory of realism (1967: 9–16). Nichols has later defined the ‘indexical image’ as the faithful registration of the imprint of things (sights and sounds) achieved by recording instruments (2001: 34–35). Taking full

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advantage of high-end technology, Wang Bing pushes the viewer to perceive the overwhelming power of nature, certainly as a visual but almost as a tactile experience too. As sand, dust, and smoke are neatly captured to provide a richer sensorial dimension to the image, similarly the camera indulges bodily reactions to the hostile environment and to starvation. The sequence of the two guards is followed by a prisoner collapsing on the ground, probably dead from exhaustion, dragged by other prisoners towards the camera as if his body weight could also be recorded on-screen. Space thus becomes a shared, often uncomfortable, experience in which the filmmaker, the actors, and the viewers are all involved. As a result, the historical narrative resists a simple definition. Carved within an allembracing natural space, the narrative exceeds its temporal frame and shifts from the past of the Anti-Rightist movement towards the present. Hence, it is by means of space – and the way it is cinematically captured – that a broad temporal continuum is established, a continuum in which the viewer is constantly driven from the re-enacted past of horrors to a present haunted by it.

Historical spectacles: Wang Bing’s The Ditch and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò The shift of the historical narrative towards the present brings to mind Pasolini’s view on the act of filming, according to which reality can only be perceived subjectively, and in the present. In his essay ‘Observations on the long take’, Pasolini remarks that any fiction film, even when choosing a non-naturalistic point of view, becomes realistic and ultimately naturalistic as soon as we place a camera and tape recorder there: the result will be seen and heard as if by a fleshand-blood subject (that is, one with eyes and ears). Reality seen and heard as it happens is always in the present tense (1967: 1).

Pasolini’s emphasis on subjectivity also relies on capturing the texture of reality, as if the camera lens could be a tactile instrument in addition to a visual device. As an intellectual and not a professionally trained director, Pasolini experimented with cinema in order to engage with reality. In her investigation of Pasolini’s semiotics, Giuliana Bruno defines how “Pasolini speaks of the real as cinematic,” and how he establishes a relation between the real and cinema based on their status as “spectacle” (1991: 32).

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In addition, as an art historian, Pasolini was fascinated by the iconic potential of cinema, by its frontal dimension, and by its ability to conflate temporalities, to investigate the past in relation to the present and the future (Brunetta 2006: 26–27). More than a narrative tool and better than painting, film images could preserve the beauty of their subjects (young people’s faces, their bodies) while exposing the vices and contradictions of contemporary society. In fact, cinema could also reverse beauty into horror, an exploration that Pasolini started with his short film La Ricotta (id. 1963) in which the ricotta cheese of the title (or rather, hunger and voracity) becomes a lethal weapon for the exercise of power. The most basic human instincts could well be used as metaphors of social control. Reflecting the philosophy of the Frankfurt School, Pasolini’s take on power strategies – in terms of how they annihilate any form of resistance – found increasing expression in both his literary and cinematic works. The naturalistic approach of his first film Accattone (id. 1961) gave way to a fragmentation of the narrative and a stylization that reached its apex in the mannerist eccentricity of his last film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma, 1975).20 Salò represents not only the triumph of violence, but also the final acceptance of both the impotence of the intellectual vis-à-vis authoritarian power and of the hopelessness of the masses arbitrarily controlled by power structures. Several aspects of Salò find echoes in The Ditch, as a similar descent into horrors preoccupies Wang Bing who, on several occasions, has expressed his admiration for Pasolini and for his interventions on the relationship between art, history, and society.21 Pasolini transposed the tales of the Marquis de Sade into the final years of the Fascist regime when the entire structure of power was about to collapse. The Republic of Salò provided the ultimate refuge for the Mussolini loyalists, and for those who were taking advantage of the last days of fascism to give free will to their most brutal instincts. In Salò, boys and girls are taken to a secluded villa and forced to perform sexual acts upon the demands of a group of perverted overlords. The inflation of disturbing images in Salò reverberates in Wang Bing’s portrayal of starvation, which occupies a 30-minute-long section after the introductory sequences, contrasted only by the shot of two guards eating a bowl of hot noodles. 20 Brunetta has widely discussed Pasolini’s films within the context of Italian society and culture since his Forma e parola nel cinema (1970). For an analysis of Pasolini’s La Ricotta on the basis of Horkheimer and Adorno’s text Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), see Gailleurd (2008). 21 I had several long conversations with Wang Bing on Pasolini during his visit to Pozzuoli (Naples, Italy) on the occasion of the event ‘La natura del cinema – Re-tour nei Campi Flegrei’ (7–13 May 2008) in which his documentaries were presented.

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The narration proceeds in fragments, abruptly cutting from one situation to another, with a predominance of low-angle shots, frontal perspective, and with the camera lens close to the f igures and the details of bodily reaction to starvation. An old man collects poisonous grains from some tiny desert bushes; another prisoner chases a mouse and makes a soup with it; two prisoners are shown at night, helping each other crawl back inside the cave. One is suffering and while he is vomiting, the other picks up a few grains from the vomit and eats them. Finally, in a longer sequence, a group of men remove a corpse from the cave to be later accused of having eaten parts of the corpses. The increasing discomfort provoked by such an iterative structure emphasizes the progressive loss of human dignity, recalling the iterative structure of Pasolini’s Salò and his portrayal of forced human degradation. Despite the obvious distance of the cinematic and narrative contexts, both Salò and The Ditch films deny a teleological concept of history. The loss of human dignity leaves no option for the victims, except for that of perpetrating the system: in Salò, a few prisoners are selected to share the oppressors’ privileges; in the closing sequence of The Ditch, one of the prisoners is encouraged to remain in the camp. He should look after those who are too weak to go back but he is also supposed to be there for those who will arrive, inferring a circular pattern of history that transcends the reference to the Anti-Rightist movement. Repetition, pictorial composition of the shots, and the wide use of frontal perspective openly involve and target the viewers as if the show of atrocities was put on display to reach a point of saturation and eventually expose itself. Both Pasolini’s Salò and Wang’s The Ditch create a spectacle of horrors in which the past (the years of the Salò Republic and the years of the Anti-Rightist campaign) hint at the present. Yet, Pasolini’s critique of contemporary society stems from the assumption that art (and the intellectual) can still activate knowledge and are still encapsulated within the secure codes of a narrative film. Pasolini deliberately uses the spectacle as one of the key elements under attack in the increasing mass media-centric society of his time. Interestingly, Guy Debord’s critique of contemporary society La Société du spectacle was first published in 1967 and opened the debate on mass media, which rapidly involved all spheres of European culture. In contrast, Wang Bing’s discourse has far less of a secure basis to draw upon. If the implications of the natural space and its documentary force seem to provide the potential for new experiments in the construction of cinematic space, the use of disturbing images and spectacle attempts to install an additional tension in the cinematic configuration of The Ditch.

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The evidence of the re-enactment and the staging process further highlight the unbalanced structure of the cinematic apparatus, thereby creating thought-provoking fractures within which one can enquire about history, politics, and the arts. The Ditch approaches what both Rosen and Comolli refer to as the ‘historical spectacle’: a filmic construction that exceeds its historical referentiality so as to draw attention to its artificiality. The interplay between what is historically acceptable (and makes it look like a ‘true story’) and what is part of the mise en scène (and highlights the artifice) becomes unbalanced in favour of the latter (Rosen 2001: 187). The actors’ performances strongly contribute to this. Their exaggerated manners of representation often makes them look unskilled: either over-expressing their roles or being detached from their characters so as to increase the perception of displacement and absurdity that imbues the picture. If the descent into inhumanity brought about by famine occupies the first half of the film, the second half revolves around a specific narrative thread. The collective dimension suggested by the absence of a hierarchy in the first part is contrasted with the personalized nature of the second part, which evolves around the arrival of a woman at the camp. This section is preceded by the night confession of Dong Jianyi. As a doctor, he is aware of his imminent death and asks his fellow prisoner Li Minhan to guard his corpse until his wife’s arrival. When she reaches the camp, nobody dares to reveal either her husband’s death, or his crude burial and the fact that parts of his body have been cannibalized. She eventually manages to find his body, burns it, and leaves the camp taking his ashes back to Shanghai. The theatrical performance of the actors is here even accentuated, as in the scenes of the wife’s arrival and of her crying out her grief over her husband’s death.22 The actors’ movements appear slow and difficult, probably because of the harsh conditions of the wintery location. In fact, the casting process is the main reason for such a theatrical imprint, and has been pinpointed as a weak element of the film since its early phases. In order to shoot in the desert, the director had to rely on a team able to withstand the severe conditions of the area. If his technical crew was easily reduced to the essentials, casting was better done in the neighbouring cities in order to get people who were familiar with the territory and go on set only when needed (for obvious budgetary reasons). Unknown local actors, mainly theatrically trained, were recruited together with non-professional actors, resulting in a group of people whose performing skills were inevitably mixed. In addition, 22 Veg interprets the theatricality in the actors’ performance as a Brechtian distancing effect, which echoes the Maoist film tradition (2012: 180).

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the insistence on peripheral props in the mise en scène more explicitly exposes the staging process. Old style blankets, water containers, socialist propaganda posters fill the caves and the barracks without serving any function for the progression of the narrative (except for the Longines watch that Dong Jianyi keeps until his death). Adopting Rosen’s description of the Barthesian ‘reality effect’, such details help to convert a visual document into a diegesis although their overt display emphasizes the crafted mise en scène, hence the viewer’s awareness of the film apparatus (2001: 169–79). Here, they mostly serve to denote a historical period that would otherwise remain abstract in the emptiness of the natural landscape. Despite his endeavour to recreate the atmosphere of the camp, Wang Bing does not aim for a classical (transparent) historical narrative, instead he moves away from cinematic realism to draw upon a different legacy and its continuing impact on world cinema. Such a legacy, which pushes forward the boundaries of representation, harks back to the Brechtian tradition to encompass, among others, Pasolini and contemporary filmmakers like Pedro Costa.

Ghosts of the past: Wang Bing’s The Ditch and Brutality Factory and Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth The unanimously praised visual quality of The Ditch confirms Wang Bing’s ongoing dialogue with contemporary filmmakers who do not simply experiment with the juxtaposition of different modes or new technologies, but move forward to reconfigure film images in order to dismantle basic dichotomies like that between the artists and their subjects, or the artists and their viewers. The intensive editing and the meticulous post-production work undertaken to enhance the potential of the digital image of The Ditch encourage a parallel discussion with the works of contemporary Portuguese director Pedro Costa. The two filmmakers share an interest in representing marginal people in changing societies and, more interestingly, question cinema in search of the most appropriate way to approach their subjects: people forgotten by history and neglected by mainstream state narratives. These people’s stories are bound to remain minor subjects, as there were far fewer victims of the Anti-Rightist campaign, for example, than of the Cultural Revolution seen against the backdrop of Chinese history. By approaching these apparently minor subjects, both Wang Bing and Pedro Costa do not simply deal with history, but also question cinematic configurations. Despite

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the fact they are filming actual people and actual places in the case of Costa, or re-enacting historical facts as in The Ditch, their cinematic worlds are informed by ghostly figures, and a past that inevitably and incessantly surfaces in the present. As previously suggested, the prisoners of The Ditch look like ghosts and living dead. Dong Jianyi is a ghost for his wife until she finds his body and burns it. In the final part of the film, the few prisoners still alive in the camp, and those who are seen in the distance while leaving the camp are living dead. This is suggested not only by their awkward movements, but also by framing choices and post-production work to increase the sense of loss and disorientation. When the characters move out of the caves their figures nearly vanish in the vast landscape encompassed in extreme long shots; their size is often out of proportion in the frame: too bulky and cumbersome in the caves, almost insignificant in the desert plain. The way lighting and sound are processed support the perception of a progressive effacement of human beings. Enhanced contrasts in lighting parallel the movement of the characters between light and darkness so as to oppose the claustrophobic underground caves to the openness of the desert. The predominance of natural lighting in the rough film material was accurately reworked in post-production so that day scenes became dominated by a yellow sunlight that contrasts with the grey-blue-brownish tints of the prisoners’ clothes. Areas in shadow and at night-time occasionally become impenetrably dark while figures’ profiles are inscribed in a whitish glare that imbues the picture with a dreary atmosphere. The documentary quality of the natural space, a source of tension throughout the film, finds a few cathartic bursts in those shots in which the human figures disappear in the desert, eventually leaving the frame empty. The night escape sequence exemplifies how the ghostly characters dissolve in the vastness of space, as if turned into desert stone or, perhaps, surviving the desert. Two prisoners exit the camp: the older one collapses on the ground while the younger disappears in the darkness; potentially bound to opposite destinies but equally absorbed by the overpowering space. Ghosts are also the protagonists of Wang’s first experiment with fiction Brutality Factory, a short film on an interrogation room in the basement of a factory where struggle sessions were undertaken during the Cultural Revolution.23 What we see is both the empty space of one of the many dismissed factories in contemporary China and the violence of bygone days. Even if the spaces where violence took place in the past are removed from 23 On Brutality Factory and ghosts see also Koehler (2007).

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the present, they are still alive in the memories of those who experienced it. This 16-minute-long film is part of the Portuguese omnibus project State of the World to which Pedro Costa also contributed with the short film Terrafal (id. 2007).24 The project premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight of the Cannes festival in 2007, the same year as Fengming, A Chinese Memoir. Wang Bing’s segment opens with an awkward subjective shot of someone going up a metal staircase in a space very similar to the factory space of West of the Tracks. The awkwardness is due to the undulating movements of the camera. Once the camera has reached the top, it pans over the wintery landscape and enters the dismantled factory space. It stops there to show a rear view of a man in work clothes moving towards a metal door. The opening documentary sequence ends here. The following shot shows a man sleeping on a couch. The lighting and the setting have changed to a fictional setting. The man is awakened by a noise in the same room. The camera follows him as he stands up and moves towards a woman kneeling on the floor. He accuses her of being a counter-revolutionary – what “Mao meant by the enemy within.” Then, two other men question her about her “counter-revolutionary group” and her husband, who is also accused of being one of their leaders. They want her to write a list of names and as she refuses, their violent interrogation escalates. The man who was first shown asleep and appears to be the boss of the interrogators sentences her to be buried alive. The following tracking shot shows the two men taking the woman towards an open truck parked at the end of a long empty factory space. Then, she is seen again in a sort of basement where a man and a woman are washing a naked corpse. In this increasingly surreal factory space, the man in charge plays an old record on a record player and lies down on a bed while the woman continues to be subjected to violent attacks. The absurdity of the situation is further enhanced when a man declares to the woman – who has just been beaten to death – that on 4 July 1967, her husband committed suicide by smashing his skull against a brick wall. The last two minutes of the film go back to the open space of the factory with the same documentary approach of the beginning. The factory space is being dismantled and workers are shown as they are tearing down the space just getting on with their tasks unaware of the ‘ghosts of the past’. Here, Jacques Rancière’s words on fiction come to mind. According to the French philosopher, fiction does not correspond to the creation of an imaginary world opposed to the real one, but deals with dissensus and the ability of the artist to show what would remain otherwise 24 The full list of f ilmmakers includes Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Vicente Ferraz, Wang Bing, Pedro Costa, Chantal Akerman, Ayisha Abraham.

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invisible (2008: 72). This statement well describes Wang’s approach to his fictional works, although so far limited to Brutality Factory and The Ditch. A similar interest in ghostly figures and spaces that bear traces of the past can also be found in Costa’s Colossal Youth. In 2006, this film entered the Cannes festival competition and received worldwide acclaim. The film was shot with an HD digital camera and Costa closely supervised the long post-production process that gave the film its astonishing pictorial quality, a feature that Wang Bing had praised on several occasions and which also help establish the connection with Costa’s producers at the time: the Portuguese Francisco Villa-Lobos and his French associate Philippe Avril. With this f ilm, Costa experimented on the approach developed in his previous In Vanda’s Room, which established his reputation as a daring auteur active outside the mainstream industry. The low-budget In Vanda’s Room was shot among the drug addicts and marginal people of the now demolished Lisbon suburb of Fontainhas. Its loose narrative was the result of a long editing process within which fragments of people’s lives were reworked together. Costa’s cinema, just like Wang’s, has often been related to the radical works of the filmmaker couple Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, although only in the case of Costa has this reference been openly acknowledged.25 Drawing upon the same subject of In Vanda’s Room, a few years later Colossal Youth gave space to a stronger pictorial composition in which every shot was conceived to express the full potential of the digital image. Re-enacting memories of the inhabitants of Fontainhas (some of them participants of In Vanda’s Room), Colossal Youth aims to frame both their present and their past. People’s memories are juxtaposed to their current lives as if ghosts of the past co-existed in their present. This is well exemplified by the sequence at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon with the old Ventura in focus. The old man is seen leaning on a wall next to a Rubens painting. A young museum guard leads him outside, escorting him as if he were an intruder. Once in the open, they start talking. Ventura recalls his arrival from Cape Verde and his work among the immigrants who built the museum in the 1970s; the guard mentions his future as a young father and views the museum as a safe workplace. Yet, they never look at each other but away, in the same direction, towards a space that exceeds the frame. While their awkward dialogue refers to their past, present, and even their future, are they actually to be considered as two different 25 Costa based his film Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Onde jaz o teu sorriso, 2001) on the editing of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s Sicilia! (id. 1999).

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people? Or, is the frame attempting to embrace Ventura’s recollection of his own past in today’s life?26 Despite using real settings and people acting as themselves, Costa detaches himself from any naturalistic approach, and even from the more straightforward documentary approach of In Vanda’s Room. As Neyrat poignantly noted referring to Colossal Youth, ‘[n]othing could be further from the documentary pseudo-transparency inherited from Direct Cinema than these monumental, hieratic, and feverish films, realized with ceremonial rigour’ (2010). Such a rigour can only be accomplished with a slow, daily work that brings the filmmaker to share the space of his subjects, but also requires long editing and post-production processes as essential polishing tools. The carefully selected range of colours, the profile of the protagonists emerging from the darkness that informs the overall picture could not be achieved otherwise. Costa’s non-naturalistic approach is enhanced by the presence of his non-actors, occasionally asked to perform dialogues that come out of their stiff bodies as if spoken from a different world. The result is a demanding, yet mesmerizing experience that conflates temporalities. The viewers’ gaze is often drawn outside the boundaries of the frame, in the offscreen space the characters are pointing at. The same happens to their attention, which goes beyond the narrative elements to embrace and evoke a broader narrative of migration and displacement. In the case of both filmmakers, the tension between the high definition and the indexicality of the camera lens, and a certain degree of ambiguity in the narrative structure become the key elements to overcome any master narrative. Wang Bing and Pedro Costa, in different ways and at different latitudes, aim to broaden the space of the film image in order to tell stories of the voiceless. This can be seen as the artist’s engagement with the present, also in political terms. The words that Rancière used for describing Pedro Costa in his discussion of political art, can equally well apply to Wang Bing’s films; they contribute to a “new landscape of the visible” and a new idea of what “critical art” could mean today (2010: 149).27 Not by coincidence, both filmmakers draw upon eccentricity, fragmentation, and outsize formats in order to involve the viewer in an ongoing process of knowledge and understanding. In addition, thanks to their works, even major film festivals such as Venice or Cannes have had to reconsider what is usually defined as fiction or non-fiction film. 26 For an in-depth analysis of this sequence see Rancière’s introduction of Pedro Costa’s exhibition at the Tate Modern (2009). 27 For a discussion of the evolution of critical and political art see Rancière (2010).

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Moreover, such aesthetic features push the boundaries of the conventional film production and exhibition system. The demanding duration of Wang Bing’s major documentaries openly challenges the viewer’s involvement, while calling for alternative exhibition spaces other than the film theatre. Interestingly, from early on in their careers, several art galleries and museums have supported both Wang Bing and Pedro Costa, confirming their status as both filmmakers and artists or, in other words, filmmakers with a strong interest in experimenting with film images.28 As discussed in the final chapter of this book, in spite of the shrinking spaces for distribution of art-house films, in particular after the economic crisis of 2008, both Pedro Costa and Wang Bing have worked in the interstices of the industry. They have managed to expand their network of viewers on the art exhibition circuit while, at the same time, interrogating their position as filmmakers in the increasingly global cultural scene.

28 The Galerie Chantal Crousel (Paris) has handled some of Wang Bing’s works since early on in his career. Pedro Costa has exhibited in major museums worldwide.



PART II: Spaces of Memory: Dead Souls I have always felt the superiority of the written language in relation to history. I want my film to surpass any other book written on this historical subject. ‒ Wang Bing on the making of Dead Souls29

From Fengming, A Chinese Memoir to Dead Souls As groundwork for The Ditch, Wang first made use of witnesses and survivors of the Anti-Rightist campaign for his documentary Fengming, A Chinese Memoir. This is a three-hour-long first-person narration of He Fengming’s own life, an elderly lady who is the widow of one of those who died in Jiabiangou and who also experienced forced labour during the same campaign. Wang Bing met He for the first time in 1995.30 Wang was able to visit her on several occasions, in particular upon the publication of her own recollection of the year 1957 (He 2001). Wang Bing was interested in He Fengming because her husband Wang Jingchao had died in Jiabiangou. At the start of Mao’s campaign, she and her husband were sent to separate camps. She was given permission to visit him when he was ill, but when she arrived at Jiabiangou, Jingchao had already passed away, one of the huge number who died from starvation and physical exhaustion. When the camps were closed and the remaining prisoners liberated, He Fengming returned to Lanzhou. She has lived there for most of her life and raised their two children on her own. Only in 1990, after having been rehabilitated, was she able to go back to the camp in search of her husband’s grave. Although she found a stone with Wang Jingchao’s name, the passing of time and the harshness of the natural elements in the location of the camp had erased all other traces. Wang first decided to meet the lady as part of his own preparatory work for The Ditch and later he resolved to use the material for a separate documentary. In Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, he wanted to keep the focus on the lady’s voice and on her own recollection of the past. Therefore, editing, external interventions in post-production, and even camera movements are minimized so that the film is structured as an extremely long, nearly static shot. Except for the opening sequence in which the handheld camera 29 Private conversation, Bruxelles, 2 April 2018. 30 Wang Bing’s reference to his first meeting with He Fengming is included in the presentation material for the film.

