Thursday, March 21, 2024

Argentine Noir: The restoration of Carlos Hugo Christensen’s "No abras nunca esa puerta" / "Never Open that Door" (1952)

The Noir City: Hollywood festival and the UCLA Festival of Preservation are premiering a terrific noir film No abras nunca esa puerta / Never Open that Door (1952), directed by Carlos Hugo Christensen, a key director of Argentina’s golden age of the studio. This policial - as crime films are known in Spanish, from the French policier - was preserved in 2013 by the Film Noir Foundation, on the recommendation of Argentine film historian and archivist Fernando Martín Peña. It has now been completely restored by the FNF through the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with a generous grant from the Golden Globe Foundation

 The case for homegrown forms of film noir in Latin America was strengthened in the Anglo-speaking world by two series at the Museum of Modern Art about Mexican and Argentine policiales of the 1940s and 50s. These two exhibits showed that these films were a native species of noir that warranted their inclusion in a canon. (1)

 The Film Noir Foundation, founded and headed by film critic and historian Eddie Muller, has been working on making available some of these Argentine films in BluRay and DVD editions, in collaboration with LA-based Flicker Alley. (2) 

These policiales have found a new life since their theatrical distribution in the 1950s in Argentina and Latin America. Their relative inaccessibility - except special screenings, occasional TV broadcasts and poor copies on the internet – made them ripe for discovery by modern audiences.  They were instances of purloined letters, although their value has been noted in Spanish-language histories of Argentine and Latin American cinema.  Los tallos salvajes (1956, directed by Fernando Ayala), La bestia debe morir and El vampiro negro, released in 2021, are now joined by the forthcoming No abras nunca esa puerta, an excellent addition. 
 
What follows are the notes I prepared for a documentary short to be included as one of the bonus materials for its Flicker Alley release. They are relevant to put this policial in a historical and cultural context.  

 Director Carlos Hugo Christensen traveled to New York in 1951 to meet Cornell Woolrich and secure the rights to three stories, “Somebody on the Phone”, “Hummingbird Comes Home” and “If I die before I awake”, all of 1937. In an interview with biographer Mario Gallina, the director recalled the meeting: “We met at the Hotel Normandie, where Woolrich was living. I knew beforehand that he had sold the rights to one of his novels, Phantom Lady, to Universal Studios, for $60,000. You can imagine this was a strike against me because what I was going to offer him was way below that sum.  Before talking about money, we discussed his literary work. He was pleasantly impressed when he realized that I was very familiar with all of it. At some point, he asked me, ‘How much are you thinking of paying me for these three stories?’. With trepidation, I answered, ‘3,000 dollars each’. He looked at me smiling and said: ‘They are worth four times more. But this time, I’m going to make an exception. The stories are yours’. I think that the enthusiasm he perceived in me for his work, must have influenced his decision. A little time later, when we finished the film, we sent him a copy. He was very happy with the results.” (3) 

 No abras nunca esa puerta adapted the first two stories, “Somebody on the Phone”, “Hummingbird Comes Home”, and runs for 85 minutes. The third one became a standalone film of 73 minutes.  They were released less than a month from one another, If I Die … on April 29 and No abras nunca esa puerta on May 25, in the Ambassador and Ocean theaters on Lavalle Street, the movie house district of downtown Buenos Aires. (4)
 
Both films were produced by San Miguel studios, founded in 1937 by Spanish businessman Miguel Machinandiarena. San Miguel was patterned d on the Hollywood model of various producers under one roof, managing a variety of projects. The business model ultimately did not prosper, since distribution and exhibition in Argentina and Latin America did not generate earnings to offset production costs. The studio’s last releases were the Christensen films.  

It should be noted that the Argentine studio system spanned since the coming of sound in the early 1930s to its decline by the mid-1950s due to several factors, among which the Peronist government control of the media – radio, film and print - by the mid-1950s. (5) 
 
Christensen discussed with film historian and Stanford professor Jorge Ruffinelli the ideological constraints of working in the national-populist Peronist era (1946-1955), that ultimately led to his leaving Argentina in 1954. In two conversations held in Christensen’s home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from where he worked for the rest of his career, the filmmaker recalled the stifling of the studios – with one exception, Argentina Sono Film – by the double-edge sword of political censorship, the threat of exile, and protectionism for the friends of Perón and his former actress wife Eva Duarte.  Some historians of the era have viewed the Argentine noirs – silent about the specifics of the era – as indirect revelations of an oppressive political climate. (6) 

Regarding Cornell Woolrich stories and novels as the source of Latin American films, here are the five Argentine and Mexican films, made between 1951 and 1956. They are all interesting cases of transformative adaptations, and the subject of further comparative study.

