Wang Bing Gives Voice to ‘Re-education’ Camp Survivors
“Well, I guess I’ll start at the beginning.”
The opening words spoken in Wang Bing’s film “He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir” are humble ones. But what follows is a record of cataclysmic times in postwar China, recounted by Ms. He, a survivor of forced labor camps. She methodically speaks of how it happened, how she was separated from her husband, all while seated in her cluttered, dimly lit, utterly ordinary home.
The result is by turns shattering and sedate — a testimony that one critic called “both a cry of pain and a sigh of relief.”
“He Fengming” screened at Cannes in 2007, the same year as “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and “No Country for Old Men.” Now Mr. Wang returns to the festival with a work that gives voice to more living veterans of history like Ms. He. “Dead Souls,” his new documentary, has its world premiere this week, clocking in at 8 hours 15 minutes.
“The only objective is to obtain, from their memories, the knowledge of the people who can no longer speak of what they went through,” Mr. Wang said in an interview.
The subjects of “Dead Souls” were condemned in the Communist Party’s “anti-rightist” campaign in the 1950s. Like Ms. He, they were imprisoned, enslaved and starved in “re-education” camps like Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert.
“Dead Souls” is only the latest film in an ambitious, outsize oeuvre that seems to take Frederick Wiseman as the benchmark for capturing the experience of a nation.
Mr. Wang’s previous works include his gargantuan chronicle of obsolescent factories and their workers, “West of the Tracks,” which The New York Times called a “nine-hour masterpiece.” His 14-hour installation “Crude Oil” tracked the process of oil extraction. “Mrs. Fang,” his most recent, is a comparatively brief (86 minutes) but devastating elegy of an older woman’s final days.
Mr. Wang sits at the pinnacle of the Chinese documentary groundswell that arose with the country’s social and economic upheaval in the 1990s. Last year, he won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival, bestowed by a jury led by the filmmaker Olivier Assayas. His work has premiered in Berlin, Venice (garnering another prize), and Documenta (which has also commissioned projects of his), with retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou and the Harvard Film Archive.
“Wang brings us inside the world he is chronicling so thoroughly that, if we watch it in one go, we are apt to lose track of what things outside are like,” the critic Luc Sante wrote of Mr. Wang’s “epic and intimate” cinema.
“‘Fengming’ stands alongside first-person precedents like Shirley Clarke’s ‘Portrait of Jason’ (1967) and Errol Morris’s ‘The Fog of War’ (2004) in its ability to wrest powerful effects from the deceptively simple setup of a lone raconteur,” the critic Ed Halter wrote. Other admirers include the filmmakers Jia Zhangke, Arnaud Desplechin and Pedro Costa.
For his part, Mr. Wang can sound very modest about his continuing document of Chinese history.
“In China, my life is like that of all the other normal Chinese,” Mr. Wang said. “I am one of the many from the normal class. So I filmed these people.”
Mr. Wang was born in the north of China in 1967, after the events chronicled in “Dead Souls.” Initially studying photography, he went on to the Beijing Film Academy, part of the same generation as Mr. Jia (who also has a film at Cannes this year). Mr. Wang gorged himself on the directors Antonioni, Bergman, and Tarkovsky (partly thanks to a professor who brought thousands of videotapes from abroad), with Pasolini close to his heart.
“West of the Tracks,” with its view of Chinese heavy industry in decline, put a spotlight on Mr. Wang in 2003. The film announced an artist with a mission to catch major epochs and small moments before they disappeared.
“Dead Souls” is no different. Shot from 2005 to 2017, it covers most of China’s provinces and entailed visits to more than 120 survivors of re-education camps. Mr. Wang’s goal was to preserve memories before they disappeared, in the vein of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental “Shoah.”
“What happened in the Jiabiangou labor camps was a page unknown in the Chinese history,” Mr. Wang said of the project, which at an early stage was titled “Past in the Present.” “Of course, it’s not only a tragedy of China, but also one of the numerous terrible catastrophes in human history.”
Hard-hitting subject matter can sometimes be a problem for filmmakers facing censorship in China, but this does not seem to have been an obstacle for Mr. Wang.
“I’ve been free to shoot my films in China,” he said, explaining that the low commercial value of his work kept him from submitting them for theatrical release there. (“Mrs. Fang” will screen at next month’s Shanghai International Film Festival.)
“Dead Souls” finds Mr. Wang again embracing the immersive approach that has yielded memorable results: the touching and magical fireside moments with migrants in “Ta’ang,” or the unnervingly free wanderings of children left to fend for themselves in “Three Sisters.” It’s a form of cinema that begins to feel more like living with the people on screen than merely watching them.
For those ready to commit the time and attention, “Dead Souls” will be an oasis of focus amid the many distractions of Cannes.
With his typical cool understatement, Mr. Wang said: “I don’t have particular expectations from the audience. I hope this film can hold the content of the stories I shot. In other words, there is a lot of content in this film. That’s why it’s long.”