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follows the elderly lady along a snowy walkway towards the apartment compound where she lives, the rest of the 184-minute-long documentary keeps the camera close to her with only a few variations. She is filmed frontally and at eye-level, in medium shot, so as to position the audience in conversation with her. Variations in this layout are limited to lighting or to her changing position on the chair so as to maintain a sense of the passing of time, which is mainly registered in real time. For three hours, she recalls how her husband, Wang Jingchao, was labelled the ‘biggest rightist in Gansu’ and sent to the labour camp of Jiabiangou. She received the same label for refusing to denounce her husband and was sent to a different farm. Alerted by a letter to the worsening famine in late 1960, she goes to Jiabiangou to visit her husband where she finds him dead. As noted, the film premiered as a Special Screening of the Out of Competition section at the Cannes film festival in 2007. It was Wang’s first entry in the official selection of one of the three big European festivals – Berlin, Cannes, and Venice listed in their order in the calendar year. This single camera set-up focused on one person was a challenging viewing for the festival-goers, yet it received unanimous critical praise. Moreover, it should be noted that Wang’s second film to be screened in the Cannes Official Selection was Dead Souls, also as an Out of Competition entry, on 9 May 2018, which expands on the work on memory Wang started with Fengming, A Chinese Memoir. Although the filmmaker’s preoccupation with engaging with witnesses as a way to bridge the past to the present started with his f irst history project, his vision of providing a visual archive of witnesses of the labour camps became more urgent as he feared that most of those who had witnessed the actual facts would soon be gone or else, in their 80s or 90s, their memories would fade along with the pages of history they had lived through. Wang Bing’s sense of urgency emerged strongly with the nearly nine-hour-long Dead Souls. This monumental collection of survivors’ voices – shot at different times and across China – builds up an articulate picture of the Anti-Rightist campaign, one that has not yet been reported in history books. Dead Souls can also be looked on as a mature work in which the filmmaker is fully conscious and confident of his own craft. During the decade separating Fengming, A Chinese Memoir and Dead Souls, Wang Bing has confirmed his role as one of the most respected and highly praised documentarists in the world, and interest in his work has grown enormously. In addition to being invited by major art exhibitions and institutions worldwide, his films have also received some theatrical release. Dead Souls

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was shown in French theatres starting on the 24 October 2018 and garnered critical praise that made Wang Bing the cover story of the French cultural magazine Transfuge the following November. The magazine featured a long interview and an extended review article by writer and film critic François Bégaudeau. In the same magazine, Antoine de Baeque introduces his long interview with Wang by drawing a parallel between his work and that of and two other filmmakers dealing with mass persecution, Claude Lanzmann and Rithy Pahn.31 Lanzmann’s work is on the Holocaust and Rithy Panh’s on the massacres perpetrated in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge regime. According to De Baeque, the three directors set their crucial position in documentary cinema by making the camera a tool for making “death at work” visible and perceptible (2018: 42). Although this parallel testifies to Wang Bing’s relevance in the current film scene, there are two elements that highlight the distinctiveness of his approach in comparison to these two filmmakers. The first one relates to the cinematic subject, as Dead Souls is as much about survival as it is about death. If read against Chinese traditional thinking, and not only in relation to Western paradigms, it would be impossible to conceive of death and life as two separate entities. Confucian ethics together with Taoist and Buddhist values often emerge in the survivors’ interviews as a way to connect the deeds of those who survived to those who died. The Confucian virtue of filial piety (xiao), the virtue of compassion (ren) as well as the relevance of the Chinese traditional structure of family relations inform many of the interviewees’ recollections. Some of them are shown next to their wives or family members, as they had to rely on their support in order to stay alive; some of them narrate how their family members offered their life to support those who were more in need and many of them refer to those who died. A crucial sequence of a ritual for the dead performed on the actual site of the camp by some of the survivors epitomizes such an essential link between the past and the present. The second element distinguishing Wang Bing is related to his cinematic choices. By means of the camera, he looks at these elderly people today, and not only at their past. Although he is not entirely sharing their spaces, as he used to do with his earlier documentaries, he avoids using them as ‘talking heads’ recollecting or illustrating past events. This approach significantly differentiates Dead Souls from other documentaries that, in China and elsewhere, have tackled historical events

31 Saër Maty Bâ has noted a reference to Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks in his discussion of Rithy Pahn’s S21 (2011: 129).

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or violent political campaigns.32 As the filmmaker noted in interviews, “[i]f we were to focus only on narrating past events, the survivors would become nothing more than talking heads, alienating the audience from the events being described onscreen. Because we exist on a different time frame, we cannot rely solely upon our imaginations to return us to the past, or to bridge the gap between past and present truths” (Wang 2012).

The genesis of Dead Souls The f ilm material of Dead Souls is a combination of interviews with survivors shot between 2005 and 2009 in preparation for The Ditch and additional interviews shot between 2016–2017. In addition to the interviews, some material shot on the actual sites of the camps is included. The editing of this material into the 507-minute-long documentary has become the f irst part of Wang Bing’s triptych project on Chinese labour camps.33 After having completed The Ditch, Wang Bing kept significant preparatory work shot either with a borrowed 35mm-camera or with a digital camera in his studio in Beijing.34 He had f irst thought of a project on memory and witnesses to the campaign while still preparing The Ditch but it took several years to come to fruition, not only due to production constraints but because of the many other documentary projects Wang had already started. The first work following The Ditch and actually making use of the material shot in the actual space of the camps of Jiabiangou and Mingshui in 2005 was the video installation Traces of 2014. As Wang Bing has remarked in interviews, the material was shot with a 35mm camera as preparatory work for the fiction film. However, it was only in 2014, on the occasion of the homage of the Centre Pompidou, that he decided to transfer the material to DCP and conceived the 25-minute-long black-and-white installation entitled Traces. This video installation is conceived to be projected on the floor of a gallery or museum space. It presents close shots of human bones, which were still visible on the sites of the camps at the time of the shooting. The 32 Ai Xiaoming’s Jiabiangou Elegy (Jiabiangou gushi, 2016) deals with the same subject of the Anti-Rightist campaign. 33 All information related to Dead Souls were collected in a private conversation in Cannes on the occasion of the world premiere of the film on 9 May 2018. 34 Wang Bing borrowed the 35mm camera from his friend the f ilmmaker and artist Yang Fudong. From private conversations with both filmmakers.

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sound of the wind is also recorded as a natural soundtrack. Once again, the space of the camps – the actual sites in the desert that were still revealing signs of human suffering several decades after the destruction of the camps – had a powerful impact on the filmmaker. And, as such, he aimed to bring it to today’s viewers. Here, the space seems to resist the eroding effect of natural elements over time. As Wang noted, the desert wind is both an element for effacing traces of human remnants and for making them re-emerge from the sand.35 The traces of the past on the actual space – the human bones that were still visible – was actually one of the reasons why Wang Bing decided not to use the actual location of the camp for The Ditch. In line with Harvey’s discussion of Ground Zero, the space bears a too strong and tangible connection with its past: whatever is built at this site has to say something about history and memory (Harvey 2006: 137). Through the years and alongside his other work, Wang Bing has maintained contact with witnesses of the Anti-Rightist campaign so as to expand his original project to a broader one including witnesses of labour camps across the country. Yang Xianhui, the author of the collections of memories that inspired Wang’s work on the Anti-Rightist campaign was the starting point of his journey. Starting with Yang and He Fengming, the filmmaker met around 120 people between 2005 and 2008. Some of them were already in contact with each other, others got in touch thanks to the project. Altogether they created a network upon which Wang could rely for his interviews. Looking at The Ditch retrospectively, Wang was never entirely satisfied with his experiment with fiction, partly because of the aesthetic limitations pointed out in the first part of this chapter, and partly because he felt that the film was a starting point rather than an accomplished work. Therefore, in 2013, he decided to re-work the material he had collected for The Ditch.36 By then, some of the interviewees had already died, or their physical and mental strength had further deteriorated. Wang’s need to bring the work to the public before all the survivors had gone became more compelling at a time when China, under President Xi Jinping, was openly revitalizing Maoist slogans and themes and translating them into the new glossy framework of the China Dream.37 35 See Antoine De Baeque (2018) for a full interview with Wang Bing on Dead Souls. 36 Comments personally collected on several conversations with Wang Bing. 37 Political observers have debated the revitalization of Mao’s image under Xi Jinping’s leadership (Zhao 2016) and discussion on how Xi Jinping is adopting features of Maoism and adapting them to his own policies is ongoing.

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The configuration of the work Wang Bing had in mind required significant production support and post-production to bring the diverse material shot in 35mm and with different digital cameras to a comparable quality. Inevitably, interviews collected in 2005 were of a much lower quality in comparison to those shot later in 2016. This meant that the budget for the project was not a small one. Thanks to his international reputation, Wang won the support of a set of experienced production companies, including the French Les Film d’Ici, specialized in documentary films, together with the Swiss co-producers CS Productions and Adok Films and the financial support of Arte France Cinéma. This solid production structure allowed him to complete the editing and post-production for Dead Souls in the relatively short time of one year. The material the film is based on amounted to over 600 hours of rushes. The project also had the support of Doc and Film International handling the international sales, which further confirms Wang’s stature as an international director. On the occasion of the film premiere in Cannes on 9 May 2018, the Festival Director, Thierry Frémaux, highlighted Wang’s distinctive record. He was about to show the longest film screened at the Cannes festival since the presentation of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s seven-hour-long Hitler: A Film from Germany (Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland) in 1977.38 Remarkably, the extensive duration of Wang Bing’s film managed to change and modify the traditional structure of major festival screenings, as will be discussed in the last chapter. In fact, major festivals have a rather rigid structure of screening slots and a fairly fixed number of films to include in each section. A film of over eight hours basically occupies from two to three slots in the festival daily programme. As a result, instead of the usual three screenings granted to each title in the official selection of the festival, Dead Souls was screened only once and it occupied one of the main theatres – the Salle du Soixantième – for the entire first day of the festival, with an unusual one-hour lunch break. Wang Bing and his minimal crew stayed at the screening for the entire day together with the audience. After the premiere in Cannes, screenings of Dead Souls have been included in homages and exhibitions all over the world, including the London Tate Modern in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Harvard Film Archive, and the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid, all in October–November 2018. Despite the duration, the f ilm received some small-scale theatrical release in France in October–November 2018 thanks to the French distribution company Les Acacias. 38 Comment personally collected at the screening in Cannes, 9 May 2018.

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Spaces for survival: Archiving audiovisual witnesses As Wang Bing commented in the short presentation prior to the Cannes screening, he conceived the structure of the film when he decided to bring the work he had started with The Ditch to completion. He went for the second round of interviews in 2016 and by then he had become quite confident about his own filmmaking approach. The structure of Dead Souls is fairly straightforward and can be summarized as follows: the first block presents six witnesses for a total of approximately two hours and 20 minutes. This part sets the historical basis as well as the network of the witnesses and their connections. Moreover, it presents the way Wang uses the two different main timeframes of 2005 and 2016 during which he collected most of the interviews. The second shorter block focuses on the actual space of the camp and its remnants for approximately 40 minutes, followed by a longer block of interviews. This third block combines five long interviews shot in 2005 lasting altogether two hours and 20 minutes with some witnesses that have already died. In fact, each one of these interviews ends with a credit on black stating the interviewee’s death date. There are two more long interviews collected in 2005 composing a fourth shorter block of 50 minutes. After that, all the remaining interviews with survivors date to 2016. The last group of survivors are mainly seen together with their close family members, mostly because of their advanced age. The last witness to be interviewed is a former Jiabiangou cadre whom Wang Bing met in 2007. This interview, finishing at the end of the eighth hour in the film, also closes with a credit reporting the date of his death in 2013. The final block of 50 minutes includes material evidence such as photos and letters shown during the interview with the wife of one of the prisoners. The last 10 minutes of the film go back to the space of the camp with no human present except for the filmmaker walking in the empty space, which still brings human remains to the surface. The only sound is that of the wind and Wang’s own steps. The film opens with minimal credits presenting the historical background, as in many of Wang’s works. It reports that in 1957 the Chinese government launched a campaign against anyone suspected of opposition to those in power. Between 550,000 and 1.3 million people were targeted but the exact figures remain unknown. During 1957–1958, approximately 3,200 people accused of being ‘ultra-Rightist’ were sent to the Jiabiangou camp for reeducation through labour. The first long take is of an elderly couple in their very simple bedroom. Like all other interviews, the name, age of the speakers, the location, and the date of the interview are inscribed on screen as soon

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Figure 6: Dead Souls, Gao Guifang (Copyright courtesy of Les Films d’Ici)

as people start talking. Zhou Huinan – aged 85, interviewed in Lanzhou on 9 November 2005, is seen on a sofa with his wife Gao Guifang, 86, on his left. In this first interview, lasting 34 minutes, Zhou narrates how he became a Communist Party cadre after having been a Nationalist soldier and a war prisoner during the civil war of 1948–1949. He moves on to explain how most of those who had some connection to the Nationalist Army during the war were later sent to cover civil positions in the administration. This was because the New China under Mao had to develop in all its sectors and needed a workforce. However, those who had served China under the Nationalists were seen as suspect by those who had fought as Communists and come to power with the victory of 1949. People, like Zhou Huinan, who had changed sides, believed their past would not be a burden, yet nobody could voice criticism against the Communist Party or show any personal view or critical thinking as soon as the Hundred Flowers Campaign was called to a halt in 1957. In Zhou’s words, the purpose of the Anti-Rightist campaign was a way for Mao to identify those who could not be trusted within the Party in order to minimize the risk of internal political struggles. Zhou explains Mao’s doctrine of the five per cent, according to which only five per cent of the people in the party were negative elements. Yet, Mao’s words had to be taken literally, which meant that each work unit or each group of 100 people had to identify exactly five rightists. And if those five could not be found, the person in charge would be condemned as a conservative and a rightist. This was the extreme political climate and attendant dogmatism against which the campaign unfolded. The camera is positioned at the speaker’s height, on the knees of the filmmaker so as to give the sense that he is in conversation with the interviewees

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in a way not dissimilar to what he did with Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, but with much more confidence in his own craft. The camera is mostly static and in the first fifteen minutes only three cuts are noticeable. After the fourth cut, the wife disappears from the shot. As in his other works, Wang Bing does not hide his own presence. Here, he poses a question off-screen with no change in the camera position throughout any of these cuts. It is a full 16 minutes into the film before the camera has its first movement, a left horizontal panning to include the wife who has come back into the room and changed her position. She is now sitting on the right side of her husband. The couple is seated frontally to the camera, symmetrically placed at the centre of the shot, with wife and husband on each side of the sofa. The position of the filmmaker remains the same, so that the viewers’ perception is that of an increasing familiarity with the couple, their space and, ultimately, the husband’s narrative. Some 24 minutes into the sequence, the wife joins in the conversation by mentioning the date on which her husband left for Jiabiangou, February 1958. She left to look for him a few months later in the same year. She makes the point that the prisoners in Jiabiangou did not have enough to eat, as their daily food ration amounted to only 250 grams, in most cases to be shared with others. Zhou makes it clear that he survived only because he was lucky enough to be assigned to a task that allowed him a little more food, together with the little extra food that the family was sending to him at the camp. Zhou also refers to He Fengming for having retraced in detail what happened in the camp, and therefore testifying to the network of witnesses who, in different ways, have confirmed the brutal reality of ‘re-education through labour’. As for the contents, these f irst two voices introduce the two central concerns of the film, repeated over and over in all the witnesses: political struggle and famine. These two intertwined issues caused the tragic outcome of the campaign, as in most cases people were arbitrarily accused, sentenced for political reasons, and often ended up dying of forced labour and starvation. These two main points are incessantly reiterated so as to provide the perception of an increasingly de-humanized reality. The process of de-humanization reaches a peak with cannibalism, an underlying sub-plot that unfolds as the witnesses describe their hunger in increasing detail. This crescendo is a structural choice that emerges thanks to the order that Wang Bing has edited the interviews. Dead Souls starts off in a matter-of-fact tone, yet, just as in The Ditch, the iterative survivors’ accounts and the accumulation of detail transforms the documentary into a narrative of horrors that, once again, ends with a ghostly space immersed in deadly silence. As a further intertextual reference to The

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Ditch, the explicit mention of He Fengming’s recollection of the camps connects Dead Souls to Wang Bing’s previous works on the Anti-Rightist campaign. In terms of structure, this first long interview serves as an establishing segment for the entire film. It marks the pace of the film and establishes the position of the filmmaker as a restrained presence. Thus, Wang Bing may prompt a witness with some questions but he never takes the lead in the film. Like in all his previous documentaries, the full scene is given to the witnesses. Moreover, this first interview introduces Wang’s minimal editing as a crucial choice as it allows the witnesses to provide their own individual stories, each at his or her own pace. This is also the pace of their memory, still vivid but prompted and activated in different ways for each of them. The sum of these individual narratives, in a way marginal when related to history, composes the larger picture of a collective tragedy. After the first interview, the narration passes on to Zhou’s younger brother, Zhou Zhinan, aged 82 and interviewed on 31 October 2005 in Yulin, in Shaanxi province. His face is filmed in close-up while he is lying in bed, in poor health. Despite his feeble voice, his memory of the camp appears vivid and reinforces the main issue: lack of food. The five-minute-long take is then followed by Wang’s shooting of his funeral, on 4 December 2005 in Zizhou, in Shaanxi province. Here, the movement of the camera around the space of the funeral ceremony and among Zhou’s relatives, creates a contrast to the previous predominance of static takes. Furthermore, this traditional burial in rural Shaanxi can be seen as a testimony to the resistance of Chinese traditional culture against the impositions of state regulations, which demand cremation as a modern burial, as noted by Veg (2018). As Bégaudeau noticed, the way Wang Bing included shots showing the difficulty with which men had to carry the coffin up the muddy mountain paths in order to bury it in the most appropriate place takes any allegorical meaning away from the sequence (2018: 46). Furthermore, in line with Bégaudeau’s observation, this is not an epitome of death but rather the inevitable end of any individual life. It is a simple action just like any other action in life and, as such, it can be filmed with the cacophony of the voices and cries of the participants. The funeral sequence is by no means a shooting of or about death. What makes the sequence relevant in the film, is actually what the viewers already know and how Zhou Zhinan’s life is recalled. During the funeral, the injustice and sufferings he has endured are evoked, and these resonate even after his death. This whole sequence inscribes individual stories into an extensive archive of memories on the verge of disappearance. The people who have lived through a period of history that has not yet

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been narrated are ageing and dying, with the risk of having their dramatic experience erased from the historical narrative. The first hour of the film closes on Gao Guifang, the wife seen in the first interview, shot eleven years later – aged 97 in Lanzhou, Gansu province, on 31 August 2016. Her body has become tinier and she is seen, cross-legged, on her bed, alone. Her first statement is that she wishes to die as soon as possible as she would suffer less. Then the camera pivots to show the same simple room that was seen in the first sequence. It stops to zoom in on the picture showing the elderly couple together while a credit informs viewers of the death of her husband, Zhou Huinan, on 26 April 2012, aged 92. This first hour could constitute a film on its own and be part of what I describe in the next chapter as ‘individual narratives’. These individual narratives speak to the collective narratives that Wang is trying to deconstruct or nuance. They shed light on aspects of people’s lives today and help better understand the larger picture of past events. They also testify to the film’s potential to create moments of intimacy through which the viewers connect to the social actors on-screen. As the film proceeds, the next witnesses are shot in a similar manner and reinforce the same narrative. Wang Bing talks to the survivors in their simple flats, usually shared with their wife or family members. They all report on the different ways of surviving famine and physical exhaustion in the camps with a variety of detail. There is nothing trivial about these basic narrations as the iteration of the sufferings provides an increasingly vivid picture. The portrayal of the camps by means of repetition and accumulation makes the viewing experience extremely poignant, as the viewers become more absorbed in the different spaces of the film, the tangible space where the camps were located, and in the less tangible space of the witnesses’ memories. The time the filmmaker grants to each individual allows the viewers to shape their knowledge of the historical facts. It also records their living spaces with their decorations, their photographs hanging on the walls, and the many small items they have preserved in order to help their memory: books; letters; tiny pieces of papers. All these elements cannot be inserted into history books but they do fit well in a contemporary audiovisual archive of memories and living spaces. Wang’s filmmaking in Dead Souls represents his mature cinematic strategy for filling the gaps in collective memory, something that many history books have proved unable to do. Some of the interviewees have done and archived their own research, although it has not necessarily resulted in published recollections such as those of Yang Xianhui (2002, 2003) or He Fengming (2001). This is not a marginal detail in the film, as it testifies to the importance of memory as

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an individual process related to the passing of time, as did the graffiti in the confined places of the mental asylum of ’Til Madness Do Us Part and of the textile workshops of Bitter Money. All these traces remain generally unknown and unaccounted for. The second hour of Dead Souls reinforces the relevance of small detail or objects in relation to the individual memory. It revolves around Cao Zonghua, aged 75, filmed on several occasions between 2016–2017, the Chinese doctor Qi Luji, 83, and Chen Zhonghai, 85, also interviewed in 2016. Cao is shown in the flat he shares with his wife. He searches for some books with his own notes on the camp and shows them to Wang Bing. Qi is introduced as he is working as a doctor and then the filmmaker follows him to his flat. They share a short walk and smoke a cigarette together while they get ready for the talk. These apparently marginal moments of daily life confirm Wang’s intention to share the cinematic dimension with the viewers. In the impossible task of making them participants of his own search, filmmaker Wang turns the cinematic apparatus into a tool for sharing knowledge. Furthermore, his quest for historical accuracy is also evident from the insertion of dates related to when the material was shot. These credits also help clarify the extended research process without adding any additional explanation or voice over commentary. At times, Dead Souls takes the shape of a reportage about the filmmaker’s own research on the historical facts, a sort of research diary that is then shared with the viewers. However, Wang does not aim at intertwining his own narrative and those of the witnesses, nor does he wish to provide a final thesis upon the campaign and the labour camps. Rather, he testifies to the process while presenting the mechanisms of his own cinema and the camera, exposing their potential and limitations.

The act of filming and spaces of death In his discussion of Dead Souls, François Bégaudeau defines Wang Bing a “filmeur marcheur”, literally a “walking filmmaker”, (2018: 47) since his is a moving presence in the actual space of the shooting. In fact, since West of the Tracks, Wang Bing has travelled with his camera following his social actors in their daily routines. In Three Sisters, he pushed himself to the limit, filming the three girls in the mountains until he fell ill as a consequence of the physical toll of shooting at high altitude. As noted earlier, the movements of the camera as well as its positioning in space over an extended period of time is a significant feature of Wang’s aesthetics. Thanks to these cinematic

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features, he has progressively fine-tuned his method of ‘extracting narratives from reality’ and sharing this process with the viewers. Although Dead Souls appears for the most part as a ‘static film’, based on intimate portrait-interviews, shot in a manner similar to Fengming, A Chinese Memoir with an extensive use of long static shots, Wang’s insistence on sharing spaces and knowledge by means of images remains his central concern. In the first part of the film, his own movement is left out of the shots and remains implicit in his search for witnesses across China. The first block ends at two hours and 23 minutes in the film, after all the witnesses have insisted on starvation as the major cause of death in the camps. At that point, Dead Souls cuts to a wide shot of the desert area with mountains at distance. The contrast with the small apartments where the survivors live is striking and emphasizes the relevance of this geographical space. An on-screen credit informs us that many of the victims of the Jiabiangou camp were buried in the nearby site of the Mingshui annex. This is also an intertextual reference to the fiction film The Ditch, which re-enacted the last days of a group of prisoners in the Jiabiangou camp. It is also a reference to the 2014 installation Traces, which made use of the audiovisual material shot on the actual site of the camp accompanied only by the soundscape of the desert: the wind and the sound of the Wang’s steps on the hardened soil. In line with Traces and in contrast to the fictional re-enactment of The Ditch, in Dead Souls the act of filming is openly exposed. After the wide shot of the desert, the camera tilts down to the ground to show some of the bones that the desert soil has preserved. This camera movement suggests the presence of the filmmaker on the actual site of the Mingshui camp – as promptly confirmed by a credit on screen. From here, Wang Bing starts walking around the open space with his handheld camera. The device bounces according to his own steps. Whereas filmmakers tend to use a Steadycam to provide stable shots when they walk, Wang takes the opposite choice. As he moves, so does the camera, capturing and mirroring what his own eyes notice on the ground. Human bones are spotted one after the other. At times, these human remains are together; at times, they are scattered around by the force of nature and the desert wind. For approximately 40 minutes, the camera keeps exploring the original site of the Mingshui camp, allowing the viewers to mentally insert the witnesses’ narratives in their actual space. What in The Ditch was a cinematic re-enactment, here has turned into an abstract re-enactment that takes place in the viewers’ minds with the help of documentary evidence. The space of the camp is not re-built or verbally described by a voice-over commentator, but somehow visually experienced by means of different textures. These include the texture of

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the soil that the camera captures, the texture of the bones in the hands of the filmmaker, and those found by some of the people Wang talks to in that area, as confirmed in the interviews with the farmers who settled later in that same site. As one of the farmer talks, the camera tilts down again at a skull. The soil is central, and so its materiality together with the sheer capacity of nature to preserve and to efface elements. In this second block of Dead Souls, the visual impact of the desert recalls the perception of space in The Ditch. The bright, stark natural light is recorded together with the sound of the wind and the steps of the filmmaker while he moves to talk to the people who currently inhabit the area. These herdsmen and farmers were relocated here in 1987 with their families, in order to cultivate the area. In these 40 minutes, Wang Bing engages in conversation much more than in the rest of the film. He asks questions to the farmers about the caves they found when they first settled here with their families and children. They tell him about their own discoveries of a significant quantity of bones and other items such as handcuffs that the soil had preserved, as well as the prisoners’ caves. The two farmers interviewed here mention that the area as seen at the time of filming looks different from how it was back in 1987 before they started cultivating. The state first made the soil suitable for agriculture and then relocated people for that purpose. The concomitant presence of human remnants, of farmers and kids playing in the area, as well as of that of the caves where prisoners had died, reinforces the distancing effect that was first perceptible in The Ditch and testifies to the relevance of space in all of Wang’s works.39 The first block of individual narratives finds its collective dimension in this relevant section on the actual space of the camp. Wang’s movement across the space, his own investigation of the camp’s traces, and the collective movement converge in a sequence shot in 2005. Some of the survivors arranged a simple commemorative burial of the many who died. As they burn offerings to the dead, they remark that if they are still alive it is thanks to those who died, thus reinforcing Confucian values and the traditional connection between life and death. Among these people, we find Cao Zonghua – seen in the first block during his interview in 2016, 11 years after the ceremony was held. This second segment of the film dealing with the materiality of the space ends at three hours into the film with a comment from one of the survivors: there were no people but ‘living dead’ walking in the camp area at the time of the Anti-Rightist campaign. Once again, the ghostly world first represented in The Ditch is openly evoked. 39 Veg (2012) and Pollacchi (2012) both referred to this distancing effect in The Ditch.