El pendiente (1951) – based on the novelette The Death StoneThe Earring (1943)  (as William Irish). Argentina. Dir. León Klimovsky. Written Samuel Eichelbaum, Ulises Petit de Murat.  With Mirtha Legrand, José Cibrián, Francisco de Paula.

La huella de unos labios (1952) – story “El cuello de la camisa” / “Collared” (as William Irish). Mexico. Dir. Juan Bustillo Oro. Written Juan Bustillo Oro, Cornell Woolrich. With Rosario Granados, Carlos López Moctezuma, Rubén Rojo.

Si muero antes de despertar / If I Shoud Die Before I Wake (1952) – based on the novelette If I Should Die Before I Wake (1937) (as William Irish). Argentina. Dir. Carlos Hugo Christensen. Written Alejandro Casona, Cornell Woolrich. With Néstor Zavarce, Blanca del Prado, Floren Delbene, Homero Cárpena.

No abras nunca esa puerta (1952) – stories “Somebody on the Phone” and “Hummingbird Comes Home”, both of 1937 (as William Irish). Argentina. Dir. Carlos Hugo Christensen. Written Alejandro Casona, Cornell Woolrich. With Ángel Magaña, Renée Dumas, Nicolás Fregues, Roberto Escalada, Ilde Pirovano.

El ojo de cristal (1956) – based on story “Through a Dead Man’s Eye”. Mexico. Dir. Antonio Santillán. Written Cornell Woolrich, Ignacio F. Iquino, José Antonio de la Loma. With Carlos López Moctezuma, Armando Moreno, Beatriz Aguirre.   (7)
                  

 The three Woolrich stories were adapted by Alejandro Casona, the Spanish playwright who lived in Buenos Aires between 1939 and 1962, as a result of the Spanish War. Belonging to the Generation of 1927, together with Luis Buñuel and Federico García Lorca, Casona wrote plays in a style of poetic theater. His collaboration with Christensen is a subject to further explore: the meshing of two very different sensibilities, one poetic, the other melodramatic.
 

The recent restoration of No abras esa puerta opens a door (pun intended) to enjoy a topnotch example during the heyday of Argentine policiales spanning from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. The noir vitality – however complicated its classification - can be traced through the following decades. There should be a film series connecting the landmark Hugo Fregonese’s Apenas un delincuente (1949) with modern neo-noirs like Fabián Bielinksy’s Nueve Reinas (2000) and Damián Szifron’s Relatos salvajes (2014) and To Catch a Thriller (2023, a US production). Along the way, the policialesof Adolfo Aristarian – La parte del león (1978), Tiempo de revancha (1981) and Últimos días de la víctima (1982) would substantiate the case.  For a larger selection of Argentine crime thrillers in general, De La Fuga a La Fuga (2004) by Roberto Blanco Pazos y Raúl Clemente is a very complete source.
 

            

 Notes
(1)  The two series organized by the Museum of Modern Art were “Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina. Feb 10–16, 2016” (https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1616); and “Mexico at Midnight: Film Noir from Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age. Jul 23–29, 2015” (https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1533).

(2)  https://flickeralley.com/products/never-open-that-door-no-abras-nunca-esa-puerta
 
(3)  Mario Gallina, Carlos Hugo Christensen, Historia de una pasión cinematográfica (1997). My translation.
 
(4)  Un diccionario de films argentinos, edited by Raúl Manrupe and María Alejandra Portela (1995). A subject of further study is the fact that the films were released three and two months before the death at age 33 of Eva Perón, an indispensable political figure to understand the second part of 20th century Argentina. Christensen left Argentina with his family two years later, as a result of political pressure, settling in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, until his death in 1999.
 
(5)  For a succinct account in English of the film industry in Argentina during Christensen’s film career at Lumiton and San Miguel studios, see David George and Gizella Meneses, Argentina Cinema: From Noir to Neo-Noir (2017).
 
