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 19^th 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 21^st 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 Factory, The Ditch) and installations (including Crude Oil, Beauty 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 Money, Dead Souls, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, Three Sisters, Ta’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.
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Holdovers (2023): a deep and subtle meditation on Christmas

In The Holdovers, Alexander Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson pay quiet homage to the revolutionary spirit of Christmas. They show its impact – acknowledged or unrecognized - through three people haunted by grief and despair. The externalities of Christmas rather a newborn in a manger at the fringes of the Roman Empire, trigger a healing process from brokenness to hope.
 
The film sketches out two different responses to these existential crises, one Christian, the other, rooted in classical culture. They share two transformative traits: love and communion, free to grow when they break out of their wounded selves.  The two responses converge at the end, when the choices made by the three protagonists point to cautious hope.

The first road sign of the journey is in plain sight, written in Greek and Latin on the blackboard in the classroom where the classics professor Paul Hunham, played by Paul Giamatti, conducts a contentious relationship with his students. “Nosce te ipsum”, the Latin translation of the Greek original,“Know thyself”.

The relationship between the teacher and Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), the angry student left behind by his parents at the prep school for the Christmas vacation, evolves from adversarial to a negotiated truce, until a series of dramatic events pushes it to that of a master and disciple. It is a form of love, as Andrei Tarkovsky has beautifully described the friendship between teacher and student.  

The parallel trajectories of teacher and student are variations of the same process: first, a painful peeling off of obfuscation and hardened perceptions, then a struggle for sincerity, from where love - emotional and spiritual - can begin to operate. It is also a battle against pride and anger; if unrestrained, the process is derailed. 

Like Payne in The Holdovers, Paul Schrader explores brokenness in First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021). Both filmmakers come close to the mystery of the human person – a soul incarnated in a body – but stop short of plunging in. They touch the edges of a redemption that is only hinted at the end of each film. Schrader follows the steps of austere Robert Bresson, as he has noted, while Payne finds a place in the sunny world of Marcel Pagnol. All three films can of course be seen through the “transcendental” lens, observed by Schrader himself in Carl Dreyer, Paul Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu: works that reveal through the physicality of film a spiritual dimension – the sacramental impulse of Christian art.  The stories show the workings of hope and mercy in the economy of salvation, after an anguished  stay in the dark night of the soul.
 

The third protagonist in The Holdovers is the cook, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She offers a subtle but straightforward rendition of Christian love. Mary Lamb – a name that could not be more explicit - represents the practical way of loving, more intuitive than rational. From a place of darkness and despair for the recent loss of her only son in Vietnam, her gruff exterior hides a soul in the Christian African American spiritual tradition ready to continue her life’s journey. The baby her sister is expecting will repurpose her life as will the love of a good man.
 
The Holdovers can be seen as a work of Catholic imagination, showing how hard hearts, intellectual animosity and emotional blockage can be transformed by grace and beauty.
 
 
 
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