Wang Bing's Shots: Stylized Gaze and the Texture of Death

Chinese director Wang Bing appeared at the 70th Locarno Film Festival and won the Golden Leopard Award for Best Film for "Fang Xiuying". (Visual China/Photo)

(This article was first published in Southern Weekend on November 9, 2017)

At the Toronto Film Festival, I watched Wang Bing's documentary "Fang Xiuying". In this work, Wang Bing uses a serious and heavy, calm and respectful attitude to observe the death of a lady with the audience. Through the lens, Wang Bing's gaze extends to her entire living environment, and even the local and current social picture. At the same time, Wang Bing is still insisting on his consistent exploration of the language of documentaries in this film, and for an artist, the exploration of this language is often more difficult to achieve.

<h3>The Golden Leopard Award was actually given to a documentary</h3>

On August 12, 2017, the 70th Locarno Film Festival closed, and Chinese director Wang Bing's work "Fang Xiuying" won the Golden Leopard Award, which was the first time in the history of the festival that the highest honor award was awarded to a documentary. This work has won almost unanimous praise from film critics at the film festival, and it is also the work with the highest odds at the Golden Leopard Award on the eve of the awards.

"Fang Xiuying" was filmed in 2016, and the core subject is Fang Xiuying, a 69-year-old man in Zhejiang. She suffered from Alzheimer's disease for 8 years, and in 2015 she was seriously ill and was admitted to a rehabilitation hospital for ineffective treatment. The family gave up treatment in June 2016 to take her home. Wang Bing already had plans to shoot her, but he was also filming his other works. Shortly before Fang Xiuying's death, Wang Bing received news from Fang Xiuying's family and rushed to photograph her eight days before her death. We see that Wang Bing's lens is not only observing Fang Xiuying. Fang Xiuying's daughters, relatives, other neighbors in the village, the scenes around the village and the flow of life are all presented to us through Wang Bing's lens.

In this work, Wang Bing uses a serious and heavy, calm and respectful attitude to observe the death of a lady with the audience. Through the lens, Wang Bing's gaze extends to her entire living environment, and even the local and current social picture. At the same time, Wang Bing is still insisting on his consistent exploration of the language of documentaries in this film, and for an artist, the exploration of this language is often more difficult to achieve.

<h3>Gritty gaze</h3>

At the Toronto Film Festival, I watched Wang Bing's documentary "Fang Xiuying". This viewing is a difficult process, the direct viewing experience is uncomfortable, is to avoid not looking, is the annoyance and psychological great sense of oppression and discomfort. However, through the physical and intuitive discomfort, I saw the novelty of the author's audiovisual language, and I saw the texture and living conditions of those people's lives. While watching it with difficulty, I savored with the author the powerless and utterly unconscious, but naturally existing sense of life that the woman had at the time of her death. This film allows me to think about and experience the empty, absurd and meaningless side of life. Perhaps my uncomfortable, uncomfortable experience of watching movies can be seen as what Aristotle called "causing pity and fear"? Through this uncomfortable experience, perhaps we can get some spiritual purification and sublimation. This may be what we often call beauty.

The film is featured on the Toronto Film Festival website, and curator Giovanna Fulvi describes it as "a disturbing alternative observation of the upheaval of contemporary Chinese culture" (Mrs. Giovanna Fulvi). Fang is a disturbing， alternative look at contemporary China's cultural upheaval. Actually, I should translate the word "disturbing" here as "annoying" or "uncomfortable." Because, in this film, Wang Bing uses the film language with a personal style to let us see the living conditions that we usually can't see.