(6)  For Spanish-language source, see the Argentine film studies by Clara Kriger, Cine y Peronismo: El estado en escena (2009). Domingo Di Núbila, La época de oro. Historia del cine argentino (1998); Abel Posada, “La caída de lose studios, sólo el fin de una industria”, in La otra historia, ed. Sergio Wolff (1994); and César Maranghello, Breve historia del cine argentino (2004). Currie K. Thompson applies Roland Barthes’ analytical framework to study crime films during the Perón era, distinguishing between cine negro and policial documental: Picturing Argentina. Myths, Movies, and the Peronist Vision (2014).
 
(7)  Compiled from IMDb and Spanish-language sources, imdb.com
 
 

Friday, February 23, 2024

Mater Dolorosa: "Vogter" (Sons, Denmark/Sweden) and" Who Do I Belong To" (Tunisia/France/Canada/Norway/Qatar/Saudi Arabia)


Once again in the 2024 Berlinale, two very different films in competition find themselves in unexpected conversation. In this case the subject is motherhood, violence and trauma in shaping relationships within the family and the larger world.  Vogter (Sons), a Danish-Swedish production directed by Gustav Möller, and Where Do I Belong To, directed by Tunisian Canadian Meryam Joobeur, with public and private funding from Tunisia, France, Canada, Norway, Qatar and Saudi Arabia (the combination of countries in today political cauldron deserves more than a passing observation) share more than portraits of strong mothers and Jungian archetypes.

Considering Manny Farber’s observation that “a film transmits the DNA of its time”, this Scandinavian psychological thriller and the Arabic-language family drama about the impact of Islamic terrorism are films that capture the zeitgeist, revealing perhaps more than they would like to.  Both focus on violence and trauma, not from the perspective of those engaging in it brutally, Orc-style (graphically shown on screen) but through the lens of mothers of now grown men that have gone to the dark side. The power of these works, I think, comes precisely from this deliberate choice of perspective. If we had been taken inside the mind of an unhinged criminal or a brainwashed ISIS militant, our rejection would have been instinctive. Here, the viewers walk in the shoes of the mothers: one, Eva, an emotionally-controlled prison guard (Sidse Babett Knudsen) in Denmark; the other, Aicha, an alert peasant woman in Tunisia (Salha Nasraoui). The women are forced to confront the spiritual and family wreckage caused by offsprings for whom there may be no path of redemption.  Both actresses give terrific performances, where closeups and subtle gestures rather than words carry the weight of their emotional journeys.
 
Tunisian-French director
Maryem Joobeur,
press conference 

Unlike the four films reviewed in the previous post, hinging on dialogue to sculpt the characters, Vogter and Who Do I Belong To (no question mark at the end of the title) relie on a narrative dependent on the progression of time– when and how they discover elements of the puzzle structures the dramatic tension that climaxes in acts of great violence. When Eva discovers that a new inmate in the high security section is the murderer of her son, she plots a revenge worthy of Lady Macbeth; Aicha is intent of finding out what exactly happened to her son Mehdi, recruited by ISIS in Syria, who has come back home catatonic, with a mysterious, burqa-clad pregnant wife. These quests for understanding are solved differently considering the conventions of the thriller and the drama, but also with the clever trick director Meryam Joobeur, also the screenwriter, plays on an audience expecting a realistic plot.  In the case of Vogter, the viewer is increasingly jolted by the cat-and-mouse game played by the criminal, a Silence of the Lambs creature.
 
Director Gustav Möller and
actress Sidse  Babe Knudsen
Visually, both women function as a Mater Dolorosa facing the death of their sons; they are not presented as victims of patriarchal societies or pawns in an archaic worldview. They play the hand they are dealt and, in their struggle, they learn hard lessons.  There are some people beyond rehabilitation, Eva’s superior notes in Vogter; and a mother’s boundless love and forgiveness cannot wash the guilt of the son’s barbarism. In front of these grieving women, the men literally and metaphorically jump into the void.
 
Salha Nasraoui as Aicha
Remarkable in both cases is the use of music to depict interior states and the chaos of an external world, once the protagonists have seen it shattered.  The locations where the action takes place become integrated to the plot.  Maryem Joobeur had used her Tunisian location - and two of the non-professional actors - in her Academy nominated short, Motherhood (2018), from which this film expanded.   The Danish prison functions both as realist location and a space of metaphorical confinement for Eva.
 
