Wang Bing: The Mystery of a Fact Clearly Described

In a wonderful scene from Doctor Zhivago, Strelnikov (Tom Courtenay) schools Yuri (Omar Sharif) on just how the world has turned. “The private life is dead,” he lectures. “History killed it.” Yet the reverse is so often true to cinema. History is dead and filmmakers hold the bloody knife. Their representations of past realities are only that, a reflection. In documentary this confrontation is even more acute and is one which is being constantly addressed by Wang Bing, a man sitting at the forefront of modern documentary filmmaking.

His 2012 feature Three Sisters (San Zimei) won the Orrizonti Prize at Venice that year, and this year his new film 'Til Madness do us Part  has its UK premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival. His epic truths of China’s past and present include the harsh reality of street capitalism in Coal Money; intolerable persecution in The Ditch; a shattered soul glued together by strength and dignity in Fengming: A Chinese Memoir. But these truths are distorted as soon as they travel through a lens. The camera is the viewer’s eye and we see only from its point of view. For documentary, then, it’s so important that this eye is unwavering.

“Language is the weakest element in cinema,” says Wang, “But I can’t avoid using verbal ways to tell the story.” Unusual then that his epic Fengming: A Chinese Memoir is basically a three hour monologue, a life laid bare. As a young journalist in the new Chinese Republic, its subject, He Fengming, reveals, “We felt so free, like skies were blue for the first time.” Yet those skies turned bruised and lachrymose as Mao attempted ‘to achieve great order under heaven by creating great chaos under heaven.’ Her story of inhuman humiliation, cruelty, suicide and hardship is rendered face to face, straight to camera – it’s like a disturbing afternoons visit to grandma.

Three Sisters – Wang Bing

This approach “gives Fengming a very free space at her home so that she can walk in and walk out. She goes to the toilet, she picks up the phone and she does her own thing.” Her comfort and ease closes the gap between the subject and viewer, an eternal problem in cinema. “Every filmmaker uses different ways to solve the problem,” Wang says. “For me I am trying to let characters be freer in the images, so I don’t let the space of images constrain the movement or actions of the characters.” The film opens by tracking behind Fengming as she walks home with shuffling gait. The legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle once said of Maggie Cheung that “if you’re Maggie, the way you walk tells us where you came from.” On an opposite scale of poise and grace, but with obstinate dignity, Fenming also proves this true. This is a hugely prolonged opening shot, not included for aesthetic purpose but simply to allow us to see her walk, as Doyle suggests, to tell us where she came from. 

The accolades for allowing this extended scene should go to digital technology. Philippine cinema’s enfant terrible Khavn De La Cruz said of digital film, “If you want to see how technology has democratized cinema, here is the tip of a massive iceberg.” For Wang it provides freedom. He chose the methods originally for financial reasons. “It’s cheap to make digital films,” he observes, “but it shouldn’t look cheap.” What it does is sever a link between filmmaker and sponsor. Without the need for high level funding there is less danger of the opinions of financial backers seeping on to the screen; truth travels through one less distorting prism. “The condition in China is very different from the situation in Europe because there is no state support for filmmaking and so people have to do this independently by earning money themselves. Digital filmmaking makes it possible.” Digital provides freedom for both the filmmaker and subject. Reality need not be cut to fit budget, it can be captured naturally and in this way truth can be maintained.

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“The condition in China is very different from the situation in Europe because there is no state support for filmmaking and so people have to do this independently by earning money themselves. Digital filmmaking makes it possible” – Wang Bing

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As a filmmaker Wang has worked almost exclusively in China but has moved geographically around its borders. When reaching the north-west he decided to tackle history in place of the contemporary. The area of the country west of Beijing borders on the Gobi and it was this arid, inhospitable landscape where outspoken voices were sent in the 50s to be silenced under the guise of re-education. The Ditch is Wang’s harrowing telling of these ectopic bodies, displaced and destined to perish. He filmed this as his first full non-documentary feature, a brave move. There was a certain furore when Jia Zhang-Ke presented his wonderful 2008 feature 24 City, a merging of documentary and scripted scenes telling the story of a collapsing state factory. There was never a claim that this was purely a captured reality but some audience members felt manipulated.

On whether truth and fiction can coexist harmoniously, Wang states, “they don’t supplement each other. They are independent. The real images of documentaries are the real images of people’s lives. Images in fiction, although they might seem authentic, have been fabricated artificially. It’s a kind of interpretive reality that cannot be equal to the reality in documentaries.” Fiction might be viewed as a metaphoric telling, while documentary footage has an almost physical relation to the true happening. It is as if reality has travelled through the lens and been preserved digitally, like a fly in amber. Wang explains: “the attitudes of documentaries come from the attitudes of the characters but also their understanding and identification with the filmmakers. Fiction films are completely up to the attitudes of ourselves, the filmmakers.”  He is a purist, feeling that truth and fiction must be sharply divided. “Every filmmaker has his own principles and character,” he says. “For me, in life you can be playful, but in some circumstances you should not be, not treat it as a game.”

He calls The Ditch “not necessarily a record of history but [of understanding] your life and how life around you has been constituted.” It’s a delicate subject and interesting that this linking of the past with contemporary China has caused no friction with state censorship. Lou Ye was slapped with a five year filmmaking ban after defying authorities and screening his uncut version of Summer Palace in 2006. He shrugs and says that for him it’s quiet, he’s been lucky. He has even tackled the Cultural Revolution directly in his short film The Brutality Factory, part of a 2007 anthology titled The State of the World. It’s depiction of torture is like a punch to the chest. "It could be better," he retorts in typical self-deprecating fashion, before indicating in a similar manner that “once the film is finished there’s not much relationship between [it] and myself. People like images on the screen and not the person who has made the film.” For this world class filmmaker, Orizzonti Best Feature winner and EIFF guest of honour in 2014, the truths he projects are king.