A thing that makes people not vomit and unpleasant.
The Cannes Film Festival, the supreme hall of global art films, the release of the shortlisted film list every year will attract a cheer, especially for Chinese-language films, shortlisting is victory, which can reach the point of boiling public opinion.
But this year.
A Chinese director who was shortlisted for Cannes with two films, one of which was also shortlisted for the main competition unit.
People fell silent.
Sporadic discussions, the focus shifted to the sub-unit "a kind of attention unit", saying that Wei Shujun's "Mistakes by the River" and Chen Zheyi's "Burning Winter" bypassed one name - Wang Bing.
The director is too unpopular? Sorry, if the top 100 directors of Chinese history are selected, Wang Bing is bound to occupy a seat; Documentaries too niche? As the first documentary on Chinese themes shortlisted for the main competition unit, this in itself is more historical.
So what's behind the silence?
It may be that in this era of blurred boundaries, we have involuntarily added many taboos to ourselves, or it may be that in this era of entertainment to death, we have stopped caring about the value of reality.
So today, we might as well talk about Wang Bing.
With his experience.
Sketch out a "value" that we have forgotten for a long time.
01
Comb through the traces of the survival of "people"
There are so many people in this country that they really are... I think it's more important than art.
- Wang Bing
In 1999, Wang Bing, who only had a few thousand yuan on his body, rented a DV and went to the Tiexi District of Shenyang's state-owned factory.
Although he didn't know exactly what to do at the time, he dared to shoot.
This was the beginning of his filmmaking.
Four years later, a 9-hour documentary epic "Tiexi District" was born, which has painted a heavy color in the history of independent documentaries in China and even the world.
Named one of the 50 greatest documentaries in film history by the British Film Institute
So to speak.
Almost all fans who grew up in the same era as Uncle Meat do not know about this documentary.
I still remember the thick box of DVDs.
Plain, real, and heavy, so that it is difficult for anyone to dare to read it in one sitting.
Wang Bing can be said to be a "god in World War I".
But after that?
Over the next 24 years, he gained fame but stayed away from profit.
For most of the time, he didn't make more lucrative, commercial documentaries, but still stuck to the "one person, one machine" approach, documenting one specific person after another, people who never even saw themselves existing.
We have always maintained our "original intention".
His trajectory is flexible and mobile, moving between the present and history, between the modern and the wilderness. His footsteps have traveled all over the country, east, west, south and north, to the northeast, Yunnan, Shanghai, Gansu and so on.
Because of his unique image style, precious personal writing and historical thickness, Wang Bing has won numerous awards at international film festivals.
To these "achievements", he responded that what he did was "very simple."
Versailles? Not really.
It's just that his positioning of his own creation has always been clear, and what he has to do is "a simple combing of history on the body of the current person." ”
Therefore, under his lens, we can see that the scars of the gears of the times will slowly appear on a person's body.
Some people have experienced the history of 60 years ago.
Some people are hidden in the shadows of Chinese society.
"Tiexi District" in 2003.
Focus on the heavy industrial areas of China in the late 90s, people who are experiencing the pains of social transformation.
The camera silently takes us, gazing at the disintegration of the factory, at the disintegration of the workers from the outside in, and at the same time, witnessing the shattering of a dream of "creating a new world": "We wanted to create a world, but in the end the world collapsed." ”
2007's "And the Phoenix Ming".
He was just quietly listening to the self-account of a right-wing movement witness.
In the changing light and dark sky, in the silent room like a grave, listen to her experience of being "forced to be a rightist", her incomprehension and despair, and her most painful memories, the painful and sweet love with her husband.
In her gentle tone, you can still feel that she is wrapped in a huge sense of loneliness
"Mad Love" in 2013.
Wang Bing walked into a psychiatric hospital in Yunnan.
In that disorderly space, you will see his camera never curious, as if it were usual: the eating and drinking of the mentally ill, their silence, or the running in the corridor...
Wang Bing has also tried feature films.