The clear-eyed depiction of ISIS, the Salafi organization of Jihadistst founder of a brutal quasi-state caliphate in parts of Iraq and Siria in 2013, is perhaps the most notable aspect of Who Do I Belong To.  And more so now since the Hamas invasion of Israel in October of 2023. Aicha’s husband views ISIS what the terrorist organization is,  training its recruits to rape and decapitate infidels". The film’s climax hinges precisely on these two actions. It a scene hard to watch, and one that contains the clue to fully understand the origin of the son’s pregnant wife.
 
The films had their international premieres at the Berlinale, and in the press conferences not many details were given about their release and international distribution.  Prima facie, they may not seem to be a good fit for platforms that look for lighter or more entertaining fare.  The festival route is assured, though, and one would hope these titles would then find a large, receptive audience.
 
 
 
 

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

The business of living: "My Favorite Cake", "Suspended time", "Dying" and "A Traveler’s Need's"at the 74th Berlinale - February 15 - 25, 2024

In festivals, very dissimilar films in form, subject and countries of origin can talk to each other in unexpected and meaningful ways.  In the first four days of the 2024 Berlin Film Festival (February15 through 25) this is what happened with My Favorite Cake, an Iranian dramatic comedy entirely funded by public and private European sources, directed by Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Saneeha; the French autobiographical pandemic-set comedy Hors du temps (Suspended Time), written and directed by Olivier Assayas; the equally autobiographic German family drama Sterben (Dying), written and directed by Matthias Glassner; and A Traveler’s Needs, a small-scale probing dissection of  Korean emotional features by Hong Sangsoo, starring Isabelle Huppert as the catalyst for quiet revelations about other people’s lives.
 
Competing for the golden and silver bears of the Berlinale, these are above par works of imagination and with an intriguing use of film language.  After years of teaching cinema history and esthetic classes in Los Angeles, it dawned on me that probably none of these films would have come out of, or been encouraged by our film schools, attuned as they are to commercial cine. The emphasis on classic narrative structures, featuring strong protagonists and antagonists, conflicts clearly laid out and solved, persuasive motivations and backstories, would not have led to the four films I note here. They have minimal plots, reveal characters primarily through dialogue and subtle acting, tend to keep motivations opaque, and avoid dramatic emphasis. Viewing these films was a gentle reminder that teaching the same subjects and discussing the same films, semester after semester, can lead to simplifications; and they can fall short of making our students true cinephiles, absorbing a wide range of cinematic experiences.  Festivals are a great incentive to jump out of furrows made deep by repetition, clichés, and in the past years, flooded by ideological gobbledygook. The upcoming TCM Classic Film Festival in April, now back in the restored Egyptian theatre, is keen on discoveries and reevaluations.
 
I have listed these four films in order of increasing departure from standard film practices. A CSUN Cinematheque series featuring them would be an opportunity to reassess the work we are  doing in forming our emerging filmmakers. It is the question at the heart of a university -run institution: How can we better expand our students'cinematic minds?
 
My Favorite Cake
 is a gentle exploration of a few days in the lonely life of a middle-class widow in present-day Tehran. It shows what happens behind the movable walls eloquently described by Hooman Majd in The Ayatollah Begs to Differ(2008). It is a private world, somewhat isolating the protagonist – an excellent Lily Farhadpoud, who also wrote the script - from the constrictions and regulations of a theocracy enforced by an omnipresent morality police.  The current political context is efficiently spelled out in the dialogue and plot events, especially the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in 2022, detained because her hijab was not worn right. The restrictions placed on women, material, psychological and spiritual, are the story, and the protagonist begins to assess them because at age seventy she still wants to live a meaningful life. A love story with a twist, My Favorite Cake was shot over three years, mainly with two actors, one location and some exteriors.  It depicts in gentle but unequivocal terms what Jafar Panahi (OffsideClosed CurtainTaxi), Asghar Farhadi (A Separation) and others have also been doing at great risk.  Based in Tehran, the directors were not allowed to come to Berlin, and the film will not circulate in Iran. As is the political tradition of the Berlinale, the film was given a platform, and the message was not lost. Its celebration of dignity, freedom and love is universal.  
 