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The last shot of this segment is a tracking shot towards a fracture in the hardened desert soil, the entrance of one of the caves. After this segment, the film provides another set of interviews with a similar structure to the first block. Repetition is crucial in Wang’s film but it is always a repetition with variations, as each character contributes different details to the collective account. The complexity that Wang Bing achieved with Dead Souls confirms the evolution of his filmmaking and his consistent effort to make cinema a meaningful tool to address the present while connecting it to the past. It is worth noting the many different layers at which Dead Souls talks to the viewers. At a primary level, the film is a document of today’s China as it bears witness to the farmers-herdsmen living on the former site of Mingshui at the time of the shooting. It also testifies to the actual landscape, made suitable for agriculture by the state before 1987. At a second level, this remark evokes the significant impact of Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies of the 1980s, which laid the basis of contemporary China’s economic success, but also involved the relocation of workers and farmers from different areas of the country, a phenomenon replicated many times in recent Chinese history. At a third level, the presence of human bones in the same space brings the viewer back to what the witnesses have narrated in the first two hours of the film and to Wang Bing’s previous work on the Anti-Rightist campaign. Regardless of the viewers’ knowledge of China’s modern and recent history, all these layers and historical phases converge in this central block of narratives making it a crucial segment in the officially unaccounted history of China.

Wang Bing’s Dead Souls and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah The importance of using the present to speak to the past, which Wang approached as early as in the preparation of The Ditch, has come to full flower with Dead Souls. His ability to testify to and to share people’s daily life over time, functions as a unique entry point not only to their individual present or to their personal memories, but also to the past and the collective dimensions they have experienced. This marks one of the most significant and distinctive traits of Wang’s cinema and distinguishes it from other works that have dealt with the impact of authoritarian regimes. A set of filmmakers have been grouped together within the so-called cinema of testimony for their oral history film projects, namely, the French Claude Lanzmann with his Shoah, the Cambodian Rithy Panh with his many works

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on the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime, and the Chilean Patricio Guzmán with his Nostalgia for the Light (Nostalgia de la Luz, 2010) on the impact of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Wang Bing has occasionally mentioned Lanzmann’s Shoah as a reference for his work with witnesses and labour camps. In this monumental documentary, Lanzmann interviews witnesses, survivors, and perpetrators of the concentration camps in Poland. 40 However, Wang has often referred to this work as a cinema that is close to the written work of history and literature. His intention from the start of his project on the labour camps was to go beyond a collection of interviews and transcend Lanzmann’s work in two ways, first by making a film for and about the present rather than just about the past and, secondly, by making cinema a tool that could surpass the written language. A comparison between these two works has been suggested several times since the first presentation of Dead Souls, prompted by the proximities of their basic structure in which the main material is a collection of testimonies and the result a work of extended duration. The 566-minute-long Shoah premiered in New York in October 1985 after eleven years of research and shooting across many different countries. The 507-minute-long Dead Souls is also a collection of interviews collected all over China in the two periods of 2005 and 2016–2017. Despite their similarities, these two films differ significantly. Firstly, from the very start of the project, Wang Bing was dealing with a sensitive page in Chinese history that was left unaccounted in the official historical narrative. Most of the facts related to the AntiRightist campaign have not yet been reported in their entirety, including the numbers of victims, and thus the campaign’s tragic impact on people’s lives. Secondly, Lanzmann and Wang Bing adopt a different position and perspective towards the subject, the space, and the witnesses. Although the actual space of the camps and the witnesses’ voices are equally relevant elements in Wang Bing’s work, witnesses and spaces are kept in separate blocks. Most witnesses are mainly shown in their actual living spaces and when Wang visits the site of the camp, the segment is edited as a separate segment from the survivor’s recollections to minimise the filmmaker’s presence in the film. By contrast, in Lanzmann’s Shoah, the filmmaker and the witness often talk while visiting the spaces of the atrocities so that they are seen together in these locations while the camera filming them remains invisible. Consequently, his interviews appear more staged whereas Wang’s conversations 40 For Lanzmann’s discussion on his work Shoah see Lanzmann et al.(1991).

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with witnesses are more informal, meander through different subjects and deal with their daily lives. Furthermore, in Wang’s work, the organization of the film and its separate segments mark the distance between the various locations, which is pinpointed in the film by simple credits stating the name, the age, and the city of the interviewees. This editing engages the viewer in an active role. Although Wang’s investigation highlights the relevance of filmmaking in the process of composing a visual archive of memories, the viewers are invited to create their own geography of the survivors and to form their own narrative about the facts. Historical facts can be better understood through this epistemological process – activated thanks to the exploration of spaces for an extensive period of time –while, at the same time, the cinematic apparatus is exposed and revealed. Yet, Wang is not leading the film, but he appears only when necessary to either explore the space or ease certain interviews. This is the case at the end of the film when he interviews the only Communist cadre. As Wang explained, he decided to be filmed in order to put this former cadre more at ease while speaking, given that he was the only one of the guards and cadres who agreed to be interviewed. Finally, Lanzmann’s work takes the oral history project as its central concern thus parallelling existing accounts of the Holocaust. In Wang’s Dead Souls the interplay between the present and the past is central. This concern for the tight connection between history and the present is distinctive of Wang’s cinema. It also evokes how the past is still imbued in the present and, conversely, how the present is the result of the previous decades. Workers, teachers, ordinary people have remained marginal in Chinese historical narratives as they are marginal in the current political discourses. As Joseph Parrott noted in his review, “[t]he film is a powerful artistic journey through an inhuman experience” (2020: 133). Thus, although both filmmakers revive and re-open the discussion on historical atrocities and human sufferings caused by power structures, Wang Bing himself has noticed a significant divergence, primarily in the concept of the two films. While Lanzmann’s Shoah offers a thesis to viewers by means of editing and intertwined stories, in Dead Souls each witness defines his or her own narrative by means of their individual accounts. Wang Bing defined the configuration of the film on the basis of what each witness was not only telling but also experiencing in his or her present. When he organized the editing of the interviews, he decided to give each interviewee approximately 15–20 minutes with minimal cuts and postproduction interventions. As he also noted, Lanzmann could not have the same number of witnesses as he had, due to the fact that they were more

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dispersed. However, Wang decided not to intertwine their accounts, in order to let them speak more freely and avoid framing them in a predefined film structure or in a pre-established thesis.

References Bâ, Saër Maty (2011) ‘Gathering Dust in the Wind: Memory and the ‘Real’ in Rithy Panh’s S21’ in Dekalog4. On East Asian Filmmakers, Brighton: Wallflower Press, 112–139. Bazin, André ([1958] 1967) ‘Ontologie de l’image photographique’/‘The ontology of the photographic image’, Qu’est-ce que le cinema?/What Is Cinema? (trans. Hugh Gray), vol. I, Paris/Berkeley, CA: Éditions du Cerf/University of California Press, 9–16. Bégaudeau, François (2004) ‘Après le siècle, en marche’, Cahiers du Cinéma, June 2004, n°591. — (2018) ‘Wang le dingue’, Transfuge, 123, November 2018, 46–51. Brunetta, Gian Piero ([1970] 1986) Forma e parola nel cinema/Inside the Gaze, Padua/ Bloomington, IN: Liviana/Indiana University Press. — (ed.) (2006) Dizionario dei registi del cinema mondiale/Dictionary of world cinema directors, vol. 3, P–Z, Torino: Einaudi, 26–31. Bruno, Giuliana (1991) ‘Heresies: The body of Pasolini’s Semiotics’, Cinema Journal, 30:3, 29–42. Cai, Shenshen (2016) ‘The Chronicles of Jiabiangou (Jiabiangou jishi): An Analysis of Contemporary Chinese Reportage Literature Using the Theory of Totalitarianism and Power’, Modern China Studies, 23:1, 121–134. Comolli, Jean-Louis ([1977] 1978) ‘Historical Fiction: A Body too much’, Screen, 19:2, 41–53. (First published as ‘Un corps en trop’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 278, July) De Baeque, Antoine (2018) ‘Il est difficile dans ces camps de distinguer les victimes des bourreaux’, Transfuge, 123, November, 40–45. Debord, Guy ([1967] 1994) La Société du spectacle/The Society of the Spectacle (trans. D. Nicholson-Smith), Paris/New York: Buchet-Chastel/Zone Books. Gailleurd, Céline (2008) ‘L’enfer du divertissement. La Ricotta au regard de La Dialectique de la Raison’, Europe, 86, 947 (special issue on Pasolini), 110–119. Grønstad, Asbjørn (2011) Screening the Unwatchable. Spaces of Negation in PostMillennial Art Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Harvey, David (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism. Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, London: Verso. Harvard Film Archive (2010) ‘The Epic and the Everyday – The f ilms of Wang Bing’, http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/f ilms/2010octdec/wang.html [accessed 15 August 2011].

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He Fengming (2001) Jingli. Wo de 1957 nian [My experience of 1957], Lanzhou: Dunhuang Wenyi. Koehler, Robert (2007) ‘Ghost Stories: Wang Bing’s Startling New Cinema’, Cinemascope, 31, http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs31/int_koehler_wangbing.html [accessed 15 August 2011]. Lanzmann, Claude, Cathy Caruth, and David Rodowick (1991) ‘The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening with Claude Lanzmann’ American Imago, 48: 4, 473–495, www.jstor.org/stable/26303924 [accessed 5 April 2020]. Lounas, Thierry (2004) ‘Notas sobre Onde Jaz o teu sorriso?’ [Notes on Where does your hidden smile lie?], Onde Jaz o teu sorriso? Lisbon: Assìrio & Alvim. Moody, Luke (2013) ‘Act Normal: Hybrid Tendencies in Documentary Film’, ­1 1polaroids. Journal of Film, Sound & Art, https://11polaroids.wordpress. com/2013/07/02/act-normal-hybrid-tendencies-in-documentary-film/ [accessed 12 May 2018]. Neyrat, Cyril (2010) Pedro Costa’s Fontainhas Trilogy: Rooms for the Living and the Dead, http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1425-pedro-costas-fontainhastrilogy-rooms-for-the-living-and-the-dead [accessed 30 November 2011]. Nichols, Bill (2001) Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Niogret, Hubert (2004) ‘Entretien avec Wang Bing, regarder le peuple, la vie’, Positif 520, June. Pasolini, Pierpaolo ([1967] 1980) ‘Osservazioni sul piano-sequenza’/ ‘Observations on the long take’ (trans. Norman MacAfee, Craig Owen), October, 13, 3–6, http:// www.jstor.org/stable/3397696 [accessed 15 August 2011] (Originally published in Empirismo Eretico/Heretical Empiricism, Washington/Milano: Garzanti/New Academia Publishing 1972/2005). Parrott, R. Joseph (2020) ‘Review: Dead Souls, by Wang Bing’, Pacific Historical Review, 89:1, 132–133. Pollacchi, Elena (2012) ‘Wang Bing’s The Ditch: Spaces of History between Documentary and Fiction’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6: 2, pp. 189–202 [doi: 10.1386/ jcc.6.2.189_1. July 2012]. Qian Liqun (2007), Jujue yiwang: ‘1957 nian xue’ yanjiu biji/Refusal to forget: notes for ‘1957 studies, Tianjin: Tianjin University Press. Rancière, Jacques ([2008] 2009) Le spectateur émancipé/The Emancipated Spectator (trans. G. Elliott), Paris/London: La fabrique éditions/Verso. — (2009) ‘The politics of Pedro Costa’, http://www.abril-filmes.pt/press/PedroCosta-TATE-MODERN-programme.pdf [accessed 30 October 2011]. — (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (trans. Steven Corcoran), London and New York: Continuum.

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Rosen, Philip (2001) Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sorlin, Pierre (1980) The Film in History: Restaging the Past, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Veg, Sebastian (2012) ‘The limits of Representation: Wang Bing’s Labour Camp Films’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 6: 2. — (2014) ‘Testimony, History and Ethics: From the Memory of Jiabiangou Prison Camp to a Reappraisal of the Anti-Rightist Movement in Present-Day China’, The China Quarterly, 218, 514-539 [doi:10.1017/S0305741014000368]. — (2018) ‘Wang Bing’s Dead Souls and the Memory of Prison Camp survivors’. Commentary, https://vegsebastian.wordpress.com/2018/11/25/wang-bings-deadsouls-and-the-memory-of-prison-camp-survivors/ [accessed 28 March 2020]. Wang Bing (2008) ‘Interview by Marianne Alphant and Roger Rotmann’ (December 2008) https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8h6ob [accessed 12 May 2018]. — (2012) ‘Past in the Present’ (trans. Cindy Carter), Sabzian, 5.12.2018, https:// sabzian.be/article/past-in-the-present [accessed 20 February 2020]. Yang Xianhui (2002) Jiabiangou jishi [Chronicles of Jiabiangou], Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe. — (2003) Gaobie Jiabiangou [Farewell to Jiabiangou], Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe. Zhao, Suisheng (2016) ‘Xi Jinping’s Maoist Revival’,  Journal of Democracy 27, 3, 83–97.

5.

Collective Spaces – Individual Narratives Abstract This chapter testifies to Wang’s concern for how individuals came to be exposed to social inequalities as the welfare system declined over the course of China’s transformation. After Fengming, A Chinese Memoir focusing on a first-person recollection of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Wang has continued looking at individual stories as a way to zoom in on certain processes. These intimate portraits of men and women by means of the camera bring to the fore the relationship between collective spaces and individual narratives. They also help introduce the diversity of Wang’s work as some of them were first presented in art exhibition spaces together with video installations and photographic series. Keywords: Documentary cinema, Post-socialist China, Witnessing, Subaltern, Marginal spaces, Exhibition practices, Wang Bing

While his extraordinary epic, West of the Tracks, traced the destruction of a city’s industrial zone and the forced relocation of thousands of residents, new pic is scaled in opposite fashion–intimate, minimalist, nearly private, as former journalist and teacher He Fengming describes in vividly painful detail how her life in the revolution turned into a 30-year nightmare. ‒ Robert Kohler (2007) A first impression offers a sense of community and cooperation; it’s only later when the women get talking amongst themselves that we hear about individual grudges and complaints. And then, more stories, and for all the horror, tears are surprisingly few. ‒ David Hudson (2016), Daily | Berlinale 2016 Diary #5 on Ta’ang

Pollacchi, E., Wang Bing’s Filmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses, and Marginal Spaces. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463721837_ch05

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In a country that celebrated the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic under the Communist Party government in 2019, collective spaces, or even just the concept of a ‘collective’ narrative, are inevitably strongly rooted in people’s minds. Although strictly linked to socialist ideology, in China the idea of the collective has undergone the same transformation that society has experienced in the last two decades under the drive of reform policies. Moreover, such a concept does not necessarily correspond to the idea of the ‘public sphere’, which is frequently associated with ‘an arena of political deliberation and participation’ within the functioning of democratic governance, in David Harvey’s words (2013: 17). As discussed in the previous chapter, the ‘collective’ narrative of China has also produced dystopian visions of a unif ied country in support of specif ic political views, often with tragic and violent results, as in the Red China of the Maoist decades. This was the case with the Anti-Rightist campaign and also that of the Cultural Revolution, the latter now largely regarded as a ‘mistake’. Political campaigns and political control apart, the idea of a ‘collective subject’ has been put into practice in the organization of Chinese daily life since 1949.1 Villages, communities, work groups and work units, state enterprises, collective living units were conceived as a way to form the collective subject under state guidance towards the construction of the new society. Socialism was a way to educate the masses and also to shape their everyday life. With the introduction of Deng Xiaoping’s reform policies in the late 1970s, attention has progressively shifted from the ‘collective’ to the ‘individual’, as individual initiative has been encouraged by and through Xi Jinping’s ‘China Dream’. Since Deng’s period in power, the role of the individual has become prominent and collective spaces, working structures as well as the collective way of life of the previous decades, have signif icantly changed. The closing of state factories has paved the way for private entrepreneurship, as seen in Wang Bing’s trajectory from West of the Tracks to Bitter Money. The pursuit of individual goals or simply the need to support oneself and one’s family has brought about internal migration flows and the loosening of traditional family structures, as seen in Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, and Bitter Money. Yet, all these large social narratives, which have unfolded against the backdrop of China’s transformation, can equally be read as a rollback of the socialist welfare system towards a post-socialist system open to 1 The roots of the collective subject go back to the Yan’an period, the major Communist base between 1935 and 1948. See Apter and Saich (1994).

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a neoliberal economy focused on the individual. In this shift, what was once the socialist collective space becomes empty, whereas individual narratives become revealing. This chapter discusses Wang’s more mature works. Since the mid-2010s, his increased confidence has allowed him to become more and prolific and to diversify his output. If the works undertaken or completed around 2015–2016 often seem driven by the urgent need to film certain spaces and thus, in various ways, meet his own desire to better understand what was happening in his country and record its fast-paced change, his later works appear more reflexive and thoughtful. Wang has adapted his work to the pace of the phenomena he intended to film. He never decided in advance how long a project would take, starting from the dismissal of the Tiexi district workers, which took three years of shooting between 1999 and 2002, to the last few days in the life of Fang Xiuying, shot between 2015 and 2016; rather, the events have established the time and the pace of his cinema. In his later works, Wang’s position has evolved from that of a close observer interested in understanding and in sharing this understanding with viewers. Instead, through the interplay between individual narratives and collective stories, he has reached the position of an intellectual and artist approaching the complex issues from multiple angles. This evolving approach has also brought his filmmaking closer to art practices and helped establish his name not only among the most renowned contemporary filmmakers, but also among contemporary artists. In this chapter, I aim to shed light on a set of works of diverse duration and format – some of them commissioned by art institutions and screened at art exhibition spaces – in which Wang Bing has focused on the interplay between the individual and collective. These works are often related to the larger narratives and collective issues that Wang Bing has explored elsewhere. I analyse these individual narratives both in relation to the filmmaker’s career and also in the ways they reinvoke some of the collective spaces that Wang has approached in other films. Here, I suggest that his works further elaborate certain issues and marginal spaces while, at the same time, speak to each other and to the viewers. Furthermore, these individual portraits of men and women, shot in their living spaces across China and even abroad, scale down the epic dimension of Wang’s cinema. They offer more intimate perspectives through which space, in all its many articulations, is seen from a personal angle yet is able to evoke the larger social, historical, collective narrative. As Nadin Mai has noted in relation to Man With No Name, these individual narratives can be read as bookmarks or pauses in the collective flow of Wang Bing’s cinema. They offer an alternative

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entry point and shed some light on issues that Wang has more extensively explored elsewhere (2018). This is the case of the individual narrative of Fengming, A Chinese Memoir in relation to the feature film The Ditch together and the documentary Dead Souls, as discussed in the previous chapter. In that case, the two opposite dimensions – the individual witness and the collective horror of the labour camps – relate to each other in such a way so as to offer a plurality of voices and perspectives on the Anti-Rightist campaign. As Kohler noted in his review, “Fengming’s testimony – deeply personal and subjective from start to finish and spanning the key decades during Mao’s era – can be read as a Chinese oral history equivalent of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago” (2007). Storytelling – for long segments in real time – is as crucial as the positioning of the camera, which aimed to absorb the viewers into Fengming’s personal recollection of a life of injustice. When The Ditch was presented two years later at the Venice film festival and Dead Souls in Cannes in 2018, Fengming’s narrative constituted a more intimate reference for both films and offers an individual entry point to the entire tragedy of the Jiabiangou labour camp. With reference to the Anti-Rightist campaign and in addition to the first-person account of He Fengming, in the winter of 2018 Wang presented Beauty Lives in Freedom. This work – which can be seen as a diptych with Fengming, A Chinese Memoir – was shot in the United States and screened mainly in art galleries. In it, Wang presents his encounter and extensive conversation with Gao Ertai, a philosopher, calligrapher, and artist who experienced a life of persecution as an intellectual from the late 1950s to 1989, when he left China. Beauty Lives in Freedom is the last work discussed in this chapter, which investigates such individual narratives in chronological order since they parallel Wang’s journey across China. The first one is the 2009 documentary Man With No Name, which is also connected to the collective of the Anti-Rightist campaign, although only in terms of its location. In fact, this individual portrait of struggle was shot in the Gobi desert close to the location chosen for The Ditch. When Wang Bing moved towards the south-western and southern regions for Three Sisters and Bitter Money, he met the subjects that became the focus respectively of Father and Sons and Mrs Fang. Both works tackle the impact of China’s transition towards a market economy on the family space, which for centuries has been the core structure of Chinese society. Moreover, while they relate to the same disintegration of traditional family structures as the larger documentary projects Three Sisters and Bitter Money, they provide more intimate and touching portraits.

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Two other works can be fruitfully considered within this dialogical framework between individual narrative and collective spaces. Mi Niang is a work-in-progress that was presented as part of Wang Bing’s retrospective at the Royal Belgian Film Archive in Brussels in October 2014 and focuses on a Laotian woman at the Chinese border. Ta’ang offers a larger picture of a group of women from the Ta’ang ethnic minority escaping a war zone and was screened at the Forum Section of the Berlin Film Festival in 2016. It shows the Ta’ang, a Mon-Khmer ethnic minority on the border between China and Myanmar, as they seek shelter from armed clashes in their region. These works expand on Wang’s exploration of border regions and marginal groups by looking at non-Han minorities and further testify to the importance of individual stories in relation to larger collective narratives and spaces. They also show the filmmaker’s concern for humanity conceived not only as a social entity but also, if not primarily, as the sum of individual life experiences. Fengming, A Chinese Memoir is the pivotal f irst of these individual perspectives, which enrich and diversify the range of Wang’s cinema, not only by offering different entry points to certain issues or past events that continue to reverberate in the present, but also by providing visible evidence of how these issues are lived and experienced by individuals – men, women, children – at all different latitudes regardless of country, culture, or ethnicity. Furthermore, individual stories allow us to focus on a series of human gestures, usually simple actions such as eating, drinking, sleeping, or feeding children, which might escape from larger narratives but which constitute the basis, although still not easily granted, for large parts of the world’s population. In line with Wang’s approach to filmmaking, these works focusing on individuals tend to take the structure of narrative films. Thanks to Wang’s growing confidence in the potential of documentary material, these works have travelled across the globe and across the diverse screening spaces of the film festival and art exhibition circuits. However, despite the fact that some of these works were commissioned by art institutions, and have varying lengths or remain works-in-progress, they should by no means be considered as ‘minor works’. They reinforce Wang’s cinema as a way to give voice to the subaltern, to real people and real stories. They have also pushed the boundaries of film exhibition spaces at a time when the global distribution systems offers little or no space for non-commercial films. In fact, Wang’s more recent works have consistently challenged the traditional theatrical screening format, either through their non-conventional duration or their aesthetic features, and frequently better fit art exhibition spaces, as discussed in the final chapter.