The film, based on documentary literature, uses his usual quiet video language to tell the story of the death and suffering of people on the labor camp.
For example, this scene.
The woman came to the farm with food to save her husband, who turned out to be dead, and she went to the administrator's office, crying and asking where he was buried.
The other party said in a high-spirited manner that she was trying to be reactionary and threatened her to leave.
The camera cuts back to the woman, and the bright background sets her off like a shadow that only has a "human form", so quiet that there is no sound, and even the crying disappears.
This time, the new film "Youth", which was shortlisted for the main competition unit of Cannes, Wang Bing focused on migrant youth in the metropolis.
He followed a few rural young people from Yunnan to Shanghai, which may give us a look of youth burned out that we have never seen before.
It is worth mentioning that for a long time, Wang Bing has been regarded as a director who pays attention to "marginal people".
But he has repeatedly rejected the term "edge":
"If you think about it, among the more than a billion people in China, the people I photograph are the vast majority. Like the workers in "Three Sisters" and "Tiexi District", are migrant workers not mainstream? Aren't workers mainstream? How can it be marginal people? So what exactly is our social subject? They are just ordinary people, ordinary to the existence of individuals that do not exist and can be ignored. I'm not trying to fight for anything, I'm just trying to say that they're people who can't make a sound, but they're not marginal. ”
According to the latest statistics, there were more than 400 million blue-collar workers in China in 2021, accounting for 53% of China's 740 million employed population. (Source: Employment Research Report on Blue Collar Groups in China (2022)
For him, they are not marginal.
It's just that this society has never given them a voice, so much so that it forgets their existence.
He is going to see the existence of a "man."
And the immortal mark of the times after the dust of the times has fallen on them.
02
"Together"
I think art itself exists for individual experience. Because of this kind of individual experience, people can communicate with each other, through movies, we can see the bottom of another person's heart, the reality of another person, we can communicate and share the life feelings of others. This is the only reason for art to exist in this world, and nothing else has anything to do with it.
——Wang Bing on "The Essence of Movies"
Some time ago, "To Nineteen-Year-Old Me" directed by Zhang Wanting won the Academy Award for Best Film, but it also attracted controversy.
The subject accused "exploitation", so much so that it was urgently taken offline within 4 days of release.
The same is to shoot individuals to reflect the times, Uncle Meat feels that this can almost be compared with Wang Bing's films.
If "To Nineteen-Year-Old Me" is suspected of deliberately leading.
Then Wang Bing's film presents the original world completely without bringing a trace of shock.
Music, no; interviews, no; The narrative is always in chronological order, and the editing is always to preserve the original appearance to the greatest extent, so once the viewer enters his film, he will unconsciously experience a period of her/his time and space with the person in the film from an eye-level perspective.
There is a strong sense of experience and realism.
Anthropologist Xiang Biao once used one word to describe the unique feeling brought by Wang Bing's lens - "together." ”
It can be said that this word is extremely precise.
He steadfastly refuses to look at others from a high position, to "make stories" with their lives, to see them as symbols under some grand narrative.
He tried to capture the "equality" that every life should have.
In "Fang Xiuying".
We are with a dying elderly man with Alzheimer's disease.
In the last eight days of Fang Xiuying's life, Wang Bing stared at her face with a long close-up.
She was so sick that she couldn't speak, and we don't know what she was thinking at the time, but her eyes still stubbornly shone with the light of life, as if she was telling something.
"Three Sisters".
We are with left-behind children in remote mountain villages.
Watch them quietly and tacitly begin to catch lice in the steppe between driving pigs.
In Wang Bing's images, an action in the characters' lives will naturally tell their stories, without the need to specifically explain the cause and effect.
Apparently, the parents of the three sisters have not been back for a long time, and living in a backward mountainous area without a hot water system, they rarely have access to bathing without supervision, so catching lice has become a "daily action".
In "15 Hours".
We are with anonymous workers.