In Hors du temps (Suspended Time), Olivier Assayas, a veteran of the French screen and a beloved figure in popular entertainment (Irma Vep and its recent miniseries, Personal ShopperClouds of Sils Maria) turns the camera to himself and the months of Covid isolation he spent in 2020 with his brother in their ancestral home.  The film hinges in the personality clash between the protagonist – an exacting, obnoxious, germophobe film director, Assayas’ alter ego (Vincent Macaigne) – and his equally insufferable music critic brother, who flaunts his annoyance with precautions, masks and unruly germs.  The fighting is purely verbal, a linguistic staccato that skewers the gamut of responses to the pandemic. (Added fun is to place oneself in one of the two camps sharply delineated). There is no American-style conflict in this slice of French life under the coronavirus regime; the comedy is carried on by long-winded conversations  - Eric Rohmer style – with verve and witty cultural references. Key to the comedy’s success is carried its location – the proverbial, civilize French countryside – and the dialogue, including a first-person narrator that pokes fun at himself, with dollops of nostalgia for a childhood fondly remembered.  Nothing earth-shattering happens in the film,  and the total halt to these busy lives allows for both a reckoning and a pleasant happy ending.
 
Sterben 
hinges on dying, literally and figuratively, both as the physical death of one’s parents and its aftermath, and the nature of creation and the toll it takes on the artist. It is divided in chapters, offering not only the point of view of key characters, but also explicit comments on life. The last one is tellingly, “Love”. The film proposes the concept of “kitsch” to describe how an elderly couple has lived by the time Alzheimer’s and cancer get them, and how their two emotionally distant children grope for a meaning to their lives.  “Kitsch happens when our emotions and feelings do not match with reality”, one of them notes. Sterben works out its plot through this insight, not so much about what happens to the characters, but the way they reach awareness in their life journey. The siblings’ insights are revealed in two key moments, superbly staged: the last conversation between mother and son - a reckoning with echoes of Ingmar Bergman - and the daughter’s physical reaction to the world of high culture her brother belongs to, at the fabled Berlin Philharmonic theater. The siblings also represent the clash between chaos and order, the belief in radical autonomy and the realization that there is a price to pay. Composed specifically for this work, Sterben is a musical piece that, through several important transformations, captures the meaning of the film in its moving climax.  Sterben is about the tragicomedy of life, pared to its essentials, by virtue of its sharp writing, mise-en-scène and nuanced performances by veteran Lars Leininger, Corinna Harfouch and Lilith Stangenberg.  Sterben is not interested in the three-act structure and other workings of the Hollywood screenplay. It is absorbing because we can recognize the human experience in the foibles of these characters dealing with the curveballs of life.
 
Stylistically, the most audacious of the four films is A Traveler’s Needs: it is drained almost to the bone of dramatic action. During a few hours one day in Seoul, Iris, a French woman played by Isabelle Huppert, teaches the same French language lesson – in English – to a young adult and a married couple. She has a heterodox method – perhaps she is an improvised instructor, lacking pedagogy and textbooks. The film jumps in media res into the two conversations. The scenes have the same set up – long takes in parks. Twenty minutes into the film, the same blocking of the scenes and lines of dialogue lovingly showcase the politeness and emotional restrain that are Korean clichés. However, these two conversation perform an intriguing function: they beg the question, who is this middle-aged frazzled woman and what is she doing in Korea? The third conversation is with between Iris and her host, a young poet of little financial means who has offered to share his modest lodging. The unexpected visit of his politely overbearing mother flashes out questions that loom large, regarding this polished foreigner who may have ulterior motives. The film concludes without any climax or explanation, with allusions to poetry and beauty hanging in the air. A Traveler’s Needs relies on the stellar, understated yet nuanced performance of Huppert (in a striking green and orange outfit), and the other four actors. Less is more and the unrevealed mystery of this traveler and her needs may not be far our experience in real life. We are always intrigued by other people’s Rosebuds. 
 
Viewing these films, another thought dawned on me: if Gustave Flaubert had been our contemporary, he would be writing movies like these, organizing a world around characters we can understand but cannot quite figure out; characters that  refuse to yield us their mystery, since "the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing about", as Blaise Pascal noted in his Pensées. We are far away from the Greeks and Shakespeare. It is Madame Bovary territory.
 