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Man With No Name: Individual spaces of self-isolation After Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, the first work revolving around a single person was Man With No Name, which was completed in 2009 on the occasion of Wang’s first solo exhibition at the Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. Produced with the support of the Paris-based art gallery, it presents the life of a man who lives alone in an extremely harsh desert area. Wang Bing first met this man in 2006 while he was preparing the shooting of The Ditch. He filmed him on several occasions during the years 2006–2009 and the French gallery enabled him to complete the project. Shot in the barren landscape at the edge of the Gobi desert, it focuses on a single hermit-like character who lives in a cave among the rocks and the ruins of an abandoned village. With no dialogue and just the natural sounds of the man’s movements and the natural elements, the 97-minute film, made entirely of documentary material, is structured as a narrative of struggle. After the gallery presentation, the work circulated both in art exhibition spaces and film festivals although the absence of dialogue often constitutes a challenge for theatrical and festival screenings. The film opens with a static distant shot of the snow-covered barren landscape in which a small house is visible against the ruins of a village wall. Then, a close-up from above shows the head of a man peering out above some rags. The viewers soon understand that he is coming out of a hole between rocks. Nothing more is seen of the nearby house, most likely closed or abandoned. In the following shot, the camera follows the man from a distance as he carries a heavy bundle of rags on his shoulders. As he walks across this desolate open space, the camera gets closer to him and finally shows his darkened face and worn-out clothes. What follows next shows the character performing his daily tasks, some of which seem to have no specific purpose, such as covering or digging holes in the desert earth. Other tasks becomes more meaningful throughout the film: the first views of him ploughing the arid, hardened soil make him seem to be acting like a mad man, but then we understand when the hermit is seen picking the vegetables he has grown. Most of the tasks he engages with are basic yet essential actions, such as collecting small pieces of wood in order to light the fire for cooking his scarce meals. We watch him eating, cooking again, going in and out of the cave in order to fetch water or grow some vegetables. In these shots, apparently with no special content, every detail is in focus and enhances the actions’ meaning. Space is as crucial here as it was in The Ditch, made when Wang’s main cinematic concern was to represent the struggle for survival of

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those who were forced to live in the labour camps in the Gobi desert. Against this extreme space, each one of the hermit’s basic actions turns into a challenge. Yet, there is no coercion. The man has taken up the challenge of living alone in a space that, despite its hostile nature, has turned into his shelter. In order to get in or out of the cave he lives in, the man must squeeze between the big rocks. Once inside, he cooks his meal, smokes cigarettes, stores the few things he has. With The Ditch and He Fengming’s recollections in mind, this living space recalls the caves where the prisoners were taken and lived in the labour camps. These f ilms were all shot against the same natural space, which served as a forced and confined collective space for the labour camp prisoners while providing an individual living space for the hermit in Man With No Name. This man’s silent narrative provides a complete contrast with He’s fluent expression, yet both individual characters tell their life story. As noted earlier, in Wang’s cinema the narrative is established by the unfolding of real facts or by real people and not established a priori. In the case of He Fengming, the flow of her speech predominated and evoked the space and the tragedy of her own experience of the Anti-Rightist campaign. This ‘man with no name’ does not utter a word, yet the flow of his daily routines shapes the film. Here, Wang Bing patiently uses the camera as a way of listening, and paying attention and respect to the subject. In both cases, the social actors’ unfolding narratives are shaped by their own actual lives. The f ilmmaker’s camera shares and records their present, choosing the diverse degree of proximity for every shot and each of them according to their own nature, a prosecuted woman who has been able to return to society and a man who has withdrawn from it. Not even the changes in light from day to night, or of the seasons – from the snowy landscape of the opening to the milder climate during which he grows a few green vegetables – seem to affect the man’s routine. Why has he retired from the world? Was that his own choice? And who is he? He is a ‘man with no name’ and the film offers no answer to any of these questions. As Nadin Mai noted, “[a]nonymity and intimacy – these two characteristics work hand in hand in Wang Bing’s Man With No Name, which is a mere glimpse of the life of a hermit” (2018). Yet, the longer these images are observed the closer they bring the man to the viewers, making him another epic figure, not far from those of the little girls on the Yunnan mountains that Wang Bing would take as the focus of his work Three Sisters, which he started work on right after the Paris retrospective. Although long shots are less frequent in Man With No Name than in other works – with the exception of a long shot showing him preparing a meal one hour into

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the film – duration and repetition remain essential in order to deliver a powerful viewing experience. In fact, as in all of Wang’s films, time is the crucial element. Time allows the viewers to focus on the hermit’s living space, indoor or outdoor, and get accustomed to his way of living. Time is also crucial to understanding how the passing of time in his life certainly has another meaning to that of most people in today’s China, and elsewhere. Consumer societies, fast-paced cities, social struggles, and even family bonds are erased from this portrayal of solitude. Yet, there is no judgement or emotional engagement in Wang’s cinema. The viewers are encouraged to make their own considerations and decide how to respond to the images. It is worth noting that Wang used material from Man With No Name for his one-minute contribution to the project ‘Venice 70 Future Reloaded’ of the Venice Film Festival. For this project, in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the event, seventy directors from all over the world were invited to make a short film with a length between 60 and 90 seconds and no specific assigned topic. In Wang’s short, the old man is seen ploughing a small piece of land, cooking a simple meal, eating, smoking a cigarette, and going out into the fields again. Nothing is more mundane than this set of activities depicted in six shots, but with them, the filmmaker brings to the surface what is usually unseen in China, in most of today’s society, and in cinema as well. The universality of such images, and their timeless connotations, suggest a broader space which exceeds geographical and cultural specificities. As in the case of Wang’s later pieces Three Sisters and Alone, the two ‘versions’ of the same material – the 97-minute documentary Man With No Name and the 90-second short film – serve different functions. They also point to the importance of the editing in encouraging the viewers towards alternative readings. Here, the shorter version does not allow the viewers to become familiar with the man and his own living space but makes his condition even more universal; without knowing anything about this man, he turns into the epitome of poverty and human resistance to a hostile environment. However when looking at this man in the longer version with the film’s insistence on the physical struggle in these extreme living conditions, a further question emerges: How much hardship can human beings endure? This seems to be the underlying issue that informs Wang’s first decade of filmmaking. His works voice some critical statements about the contradictions of uneven development that can be found in today’s China, and the world. In addition, they also provide a stark contrast between the glossy images of city life and the hidden existence of anonymous individuals struggling for their living in extreme poverty.

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Father and Sons: Individual spaces and deteriorating family structures Since 2009, Wang Bing has more frequently presented his work in art exhibition spaces thanks also to the support of galleries and museums which have commissioned new works. The year 2014 was particularly fruitful for exhibitions and presentation of new works. At the exhibition Wang Bing et Jaime Rosales. Le geste humain (Wang Bing and Jaime Rosales. The human gesture, 14 April–26 May 2014) staged as part of the series Cinéastes en correspondence (Filmmakers in correspondence) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Wang Bing presented the 87-minute-long documentary Father and Sons together with three photographic series. These series were related to the material and spaces shot in Gansu such as Traces and Man With No Name, and to some unseen material shot in Yunnan at the time of Three Sisters, which took the shape and the title of Father and Sons. Both the film and the photographic series feature a father with his two teenage sons living in a tiny room with no window in a suburb overlooking a newly developed residential area. No other location is seen apart from two brief shots showing the outside the room. Three simple credits at the end of the documentary provide some information on the geographical location, the village of Fumin in Yunnan province where workers in small factories ground stone into powder. The credits also report that Cai Shunhua, the father, left his village of Qiaojia in search of a job ten years earlier and his two sons reached him in 2010. The last credit notes that the shooting took place in February 2014 but had to stop after the film crew received threats from Cai’s boss. Such circumstances are relevant as the work seems to be more of a workin-progress than a fully finished work while, at the same time, reinforcing the idea that Wang Bing has always looked for real-life situations as they happen. As Michael Guarneri has noted, “contrary to the ‘usual’ Wang documentary film, we are locked out of the inner world of the protagonists […] In spite of the sense of closure achieved through a well-executed ‘24 hours in the life of…’ montage, the feeling is that we are watching some rushes for a film-to-be” (2015). As with other works, Wang interrupted his journey across China when he happened to find a situation he considered relevant. And, as on previous occasions, Father and Sons originates from a chance encounter. The teenage boys Cai Yonggao and Cai Yongjin were also part of the group of left-behind children Wang Bing had the chance to observe during the shooting of Three Sisters on the Yunnan mountains. Just like the three girls, they were living mainly by themselves as their father Cai Shunhua was away looking for work

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and their mother had abandoned the family. When he started shooting in February 2014, the brothers – at the time fifteen and thirteen years old – had already moved with their father to a cramped hut in the stone grinding factory where he worked and lived. As Wang has often clarified in interviews, he had only been shooting for a few days when he started receiving threats from the factory boss and filming stopped. This reduced shooting time forced the filmmaker to edit a set of static shots with very little variation, limited to the change in the natural lighting and with very few options for the camera positions due to size of the room. Although this method was used for Fengming, A Chinese Memoir, here none of the characters talk and the only perceivable sound is the incessant noise of the TV. The absence of dialogue and the frontally shot one-location make the work more suitable for art exhibition spaces than for theatrical screenings. In fact, Wang decided to edit the work specifically for the Pompidou exhibition with the production support of the Paris-Beijing Art Gallery. The father, Cai Shunhua, is presumably out to work most of the time. We see him in the opening shot of Father and Sons in the shape of a black shadow – a sort of impressionist Murnau reminiscence – projected on the wall behind the bed on which his son is lying. He enters the room on only a few occasions to switch off the TV and order his sons to sleep. When he moves in the small room, his body covers the camera. In fact, in this minimal space, it is almost impossible to change the camera angle. Most of the time the camera is placed at the entrance of the room, frontally filming the bed, which serves as the only space where all the characters can sit and lie down. A rusty door on the right-hand side of the frame reinforces the perception of the tiny space where the family lives with a dog and her two puppies. In such cramped living conditions, the TV set and the mobile phone, which is always in the hands of the boys, are the only two items that seem to matter to the teenagers, who hardly speak to each other, although in the film they mainly appear one at a time. The only two shots in which the camera exits the room are at the beginning and at the end of the film showing, respectively, the father looking at the newly developed apartment blocks and a night scene of the same residential area. Clearly, the living conditions of the Cai family are in stark contrast with these newly built residential blocks testifying to China’s rapid transformation and economic growth. Cai Shunhua’s work in the stone grinding factory, like that of the workers in most of Wang’s films, has probably contributed to the expansion of Chinese real estate, which is also part of the China Dream, but they will never benefit from it. Wang’s statement of how Cai’s boss brought the shooting to a halt is a further confirmation that those who work and

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live at the lower levels of the Chinese economy have no voice and are even more invisible than the workers of West of the Tracks who were still part and parcel of the socialist system. As Jeanne Boden has argued in her cogent analysis of Father and Sons, this is a “document representing a changed China and its consequences on the individual.” In line with her reading, the interplay between the collective and the individual dimension testifies to the transition from the socialist to the post-socialist system. The promises of the socialist utopia with Mao Zedong as the overarching father-like figure have given way to a post-socialist society in which “the individual father regained his position, now confronted with the daily reality where socialist ideals and dreams of a common goal are shattered” (2015: 178–179). In fact, during the Maoist decades, the family was incorporated in the dream-like vision of the collective socialist family where every member would be looked after by the caring state. The impact of reform policies and economic transformation on family structures turned into the opposite. Family ties were cut for economic reasons and the state welfare system was progressively dismantled, with the result that those in need of care and health support could not afford the rising costs for private providers. In this transition, as the younger generation started leaving their native areas in search of work, children and the elderly members were left alone just at those stages in life when they needed more care. At the same time, the issue of the residence certificate (hukou) impacted a significant segment of the population as growing numbers of migrant workers and their children were excluded from any support including healthcare and education because their residence certificate was based elsewhere.2

Mi Niang and Ta’ang: Spaces of refuge and escape In 2014, in addition to the exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, a full retrospective of Wang Bing’s work was held at the Royal Belgian Film Archive (20 October–30 November 2014). The two institutions collaborated on the organization and promotion of these events, and displayed some new works. Father and Sons and the photographic series constituted Wang’s contribution for the Centre Pompidou; the same works together with a new documentary project entitled Mi Niang featured in Brussels. Mi Niang was screened only once, as a work-in-progress, on the occasion of Wang’s masterclass at the 2 For an analysis of the hukou system and its impact on health in rural and urban China see Song (2019).

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Royal Belgian Film Archive on 23 October 2014, and it has not been screened since.3 This unfinished work and the later documentary Ta’ang are significant as projects dealing with non-Han minorities at the south-western Chinese borders. They highlight Wang exploration of the ethnic subaltern, a topic that he has not continued to develop but which constituted an expansion of his investigation on migration. The individual story of Mi Niang, a young woman from Laos who leaves her village to settle with a Chinese man across the border, and the broader perspective of the Ta’ang women – a Burmese minority escaping their territories to reach a no-man’s land – reconnect to Wang’s focus on those who have no voice in today’s society. Together with Three Sisters, they also articulate an implicit gender discourse as all the central figures in these works are female characters. From the left-behind sisters in Yunnan to Mi Niang, and ultimately to the group of women escaping war in Ta’ang, they all offer narratives of resistance which is also gendered as they have to sustain themselves in spite of absent fathers (Three Sisters), authoritarian husbands (Mi Niang), or male military power (Ta’ang). These projects were shot between 2011 and 2015 and relate to Wang’s work in Yunnan and Sichuan. During the years in which he filmed Three Sisters and ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Wang was able to travel extensively in the border regions and started filming these minority groups who had attracted his attention during his journey. However, he was unable to completely finish either Mi Niang or Ta’ang, partly because of the shooting conditions, the limited time and budget, and also because of the difficulty he had in understanding these ethnic groups’ languages. As he has noted in interviews, at the time he was frequently filming situations and places without knowing whether they would become a full narrative or not. In the case of Mi Niang, he felt that the shot material was not sufficient to deliver a complete work and that is why it remains as a work-in-progress and it rarely features in Wang Bing’s filmography. Mi Niang was filmed on few occasions in September 2014. The filmmaker had visited the border areas between China, Laos, and Myanmar on several occasions prior to the shooting in order to understand the social groups and the ongoing situations in those territories. The location was one of 3 I was the moderator for the masterclass and had the chance to work closely with the director of the Royal Belgian Film Archive Nicola Mazzanti on the organization of the full retrospective. Mi Niang was supposed to be completed after the retrospective but until now it remains as a work-in-progress. Information on the making of this work were collected on that occasion.

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the so-called cross-border rubber villages in the Chinese Xishuangbanna Autonomous Area, where rubber farmers have forged their economic success growing rubber trees on the land of relatives and friends in neighbouring Laos. This cross-border rubber cultivation implies a complex interplay of ethnic and regional issues related to expansion and modernization of rubber cultivation (Sturgeon 2013: 70). Due to production and time constraints, Wang’s f ilm hints at such issues yet it does not succeed in providing a thorough observation. Credits indicate that the eponymous Mi Niang is a 23-year-old woman from Laos who was born at the border region with China. Like many other women and young girls from that area, she was sold to a Chinese man, Dongda, who works at the rubber plantations. A further on-screen credit states that Dongda bought her for the price of 500 yuan. His wife had died leaving him with two children. With no property of his own, he could rely only on contract work from the plantation owners, thus representing another layer of exploited workers in marginal areas, which are rarely reported on. Mi Niang is mostly seen in the plantations where they collect rubber directly from the trees. She has lived and worked with him for a certain time but as viewers learn from a credit, on 28 September 2014 after an argument, she resolved to leave him. There is little communication between the two due to their mutual difficulty in understanding each other’s language. While Mi Niang is seeking refuge from a life of poverty across the border and might have found the prospect of being sold to a Chinese man more attractive than the life she would face at her village, Dongda somehow exploits Mi Niang in turn, leading her to resolve to leave him. The film does not show what became of her afterwards, yet the different degrees of despair and exploitation are evident in this couple’s minimal narrative, as is their life of hard labour against the unusual landscape of rubber trees, regardless of their decision as a couple. Although the picture appeared almost an extempore in Wang’s career, Mi Niang is important as a meaningful precedent for Ta’ang, which was also shot in these border territories unfamiliar to Wang Bing. Some of the individual narratives served not only as different entry points to major issues but also as tests through which the filmmaker explored something new and different circumstances, rather like the preliminary drawings of a painter who aims to approach a large canvas and refine their craft. Ta’ang had a similar genesis to Mi Niang. It was shot for a few weeks during February 2015 at the border between China and Myanmar, in the country’s north-eastern Kokang region. Wang Bing was travelling in Yunnan province when the so-called Kokang offensive erupted. This was a series of armed clashes between the Myanmar Army and various insurgent groups

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Figure 7: Ta’ang, women of Ta’ang minority (Copyright courtesy of Asian Shadows)

gathered under the name of Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army claiming control of this region. The fighting lasted until May when the Myanmar government offered a peace deal with no changes in territorial administration. During the conflict, an estimated 100,000 civilians were reported to flee their homes and seek shelter on the Chinese side (Hu and Konrad 2018). News about this conflict and the refugees’ journeys could be found on Chinese media since the Kokang population is largely of Han Chinese origin. However, the armed conflict was hardly known outside Asia as Europe and the Western world was mainly focused on migrants from Northern Africa escaping war-torn territories and travelling across the Mediterranean to reach the Italian and Greek coasts. Despite the short shooting time and relatively limited material, Wang Bing managed to edit a rough cut during the summer 2015 and thanks to the assistance of Chinese Shadows, the Hong Kong–Paris-based film company that has supported him in several projects, the film reached the standards for theatrical screenings by the end of the year. Ta’ang premiered in the Forum section of the Berlin film festival in February 2016, by which time Wang was already working on Bitter Money, set in Zhejiang. Ta’ang portrays mainly women and children of the Burmese Ta’ang ethnic minority who are seeking refuge across the Chinese border to escape the violence raging in Myanmar. These women, recognizable by their traditional clothing and silver earrings, managed to reach Yunnan province by crossing the apparently unguarded border, but as once in China they were illegal immigrants, they remained in most cases in the no man’s land near the border or escaped from one area to the other seeking shelter in improvised

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refugee camps or anywhere they could find a shack. Most of the people in the film are Ta’ang women and children escaping the violence threatening their villages but there are also other groups, as violence is a menace for everyone regardless of their ethnicity. Wang Bing does not film the conflict but rather, the strength of these women forced to escape with their children on their shoulders. They strenuously search for a better place with little chance of finding refuge in China or elsewhere, yet showing no despair and sharing moments of sisterhood during restless nights in the refugee camp. The few weeks of shooting allowed the filmmaker to structure Ta’ang along a loose narrative of four days and three nights. The night scenes stand out for their length and are at times challenging for viewers as they are lightened only by the refugees’ torches or the fires they lit, or even by just a candle. These features give Ta’ang what Jeanne Boden defined as Wang’s “hyper-real fashion” or as an “inescapable reality” that confronts the viewer (2015: 186). Its unpolished, rough, dark images bring it closer to a work-in-progress similar to Mi Niang or even Father and Sons but they also make the portrait of children and women extremely vivid. The aesthetics bringing together this set of Wang’s work, come partly from the constraints imposed by the actual locations, as well as time constraints and production limitations. Yet, Wang’s handheld camera gives viewers a sense of rare immediacy. Ta’ang, even more than other works, is a ‘visual exploration’ of spaces and people at a precarious (and dangerous) juncture. Since Wang Bing could barely communicate with the social actors, some of whom spoke only their local dialects, he relied entirely on his camera to approach them. In this case, there was no social network he could rely upon. He followed them from one of the improvised refugee camps on which the film opens, to a Chinese border town. Here, a group of women and their many children carrying their rugs and their bags negotiate with the locals for transportation elsewhere. A night sequence lasting nearly one hour brings the camera close to the bodies and faces of these many women and children, mostly seated around the campfire where they share their stories or simply feel their common destiny. The fire, one of the film motifs, and the low camera angle make the facial features of these people emerging as if sculpted or carved from the darkness. One of the last night sequences is lit only by a candle, highlighting the potential of the digital camera. In the final segment, lasting about forty minutes, we see a dozen women and children walking along a narrow, muddy mountain road while in the background, the sound of bombs or some kind of shooting is clearly heard. The group stops at times, then starts marching again without knowing where they

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are heading. They meet a motorbike rider and ask for information before eventually noticing a wooden shack in the fields where they can stop for the night. Before the film ends, one of the women takes out her mobile phone and makes a call, as has happened on other occasions before in the film. The presence of this electronic device, so much a sign of our times, appears at odds in that landscape, which seems excised from our contemporary world. It functions as a shocking reminder of the many similar situations we are probably not aware of even when refugee issues become top priority in the media world we are living in. Against the backdrop of the many conflicts around the world, this war-torn territory failed to come to international attention with the result that these women could not rely on any support, either from their own countries or internationally. There is no rescue from outside: they either support each other and save themselves, or they do not survive (Kraicer 2016). These women are just a tiny fragment of a population escaping war from Myanmar across the Chinese border, yet how many other people, in particular women, are escaping violence today? Wang not only testifies to the existence and struggles of an ethnic group about which very little is known, but also makes viewers aware that they are living in our times and share our will to communicate with family and dear ones. Without speaking the language and with little time to get familiar with them, the filmmaker relies even more on the proximity of the camera to the subjects. In Ta’ang the individual narrative is not that of a leading character but rather of the group in which everyone shares a common destiny in this no man’s land. The filmmaker follows first some, then others of them and is never able to track them for very long, yet by doing so, he brings the universality of this situation to the fore, reminding everyone of the status and the condition of refugees, regardless of territories and ethnicity. Furthermore, Wang’s confidence in his approach has reached a point by which the camera “seems to melt away as paradoxically, his subjects become accustomed to his intimately distanced presence” in Shelly Kraicer’s words (2016). The Ta’ang people look at the camera but they also move as if nobody is filming them so that their body movements and their actions remain natural, even in this unfamiliar space. Their camaraderie unites them into one more narrative of survival brought to light in Wang’s cinema.

Mrs Fang: Individual spaces of death Shortly after having followed the trajectory of migrant workers from Yunnan to Zhejiang in preparation for Bitter Money, and during its shooting in

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2015–16, Wang Bing had the opportunity to expand on the topic of deteriorating family structures when he was invited to contribute a new work to his full retrospective to be held at Documenta 14 in Kassel 2017. Thanks to financial support from the German art institution, the filmmaker returned to the area where he shot Bitter Money in order to complete a work that he had started in 2015 and would become Mrs Fang. The main shooting took place in 2016; editing and post-production went fairly smoothly so that the film was ready to be screened weekly at Kino Gloria as part of the Kassel art exhibition from 7 June 2017. In August 2017, Mrs Fang was screened at the Locarno Film Festival and received the Golden Leopard for the Best Film. The film focuses on Fang Xiuying, a 67-year-old lady with Alzheimer’s disease whose condition worsened in 2015 and who died on 6 July 2016. As stated in the production notes, she was born in Huzhou in 1948 and spent her life as a farmer. She suffered from Alzheimer’s for the last eight years of her life. By 2015, her symptoms were already very advanced and her treatment in a convalescent home was ineffective, so it was discontinued in June 2016 and she returned home (Chinese Shadows 2017). Although a set of credits informs viewers that Wang Bing had the opportunity to shoot in the area on several occasions starting from 2015 and the opening scene shows Fang Xiuying standing outside her house, the film concentrates on the last ten days of her life, in 2016. In this more mature phase of his career, a combination of informal networks and self-confidence have significantly shaped the intertextuality in his works. As pointed out in the opening credits, Mrs Fang was shot in the fishing village of Maohui in Zhejiang province. The director learned of the elderly lady while shooting Bitter Money, between 2015 and 2016. The village where Mrs Fang lived is relatively close to the area where Bitter Money was shot. Wang Yang – one of the films’ producers – confirmed that the two places were only a ten minute drive away. They met Mrs Fang thanks to her daughter who operates a cotton thread store in Huzhou district, the location for Bitter Money. 4 Although it unfolds as one long segment towards the sensitive moment of her death, the film also evokes the long preliminary phase of getting to know the village and the people, which remains unseen. The mutual trust between the social actors and the filmmaker is clearly manifested in the film, which further confirms Wang’s reliance upon his set of informal connections. The issue of disintegrating family structures – an underlying thread connecting Three Sisters, Father and Sons, Bitter Money, and Mrs 4

Informal conversation with film producer Wang Yang, Paris, 10 February 2018.