In "Fang Xiuying", we see the helplessness and embarrassment of her relatives facing death, and we see a certain habit and indifference of her relatives and friends in the face of slow death. Wang Bing's lens likes to stare for a long time, sometimes staring at the subject of the film, for a long time that I can't help it; sometimes it is a long time to move behind the subject. It seems that the long time behind this follow-up does not seem to have much changed information. Ordinary documentaries are not filmed in this way. The unhesitating observation and presentation of this condition of death and existence is where its compulsive power lies. Perhaps because of the film's choice of subjects, and because of the relatively strong relationship between Wang Bing's lenses and subjects, the planners of this section of the Toronto Film Festival called the work "dangerous and devastating" ( dangerous and devastating " . In my opinion, this film will destroy many of us's popular understanding of familiar concepts such as "beauty", "sympathy", and "humanitarianism".

I admire Wang Bing's sensitivity to grasping the subject matter, and he has a natural sensitivity to the difficult situation of people and the kind of realistic scenes that people want to avoid. This sensitivity can also be seen in his documentary "The Nameless", which tells the story of a man who lives in a hillside cave on the junction of Inner Mongolia in Hebei Province, who is almost a contemporary caveman, and we never see him talking in the film. In Wang Bing's lens, I can always see the vision of "people with cameras" and the strong spirit in the face of cruel scenes. The artist Cao Kai's evaluation in the WeChat circle of friends is quite interesting: "Wang Bing's lens is very heavy on taste. What the average person subconsciously avoids when visually watching, Wang Bing chooses to face and enlarge, close-up amplification, conceptual amplification. ”

Like works such as "Tiexi District" and "15 Hours", Wang Bing does not like to ask questions to the subject, and in addition to extremely brief responses, he almost does not talk to the subject. For the subject, Wang Bing has a respect in his own way. When I spoke to him in 2012, he expressed his clear understanding of the relationship: "For a documentary, some authors may constantly ask and communicate with that person, and that is an expression of him. For me, the camera is already here, and I have fixed what I want to see into an image, which is expression. Wang Bing particularly emphasized that when Fang Xiuying died, his camera avoided.

In my conversation with Wang Bing in 2012, Wang Bing was obviously both self-conscious of his own observation attitude and the form of film language: "Of course, I just look at this history and the environment and stage of our own lives today, the history of our films and our own lives. There will be even greater variations and forms in the film. ”

In terms of choosing the object of observation and the way of observing the record, we all see a certain persistence and strength of Wang Bing. What we see is a calm, extremely long period of silent observation, and his lens forms a forced viewing and forced viewing relationship with our audience.

<h3>The physical environment and texture of life in the village</h3>

Alternative observation has at least two meanings, the other being an alternative to choosing objects of interest. Faced with Fang Xiuying's unbearable near-death characters and decadent environment, most documentary filmmakers did not expect to record or even stare at it. If you compare the selection of recorded objects and image quality and texture (texture) between "Fang Xiuying" and "China on the Tip of the Tongue", the audience can see the huge differences. The former is calm, does not avoid the ugly and dirty character image and living environment, many night scenes have an uncomfortable sense of dampness, and the river water is also muddy. The latter's images are aesthetic, and the living environment of the characters depicted is generous and pleasant, with a certain obvious lyrical attitude in the record.

In "Fang Xiuying", Wang Bing, as always, opened his observation horizons very widely. He would faithfully and consciously show the physical environment and living conditions of the people he observed, as well as photograph their relatives and other neighbors of the village, showing their relationship with each other. In "Tiexi District", Wang Bing used Lao Du's father and son on the railway side to write out the dependence of the workers there on the railway and the freight yard, and also wrote out the psychological dependence of Lao Du on the management agency. He would say to his son, "I'm not an ordinary person."

In this film, we see Fang Xiuying's relatives using tools made of simple batteries to go to the river to make electric fish. Boats searched everywhere in the muddy shallow water, and the whole environment and air gave a wet feeling. It is an intuitive, textured presentation of material reality. In my opinion, these images of the environment and the group of characters shown in the film have the power of Zola's novel. In "Tiexi District", Wang Bing filmed a scene of workers unloading bags of smelting chemical raw materials from train cars. The camera throws the viewer into the environment where dust is flying in space, watching the workers running back and forth with heavy bags, we can feel the dust sucking into our noses and sweat flowing from our necks.