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Capturing the experience of a nation: the documentaries of Wang Bing



On November 11, 2018, the UCLA Film & Television Archive showed Wang Bing’s 8-hour long documentary Dead Souls about Mao’s forced labor camps in the late 1950s. A few days ago, on January 14, 2024, the American Cinematheque screened Youth (Spring) – a three-plus hours documentary on young people from impoverished backgrounds working in privately-owned textile factories in the industrialized Yangtze basin.  In both instances, the Paris-based Chinese director Wang Bing came to Los Angeles to discuss with audiences these two remarkable documentaries, whose implicit goal is to record and preserve a state of affairs at odds with the Communist Party’s view of history and politics.  That these documentaries got made at all is a remarkable story – Wang Bing’s non-commercial projects are shot independently with small crews, European funding, niche distribution companies, and circulation in China outside of the state apparatus.


A retrospective organized by Film at Lincoln Center in 2018 assessed Wang’s career: “One of the great documentarians working today and an intrepid chronicler of the human tribulations underlying modern China’s social and economic transformation, Wang Bing makes films that are epic in duration yet precise in scope. Forging intimate bonds with his subjects, he captures the plights of individuals and communities in factory towns and rural villages and demands that we behold the political complexity and moral weight of their struggles”.

I had the opportunity (the honor, really) of watching Dead Souls and Youth (Spring) and the Q&As with Wang Bing, speaking in Mandarin and translated by excellent interpreters.  I keep marveling at how documentary cinema – in its infinite flexibility – is a remarkable tool to capture the human experience as it happens and is archived for the future.  Documentary can do two things very well, and the work of Wang Bing is a testimony to this: on the one hand, as in Dead Souls, it is an instrument for oral  histories, giving voice to the survivors of ideological purges, whose testimonies had been hitherto unrecorded; on the other, documentary can observe people’s lives over a long period, and by seeing how they function in their surroundings, yield deep insights into circumstances beyond their individuality. Youth (Spring), shot between 2014 and 2019, is a brilliant case.

 

These two films are also good examples to describe the matrix that contains the director’s work: a chronicle of ordinary lives in post-Mao China; and a counternarrative - rooted in the rescue of historical memory - to the Communist view of China, shaped by ideology, repression and mythmaking. The question undergirding this matrix is left unstated but comes through clearly: can the experience of a nation be captured by cinema?  Wang Bing’s body of work shows that it is, in all its messiness and without Manicheism.  The films of Theo Angelopoulos, shown in a 2022 retrospective of the UCLA Film Archive, ask the same question and give a similar answer, even though the director uses fiction film to do so.  Seeing all the key films by the Greek director over two months, one observes a direct and passionate engagement with the historical, political, and cultural fabric of Greece and its place in the development of a civilization.  Wang Bing’s work comes from a different impulse – to leave the record of a people, the humble of the earth, the unseen and unheard – but he is preoccupied by the same underlying subject.

 

While Angelopoulos emphasizes ideas and their relationship to political praxis, in early films such as Days of 36 (1972), The Travelling Players (1975), The Hunters (1977) and Alexander the Great (1980), Wang Bing’s commitment is to the preservation of historical truth, via oral histories, and in the presentation of workers, using a Direct Cinema approach.  

 

Both auteurs share an ardent attachment to their nation and their people. That Wang Bing’s affection is rendered by a fly-on-the wall camera and a narrative strategy designed to create a respectful distance between the filmmaker and his subjects should not obscure the director’s moral commitment to show things as they are. When all is said and done, Wang Bing’s vérité techniques are at the service of freeing his characters and their stories from any external constraints, whether ideological or commercial.  Documentaries like Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), Three Sisters (2012), Fathers and Sons (2014), ‘Til Madness Do Us Part (2013) and Bitter Money (2016) are examples of this style. Like Frederick Wiseman, Wang Bing, time and again, captures individuals while revealing the larger human and economic landscape in which they are inserted.

 

His approach – the rescue of a person’s voice and uniqueness, “I try to maintain the integrity of each person”, he has noted in interviews – is in the antipodes of the government-sanctioned Chinese cinema of propaganda. The viewing of feature films like Confucius (2010), Beginning of the Great Revival (2011), Wolf Warrior (2015), Wolf Warrior 2 (2017), The Founding of an Army (2017) easily illustrates the point. 