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Fang – is observed through the lens of a person approaching death. The question of whether death can be filmed and shown on screen has long been a crucial and sensitive subject. French theoretical discourse of the seventies extensively explored this point, concluding that death on screen would mean exploiting the subject and therefore should not be seen.5 Critics have referred to Fredrick Wiseman’s epic documentary Near Death (1989) as the closest precedent to Wang’s Mrs Fang (Kasman and Small 2017), yet the only similarity is that they both deal with death otherwise there is hardly any connection in either the approach or the topic. Wiseman’s documentary shows the struggle of doctors and nurses facing the anguished friends and relatives of people on the verge of death. There are no doctors in Wang’s film and no way to help her on the part of the family members. There have been other examples of Chinese documentaries presenting death and corpses on screen as in the case of Zhao Liang’s documentary Petition (Shangfang 2009), which was screened out of competition at the Cannes film festival in 2009. Zhao Liang, who has been Wang Bing’s neighbour and friend in Beijing for many years, filmed petitioners in the capital city for a period of twelve years. In the film, the corpse of the victim of a train accident is shown and body parts are clearly visible on screen. Nothing of this indexicality is actually perceived in Mrs Fang, which is far from being a film ‘documenting’ death. Wang actually deals with this sensitive topic by means of proximity to the social actors and through the shared space of Fang Xiuying, her family members and the camera. Once again, his filmmaking is pushed to the limits by challenging the conventions of what is seen (or unseen) on screen. However, in Wang’s approach the bodily and mental deterioration of the elderly lady is both an individual story of decay and a collective experience in which the family dynamics come to the fore at a time in which one member is on the verge of death. The film starts with a few static shots of Fang Xiuying as she is standing in the green open area close to a narrow waterway. The image composition is not evocative or lyrical, but still suggests a calm rural environment with the lady standing on the left side of the frame and the river flowing on the right side of it. The willow tree branches hang down towards the water so as to evoke a typical landscape of China south of the Yangzi River. A simple credit provides the name of Fang Xiuying, the village name, the province and the date. These few introductory images fade to black marking the time ellipsis. The next shot opens onto what will be the focus for most of the 86-minute-long film: the woman is confined to bed. As stated in 5

For the French critical debate see Wilson (2000) and Jullier and Leveratto (2016).

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another onscreen credit, one year has passed and Mrs Fang is bedridden as a consequence of her decline. Once the camera has moved into the indoor space, Mrs Fang’s living space becomes the central location. She is lying down on one of the two beds of the only visible room, surrounded by her family members whose noisy talks and comments revolve around her health and trivial topics, money in particular. It is immediately clear that the main concern is how to meet the costs of Fang Xiuying’s medicines. The absence of doctors and no mention of any state support in the family conversations reinforce the knowledge that the public health system – long taken for granted in the socialist decades – is no longer in place. In Wang’s style, the viewer is here invited to enter a space and then become familiar with it and its inhabitants. But there is an evolution in Mrs Fang. In this case, the introductory shot and the confidence with which the camera gets close to the lady’s body suggest that the filmmaker is sharing an ongoing situation, yet in a space with which he is already familiar. The few indications that the credits provide on screen are the names of the family members and their relationship to her. The room features a basic decor: two large beds, one next to the other, a few simple pieces of furniture and a TV set providing the background noise that is heard throughout the film recalling the soundscape of Father and Sons. Vehicles provide most of the outdoor noise. The first 20 minutes of Mrs Fang record the conversation between the closest family members – her son and daughter, the brother-in-law, and a few other people in the room – intertwined with close-ups of Fang Xiuying in bed. These close-ups, which are taken from different angles, often focus on details of her body, her face, her hands, and her clothing. Wang’s camera dwells on Fang’s mouth which often remains half open with the lady unable to utter any word. As Variety reviewer Jessica Kiang has noted, “[h]er advanced Alzheimer’s has shrivelled the skin onto her bones, and her face is almost unrecognizable, lips drawn back in a constant rictus, teeth exposed like those in a skull” (2017). These shots are disturbing yet controlled in order to avoid being exploitative. Despite the non-emotional approach of the film, these shots suggest and mirror the proximity of the filmmaker and the crew to the sick lady and her family. If the circumstances of the film-shooting risk having a disturbing effect on the viewers, the insistence on the lady’s bodily features helps the viewers to gradually adjust and accept them. Fang Xiuying is a central figure but so are the family members and the villagers. In fact, the entire life of the village slowly emerges in addition to the individual portrait. Here, from the individual narrative the film opens up to the collective space of the village. In the film, not much is narrated about Mrs Fang’s

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own life. Her personal story is limited to a few random comments by the people at her bed and it becomes evident that the point of the film is not her past or her personal story but, once again, her silent presence on screen. If the silent hermit in Man With No Name seemed to experience a different temporality from that perceived by all other people living in present time society, so Alzheimer’s deprives Fang Xiuying of any sense of time and what we experience as viewers is the passing of time seen through her family members and fellow villagers while she is approaching death. These multiple temporalities become more evident when the film cuts to a long night- fishing scene. It is a ten-minute-long sequence in which two villagers use an electric net to catch some carp or other fish in the river. The darkness of the night is illuminated only by the fishermen’s torch used to attract fish into their net. However, in the distance far away from the river, an imposing line of road lights denotes the presence of a highway. There is nothing exotic or fascinating about this fishing scene. The contrast between the rural lifestyle and the distant highway is striking, as is the pollution of the water. Not by coincidence, when one of the women is seen cleaning the fish in a later scene, she notices something odd in one fish and on the basis of some superstitious attitude, as she says, she refuses to kill that specific fish although it is already nearly dead. Thus, the long shot of the night fishing creates a parallel narrative as the viewers remain aware of the silent presence of Fang Xiuying in bed. Furthermore, when juxtaposed to traditional images of fishing villages in Chinese films or visual and literary representations, there is nothing left of that lyrical approach. The same can be said for the rain sequence which follows the fishing scene. In the daylight and under a pouring rain, the village is shot from the side of the only road that cuts across it. Occasionally, villagers look into the camera. The sound of cars and the general background noise increases the distance from earlier images of fishing villages. What is left here of the traditional Chinese imagery? What is left of the family structures and village community life? As Jessica Kiang also noted “Mrs. Fang is, like all of Wang’s films, concerned with economically challenged, marginalized Chinese life. This ramshackle and impoverished village in the country’s rural south is not a place of bucolic serenity, but scrappy make-do-and-mend” (2017). After the first night-fishing sequence, Wang Bing returns to Fang Xiuying in bed and the care of her relatives. In a second fishing sequence, the camera follows the lady’s grandson who is walking with two other men. They carry two long fishing nets. The camera moves towards their backs and proceeds behind them in a tilting movement which seems actually to replicate their pace and their breathing. At one point, the men continue walking while

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the camera stops and films them from an increasing distance. These shots, which alternate long indoor sequences at Fang Xiuying’s bedside, allow an understanding of the transformation of the village’s economic, social, and political life. The villagers talk about hospitals and costs of caring for a sick relative, while the fishing sequences show the poor conditions of the natural environment surrounding the village. Without making any open political statement, and without any judgemental stance about any of these subjects, the disintegration of traditional structures, social networks, and the environment comes to the fore. The multiple temporalities at stake articulate the discourse – and interplay – between the individual (Fang Xiuying) and the collective (the village), which can well be transposed to a larger scale than that of the village. Moreover, when approaching sensitive subjects like illness and death, the positioning of the camera becomes even more relevant. The death of Fang Xiuying is anticipated by the only question uttered by the film-maker when he returns to the village in 2016. He asks if the lady has already died. As he has noted in interviews, “when I arrived I found that Mrs Fang was really very sick. Still, even at that time I wasn’t sure that I wanted to make a documentary about her and her illness. I decided anyway to shoot something. I didn’t have a clear idea of what it was that I was going to do with the footage because you never know—maybe sometimes there is a story there, other times there isn’t. Anyway, I was there shooting until the very end. […] The whole process then was in trying to understand—and find a way of expressing in cinema—what were this woman’s last thoughts” (Kasman and Small 2017). The closing images show the relatives close to her bed in the sequence of her death. Rather than making critical statements, Wang Bing is here more concerned to express his own positioning in relation to the subjects, which is that of a close participant in people’s lives. In his introduction to Wang’s cinema at Documenta 14, French film critic Emmanuel Burdeau connects Mrs Fang to the cinema of the contemporary Catalan filmmaker-artist, Albert Serra, also invited in the same exhibition. It is worth noting that both filmmakers – although from different perspectives and cinematic approaches – have frequently presented their works across the two circuits of film festivals and art exhibitions. In one of Serra’s film, The Death of Louis XIV, the French King is sick and approaching his last days bed-ridden and surrounded by doctors and courtiers. Here, the camera moves mainly on the horizontal plane as in Wang’s Mrs Fang. These two bedridden subjects – Fang Xiuying and the French King – are worlds apart, but both filmmakers escape and challenge the limits and constrictions of today’s production and exhibition structures, making use of art exhibition

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support and spaces and therefore escaping the “habitual cartographies of art and cinema.” In his comments, Burdeau uses a set of oppositions to describe a possible organizing principle for Wang’s work: upright versus lying down, vertical versus horizontal (2017). Fang Xiuying can be seen as the epitome of people in a reclining pose, recalling those who were forced to live in caves during the Anti-Rightist Movement or the inmates of mental asylums such as those in ’Til Madness Do Us Part. These people are as relevant as those who stand and move across the country such as the children of Three Sisters or the migrant workers of Bitter Money. They all represent different marginalized groups in today’s society. Their individual stories as well as their collective dimension are all unrecorded, and yet express individual variations that are even more difficult to grasp. When looking at the living standards of social actors in Wang’s films, we see that social and economic inequalities not only affect the poorer social groups as opposed to those who could benefit from the reform era, but we also notice how different degrees of poverty shape the living conditions of those many groups who have remained at the margin of China’s economic growth. As a case in point, Mrs Fang and her family live in a fairly modest rural area when compared to images of contemporary Chinese cities, yet they are already much better off than those living in the villages of the Yunnan mountains, as the villagers of Three Sisters, or the migrant workers in Father and Sons. Moreover, whereas in the Yunnan mountain villages, children and elderly people were the social groups forced to remain in the rural areas while those able to work had to leave to find employment, in Mrs Fang and Bitter Money, people belonging to different age groups are observed in a social context where family ties are strongly affected by lack of income and welfare support. In Mrs Fang, the conversations in the room and the few sequences in the village streets show young and middle-aged people discussing money matters in a way not dissimilar to Bitter Money. If in the Yunnan mountains of Three Sisters, food scarcity was a primary concern; in Zhejiang, health, environmental pollution, and declining welfare structures are in focus while poverty is less extreme. Through Wang’s work, the tiles of the complex Chinese mosaic compose a picture in which subaltern groups, in particular those of the peripheral regions, not to mention the minority groups living across border areas as discussed in relation to Ta’ang and Mi Niang, come to fore and receive full attention. Not only do all these social groups belong to the marginal people in relation to the mainstream narrative of the China Dream, but they also represent different levels in the scale of Chinese wealth distribution and face different economic constraints.

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Beauty Lives in Freedom: Individual spaces of exile Beauty Lives in Freedom is, at the time of writing, the last work that Wang Bing has presented in public and also the last one devoted to individual narratives. For several reasons, it stands out in the filmmaker’s career. It is the first work that Wang filmed outside China. It was shot in Las Vegas and therefore required an organized travel plan and some preparatory work instead of the chance encounters that have shaped most of his films. Secondly, although this work provides an extra tile to the mosaic of witnesses related to the Anti-Rightist campaigns, it is an unusual one as Gao Ertai is not just one of the many victims of re-education camps. He is a well-known intellectual and artist who has continued denouncing Chinese injustice throughout his life both in China, despite the different waves of political violence, and in exile. Thirdly, and in terms of production and exhibition, this work maintains the structure of a full-length documentary film, yet it has been presented only in art exhibition spaces. Finally, and for all these reasons, it is fully representative of the mature phase of Wang’s activity, during which his works have frequently intertwined film festivals and art exhibition spaces without impacting the final format of the film. Beauty Lives in Freedom was presented for the first time in the context of Wang’s retrospective ‘Dispossessed Lives. Resilient Lives’, which opened at the Museo Reina Sofia, in Madrid, on 5 October 2018. The work was later screened in Paris, at the Galerie Chantal Crousel for Wang’s second solo exhibition, which opened on 1 December 2018, the first one was in 2009. The two art institutions also provided financial support for the work. The f ive-hour-long documentary focuses on the artist, calligrapher, philosopher, and art critic Gao Ertai, who was born in 1935 in Jiangsu and fled to the US in 1993 after having left the People’s Republic of China following the Tiananmen incident in 1989. He currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife Pu Xiayu, also an intellectual and a painter, whom he married in 1987. Wang’s documentary shows his encounter with Gao Ertai and Pu Xiayu, their conversations about their life experiences, and moments of their daily life. The life of Gao Ertai epitomizes the lives of many Chinese intellectuals at home and in exile. Wang Bing became interested in Gao’s experience when he published his recollection of the Jiabiangou labour camp In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labour Camp (Gao 2009).6 Gao was born in an educated family and therefore had the chance to study, two features 6 The book was first published in Chinese in 2004, when Gao was already in exile, under the title Xunzhao jiayuan, Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House.

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that made him an easy target during the various Maoist campaigns. He was persecuted on several occasions starting from the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957. In his memoir, Gao recalls how these persecutions began with his essay ‘On Beauty’ written and published in 1957 when he was a middle school art teacher. Gao’s essay on aesthetics raised harsh criticism from Party cadres, since it encouraged the subjectivity of aesthetic judgement and an individual appreciation of art, thus going against the principles of the collective system and the ‘objective’ divide between positive (socialist) and negative (bourgeois) aesthetic values.7 He was therefore labelled a Rightist and sent to work in the Jiabiangou re-education camp. He survived the experience and was then assigned to work at the Research Institute of Cultural Relics in Dunhuang, in Gansu province, until the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, he was again targeted as a ‘bourgeois’ and ‘capitalist’. After the decade of the Cultural Revolution, Gao was allowed to teach at universities in Lanzhou and Nanjing but was arrested again in relation to the student movement of 1989 and its violent repression. After that, and like many other artists and intellectuals who had supported the student movement, he escaped first to Hong Kong and then to the US. Since then, he has lived in exile without being able to return to China. His works and publications mainly focus on aesthetics but he has also published a series of literary essays which have made him a prominent writers of contemporary exile literature. Wang Bing, in contrast to his usual reliance on informal networks and fortuitous encounters, had long nurtured the desire to meet the author of one of the books on Jiabiangou which was so strongly connected to his own work on Chinese labour camps. The art exhibitions planned for 2018 gave him the opportunity to organize the trip to Las Vegas in order to spend some time with Gao Ertai and his wife. He filmed their extensive conversations while showing at the same time Gao’s collection of writings, his calligraphy, and his wife’s paintings. Beauty Lives in Freedom might appear as a more conventional biographical portrait of an intellectual in exile, yet the features of Wang’s cinema are still evident. The rather extensive duration of the film does not serve the function of introducing the viewers to an unusual space, as the location is a relatively standard American house where the couple live, but allows Wang Bing to film Gao’s uninterrupted narrative flow so as to give him full attention. It also serves to insert Gao in his living space as an exiled person. The support of art exhibition institutions and the prospect of gallery screenings worked in favour of the loose editing of the film, which does not articulate a narrative of its own but lets the character speak. Although 7

The essay ‘On Beauty’ is included in Gao (2004 [2009]).

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the documentary functions as a diptych together with the one-person narration of He Fengming in the eponymous work of 2007, the international stature Wang has achieved in the decade separating the two films plays a significant role in the overall making of the film. Beauty Lives in Freedom was not conceived as a preparatory work to something else, as was the case for Fengming, A Chinese Memoir in relation to The Ditch, but rather as one work that completes a project that was already internationally appreciated. Moreover, Wang had no pressure in terms of screening and format, as the exhibition venue was known from the start and so the freedom granted to the project. In addition, although this film constitutes one more individual narration in relation to the collective picture of the labour camps, it also differs from Wang’s set of works on the Anti-Rightist campaign as, for the f irst time, the f ilmmaker engages in conversation with an established figure, an intellectual and artist himself. When looking at this work, the viewers share a conversation between intellectuals with different life experiences and belonging to different generations, yet all with their established international profile. This marks a significant difference with the informal conversations Wang Bing filmed and edited for Dead Souls, also presented in 2018, with witnesses whose life had remained mostly anonymous. As for spaces, Gao Ertai and his wife Pu Xiayu are mainly seen in the area where they live. When outdoors, they are filmed in the strikingly bright light of Las Vegas, which often also penetrates the indoor space of the house. This aesthetic contrasts sharply with the tiny indoor and living spaces Wang has shot across China, thus bringing this film into a dialectical relationship with all of his other works. The definition of the HD-image is so neat, bright, and sharp here that it appears to reverse Wang’s aesthetics of marginality, yet when considered as part of Wang’s oeuvre, the connection between the American and the China Dream comes to the fore. The highdefinition camera provides a sense of hyper-realism, not dissimilar to that of American photographers and artists which have often portrayed features of capitalist societies by means of photorealism and, more recently, digital photography. If hyperreal images of petrol stations, shopping malls and big cars have somehow evoked visions of the American Dream from the early 1930s, so Wang’s American portrait of Gao Ertai conjures up the two dreams, the American and the Chinese one, as well as estranged spaces of exile. As the title suggests, Beauty Lives in Freedom deals with aesthetics as well as freedom, where beauty not only refers to artwork, but also to the intellectual reflections on art and life with which Gao has been preoccupied all his life. The beautiful images of Wang’s work while Gao is retelling his difficult life journey, are actually reporting a life of struggle, pain, and loss

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framed against the contrasting backdrop of the bright blue American sky. The question that resonates throughout the film can be summarized as follows: Is the past something that the comforts of a life in exile can mend? The goal of both ‘beauty’ and ‘freedom’ seems unattainable when confronted with Gao’s own biography. In line with his approach, Wang’s camera captures the present of Gao’s life showing also, albeit in an extremely respectful way, the limitations of an ageing person including his increasing deafness and physical weaknesses. By showing Gao’s gestures, his objects and his verbal recollections, Wang conveys not only the hardships Gao experienced throughout his life, but also how they continue to mark his present, first and foremost by making it impossible for the couple to return to their own country and see their family members. Along with Gao’s narrative, the figure of his wife Pu Xiayu portrays a woman who has shared a life of exile and was forced to cut her contacts with her family. In that respect, He Fengming and Pu Xiayu are also connected as they both put forward images of resilient women who have devoted their own lives to those of their husbands while maintaining their own individual stance. Beauty Lives in Freedom completes this discussion of individual narratives which always relate to broader issues and collective spaces while enhancing intertextuality in Wang’s career. They all highlight the filmmaker’s concern for people, not as a collective body – as in the socialist paradigm – but as individuals, most of them ordinary people (with the exception of Gao Ertai), who have endured, in different ways, the hardships imposed by a society that has often been hostile to them for ideological, political, or economic reasons. With their diversity of formats, these works shed light on people’s daily life and help better understand the larger picture of today’s China and how social conditions, and the past, inform current living standards. Moreover, they all reinforce Wang’s concern with human practice, or, in other words, his observation of human beings in their simple act of being. Finally, these individual narratives confirm the potential of Wang’s cinema to create moments of intimacy through which the viewers connect and engage with the social actors in a seemingly unmediated way. Although the non-interference of the filmmaker is apparent, Wang’s approach to individuals and their living spaces has made the camera a tool for sharing and understanding. It is also a lens through which the filmmaker takes the viewer on a journey through borders, languages, and different ethnic groups. In addition, by means of the diversity of formats and outputs, Wang has pushed the boundaries of cinematic conventions, first and foremost the distinction between narrative and documentary films. His filmmaking has pursued a delicate balance between transparency, storytelling, and

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documentary indexicality so as to provide for the viewers an active role in facing humanity as it is. By exposing the presence of the camera, or his own interaction with the social actors, he has testified to his approach to cinema and laid it bare to the viewers. His reliance on informal connections can be traced, and thus his degree of proximity and familiarity to his subjects. This process goes hand in hand with Wang’s approach to the documentary material, which is ‘narrativized’ yet without any attempt to create a fictional work. These features have granted him international recognition as a major documentary filmmakers of our times and have allowed him to transcend traditional boundaries between the film festival and art exhibition circuits.

References Apter, David E. and Tony Saich (1994) Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Boden, Jeanne (2015) ‘Escaping the Room. A Post-socialist Reading of Wang Bing’s Father and Sons’, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 2: 2+3, 177–193, [doi: 10.1386/jcca.2.2-3.177_1]. Burdeau, Emmanuel (2017) ‘Wang Bing à Cassel’, artpress 447, September. Centre Pompidou (2014) Wang Bing et Jaime Rosales. Cinéastes en correspondence [Filmmakers in correspondence], Paris: Centre Pompidou, http://mediation. centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-Cineastes-en-correspondance/03wang-bing-et-jaime-rosales.html#bing [accessed 10 October 2019]. Chinese Shadows (2017), Mrs Fang https://www.chineseshadows.com/mrs-fang [accessed 10 October 2019]. Gao Ertai, Robert Dorsett (translator) (2009) In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp, New York: Ecco Press. Guarneri, Michael (2015) ‘Shadows of the Opus Magnum: Wang Bing’s “Father and Sons”’, NotebookFestival, 22 January 2015, https://mubi.com/it/notebook/ posts/shadows-of-the-opus-magnum-wang-bings-father-and-sons [accessed 10 October 2019]. Harvey, David (2013) ‘The Political Economy of Public Space’ in The Politics of Public Space, Setha Low, Neil Smith (eds.), New York and London: Routledge, 17–34. Hu, Zhiding and Victor Konrad (2018) ‘In the Space between Exception and Integration: The Kokang Borderlands on the Periphery of China and Myanmar’, Geopolitics, 23:1, 147–179. Hudson, David (2016) Ta’ang, Daily | Berlinale 2016 Diary #5, 16 February 2016, in Chinese Shadows (eds.) Ta’ang, press-review, https://www.chineseshadows. com/ta-ang [accessed 10 April 2020].

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Jullier, Laurent and Jean-Marc Leveratto (2016) ‘The Story of a Myth: The “Tracking Shot in Kapò” or the Making of French Film Ideology’, Mise au point, 8, http:// journals.openedition.org/map/2069 [accessed 10 October 2019]. Kasman, Daniel and Christoph Small (2017) ‘Inner and Outer Space. Wang Bing Talks About Mrs Fang’, Cinemascope, 72, https://cinema-scope.com/cinemascope-magazine/inner-and-outer-space-wang-bing-talks-about-mrs-fang/ [accessed 10 October 2019]. Kiang, Jessica (2017) ‘Film Review: Mrs Fang’, Variety, 13 August 2017, http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/mrs-fang-review-locarno-1202523733/ [accessed 10 October 2019]. Koehler, Robert (2007) ‘Fengming, A Chinese Memoir’, Variety, 20 May 2007, https://variety.com/2007/film/markets-festivals/fengming-a-chinese-memoir-1200559205/ [accessed 10 October 2019]. Kraicer, Shelly (2016) ‘Wang Bing Films Souls: On Ta’ang and Other Recent Work’, Cinemascope, 66 http://cinema-scope.com/features/wang-bing-films-soulstaang-recent-work/ [accessed 30 October 2016]. Mai, Nadin (2018) ‘Man With No Name – Wang Bing’, The Art(s) of Slow Cinema, 14 May 2018. Song, Qian (2019) ‘Hukou System, Mechanisms, and Health Stratification across the Life Course in Rural and Urban China’, Health and Place, 58, 7. Sturgeon, Janet C. (2013) ‘Cross‐border Rubber Cultivation between China and Laos: Regionalization by Akha and Tai Rubber Farmers’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography Vol. 31, Issue 1, 70–85. Wilson, David (ed.) (2000) Cahiers du Cinema – Volume Four: 1973–1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle, London and New York: Routledge.