In this 15-hour long film, Wang Bing uses the most primitive video form to capture a day of workers in a Chinese garment processing factory.
These 15 hours are just one of the days of their lives:
"I work 15 hours a day, seven days a week, and only one day after 6 p.m. to rest."
In "Dead Souls".
We are with the dead.
Spanning 12 years of filming, Wang Bing interviewed more than 100 survivors of the Laogai farm.
In this 8-hour film, those who died decades ago are awakened by survivors with "telling", and those who have died one after another are awakened by the image itself.
Dead souls are resurrected, and vanished history reappears.
We followed their narration, as if returning to the scene, seeing how they studied how to eat bones, how to compete with pigs for watermelon skins, and even directly saw the remains of white bones under the wind and sand of history.
Wang Bing said:
"When you finish watching this movie, it's really like at night, you stand on the Gobi Beach and look at the stars, see the light of death, it is like life, like life, because we met this living person and suddenly let us know that there was once a life like that."
For me, this is the most touching part of Wang Bing's movie.
He treats every being as an equal and unabashedly pushes them before us, "forced" us to gaze at them and feel them.
It's like a cliché that sounds old one summer when there is no internet.
In those calm narratives, we feel the traces of their enthusiastic past.
03
Doesn't it make sense?
What we do means nothing to this era... What this age needs is obedience. People need to forget these things, forget history, make life easier, this is the theme of this era.
- Wang Bing
So back to the topic at the beginning: Why did Wang Bing's new film shortlisted in Cannes not produce a splash in the public opinion field?
In addition to the "niche" of documentaries.
Probably more, it is the result of the influence of the atmosphere of the times.
Someone asked Wang Bing earlier, how does he understand this identity as a filmmaker in China?
Wang Bing's answer was: "Embarrassed." ”
The embarrassment was that he felt he was not needed by the times.
What do you mean?
For example, what is "needed" in this era is "twists and turns", is "step by step", the result of fast food is that small beauty and strong people run rampant in the short video market, and it is the reading app that has read the classic masterpieces for us.
And Wang Bing chose to look at every life in a plain way? How many hours at every turn?
It is said that the new work "Youth" trilogy is 10 hours long
Sorry, "too long to look".
For example, what this era "needs" is "positive energy", what is needed is "inspirational" and "inspirational", so some so-called "negative energy" will be labeled as catering to outsiders.
It seems that the suffering of a person is naturally opposed to national dignity.
Thereupon.
Wang Bing had no choice but to say that his works were meaningless to this era.
But is it really pointless?
However, I feel that the value and significance of one king soldier is more than ten or hundreds of so-called suspended TV series that reflect real problems.
Because here we can see clearly and unabashedly the people and problems that are obscured.
And this.
It is also why so many directors do not care about the return, and even devote themselves to filming regardless of safety.
For example, in Zhang Zanbo's "The Road to the Sky".
We can see the dark side behind the road construction project, which symbolizes the rapid development.
For example, in Fan Jian's "Alive".
We can see how a family struggled to find hope to survive despite the slogans of revitalization after the Wenchuan earthquake.
For example, in Zhou Hao's "Datong".
We saw the forced relocation of 500,000 people under the plan to develop the ancient city, and the fierce mayor disappeared overnight with the sudden transfer order.
and Wang Bing's "Tiexi District".
We see workers listening to the radio and studying stocks and finding another way out in the gloomy lounge, when the iron rice bowl is no longer secure.
And these.
It is a scene that our TV series has not written and will not be written as the main body.
They are the majority of our society, but in the colorful casino, they are silenced and ignored so much that many people almost forget that they exist.
So will all this record be meaningless?
I think its existence will make sense as long as there are people watching.
Just like this "Youth".
Perhaps, you will feel that these young people who have left home and entered the city to work have nothing to do with you.
But they do exist in this society, and they do squander their youth and bitterness in many unknown corners.
Their traces cannot be erased.
And this.
is the most precious record that a movie can leave to the world.
Worker of the day: Buster cold noodles