The cinema of the celebrated Jia Zhangke – Wang Bing’s contemporary at the Beijing Film Academy in the 1990s – functions the same way: it has made available to Chinese and international audiences a portrait of contemporary China that foregrounds with great sympathy the plight of the rural population, the migrants to cities, the alienated workers, the left behind. Titles like The World (2004), Still Life (2006), 24 City (2008) and A Touch of Sin (2013), showcased by major film festival and the ones that cemented his reputation, are in conversation with the documentaries of Wang Bing.

 

Regarding the place of Wang Bing in China’s contemporary culture, I find it important to connect the director’s overarching film project – regardless of how modest or soft-spoken he may be about it – to Ian Johnson’s recent book Sparks, China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future; it is a study of Chinese historians who challenge the misuse of history by the Communist Party.  Foreign Affairs just published an essay by Johnson himself, that summarizes the book, “Who Gets to Tell China’s Story” (December 19, 2023). One can easily make the case, mutatis mutandis, that Wang Bing, as well as Jia Zhangke, belong to this group.  

 

The 1990 essay The Chinese Amnesia by the dissident astrophysicist Fang Lizhi is the point of departure for Johnson’s piece: it describes the strategy implemented by the Goliath Communist Party to control history, via the monopoly on film, broadcasting, publishing and education. Thus, Fang Lizhi wrote, “the vast majority of people remained unaware of its endless cycles of violence”.  Johnson argues that the CCP approach has been seriously challenged since the coming of the digital revolution, where cheap tools like PDFs and digital cameras are used by citizen historians to “defy the state during the rule of President Xi Jinping, who has made the control of history one of his signature policies”.  It is in this chink in the armor that we can locate the mode of production of Wang Bing’s documentaries. Digital cameras are cheap, less obtrusive and more versatile than celluloid technology, and Wang Bing has mentioned on many occasions how DV equipment made his independent film career feasible, in cost and choice of subjects. 

 

Johnson also discusses the case of novelist Wang Xiabo, which allows for another important connection. Scarred by the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the student protests that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the novelist was looking for a way to depict a society fractured in myriad silent groups, “too weak to oppose the overwhelming power of the one-party state”. He realized his mission was to give them a voice: “I have a duty to speak of what I have seen and heard”, he wrote. It is not surprising that Johnson adds that “one of China’s greatest filmmakers, Jia Zhangke, often mentions Wang as the writer who inspired him to tell individual stories rather than the collective narratives favored by the state”. This is the mantle taken up by Wang Bing since his first film, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), about the decline of state-run factories.

 

When viewing Youth (Spring), a documentary about laborers in small textile factories that could have been 19th century Manchester, Pawtucket, R.I., or Lowell, MA, a question popped up: What would Marx, Engels and Gramsci have said about this portrait of capitalist abuse, alienation and false consciousness? Had they lived the 21st century, they would have been befuddled and horrified, to see that the People’s Republic of China, founded to be a workers’ paradise has become what they critiqued of the Industrial Revolution; they would see the triumph of the proletariat nowhere, ever, in sight. In the digital era, with China fully in the market economy, these textile workers are fully connected to the modern world, through smart phones and computers.

 

At the heart of the film is a visual and sound counterpoint between the collective and the mechanical – echoes, one may say, of 1920s experimental documentaries - and the warm portrait of earthy, vital individuals, captured in their lived experience.

 

The funny moments, tinged with foreboding and a touch of Chaplin’s Modern Times, involve shots of serger machines – they stitch, finish and trim a seam – that may slice the fingers off workers too distracted, chatting, flirting, joking and smoking.  In one sequence, the boss reprimands an embarrassed employee for a garment with crooked stitches. In a post-film “field trip” to Walmart to check clothing made in China, I chuckled when I noticed a jacket with sewing issues  – photo attached.

 


In a lively exchange with the Cinematheque audience in the newly restored Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, Wang Bing said he had shot 2,700 hours of film for this project, over five years. Asked about his approach to gaining the trust of his subjects, he answered that he tries “to capture people in a free, open environment, in the natural unfolding of things”. In this paradox – life bursting open from crammed neon-lit workshops and dingy dorms – lies the art of Wang Bing.