6. Concluding Remarks: Spaces of Exhibition and Spaces of Human Practice Abstract This chapter approaches Wang’s work from the perspective of exhibition spaces. It looks at how his career has evolved and partly transformed certain festival exhibition practices. It also discusses the virtuous circuit of Wang’s regular presence across film festivals and art exhibition spaces. Film festivals have served the essential function of providing a prestigious platform from which his work could first travel at a time in which their domestic visibility is not possible and theatrical release of art-house films or documentary films is limited in Europe like elsewhere. This concluding chapter also introduces the different modes of meaning-making of works exhibited at film festivals and art galleries. Keywords: Documentary cinema, China, Exhibition spaces, Exhibition practices, Film festivals, Wang Bing

This chapter offers some concluding remarks on the distinctive position that Wang Bing has acquired on the international scene and across different exhibition spaces, namely, film festivals, art galleries, and museums. In his career, Wang Bing has defined his profile by affirming the role of the documentary filmmaker as that of an auteur, as I have argued throughout this book. During the last two decades, not only has he shaped his own aesthetics, but his activities have provoked, challenged, and changed the patterns of the viewing experience across film festivals and art exhibition spaces. With his diverse output – documentaries of long duration, video installations, and photographic series – presented across the film festival and art exhibition circuits, he has contributed to breaking through the conventions of theatrical exhibitions and demonstrated how increasingly intertwined film and the visual arts have become.

Pollacchi, E., Wang Bing’s Filmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses, and Marginal Spaces. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463721837_ch06

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The interest of art curators in his work has strengthened thanks to his crossover activities, and the pace of his own production has also increased, thanks to the several commissions he has received from major art institutions. Scholarly attention has grown in parallel, as have attempts to define and classify his works. Film critics and scholars alike have often discussed his cinema in relation to major issues, such as labour and poverty, as Wang’s documentaries provide a visual archive of the impact of state policies and show less-known aspects of Chinese society in a distinctive manner. In this study, I have approached Wang’s oeuvre as a set of works that constantly speak to each other and intertwine recurrent themes. I have also considered Wang’s trajectory as an attempt to refine and amplify the camera’s potential to observe, record, and share life experiences, mostly at the margin of history and society. Instead of reading his work through an underlying thematic thread or a unifying aesthetic principle, I have looked at how the diversity of Wang’s production – in terms of medium, duration, and screening experience – enriches the complex picture of China in its ongoing transformation. His documentaries, feature works, photographic series, and video installations have broadened the portrayal of the subaltern that Wang has recorded during more than two decades across the vast country. Furthermore, his use of documentary material to create characterdriven narratives has moved away from the classical modes of feature and documentary film and, in doing so, has come to define his signature mode. In order to frame Wang’s work, I used the term poetics in the opening of this volume and this approach, which encompasses aesthetic features, themes, and narrative structures, has proved fruitful in investigating Wang’s evolving craft. In order to deconstruct his cinematic practice while taking into account the backdrop against which Wang’s oeuvre is set, I have read his trajectory with the help of theories emphasizing the interaction between spaces, neoliberal economy, and changing social conditions (Jameson 1991; Harvey 2004, 2006; Rancière 2010). In particular, I have scrutinized Wang’s filmmaking through the lens of space. In line with cultural geographer David Harvey, different articulations of space (spaces of labour, spaces of witness and memory, individual and collective spaces) have served here as diverse entry points to Wang’s works, so as to highlight their intertextuality and their connection to global issues. In fact, beyond the contingency of each film, the significance of Wang’s cinema lies in its ability to address both the specificity of a certain space at a given time and its resonance in the universality of the human condition. From a bird’s-eye perspective, his work conflates humanism – as a deep concern for individuals and their struggles – and a critical approach to how history, politics, and economy

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impact on human life. In summary, his camera connects spaces and human practice while mirroring them in the viewing experience. When read against Harvey’s tripartite way of conceiving space, Wang Bing has been able to connect the absolute space of China, its sheer geographical dimension (but also the idealized dimension of Maoist China) to the relative space of China during the years of economic reforms in which certain process have generated specific outcomes, with mutual effects; and, ultimately, to the relational frame of spatial references that depends upon human practice (Harvey 2004: 1–2, 2006: 127–133). Thus, Wang’s cinema – by means of the camera – encourages reflections upon individuals, society, and history in relational terms. And, since we can only establish relations by means of our experience of time and space, in order to fruitfully read the narrative of China’s ongoing success, we need to be active viewers. Furthermore, what remains less visible, or forgotten, or simply does not fit in the mainstream narrative we are given in the global flow of images needs to be included in the full picture. For more than twenty years, Wang’s filmmaking has carried with it an intuitive understanding of this relational dimension in all the different corners he has visited, in rural villages, along rivers and roads in China, and ultimately abroad. Wang Bing has filmed the absolute space of several Chinese provinces – Liaoning, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Zhejiang – in the relative spatial and temporal frame of the different stages in the process of China’s reform policies. He has established informal relations with his social characters to expand his own geographical and social network. At the same time, his camera has not looked at these places from an external perspective, nor has he attempted to provide any objective view. Rather, by focusing on the relational space of his social characters and their life experience, he has ‘extracted narratives from reality’ and carved individual narratives out of the grand narrative of China’s economic rise. These geographical locations – shot through the lens of individuals at a specific time of their lives (or even death) – all go back to human practice. Ultimately, filmmaking itself can also be read as another kind of human practice. Wang Bing has lived in the space of his social actors – often for a long time – in order to go beyond ‘frontal recording’, the observational mode, and even simple re-enactment. He has documented the sheer act of being of individuals, and groups, facing life struggles related to Chinese society at certain historical junctures. These struggles are not so different from those experienced at all latitudes by many other individuals and groups. He has used his camera as a way to connect, register, and eventually share this process with viewers in the diverse configurations of screenings and

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viewing experiences. Upon this basis, and thanks to his understanding of how to make the multiple spatial dimensions co-exist in his works, Wang Bing has been able to break the divide between narrative films, observational documentaries, anthropological investigation, and critical filmmaking in order to embrace them all in a personal interpretation of cinema. In Wang’s vision, social inequalities, political injustice, or other historical wounds come to the fore through a painstaking process of observing, filming, editing, and, finally, the exhibition of the fruit of these endeavours, either in theatres or in art gallery spaces. Without adopting any oppositional stance, Wang’s cinema has nuanced, if not undermined, the unifying state narrative of the China Dream. This catchphrase has been promoted since the start of Xi Jinping’s leadership in 2012 as a way to encourage the individual pursuit of economic success. By giving voice to people who have been excluded from such success, Wang’s cinema has constructed alternative narratives. In fact, his travels across China from the poorest regions to the new centres of China’s economic growth have shaped a counter-narrative of China’s economic rise. Moreover, in his work, present-day contradictions evoke those of the past, so that the ongoing idealized vision of the China Dream is not disconnected from the idealized vision of the Maoist decades. The tragic impact of the many waves of state policies of the Mao era and beyond still resonates through many individual stories, sometimes openly recollected as in the case of He Fengming in the eponymous work and Gao Ertai in Beauty Lives in Freedom, or implicitly evoked by the sense of the loss of family structures in Three Sisters, or the rolling back of state healthcare in Mrs Fang. Wang’s intertwining of past and present through individual characters and collective spaces is a further confirmation of his ability to embrace different scales of reality without losing his focus on the human experience. Finally, it is Wang’s specific use of the camera and the way his works function in diverse exhibition spaces that makes his cinema even more unique in the current panorama of filmmaking. His large sound and visual archive of individual human existences, which was brought together by his extensive shooting, choice of camera angles, and a specific understanding of the editing process, creates an experience that viewers bring into their own space while watching Wang’s film in different exhibition venues. This suggests an understanding of the technical medium that was developed throughout the evolution of digital technologies. In fact, Wang started filming at the end of the 1990s when the expansion of digital technologies made access to filmmaking easier not only in technical but also in financial terms. Wang’s poetics relies on the digital camera and on the potential

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offered by the evolution of such technologies since the turn of the century.1 The increasingly smaller digital cameras allowed him to explore spaces under all sorts of conditions – harshness of climate, limited lighting, narrow spaces – and record the collective/individual narratives unfolding in them. In addition, the rapid transition from the relatively low-quality digital camera of West of the Tracks to the increasingly higher definition camera used for The Ditch, followed by the even more advanced ones used for Ta’ang and Dead Souls, have allowed the filmmaker to fully explore the potential of the medium. From the indexicality of the Gobi desert in The Ditch to the recording of faces lit by the fires and the candleflame in Ta’ang, digital technologies have opened new opportunities to Wang Bing and allowed him to take up new challenges. The importance of the medium is, of course, part and parcel of film history, as are the various forms in which filmmakers have appropriated it. Starting with Alexandre Astruc’s concept of caméra stylo in which the camera becomes a means of expression, like a pen for a writer, filmmakers through the mid-1950s and 1960s seized on the potential of the camera to serve their authorial needs (1948). Not by coincidence, Astruc’s theories anticipated the French Nouvelle Vague. The positioning of the lens, its angle and focus, made cinema a personal tool over a blank page on which the directors would write their perspectives of the world, and their narratives. It is noteworthy that digital technologies and their use in documentary films have encouraged scholars to reconsider Astruc’s vision in today’s independent documentary practice (Sørenssen 2008). Wang Bing’s claim that with Dead Souls he wanted to give viewers something beyond the potential of writing, and his response to the frequent comparison with Lanzmann’s Shoah exemplifies the importance of the medium and his ambition to go beyond Astruc’s definition of the role of the camera. In fact, Lanzmann’s work has been often been seen as a documentary collecting and preserving testimonies of the Holocaust, and as such Wang noted that it was as precious as a book on the subject. However, what Wang aimed at with Dead Souls was an experience that could transcend writing, not only in terms of content but also as a cinematic experience. That ‘transcending element’, which writing cannot fully grasp is, in Wang’s perspective, the witnesses’ life experience at the moment of shooting and their recollection of the past in the context of their current daily life. This also imbues the 1 Paola Voci (2015, 2010) has discussed the impact of digital technology in filmmaking in the People’s Republic of China, but scholarly literature can also be found in relation to world cinema (Rombes 2017).

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work with a tension between memory of the past and urgency of the present, as the film was shot with the awareness that most of the witnesses would soon pass away. The additional tension between respectful distance yet proximity to the subjects – acquired through the slowly built network of contacts – determines the spatial frame in which Wang’s social actors are inscribed. The positioning of the camera in spaces and in relation to the subjects has always been a crucial feature in Wang’s works and, together with the extensive duration of many of his documentaries, has resulted in the viewer’s active engagement in the viewing process and understanding. Digital cameras provide the freedom to film during an extended period of time with relatively limited costs, and the possibility to reorganize the material in the editing process without the need of a studio and costly equipment. We should note that although financial support for Wang’s activities has grown, his filmmaking continues to be ‘handcrafted’. Although he has collaborated with various editors in his career – some of them over several projects such as Zhu Zhu and Adam Kerby – for most of his films, he has always done at least a first rough cut by himself and supervised all the stages of his work. This process has been necessary to enable him to fully comprehend his material and, on some occasions, to re-use it for new works, or to complete previous projects. This process is integral to his mode of grasping the relation between spaces and human practice. Wang’s attention to every phase of filmmaking from the shooting to the final exhibition, as well as his obsessive care for the texture and the quality of the shots bring him closer in approach to filmmakers who are also visual artists. Regardless of how rough some of his images appear, they have all been carefully chosen to absorb the viewer in the cinematic experience. Indeed, galleries began taking an interest in Wang’s activities early on in his career, even when the quality of the digital image was not yet comparable to that of more recent works. The Rotterdam International Film Festival’s invitation to Wang to contribute a videoart installation dates back to 2008 and resulted in the 14-hour-long Crude Oil supported by the Festival’s Hubert Bals Fund. The following year the French Galerie Chantal Crousel organized his first solo exhibition in Paris. The phenomenon of filmmakers shifting between the space of the theatre and that of the art gallery has surged since the early 2000s, parallel to the changes in film production and distribution. Art exhibitions, galleries, and museums have increasingly accommodated works by film directors and documentary filmmakers (Lobato 2012; Balsom 2013), including not only projects by those with a specific interest in video-art or installations. Filmmakers with similar trajectories to Wang Bing’s across the art and

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film festival circuits include Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand, Tsai Ming-liang from Taiwan, and Zhao Liang from the People’s Republic of China; or among European filmmakers, the already mentioned Pedro Costa from Portugal and Albert Serra from Spain. While they all have their distinctive aesthetic, they share the ability to intertwine the two circuits, and this happens at a time when traditional exhibition modes, such as theatrical release, are dominated by the logic of the market.2 The contribution of both the film festival and the art exhibition circuits in producing and exhibiting diverse audiovisual works has become crucial at a time in which access to production funds and theatrical exhibition has shrunk for art-house films, documentary cinema, and non-commercial works. This was also a consequence of the decline of the art-house film distribution system in Europe and worldwide following the economic crisis of 2008. Subsequently, when very little support was left for non-commercial cinema, film festivals mushroomed at all different latitudes so as to become an alternative distribution system.3 Meanwhile, more established film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, became even more important than before in launching and establishing new auteurs on the international scene. These international events became a guarantee of the quality and international profile of the filmmakers. The dynamics and the cultural policy behind Wang’s activities across art galleries, museums, and festivals are emblematic of such changes in the film industry. Moreover, when seen against the current film production and exhibition systems, crossover activities create a sort of virtuous circuit through which filmmakers can continue work while maintaining an international profile. A brief overview of some of Wang Bing’s intertwined activities across film festivals and art exhibition spaces helps clarify how the production and distribution of his works functions on a transnational basis. Wang’s early participation in international film festivals served the essential function of providing him with an international profile while, at the same time, opening up the doors of a broad range of production funds. Festivals also helped introduce him to international art institutions and 2 For a discussion of the interplay between film festivals and art exhibition spaces in the works of Tsai Ming-liang, Wang Bing, and Zhao Liang through the lens of the Venice Film Festival see Pollacchi (2019). The article is included in the special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas dedicated to the intertwined spaces of art and film creation and exhibition in China (Grube and Jiang, 2019). 3 There is a vast literature on the role of film festivals that can be accessed via the regularly updated website filmfestivalresearch.org. For a brief description on the role of festivals within the current film industry see Iordanova (2015).

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expand his viewership. For a young filmmaker from the People’s Republic of China who was not seeking permission to film or exhibit his work in China, international prestige represented a crucial asset. This has become even more relevant since artists and filmmakers are now included in the complex soft power discourse, against which the mainstream narrative of the China Dream is inscribed. 4 In fact, for those who present alternative narratives, the possibility of moving across transnational productions and working across authoritative international platforms can help limit confrontational debates with the official state institutions in China.5 The prestige, awards and international praise enjoyed by Wang Bing, position him as a first-class filmmaker/artist. They also translate into what Bourdieu defined as cultural capital (1986). On the one hand, the screenings in Venice (The Ditch, Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Bitter Money), Cannes (Fengming, A Chinese Memoir; Dead Souls), Berlin (West of the Tracks and Ta’ang), and Locarno (Mrs Fang) – together with the many international awards – have confirmed both the quality of the films and the position of Wang Bing as an auteur in contemporary global filmmaking. On the other hand, art institutions and galleries have given him the opportunity to further experiment with languages other than film including photography and video installations. They have also enabled him to re-work and complete some projects thanks to commissions for solo or larger exhibitions, as in the case of Man With No Name for the exhibition at the Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris in 2009, Mrs Fang for Documenta 14 in Kassel in 2017, Beauty Lives in Freedom for the exhibitions at the Museo Reina Sofia and at the Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris in 2018, among others.6 This more prolific phase in Wang’s career happened at a time when documentary films started featuring more regularly in the main competition of major international festivals so that they could also receive better mediatic exposure. In relation to art exhibition spaces, it is worth noticing that Wang’s works have been combined together in different exhibition formats and in spaces where his films could rarely be seen including China. This was the case of the exhibition Experience and Poverty at the Magician Space gallery in Beijing where the short film Traces, originally conceived for the exhibition 4 For a scholarly study on the interplay between soft power, state narratives, and alternative voices in the film industry see Voci and Hui (2018). 5 In his discussion of artist and filmmaker Yang Fudong, Berry anticipated the relevance of transnational activities in limiting the Chinese state interference (2014: 18). 6 A full list of Wang Bing’s solo exhibitions, including the one organized by a film festival, the Jeonju International Film Festival in South Korea in 2015, is available at http://www. galerieparisbeijing.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Portfolio-WangBing.pdf.

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at the Centre Pompidou was shown along with Mrs Fang and 15 Hours, both conceived for the prestigious Documenta 14 in Kassel. The Beijing exhibition, which also included a photographic series, was one of the few opportunities Wang has had to present his work domestically. As noted earlier, Wang’s cinema is known in China mainly thanks to his participation at international festivals and the awards he has won, but Chinese media have dedicated very little attention to his activities. Consequently, art exhibition spaces offered him an alternative opportunity to achieve some domestic visibility. Furthermore, Wang could start to take advantage of such international opportunities right after the presentation of his debut f ilm West of the Tracks thanks to the invitation he received from the Cannes Cinéfondation in 2004. That year, he began building the international production network that would later support his feature film The Ditch. Meanwhile, his name started circulating across the several European institutions f inancing non-commercial cinema including the French-based CNC ad Arte, which would become one of his regular financing bodies. Wang’s reputation as an emerging auteur was further reinforced after he won much critical praise for Fengming, A Chinese Memoir in Cannes in 2007 and The Ditch in the main competition in Venice in 2010. Although theatrical circulation remained limited, the filmmaker’s prestige in the film festival circuit opened the doors to galleries and art exhibitions. He began his regular collaboration with different art centres in Europe, including the Paris-based Galerie Chantal Crousel and the Galerie Paris-Beijing founded in 2006 in the 798 Beijing art district with a gallery space in Paris. These two galleries have promoted Wang’s work within the art exhibition circuit. After 2009, the increasing number of homages and solo exhibitions featuring Wang Bing at cultural and art institutions worldwide, gave him access to other funds and helped him further expand his network among art curators. For his first solo exhibition in 2009, the gallery Chantal Crousel allowed him to produce Man With No Name, a full-length silent documentary that, as it had no dialogue, was more suitable for an art exhibition space than theatrical screening. The year 2014, in particular, was significant for exhibitions and new gallery outputs as Wang started presenting his documentary works alongside photographs and video installations, often dealing with the same subjects of his documentaries, or somehow related to them. Three photographic series were first presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as Wang Bing et Jaime Rosales. Le geste humain (Wang Bing and Jaime Rosales. The human gesture) in the exhibition series Cinéastes en correspondence (Filmmakers in correspondence). These three photographic series relate to the material and spaces shot in Gansu for The Ditch (Traces and Man With No Name), and in

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Yunnan for Three Sisters (Father and Sons). The photographs were taken at different times but they were all processed and developed specifically for the exhibition. The same photographic sets, together with the work-in-progress Mi Niang, featured in the retrospective at the Royal Belgian Film Archive that followed the Paris retrospective in October–November 2014. After that, Wang received other important commissions from art institutions worldwide including one from the German Documenta in Kassel, which gave him the opportunity to complete the documentary Mrs Fang and the 900-minute-long installation 15 Hours, both of them connected to Zhejiang and the period in which Wang Bing was shooting Bitter Money. As a final remark on Wang Bing’s importance as an artist in the current global scene, it is worth reporting the motivation for one of the major art prizes, the prize EYE granted to Wang Bing in 2017: With his uncompromising way of working, Wang Bing is a sincere and authentic artist, who shows his engagement with today’s society and his perspective on the human condition. His well-constructed work has a deep knowledge of the visual language and is a strong voice, both in cinema and in the arts. While political and outspoken, Wang Bing doesn’t push viewers to accept his perspective, rather, his beautiful, brave work leaves room for interpretation (EYE 2017).

It is worth noting, however, that commissioned works might have some drawbacks when it comes to the intertwinement of film festival and artrelated activities. An example of one such limitation centred on the issue of ‘exclusivity’ is Mrs Fang. The Kassel exhibition demanded exclusive rights to stage the world premiere of the documentary, which meant that it could only be shown at festivals without a world premiere entry requirement. As a result, Cannes and Venice were ruled out and it premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival, the first festival without such a requirement available after the opening of Mrs Fang in Kassel. The Locarno Festival included the film in the main competition where it received the top award, although its international resonance in the media and industry was not as strong as that of Cannes, Venice, and Berlin. Another festival episode related to the importance of crossover practices and the filmmaker’s profile was the presentation of Dead Souls in Cannes on the 9 May 2018. As mentioned in the discussion of Dead Souls, the over nine-hour-long documentary was presented Out of Competition. Its extensive duration forced the festival to dedicate an entire day to the film, screened at the Salle du Soixantième, one of the main theatres, from ten

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in the morning to seven o’clock in the evening with an unusual one-hour break for lunch. Because of its length, the film was screened only once instead of the usual three screenings. However, the fact that it was included in the official programme and given one of the major theatres, despite its length, further confirms its importance and the stature of Wang Bing. He managed to force the traditional, and quite rigid, structure of the Cannes festival programming to adjust to his work. During the short introduction to the screening, the Cannes festival director Thierry Fremaux highlighted how Wang Bing had beaten the record for the longest film ever screened in Cannes, a record previously held by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg with the seven-hour-long Hitler: A Film from Germany.7 Although length, aesthetic features, and formats of Wang’s works partly limit their circulation to a large audience, he has gained the trust of film producers, international film sales companies and art curators who have been willing to support his work. Film production companies, as well as international sales companies – most of them based in Europe with some offices or representatives in Hong Kong or China – can also benefit from Wang’s international prof ile as a guarantee of quality cinema. Via his reputation, they might attract new, upcoming filmmakers from different parts of the world who see in Wang Bing their model. In addition, these companies can continue applying for European public funds that are also relevant for company portfolios and budgets. In fact, most international production and co-production funds are given on the basis of the profile of both the filmmakers and the companies supporting them. Therefore, reputation – or cultural capital – is a crucial asset in the current scenario for non-commercial, or non-mainstream filmmaking. While capitalizing on different exhibition opportunities, these artists/filmmakers continue to fund their work thanks to a mutually beneficial relationship between a set of international players and stakeholders. The relevance of transnational productions and film practices is evident in all of Wang’s documentaries, in particular the most recent ones. Here, transnational refers not only to the international players involved, but also to the interchange and co-existence of film elements that transcend national or regional borders, with Beauty Lives in Freedom as a perfect example in terms of production structure, shooting locations and exhibition modes.8 In fact, in addition to art commissioned works with relatively small budgets, 7 Information personally collected at the screening of Dead Souls in Cannes, 9 May 2018. 8 Transnational cinema has been discussed from several perspectives. For an introduction to the concept in relation to Chinese-language film, see Berry (2011).

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most of Wang’s larger documentary projects were produced on the basis of complex international co-production agreements. Their budgets were built upon multiple international funds accessed by a set of the international partners, including some regular ones such as Asian Shadows (Paris–Hong Kong), House on Fire (Paris), and Arte France (Paris). Such funds might offer bonuses or additional support if the films are screened at the three major European festivals. This completes the virtuous circuit where this process started. The same festivals that first introduced Wang Bing to the world have continued to be his main exhibition platforms. In addition, if the art exhibition circuit has contributed to expanding the viewer base and also offers a different visual experience from that of the theatre, it has also raised questions related to how the viewing of the gallery space differs from that of the theatre. As Chantal Crousel of the eponymous gallery noted on the occasion of the presentation of Beauty Lives in Freedom in Paris, viewers in the gallery need to choose how to position themselves in relation to the work; a possibility that is not granted in theatres with allocated seats. The gallery viewers can also move around the space and re-enter the gallery several times to re-watch or continue watching the work. They can also decide to leave at any time.9 These differences in the viewing experience suggest that the way the viewers perceive the work changes across the two circuits and further enriches the meaning of the works. As a concluding consideration in relation to the circulation of Wang’s work, we can state that the virtuous circuit of increasing prestige and reputation by means of activities across the art and the film festival scenes has not only consolidated Wang Bing’s prominent position as a documentary-auteur and an artist, but has also had significant implications that go beyond production and distribution to include reception modes and meaning-making of visual works.