《死靈魂》：記錄中國勞改營倖存者的苦難記憶
「好吧，我從頭開始說。」
王兵的電影《和鳳鳴》有著謙虛的開場白。但接下來，是一份戰後中國災難時代的記錄，講述者是勞教倖存者和鳳鳴。她坐在雜亂、昏暗、再普通不過的家中，有條不紊地敘述一切是如何發生，她又如何與丈夫分離。
後來她時而精疲力盡，時而鎮定自若——一位影評人說，她的證詞「既是痛苦的吶喊，又是如釋重負的嘆息」。
《和鳳鳴》於2007年在坎城放映，同年該電影節還上映了《四月三週兩天》(4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days)和《老無所依》(No Country for Old Men)。現在，王兵重返坎城，帶來了一部作品，令更多和鳳鳴這樣飽經歷史滄桑者能夠發聲。他的新紀錄片《死靈魂》時長8小時15分鐘，於本週在全球首映。
「唯一的目標就是通過他們的記憶，去了解那些不能再談起自己經歷的人們，」王兵在接受採訪時說。
《死靈魂》的拍攝對象在1950年代共產黨的反右運動中被打為右派。像和鳳鳴一樣，他們在位於戈壁沙漠夾邊溝那樣的「勞改」營地忍飢挨餓，遭受監禁和奴役。
王兵的作品全都雄心勃勃、規模龐大，似乎以弗雷德里克·懷斯曼(Frederick Wiseman)為標準，力圖刻畫一個國家的體驗，《死靈魂》是其中最新的一部。
王兵之前的作品包括他為幾座即將拆除的工廠及其工人拍下的宏大編年史《鐵西區》，《紐約時報》稱其為「九個小時的傑作」。他14個小時的作品《原油》跟蹤石油開採過程。 他的近作《方秀英》比較短（86分鐘），是關於一位老年女性人生最後幾天的悲哀輓歌。
1990年代正值中國社會和經濟動盪時期，中國紀錄片隨之迅速高漲，王兵的作品居於其巔峰。去年，他在洛迦諾電影節(Locarno film festival)獲得由電影人奧利維耶·阿薩亞斯(Olivier Assayas)領導的評審團頒發的金豹獎。他的作品在柏林電影節、威尼斯電影節（他在該電影節獲得另一獎項）和國際藝術文獻展（也是其多個項目的委約方）首映，並在蓬皮杜藝術中心和哈佛電影資料館做過回顧展映。
「王兵帶我們進入這個他正在全面記錄的世界，如果一口氣看完，簡直會讓人忘記這個世界之外的事情，」評論家呂克·桑特(Luc Sante)這樣評價王兵那些「宏偉而又私密」的電影。
「《和鳳鳴》與雪莉·克拉克(Shirley Clarke)的《傑森的畫像》(Portrait of Jason, 1967)、埃羅爾·莫裡斯(Errol Morris)的《戰爭迷霧》(The Fog of War, 2004)等先例一樣，使用第一人稱敘事，因而能夠從一個孤獨的故事講述者看似簡單的環境中製造強有力的效果，」評論家艾德·霍爾特(Ed Halter)寫道。王兵的仰慕者還包括電影人賈樟柯、阿諾·德斯普利欽(Arnaud Desplechin)和佩德羅·科斯塔(Pedro Costa)。
王兵在談起自己對中國歷史的持續記錄時很謙虛。
「在中國，我的生活跟其他普通中國人沒什麼兩樣，」王兵說。「我是普通階層的一員。所以我拍了這些人的生活。」
王兵1967年出生在中國北方，那時，《死靈魂》中記錄的事件剛發生。他先是學習攝影，後來又去北京電影學院學習，與賈樟柯是同一代（賈今年在坎城電影節上也有影片參與角逐）。王兵如饑似渴地欣賞安東尼奧尼(Antonioni)、伯格曼(Bergman)和塔爾科夫斯基(Tarkovsky)等人的作品（這要部分歸功於一位教授從國外帶回來的成千上萬盤錄像帶），尤其喜歡帕索利尼(Pasolini)。
王兵2003年的作品《鐵西區》展現的是中國重工業的衰落，這部作品引起了人們對他的關注。該片宣告了一名藝術家的誕生，他的使命是在大時代和小瞬間消失之前將它們記錄下來。
《死靈魂》也是如此。該片拍攝於2005年至2017年，覆蓋了中國的大部分省份，包括對120多名勞改營倖存者的採訪。王兵的目標是在這些記憶消失之前將它們保存起來，它與克洛德·朗茲曼(Claude Lanzmann)的不朽之作《浩劫》(Shoah)一脈相承。
「在中國的歷史上，夾邊溝勞改營裡發生的故事是不為人知的一頁，」王兵在談起該片時表示。該片原名《現在的過去》(Past in the Present)。「當然，它不只是中國的悲劇，也是人類歷史上眾多可怕的災難之一。」
對於面臨審查制度的中國電影製作人來說，題材的批判性太猛有時可能會遇到麻煩，但這似乎並沒有給王兵帶來阻礙。
他說，「我可以在中國自由地拍攝紀錄片。」他解釋，他的作品商業價值很低，所以沒有申請在影院放映（《方綉英》下個月將在上海國際電影節上放映）。
王兵在《死魂靈》中再次採用沉浸式的拍攝手法，拍出了一些令人難忘的畫面：《德昂》中與移民在爐邊的感人而神奇的瞬間；或者《三姊妹》中無依無靠的三個孩子令人不安的遊盪。這種電影形式讓觀眾感覺更像是和螢幕上的人一起生活，而不僅僅是看著他們。
對於那些準備投入時間和精力的人來說，《死靈魂》將會是坎城電影節諸多令人分神的活動中的專注力綠洲。
王兵以典型的冷靜低調的口吻表示：「我對觀眾沒有特別的期望。我希望這部影片能承載得起我拍攝的那些故事。換句話說，這部影片裡有很多內容。所以它才這麼長。」
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