 

Youth (Spring) is the first of a trilogy set in this area of eastern China.  Before travelling to Los Angeles, he finished editing the second and third parts, to be released in 2024, titled Bitter and Return.
 


BIOGRAPHY

Wang Bing has been a leading documentary filmmaker of the burgeoning independent documentary scene in China for the past decade. Acclaimed by critics and recognized as one of the most important Chinese artists and filmmakers of his time, his work has garnered awards and international praise at major film festivals. 
   Born in Shaanxi, a province in central China in 1967, Wang first studied photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Art before studying cinematography at Beijing Film Academy. He began his career as an independent filmmaker in 1999. Released in 2003, his directorial debut Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) is a monumental documentary work, exceeding 9 hours in length, that was a great success internationally. Filmed in the northern Chinese district of Tiexi, it is a strikingly profound contemplation on the lives of workers in the decaying industrial district. Since 2003, he has made 10 documentaries, many of which have been released in theaters, with Three Sisters receiving more than 45,000 viewers in France.
   Retrospectives of his oeuvre have been presented at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique.  In addition to documentaries, Wang has also created fiction films (Brutality FactoryThe Ditch) and installations (including Crude OilBeauty Lives in Freedom), and photographic series.
https://icarusfilms.com/other/filmmaker/wangbing.html
 

ESSENTIAL FILMOGRAPHY

Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002)
Fenming, A Chinese Memoir (2007)
Coal Money (2009)
The Ditch (2010)
Three Sisters (2012)
Til Madness Do Us Part (2013)
Fathers and Sons (2014)
Ta’ang (2016)
Bitter Money (2016)
Dead Souls (2018)
Man in Black (2023)
Youth (Spring) (2023)
 

SOURCES FOR FILMS

 

Icarus Films distributes several Wang Bing films: https://icarusfilms.com/other/filmmaker/wangbing.html

The Ovid streaming platform offers a handful of them: Bitter MoneyDead SoulsFengming: A Chinese MemoirThree SistersTa’ang, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part 
https://www.ovid.tv/wang-bing
 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balaga, Marta, "Wang Bing talks continuing Youth, finally feeling 'satisfied' with his films: 'You learn to respect them". Variety, November 13, 2023.

Cracken, Matt, "Man in Black. Wang Bing. Cannes '23 Review". In Review Online website, June 3, 2023.

Cutler, Aaron, “Simple Stories: An Interview with Wang Bing”. Cineaste, 2015, Vol. XL, No. 4.
 
Fang Lizhi, “The Chinese Amnesia”. New York Review of Books, September 27, 1990.
 
Film at Lincoln Center, “Wang Bing: The Weight of Experience”.  Film series, November 16-18, 2018.
 
Garson, Charlotte, “Wang Bing, Man in Black et Jeunesse”. Cahiers du Cinéma, May 17, 2023.
 
Hoberman, J., “Wang Bing, the World’s Hardest-Working Director”. The Nation, December 9, 2023.
 
Hudson, David
, "Two by Wang Bing". Criterion website, September 20, 2023.

Johnson, Ian, Sparks. China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future (2023). Oxford University Press.
 
Johnson, Ian, “Who Gets to Tell China’s Story?”. Foreign Affairs, December 19, 2023.

Lessard, Bruno, The Cinema of Wang Bing. Chinese Documentary between History and Labor.
Published by Hong Kong University Press, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2023.
 
Lim, Dennis, "Interview: Wang Bing on Youth (Spring)". Film Comment newsletter, June 1, 2023.

Lin, Wood, “Wang Bing’s Top 10: Unveiling the beauty and the sorrow of China”. Program Notes, IDFA website, November 9, 2023.
 
Petkovic, Vladan, “IDFA's Guest of Honor Wang Bing on his journey into documentary film”. IDFA website, November 13, 2023.
 
Quandt, James, “China’s Lower Depths”. New York Review of Books, November 22, 2018.

Rapold, Nicholas, "Wang Bing gives voice to 're-education' camp survivors". New York Times, May 5, 2018.

Sales Ross, Rafa, “IDFA Guest of Honor Wang Bing Discusses Chinese Censorship, Upcoming Trilogy and Politics: ‘I Don’t Want My Films to Become a Political Tool’”. Variety, November 11, 2023.