References Astruc, Alexandre (1948) ‘Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo’, l’Écran français, 144, 30 March 1948. Trans. ‘The Birth of a New Avant-garde: La caméra-stylo’, in Peter Graham, Ginette Vincendeau (eds.) (1968), The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, London: Secker & Warburg in association with the British Film Institute, 17–23. Balsom, Erika (2013) ‘How Film and Video Became Art Objects’, Cinema Journal, 53:1, 97–118. 9

Comments personally collected at the Chantal Crousel Gallery, Paris, 3 December 2018.

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Berry, Chris (2011) ‘Transnational Chinese Cinema Studies’, The Chinese Cinema Book, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 9–16. — (2014) ‘The New Gestural Cinema: Yang Fudong and the Gallery Film’, Film Quarterly, 67: 3, 17–29. Bourdieu, Pierre (1986) ‘The Forms of Capital’, Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, Richardson J. (ed.), 241–258. Westport, CT: Greenwood. EYE, ‘Winner EYE Prize 2017 | Wang Bing’ https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/about-eye/ eye-prize/winner-eye-prize-2017-wang-bing [accessed 1 July 2018]. Grube, Katherine and Zoe Meng Jiang (eds.) (2019) Chaotic formats, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 13: 2. Harvey, David (2004) ‘Space as a Key Work’, Paper for Marx and Philosophy Conference, 29 May 2004, Institute of Education, London, http://frontdeskapparatus. com/files/harvey2004.pdf — (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism. Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, London: Verso. Iordanova, Dina (2015) ‘The Film Festival as an Industry Node’, Media Industries, 1: 3, 7–11, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/15031809.0001.302?view=text;rgn= main [accessed 20 March 2020]. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lobato, Ramon (2012) Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pollacchi, Elena (2019) ‘Porous Circuits: Tsai Ming-liang, Zhao Liang, and Wang Bing at the Venice International Film Festival and the Interplay Between the Festival and the Art Exhibition Circuits’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13:2, 130-146 [doi: 10.1080/17508061.2019.1665239]. Rancière, Jacques (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (trans. Steven Corcoran), London and New York: Continuum. Rombes, Nicholas (2017) Cinema in the Digital Age New York: Columbia University Press. Sørenssen, Bjørn (2008) ‘Digital Video and Alexandre Astruc’s Caméra-stylo: The New Avant-garde in Documentary Realized?’, Studies in Documentary Film 2, 1, 47–59. Voci, Paola (2010) China on Video: Smaller-Screen Realities. London and New York: Routledge. http://moussemagazine.it/wang-bing-experienc​ e-​poverty-magician-spacebeijing/ — (2015) ‘DV and the Animateur Cinema in China’, in Z. Zhang & A. Zito (eds.), DV-made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformations after Independent Film, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 260–288. Voci, Paola and Luo Hui (eds.) (2018) Screening China’s Soft Power, London: Routledge.

Filmography Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks – Tiexi qu 铁西区 – Part I: Rust – Gongchang 工厂 (244’) – Part II: Remnants – Yanfenjie 艳粉街 (178’) – Part III: Rails – Tielu 铁路 (132’) Production: Wang Bing Film Workshop (China) with the support of the Hubert Bals Fund (NL) China, The Netherlands, 4:3, col., 554’ 2002, documentary Festival and awards:1 – Lisbon International Documentary Festival, Grand Prize – Marseille Festival of Documentary Film, Grand Prize – Festival des Trois Continents, Montgolfière d’or – Yamagata International Documentary Festival, Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize Brutality Factory – Baoli gongchang 暴力工厂 2007, short feature film in the omnibus film O Estado Do Mundo (State of the World) Production: LX Filmes (P) Portugal, col., 17’ Festival and awards: – Cannes Film Festival, Director’s Fortnight Fengming: A Chinese Memoir – He Fengming 和凤鸣 Production: Wil Productions (HK), Æternam Films (F), Fantasy Pictures Entertainment (China) Hong Kong, France, China, DCP, 16:9, col., 184’ 2007, documentary Festival and awards: – Cannes Film Festival, Official Selection – Toronto International Film Festival – Rotterdam International Film Festival This filmography is meant as an overview for easy identification. The listing of productions include only the main companies, and not all the associate producers and supporting funds. Also in relation to film festivals, awards, and exhibitions, this listing is not meant to be exhaustive but should provide indication of the circulation of Wang Bing’s work. 1

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– Yamagata International Documentary Festival, Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize – Fribourg International Film Festival Crude Oil – Caiyou riji 菜油日记 Production: Wang Bing Film Workshop (China), Rotterdam Film Festival with the support of the Hubert Bals Fund (NL) China, The Netherlands, col., 840’ 2008, documentary/video installation Festival and awards: – Rotterdam International Film Festival – Hong Kong International Film Festival Coal Money – Tongdao 通道 Production: Les Films d’Ici (F) France, DCP, 1,66, col., 52’ 2009, documentary Festival and awards: – Cinéma du réel, Paris, International Competition Man With No Name – Wu ming zhe 无名者 Produced with the support of Galerie Chantal Crousel, Collections of Centre Pompidou (Paris) and M+ Museum Hong Kong, col., 97’ 2009, documentary/video installation Happy Valley – Xi yang tang 喜洋塘 Production: CCCB Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (ES) Spain, DCP, col., 18’ 2009, documentary/video Installation The Ditch – Jiabiangou 夹边沟 Production: Les Films de l’Étranger (F), Wil Productions (HK), Entre Chien et Loup (B) France, Hong Kong, Belgium, DCP 5.1, 1,85, col., 113’ 2010, feature film Festival and awards: – Venice Film Festival, Competition – Toronto International Film Festival – Abu Dhabi Film Festival – Busan International Film Festival

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– – – –

Montréal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma Sao Paulo Mostra Internacional de Cinema Stockholm Film Festival Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival – Audience Award, SIGNIS Award, Special Jury Award – Kinema Junpo Awards – Best Foreign Film Language Three Sisters – San zimei 三姊妹 Production: Chinese Shadows (F/HK), Album Productions (F) France, Hong Kong, DCP 5.1, 16:9, col., 153’ 2012, documentary Festival and awards: – Venice Film Festival, Orizzonti Best Film Award – DocLisboa, Best Film Award – Festival des Trois Continents, Audience Award and Best Film Award, Montgolfière d’or – Dubai International Film Festival, Best Documentary Asia Africa Award – Fribourg International Film Festival, Grand Prix Award, Ecumenical Jury Award, E-changer Award, Don Quijote Award – Hong Kong International Film Festival – Edinburgh International Film Festival – New Zealand International Film Festival – Taipei International Film Festival – Mexico International Film Festival Ficunam – Tokyo FILMeX – Brisbane International Film Festival DOCS – Viennale – Busan International Film Festival – Toronto International Film Festival Alone – Gudu 孤独 Production: Chinese Shadows (F/HK), Album Productions (F) France, Hong Kong DCP 5.1, 16:9, col., 89’ 2012, documentary for TV broadcast Festival and awards: – Black Movie Festival, Geneva, Critics Award – Rotterdam International Film Festival – Melbourne International Film Festival – Rio International Film Festival

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– IDFA, Amsterdam – DocHouse, London ’Til Madness Do Us Apart – Feng ai 疯爱 Production: Y. Production (HK) Hong Kong, France, Japan, 16:9, col., 227’ 2013, documentary Festival and awards: – Venice Film Festival, out of competition – Toronto International Film Festival – Vancouver International Film Festival – Busan International Film Festival – DocLisboa, Competition – Viennale – Copenhagen CPH:DOX – Festival des Trois Continents, Mongolfière d’argent – Rotterdam International Film Festival – Göteborg International Film Festival – Fribourg International Film Festival – Brisbane International Film Festival DOCS Short film (untitled) – 2013, 94” Contribution to the Venice 70: Future Reloaded project on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Venice International Film Festival Father and Sons – Fu yu zi 父与子; 87’ Production: Wil Productions (HK), represented by the Galerie Paris-Beijing France, China 2014, documentary/video installation Festival and awards: – DocLisboa, City of Lisbon Award Traces – Yi zhi 遗址 Single-channel video, 35mm film transferred to digital, b/w, 25’ 2014 (produced in 2005), video installation Mi Niang Screened as a work-in-progress at the Royal Belgian Film Archive, 23 October 2014, produced with the support of the Royal Belgian Film Archive Belgium, col., 78’ 2014, documentary

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Ta’ang – De’ang 德昂 Production: Chinese Shadows (HK), Wil Productions (HK) Hong Kong, DCP 5.1, 16:9, col., 148’ 2016, documentary Festival and awards: – Berlinale, Forum – Hong Kong International Film Festival – Melbourne International Film Festival – Locarno International Film Festival – Vilnius Film Festival – Toronto International Film Festival – Vladivostok International Film Festival – Busan International Film Festival – Viennale – DocLisboa – Doc Buenos Aires Bitter Money – Ku qian 苦钱 Production: Gladys Glover (F), House on Fire (F) and Chinese Shadows (F/HK) France, Hong Kong, DCP 5.1, 16:9, col., 155’ 2016, documentary Festival and awards: – Venice Film Festival, Orizzonti Best Screenplay – Las Palmas Film Festival, Cajamar Foundation Golden Lady Harimaguada – South Korea DMZ Film Festival – Montréal Festival du Nouveau Cinéma – Rio International Film Festival – Mar del Plata International Film Festival – Tokyo FILMeX – Seoul Independent Film Festival – Zagreb Human Rights Film Festival, Human Rights Film Network Award Mrs Fang – Fang Xiuying 方绣英 Production: Ideale Audience International (F), Wil Productions (HK), All Ways Pictures (HK) with the support of Documenta 14 (D) France, Hong Kong, Germany, DCP, 16:9, col., 86’ 2017, documentary Festival and awards: – Locarno International Film Festival, Golden Leopard – El Gouna International Film Festival, Documentary Competition, Bronze Star Award

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– Toronto International Film Festival – Busan International Film Festival – Vladivostok International Film Festival – Hamburg International Film Festival – Rio International Film Festival – DocLisboa – Hawaii International Film Festival – Mar del Plata International Film Festival – Tokyo FILMeX 15 Hours – 15 xiaoshi 15小时 Production: Documenta14 (D) Hong Kong/Germany, DCP, col., 900’ 2017, video installation Dead Souls – Si linghun 死灵魂 Production: Les Films D’Ici (F), Adok Films (CH) France, Switzerland, DCP, 1,85, col., 495’ 2018, documentary Festival and awards: – Cannes Film Festival, official selection – Yamagata International Documentary Festival, Robert and Frances Flaherty Prize – Faro Island Film Festival, Golden Carp Film Award Beauty Lives in Freedom – Mei shi ziyou de xiangzheng 美是自由的象征 Production: Kong Lihong with the support of Galerie Chantal Crousel France, China, Digital 4K, 16:9, col., 330’ 2018, documentary/video installation Shanghai Youth – Shanghai qingnian 上海青年 Production: House on Fire (F), Gladys Glover (F), Chinese Shadows (F/HK) France, Hong Kong 2021 (in production), documentary

Photographic series Man With No Name, 2013 Fathers and Sons, 2014 Traces, 2014

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219

Retrospectives and exhibitions Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France; 31 October–5 December 2009 Filmmaker Film Festival, Milan, Italy, 2010 Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2014 Galerie Paris-Beijing, Paris, France 2014 Galerie Paris-Beijing, Brussels, Belgium, 2014 Kanal – Centre Pompidou, Brussels, Belgium, 2014 Pacific Meridian – International Film Festival of the Asian-Pacific region, Vladivostok, Russia, 2014 AV Festival, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom, 2014 Black Movie Festival, Geneva, Switzerland, 2015 Gwangju International Film Festival, Gwangju, South Korea, 2015 International Documentary & Short Film Festival of Kerala, India, 2016 Swedish Film Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, 2016 CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, USA, 2016 Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany, 2017 Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing, China; 2017 (exhibition) Magician Space, Beijing, China; 2017 (solo exhibition) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; 2018 (retrospective) École des hautes études en sciences socials, Paris, France; 2018 (retrospective) Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachussets, USA; 2018 (retrospective) Tate Modern, London, UK; 2018 (retrospective) Film at Lincoln Center, New York, USA; 2018 (retrospective) Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France; 1–22 December 2018 (exhibition) Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy; 2019 (retrospective) Take Ninagawa, Tokyo, Japan; 2019 (exhibition)

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— (2012) ‘Past in the Present’ (trans. Cindy Carter), Sabzian, 5.12.2018, https:// sabzian.be/article/past-in-the-present [accessed 20 February 2020]. — (2013) ‘Filming a Land in Flux. Interview’, New Left Review, 82, July/August, https://newleftreview.org/issues/II82/articles/bing-wang-filming-a-land-in-flux [accessed 20 February 2019]. — (2014) ‘The True Nature of Story: A Conversation with Wang Bing’ https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=X_EenguA7Og [accessed 20 October 2016]. Wang, H. and Zhuo, Y. (2018) ‘The Necessary Way for the Development of China’s Rural Areas in the New Era-Rural Revitalization Strategy’, Open Journal of Social Sciences, 6, 97–106. Wang, Qi (2014) Memory, Subjectivity and Independent Chinese Cinema, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wen H. (2019) ‘Pursuing Coordinated Urban, Rural and Regional Development’ in Pei C., Xu J. (eds.) Chinese Dream and Practice in Zhejiang – Economy. Research Series on the Chinese Dream and China’s Development Path, Singapore: Springer, 209–243. Wen Qing (2018) ‘From Rags to Riches. A Small, Dilapidated Town Transforms Itself into the Promised Land for Entrepreneurs’, Beijing Review, 36, 30 September 2018. http://www.bjreview.com.cn/Current_Issue/Editor_Choice/201809/ t20180903_800140155.html [accessed 10 October 2019]. Williams, Raymond (1990) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, David (ed.) (2000) Cahiers du Cinema – Volume Four: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle, London and New York: Routledge. Wu Fulong and Chris Webster (eds.) (2010) Marginalization in Urban China: Comparative Perspectives, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wu, Wenguang (2010) ‘DV: Individual Filmmaking’ in C. Berry, Lü X., L. Rofel (eds.), The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 49–54. Xi Jinping (2012) ‘Xi Jinping guangyu xianzai Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing de Zhongguo meng lunshu zhaipian’ [Xi Jinping’s speech on the ‘China Dream’ of the great national rejuvenation], http://theory.people.com.cn/GB/68294/388648/ [accessed 30 September 2015]. — (2014) ‘Xi Jinping talks at the Beijing Forum on Literature and Art’ Translation of summary published by Xinhua, October 15, 2014, China Copyright and Media, October 16, 2014, https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/10/16/xijinpings- talks-at-the-beijing-forum-on-literature-and-art [accessed September 30, 2020]. Xinhua agency (2019) ‘China Announces Guidelines to Promote Integrated UrbanRural Development’, China Daily, 5 May 2019, http://www.chinadaily.com. cn/a/201905/05/WS5ccee7b1a3104842260b9e22.html [accessed 10 October 2019].

Bibliogr aphy

231

Yang Xianhui (2002) Jiabiangou jishi [Chronicles of Jiabiangou], Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe. — (2003) Gaobie Jiabiangou [Farewell to Jiabiangou], Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe. Yu, Sabrina Qiong and Lydia Dan Wu (2017) ‘The China Independent Film Festival and Chinese Independent Film Festivals: Self-Legitimization and Institutionalization’ in Chris Berry and Luke Robinson (eds.) Chinese Film Festivals, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Yu Xie and Xiang Zhou (2014) ‘Income Inequality in Today’s China’, PNAS 13 May 2014, 111:19, 6928-6933, http://www.pnas.org/content/111/19/6928 [accessed 28 August 2018]. Zhang Donghui (2015) ‘Growing Up with Distant Parents: Socialization and Alienation of “Left-Behind” Children in Rural China’, Frontiers of Education in China, 10, 505–525. Zhang, Yingjin (2014) ‘Comparative Film Studies, Transnational Film Studies: Interdisciplinarity, Crossmediality, and Transcultural Visuality in Chinese Cinema’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 1:1, 27–40. Zhao Suisheng ‘Xi Jinping’s Maoist Revival’,  Journal of Democracy 27:3, 83–97. Zhao Tingyang (2006) ‘Rethinking empire from a Chinese concept “All-UnderHeaven” (Tian-xia)’, Social Identities, 12:1, 29-41. Zhao Yaohui (1999) ‘Labor Migration and Earnings Differences: The Case of Rural China’, Economic Development and Cultural Change 47: 4, 767–782. Zhou, Xiang (2014) ‘The Rise of Earnings Inequality in Urban China. Increasing Returns to Education, Changing Labor Force Structure, and the Rise of Earnings Inequality in Urban China, 1996–2010’, Social Forces 93:2, 429–455 [doi: 10.1093/ sf/sou073].



Index 1

15 Hours (2017): 56, 207–08, 218 absolute space 201 Accattone (Pasolini): 142 activist filmmakers 25, 49, 94, 121 Adams, Brooke 78 Adok Films 156 aesthetics see poetics Agamben, Giorgio 43 Ai Weiwei 21, 49 Ai Xiaoming 154 n. 32 Alone (2012): 104–06, 215–16 American Dream 96, 101–02 Andersen, Thom 100 Anderson, Benedict 22 Anti-Rightist Campaign 33 doctrine of the five per cent 158 individual narrative and collective spaces in 172–74 marginality of narratives of 57–58 political context of 128–29 see also Brutality Factory (2007); Dead Souls (2018); The Ditch (2010); Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007) Antonioni, Michelangelo 25, 31, 43, 82 art, critical 149 Arte France (Paris): 93, 104, 118, 139 n. 19, 156, 210 art exhibition spaces 59–60, 179, 199–210 Asian Shadows (Paris–Hong Kong): 210 Astruc, Alexandre 203 audience see film-viewers Aufderheide, Patricia 41, 68 Avril, Philippe 135, 148 Barbera, Alberto 30, 31 n. 10 Barker, Adam 76 Barthesian reality effect 145 Beauty Lives in Freedom (2018): 33 exhibition spaces for 206 individual narrative and collective spaces in 58–59, 174, 202 production 193, 209–10, 218 viewing experience of 210 Bégaudeau, François 19 n. 1, 132, 153, 160, 162 Beijing Academy of Fine Arts 69 Beijing Film Academy 19 Beijing Normal University 69 Berlin Film Festival 21 Blind Shaft (Li) presented at 68 role in launching new auteurs 205–06

Ta’ang presented at 34, 175, 184 Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks presented at 34, 63–64 Bettinson, Gary 28, 29 Bitter Money (2016): 32, 96, 121 cinematic structure of 117–23 festivals and awards 26–27, 31, 34, 115, 206, 217 genesis of 26–27 labour structures and social dynamics in 56, 114–17, 120–21, 172 production 118, 122, 217 shooting location 38, 51–52, 88, 95 transparency/non-transparency in 120 viewing experience of 117–18 Blasi, Gabriella 78–79 Blind Shaft (Li): 68 Boden, Jeanne 181, 185 Bordwell, David 28 Bourdieu, Pierre 206 Brechtian distancing 144 n. 22, 164 n. 41 Bruno, Giuliana 141, 142 n. 20 Brutality Factory (2007) festivals and awards 213 ghosts and ghostly spaces in 145–50 history spaces in 58 production 213 Brut de Chine 67 n. 9 Buddhism, values of 153 Burdeau, Emmanuel 75–76, 191–92 caméra stylo 203 camera technique 15–16 ‘cinema of engagement’ and 25 Dead Souls 158–59, 162–65 digital technology 72–76, 185, 202–04 The Ditch 203 Father and Sons 180 Fengming: A Chinese Memoir 151–52 high-definition (HD) recording 140–41, 148 Man With No Name 177–78 narrative structure and 23 Ta’ang 185–86 Three Sisters 102–03 Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks 203 ‘Til Madness Do Us Part 110–14 Traces 154 n. 34 viewer experience and 21, 28–29, 42, 204 Cannes Cinéfondation 106, 127–28, 134

1 Works listed are by Wang Bing unless otherwise noted. Illustrations are indicated by page numbers in italics.

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Cannes Film Festival 21, 34 Cannes Festival Residence 106, 127–28, 128 n. 1, 134 Dead Souls presented at 34, 53, 152, 156, 208–09 Fengming: A Chinese Memoir presented at 34, 128, 152, 207 inclusion of documentary in 68 role in launching new auteurs 205–06 capital, cultural 204, 206, 209 Carradine, John 101 CCA Wattis Institute exhibition (San Francisco): 20 censorship 21–22, 25, 49, 69, 135 n. 14, 136 Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB): 94 Centre Pompidou (Paris): 154, 179, 207–08 Chen Kaige 66 children, left behind 46–47 see also Three Sisters (2012) China absolute versus relative space of 201 censorship in 21–22, 25, 49, 69, 135 n. 14, 136 collective narrative of 172 Cultural Revolution 65, 129–30, 145–46, 172, 194 market economy 46, 77, 88, 90, 123, 174 modernization 23–24, 32, 38, 45–47, 54, 65, 77, 115–16, 172 post-socialist 29, 41, 90, 172–73 deterioration of family structures in 179–81 spaces of death in 186–92 spaces of exile in 183–97 spaces of refuge and escape in 181–86 spaces of self-isolation in 176–78 worker displacement and relocation in 44–48, 72–77, 114–17, 172, 181 see also Anti-Rightist Campaign China Dream 15, 32 counter-narrative of 37–44, 48–53, 202 description of 23–24, 24 n. 6, 48–49 individual initiative encouraged by 172 new centres of labour in 114–17 revitalization of Maoism in 155, 155 n. 37 Chinese Communist Party 32, 46, 51, 71, 77, 128, 132, 158 ‘Chineseness’: 22 Chinese Shadows 118, 184 Cinéastes en correspondence exhibition series 179, 207–08 cinema, documentary see documentary cinema cinema of engagement 25 cinema of testimony 165–68 cinematic reportage see reportage, cinematic cinéma vérité 42, 66, 70, 91 Coal Money (2009): 56, 93–94, 214 collective memory, construction of 73, 161 collective narratives 172

collective spaces 33–34, 39, 58–59 Chinese experience of 172 n. 1, 172–73 individual narratives in Beauty Lives in Freedom 193–97 Dead Souls 161, 174 The Ditch 174 Father and Sons 174, 179–81 Fengming: A Chinese Memoir 174–75 Man With No Name 174, 176–78 Mi Niang 175, 181–86 Mrs Fang 174, 186–92 Ta’ang 175 public sphere versus 172 Colossal Youth (Costa): 131, 145–50 commentary, avoidance of 42, 91 Alone 104 Dead Souls 162 Three Sisters 98 Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks 70, 73, 81 ‘Til Madness Do Us Part 108 Communist Party, Chinese 32, 46, 51, 71, 77, 128, 132, 158 Comolli, Jean-Louis 131, 137, 140, 144 compassion, Confucian virtue of 153 Confucianism, ethics of 153, 164 connections, intertextual 23, 29–30, 38, 200–01 Costa, Pedro 25, 33, 131, 136–37, 145–50, 205 counter-narrative of China Dream, cinema as 37–44, 48–53, 202 critical art 149 Crude Oil (2008): 55–56, 204, 214 CS Productions 156 Cui Zi’en 67 n. 10 Cullen, Jim 96 cultural capital 204, 206, 209 cultural renaissance, Xi’s rhetoric of 48–49 Cultural Revolution 65, 129–30, 145–46, 172, 194 see also Anti-Rightist Campaign; Mao Zedong danwei 47 Days of Heaven (Malick): 32, 63, 64, 78–83 Dead Souls (2018): 33, 40, 158 camera technique in 158–59, 162–65, 203 as cinematic reportage 162 cinematic structure of 157–59, 160 Confucian ethics in 153, 164 critical reception of 153 editing and post-production 156 festivals and awards 34, 53, 131, 152, 156, 206, 208–09, 218 genesis of 154–56 individual narratives in 161, 174 intertextual references in 163 Lanzmann’s Shoah compared to 165–68 production 53, 156, 218 repetition in 132, 161, 165 shooting location 52

235

Index

spaces of death in 162–65 spaces of history in 57–58 spaces of memory in 131–32 spaces of survival in 157–62 spatiotemporal frames in 162–65 witness testimony archived in 73, 152–54, 195 death, spaces of 162–65, 186–92 The Death of Louis XIV (Serra): 191–92 De Baeque, Antoine 153 Debord, Guy 143 Deng Xiaoping modernization and reforms 23–24, 32, 45–46, 54, 115–16, 172 Southern Tour 116 Direct Cinema 42, 70, 91, 100, 149 displacement, worker 46–48 see also Bitter Money (2016); Three Sisters (2012); Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) ‘Dispossessed Lives. Resilient Lives’ exhibition 193 distribution, film 49, 60, 69, 204–10 The Ditch (2010): 20, 33, 40, 130–32, 137–41 camera technique in 203 Costa’s Colossal Youth compared to 136–37, 145–50 critical reception of 207 editing and post-production 135–36, 145–46 festivals and awards 34, 49, 128, 135–36, 206, 214–15 genesis of 52–53, 133–37 ghosts and ghostly spaces in 145–50 high-definition (HD) recording 140–41 historical spectacle in 141–45 history spaces in 57–58, 130–32, 137–41 individual narrative in 174 intertextual connections 163 Pasolini’s Salò compared to 33, 141–45 photographic exhibitions drawn from 207–08 production 128, 133–36, 135 n. 13, 139, 207, 214 repetition in 132, 143 shooting location 50–51, 50 spaces of self-isolation in 175–76 spatiotemporal frame 139–40 tension between narrative and document in 137–41 theatricality in 144–45 Wang’s dissatisfaction with 155 Doc and Film International 156 Documenta 14 exhibition (Kassel): 15, 20, 56, 60, 187, 191, 206–07, 208 documentary cinema challenges to traditional typology of 90–92 as ‘cinema of thought’: 14 Direct Cinema 42, 70, 91, 100, 149

‘here-and-now’ (xianchang) approach to 41–42, 91 historical context 66–68 ‘history in the making’ observed in 72–77 interpretation in 16, 41, 117, 138, 202, 208 narrativizing of reality in 38–44, 72–77, 196–97 prominence of 34 spectacle in 28, 44, 141–45 staging/intervention in 41–43 documentary modes 29, 91, 91 n. 3 documentation of past 137–41 dragon certificate 49 see also censorship Drifters (Wang Xiaoshuai): 68 Duan Jinchuan 67 Du Haibin 21 duration in Three Sisters 104–06 in ‘Til Madness Do Us Part 114 Dutertre, Alfred 75 editing and post-production 41–42, 204 Alone 104, 106 Beauty Lives in Freedom 194–95 Dead Souls 156 The Ditch 135–36 Man With No Name 178 Three Sisters 104 ‘Til Madness Do Us Part 106 Elsaesser, Thomas 76 engagement, cinema of 25 entrepreneurship, private 172 epics of survival 63, 97–100 epistephilia 138 escape, spaces of 181–86 ethics of cinema 43, 43 n. 3 ethnic subaltern 46, 175, 181–86, 192–93 see also Mi Niang (2014); Ta’ang (2016) exclusion, dynamics of 46–47, 208 exhibition spaces 34, 59–60, 179, 199–210 exile, spaces of 193–97 exoticism 22 Experience and Poverty exhibition 206 EYE Art & Film Prize 20, 208 factory spaces see Bitter Money (2016); Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore): 26, 68 family structures, deterioration of 172–73 in Bitter Money 120–21 in Father and Sons 179–81 in Mrs Fang 186–92 in Three Sisters 98–100 Fang Xiuying 52, 186–92 see also Mrs Fang (2017) Far Eastern Economic Review 74 Father and Sons (2014): 33, 174, 179–81, 216 Fenfen see Three Sisters (2012)

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Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007): 33, 40 camera technique in 151–52 critical reception of 207 festivals and awards 34, 128, 152, 206, 213–14 genesis of 52–53, 151–52 history spaces in 57–58 individual narrative and collective spaces in 39, 174–75, 177 production 213–14 shooting location 50–51, 50 storytelling in 174 Feng Xiaogang 66 Festival des Trois Continents (France): 68 festival exhibition see exhibition spaces Festival Internacional de Cinema Documental 68 fiction/non-fiction divide cinéma vérité 42, 66, 70, 91 Costa’s challenges to 131 early film experiences 13–14, 76–77 Wang’s challenges to 25–26, 34, 41, 83, 138, 140, 149 filial piety, Confucian virtue of 153 film festivals festival/solo exhibition crossover practices 59–60 role in launching new auteurs 204–10 see also individual festivals filmmakers, activist 25, 49, 94, 121 film sorpresa 135 n. 15, 135–36 film-viewers imagined community of 21–22 international 49–50 viewing experience of 21, 28–29, 40–42, 204 Beauty Lives in Freedom 210 Bitter Money 117–18 immersive experience 16, 21, 28–29 political connotations 42–43 shared experience 26–27, 40–41, 55 Three Sisters 100 Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks 72–74 Fire at Sea (Rosi): 26 Fonda, Henry 101 Ford, John 32, 89, 100–03 form, narrative structure and 24–28 Frankfurt School 142 Frémaux, Thierry 156, 209 gaige kaifang 45 Galerie Chantal Crousel exhibition (Paris): 20, 176, 193, 204, 206, 207 Galerie Paris-Beijing 207 gallery exhibition spaces 59–60, 179, 199–210 Gaobie Jiabiangou (Yang): 134 Gao Ertai 59, 174, 193–97, 202 see also Beauty Lives in Freedom (2018) Gao Guifang 158, 161

gender discourse 181–86 geographical contexts, as counter-journey of China Dream 37–38, 48–53, 50 Gere, Richard 78 ghosts of the past 145–50 Glover, Gladys 118 Golden Leopard 20, 187 Golden Lion 26 n. 8, 68 The Grapes of Wrath (Ford): 32, 89, 100–03 Ground Zero 39, 155 The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn): 174 Guzmán, Patricio 166 Happy Valley (2009): 94–95, 214 Harvard Film Archive 156 Harvey, David 37–38, 155, 172, 200, 201 He Fengming 57, 128, 151–52, 155, 160–61, 174, 177, 195, 196, 202 see also Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007) here-and-now (xianchang) approach 41–42, 91 Herzog, Werner 14 high-definition (HD) recording 140–41, 148 history, spaces of 23, 32–33, 39, 51–52, 57–58 alternative narratives 127–32 cinema of testimony 165–68 ghosts and ghostly spaces in 145–50 ‘history in the making’: 53–54, 72–77 tension between narrative and document in 137–41 see also Brutality Factory (2007); The Ditch (2010) Hitler: A Film from Germany (Syberberg): 156, 209 Holocaust, testimonies of 153, 166–67, 203 House on Fire (Paris): 118, 210 Hubert Bals Fund 64, 69, 204 Hudson, David 171 Huillet, Danièle 148 n. 25 Hu Jintao 32, 45 hukou 46, 181 humanism 200–01 human practice, spaces of 199–201 Hundred Flowers Campaign 128, 158 hyper-realism 185, 195 individual initiative, China’s shift toward 172–73 industrial space, transformation of 92–96 see also labour, spaces of inequalities, social/economic as consequence of market economy 77, 103, 123 counter-narrative of China Dream 16, 37–44, 48–53, 202 marginal spaces and uneven development 44–48, 92–96, 192 In Public (Jia): 67, 67 nn. 11–12 In Search of My Homeland (Gao): 193 Institute of Contemporary Arts 156

Index

interpretation 16, 41, 117, 138, 202, 208 In Vanda’s Room (Costa): 131, 148–49 Jameson, Fredric 39 n. 2, 87, 110 Japanese Imperial Army 65 Jeonju Film Festival 67 n. 11 Jiabiangou Elegy (Ai): 154 n. 32 Jiabiangou jishi (Yang): 134 Jiabiangou labour camp 174, 193–94 see also Dead Souls (2018); The Ditch (2010); Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007); Traces (2014) Jiang Zemin 32 Jia Zhangke 42, 66, 67, 67 n. 12, 94 Journal of Chinese Cinemas 205 n. 2 Kahn, Albert 75 Kerby, Adam 104, 106, 204 Khmer Rouge 153, 166 knowledge, creation of 25 Kohler, Robert 171, 174 labour, spaces of 29, 32, 39, 55–57, 88–89 Alone 104–06, 215–16 Bitter Money 32, 96, 121 contradictions of economic reform in 114–17 festivals and awards 26–27, 31, 34, 115, 206, 217 genesis of 26–27 labour structures and social dynamics in 56, 114–17, 120–21, 172 production 118, 122, 217 shooting location 38, 51–52, 88, 95 structure of 117–23 transparency/non-transparency in 120 viewing experience of 117–18 cinema as/of labour 55, 90–92 Coal Money 56, 93–94, 214 Crude Oil 55–56, 204, 214 economic and political frame for 88–89 15 Hours 56, 207–08, 218 Happy Valley 94–95, 214 labour consciousness 94 Shanghai Youth 118, 218 ‘Til Madness Do Us Part 32, 113 camera technique in 110–14 deterioration of family structures in 172 duration in 114 editing and post-production 106 festivals and awards 30–31, 34, 106, 206, 216 madness and love in 111–14 production 216 repetition in 108 shooting location 48, 50, 51, 88, 95 spaces of labour in 55–58 visual experience of ‘confinement’ in 106–10

237 transition to rural/marginal spaces 92–96 worker displacement and relocation 45–48, 72–77 see also Three Sisters (2012); Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) labour camps see Dead Souls (2018); The Ditch (2010); Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007); Traces (2014) labour consciousness 94 laid-off workers see Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) Lanzmann, Claude 25, 33, 58, 153, 165–68 La Ricotta (Pasolini): 141 L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (Lumière): 76 La Société du spectacle (Debord): 143 La Sortie des usine Lumière (Lumière): 76 Lefebvre, Henri 39 n. 1 ‘left behind’ children 46–47 see also Three Sisters (2012) Left-wing Writers League 65 n. 6 Les Acacias 156 Les Films de l’Étranger 135, 137 Les Films d’Ici 93, 156 Li Yang 68 Locarno International Film Festival 34, 60, 187, 206, 208 long shooting 28–29, 102, 163, 177–78 Lou Ye 66, 68 Lumière Brothers 13, 30, 32, 64, 75–77 Lü Xinyu 64, 92 Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts 19 Magician Space gallery (Berlin): 206 Mai, Nadin 173, 177 Malick, Terrence 25 Days of Heaven 32, 63–64, 78–83 The Thin Red Line 78 Man With No Name (2009): 33, 57–58, 173–74, 206 camera technique in 177–78 festivals and awards 214 individual spaces of self-isolation in 176–78 production 176, 214 versions of 178 Mao Zedong 46, 151–52, 181 Cultural Revolution 65, 129–30, 145, 146, 172, 194 doctrine of the five per cent 158 industrialization and collective economy 54, 65, 77 revitalization of 155, 155 n. 9 see also Anti-Rightist Campaign marginality 29, 38, 44–48 ethnic subaltern 175, 181–86, 192–93 rural/marginal spaces 44–48, 92–96 see also Mi Niang (2014); Ta’ang (2016); Three Sisters (2012); ‘Til Madness Do Us Part (2013)

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market economy, China’s transition toward 46, 77, 88, 90, 123, 174 Marseille Festival of Documentary Film 68 Meliès, George 13, 76 memory, spaces of 32–33, 57, 127–32 spaces for survival 157–62 spaces of death 162–65 see also Dead Souls (2018); The Ditch (2010) migration, internal 46–48, 114–17, 172, 181 see also Bitter Money (2016); Father and Sons (2014); Three Sisters (2012) Minervini, Roberto 14 Mi Niang (2014): 33, 208 gender discourse in 182 genesis of 182–83 individual narrative and collective spaces in 58–59, 175 production 181, 183, 216 shooting location 48 spaces of refuge and escape in 181–86 modernism 75 modes, documentary 29, 91, 91 n. 3 Moore, Michael 26, 68 Morris, Errol 68 Mrs Fang (2017): 33, 208 art exhibition spaces 207 festivals and awards 20, 60, 187, 206, 217–18 genesis of 187 individual narrative and collective spaces in 39, 58–59, 174, 202 individual spaces of death in 186–92 production 217 soundscape of 189 spatiotemporal frames in 190–91 Müller, Armin 45, 47 Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid): 156, 193, 206 Mussolini, Benito 142 Myanmar 184–86 narratives collective 172 impact of camera work on 23, 43 individual 33–34, 39 in Beauty Lives in Freedom 193–97 in Dead Souls 161, 174 in The Ditch 174 in Father and Sons 174, 179–81 in Fengming: A Chinese Memoir 174–75 in Man With No Name 174, 176–78 in Mi Niang 175, 181–86 in Mrs Fang 174, 186–92 in Ta’ang 175 multiplicity of 196–97 narrativizing of reality 38–44, 72–77, 196–97, 201–02 subject matter and 24–28 tension between narrative and document 137–41

nationalism 22 Nationalist Army 158 Near Death (Wiseman): 188 neoliberalism 29, 173 New Left Review 74, 93 Nichols, Bill 41, 91, 138 Nostalgia for the Light (Guzmán): 166 observation, immersive 40–41 oil field workers see Crude Oil (2008) ‘On Beauty’ (Gao): 194 ‘ontological’ realism 13 Oppenheimer, Joshua 14 Panh, Rithy 132, 153 Paris-Beijing Art Gallery 180 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 31, 131 aesthetics of 43 ‘cinema of engagement’: 25 Salò 33, 141–45 People’s Republic of China see China personal documentary 72–73 Petition (Zhao): 188 photographic exhibitions 179, 207–08 Pickowicz, Paul 68 Pinochet, Augusto 166 poetics 28–30, 43–44 intertextual connections 23, 28–30, 38, 200–01 poignancy and effectiveness of 28–30 spectacle 28–29, 44, 141–45 tension underlying 23–25 transnational aesthetics 30, 209–10 xianchang aesthetics 41–42, 91 post-Orientalism 22 power strategies 142 Produçoes, Contracosta 137 Purple Butterfly (Lou): 68 Pu Xiayu 193–96 Qian Liqun 129 Rancière, Jacques 147, 149 realism 42–43 reality, narrativized 38–44, 72–77, 196–97, 201–02 ‘reform through labour’: 174, 193–94 see also Dead Souls (2018); The Ditch (2010); Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007); Traces (2014) refuge, spaces of 181–86 relative space 201 Renov, Michael 72 repetition 105, 108, 132, 143, 161, 165, 178 reportage, cinematic 68–72, 77, 162 Research Institute of Cultural Relics 194 residency registration 46, 181 Rosen, Philip 140, 144, 145 Rosi, Gianfranco 14, 26, 68

Index

Rotterdam International Film Festival 22 Crude Oil commissioned by 92, 204 Hubert Bals Fund 69, 204 Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks presented at 30, 63–64, 67 Rouch, Jean 42, 70 Royal Belgian Film Archive 48, 48 n. 4, 175, 181, 182, 208 rural spaces call for revitalization of 97–98 cinema as/of labour 90–92 economic and political frame for 88–89 transition from industrial space to 92–96 see also Three Sisters (2012) Sacro Gra (Rosi): 68 Salò (Pasolini): 33, 141–45 self-isolation, spaces of 176–78 Serra, Albert 191–92, 205 Shanghai Film Studio 66 Shanghai Youth (Wang): 118, 218 shaoshu minzu (minority nationality): 46 shared experience, filmmaking as 26–27, 40–41, 55, 57 Sheng Ge 116 Shepard, Sam 78 Shoah (Lanzmann): 33, 58, 165–68 short film (untitled): 20, 53, 53 n. 7, 57–58, 216 Sicilia! (Huillet): 148 n. 25 Slattery, Dennis Patrick 63, 79 socialism 194 collective spaces in 172–73 early ‘utopia’ of 132 family structures in 181 social networks, disintegration of 45–46, 189–91 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 174 Sorlin, Pierre 140 soundscapes 21 Father and Sons 189 Mrs Fang 189 Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks 80–83 Traces 163 Soviet Union 65 spaces 53 absolute versus relative 201 centrality in Wang’s narrativized reality 38–44, 201–02 concept of 32, 200 exhibition 34, 59–60, 179, 199–210 human practice 199–201 individual death 186–92 exile 193–97 refuge and escape 181–86 self-isolation 176–78 marginal 38, 44–48, 92–96 see also collective spaces; history, spaces of; memory, spaces of; rural spaces

239 spatiotemporal frames 39–40 Dead Souls 162–65 The Ditch 130–31, 139–40 Man With No Name 177–78 Mrs Fang 190 spectacle 28, 44, 141–45 Steadycam 163 Steinbeck, John 96 storytelling 14, 40, 79, 174, 196 Straub, Jean-Marie 100, 148 n. 25 subaltern 27, 129, 175, 182, 192, 200 ethnic 46, 192–93 individual stories connected to 43–44, 89 see also Mi Niang (2014); Ta’ang (2016) subject matter narrative structure and 24–28 poetics and 28–30 subjects, collective 172 n. 1, 172–73 Sun Shixiang 94 Sun Shunbao 98–99, 103 see also Three Sisters (2012) survival, spaces for 97–100, 157–62 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen 156, 209 Ta’ang (2016): 184 camera technique in 185–86, 203 festivals and awards 34, 175, 184, 206, 217 genesis of 183–84 individual narrative and collective spaces in 58–59, 175 production 181, 217 realism in 42–43 shooting location 48, 50 spaces of refuge and escape in 181–86 Taoism 153 Tate Modern (London): 156 Terrafal (Costa): 147 testimony, cinema of 165–68 themes, narrative structure and 24–28 The Thin Red Line (Malick): 78 Three Sisters (2012): 30, 32, 95, 99 camera technique in 102–03 deterioration of family structures in 98–100, 172 duration in 104–06 economic and political frame for 88 editing and post-production 104 as epic of survival 97–100 festivals and awards 20, 20 n. 3, 26, 34, 206, 215 Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath compared to 100–03 gender discourse in 182 individual narrative and collective spaces in 202 labour spaces in 55–58 photographic exhibitions drawn from 207–08 production 29, 215

240 

Wang Bing’s Filmmaking of the China Dream

shooting location 38, 48, 50, 51, 52, 88, 95 transparency/non-transparency in 102–03 viewing experience of 100 Wang’s illness during filming of 29, 41–42, 92 n. 5, 162 Tiananmen 39, 193 Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002): 19, 32 camera technique in 203 cinematic assumptions/expectations challenged by 66 cinematic structure of 65, 69–70 as contemporary cinematic reportage 68–72 critical reception of 64, 68, 127 distribution of 21 n. 4, 64, 64 n. 2 festivals and awards 22, 34, 63–64, 67–69, 127, 206, 213 film traditions represented in 66–67, 78–83 ‘history in the making’ in 54 Lumière films compared to 75–77 Malick’s Days of Heaven compared to 78–83 merging of documentary and narrative filmmaking in 72–77 production 69, 213 shooting location 38, 50, 50 social and economic contexts 30, 65–68 soundscape of 80–83 versions of 63–64 viewing experience of 72–74 visual motifs in 79–80 ‘Til Madness Do Us Part (2013): 32, 113 camera technique in 110–14 deterioration of family structures in 172 duration in 114 editing and post-production 106 festivals and awards 30–31, 34, 106, 206, 216 labour spaces in 55–58 madness and love in 111–14 production 216 repetition in 108 shooting location 48, 50, 51, 88, 95 visual experience of ‘confinement’ in 106–10 time-space 39–40 in Dead Souls 162–65 in The Ditch 130–31, 139–40 in Man With No Name 177–78 in Mrs Fang 190 Toronto International Film Festival 68 Traces (2014): 40, 206–07 camera technique in 154–55 festivals and awards 216 history spaces in 57–58 intertextual connections 163 production 154, 216 Transfuge 19 n. 1, 153

transnational cinema 30, 209–10 transparency 102–03, 120 Truffaut, François 13 Tsai Ming-liang 205, 205 n. 2 Turigliatto, Roberto 68 Turin International Film Festival 30, 68 Twenty-four City (Jia): 94 Vallan, Giulia D’Agnolo 68 ‘Venice 70 Future Reloaded’ project 178 Venice International Film Festival 20, 21, 30–31, 34 Bitter Money presented at 26–27, 115 directors of 31 n. 10 The Ditch presented at 49, 128, 135–36, 207 In Public presented at 67 n. 11 role in launching new auteurs 205, 206 Three Sisters presented at 20 n. 3 ‘Til Madness Do Us Part presented at 106 ‘Venice 70 Future Reloaded’ project 178 viewers see film-viewers Villa-Lobos, Francisco 135, 137, 148 Visconti, Luchino 31, 82 voice-over commentary, avoidance of 42, 91 Alone 104 Dead Souls 162 Three Sisters 98 Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks 70, 73, 81 ‘Til Madness Do Us Part 108 Wang, Vincent 118 Wang Bing background and education 19, 64, 64 n. 1 Cannes Festival Residence 106, 127–28, 134 cinema as/of labour 90–92 cinematic reportage redefined by 68–72, 77 counter-narrative of China Dream 37–44, 48–53, 202 dedication to filming 28–29, 41–42, 55, 162, 204 distribution of work of 49, 60, 69, 204–10 festival/solo exhibition crossover practices 204–10, 206 n. 6 hyper-realism of 185, 195 international profile and reputation 14–16, 20–22, 205–10 narrativizing of reality 38–44, 77, 196–97, 201–02 relevance of filmmaking of 19–24 transnational practices 209–10 as witness 15, 25, 44, 70 Yang Fudong and 69–70 Zhao Liang and 69–70 see also individual films Wang Bing et Jaime Rosales. Le geste humain exhibition 179, 207–08 Wang Jingchao 151–52 Wang Xiaoshuai 66, 68

241

Index

Weerasethakul, Apichatpong 205 Wen Hai 94 West of the Tracks see Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) We the Workers (Wen): 94 Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Costa): 148 n. 25 Wild Bunch 135 Wiseman, Frederick 14, 42, 91, 188 witnesses and witnessing 15, 31 audiovisual 25, 152–54, 157–62 cinema of testimony 165–68 filmmaker as 15, 25, 44, 70 of marginal areas and phenomena 49–50 see also Dead Souls (2018); Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007) Wong Kar-wai 28–29 The World (Jia): 66 World Trade Organization (WTO), China’s entrance into 46 Wu Wenguang 66, 67 xianchang aesthetics 41–42, 91 Xi Jinping

call for ‘rural revitalization’: 97 China Dream launched by 15, 24, 32, 44, 48, 172, 202 political leadership of 32 n. 11, 45–46, 55, 116, 116 n. 15 revitalization of Maoism by 155 rhetoric of cultural renaissance 48–49 Yamagata Film Festival 68 Yang Fudong 69–70, 154 n. 6, 206 n. 5 Yang Xianhui 53, 57, 134, 155, 161 Yangzi River 51, 88, 95, 188 Yingying see Three Sisters (2012) Zhang, Yinjing 68 Zhang Yimou 66 Zhang Yuan 42, 66, 67, 135 n. 14 Zhang Ziyi 68 Zhao Liang 69–70, 188, 205, 205 n. 2 Zhenzhen see Three Sisters (2012) Zhou Huinan 158, 161 Zhou Zhinan 160 Zhu Zhu 204