In "Fang Xiuying", the Zhejiang water town we see is no longer just a "small bridge and flowing water people's home", and it is no longer the clean and bright that we are used to seeing. Like "Tiexi District", he set his sights on the broader social context and material environment. For this, Wang Bing is very confident: "It is completely different from the Yellow River Basin... The wet, gloomy feeling of survival in the whole water town, I completely photographed it. ”

When Wang Bing photographed Fang Xiuying's neighbors chatting on the street at night, we could feel the wet street and the foggy air. The whole work is full of a gray and dark tone, the boundless lifeless lake, the polluted water and soil, and the repeated imagery of dead fish may also form a symbolic relationship with the death theme of the work. I like the independent film director Shen Jie's comment with symbolic poetic implications: "'Fang Xiuying' is a poem of death gazing at the earth. From This work by Wang Bing, we can see the economic relations in the village, people's attitudes towards the environment, the needs and hopes for life, the attitude towards death, the emotional state between relatives and friends, the way of communication, and so on. This is called a broad picture.

Wang Bing showed great respect and kindness to the people and the land he was concerned about and stared at: "I think my camera is very kind, because we have been trying to use the camera to echo her inner fluctuations, and we don't want to photograph the fear, pain, and uneasiness of her death. That kind of embarrassing stuff is something I don't have in my movies. When she was about to die, my camera was far away, because I wanted to protect her, and when the audience watched the movie, such a beautiful thing of her people would not be destroyed by my camera. ”

<h3>Language exploration in Wang Bing's footage</h3>

Wang Bing's documentary also has another kind of otherness, that is, his exploration and innovation in the language of documentary. "Fang Xiuying" has the significance of film language innovation, which has the same weight as its exploration of the situation of death and the presentation of Chinese reality. This kind of exploration and innovation is not only implemented in "Fang Xiuying", but he has been exploring from "Tiexi District", in "Crude Oil", "The Unknown", "He Fengming" and "Fang Xiuying".

Rory O'Connor, a film critic at film site Film Stage, also seems to have noticed that the work has a linguistic dimension. "'Fang Xiuying' is a study of facial expressions, a heavy and indifferent essay about death... This masterpiece from documentary filmmaker Wang Bing deserves everyone to sit down and watch. Whether it is on a moral level or other themes, or in the use of film language, it is a masterpiece. ”

Carefully reading works such as "The Unknown", "Crude Oil", "He Fengming", and then to this "Fang Xiuying", I think that Wang Bing's film language is no longer the so-called documentary style, but a kind of "stylized documentary", that is to say, in this kind of documentary, through the rewriting and renovation of the film language grammar, Wang Bing consciously, implicitly and intensively highlights his authorial style.

In terms of the form of the development of documentary language, this film language has a new meaning. In this documentary language, Wang Bing does not emphasize calm bystander like Wiseman, a famous Documentary Filmmaker in the United States, and does not want the ideal state of his relationship with the subject to try his best to make the photographer a "fly on the wall".

Wang Bing's shots are not Wiseman's emphasis on objectivity, he is indeed documentary, unlike Michael Moore, the director of "Fahrenheit 911", who uses a lot of juggling montages, and so strongly marks the existence of the author. Wang Bing's documentary image texture is documentary, but he has a strong transformation of documentary, or realist language.

We can have a variety of explanations for Wang Bing's long-standing gaze shots. It can be seen as a certain emotion of the author's subject appearing in the lens, or it can be seen as a challenge and questioning of the so-called "normal" viewing habits of our so-called "normal people". In the so-called normal viewing or observation, many viewers and authors will intentionally or subconsciously avoid those ugly and uncomfortable scenes.

On the spectrum of film language, Wang Bing is a little farther away from Wiseman, and a little closer to the contemporary art documentary style, which is almost imperceptible. With this little bit of persecution of the audience, with his own little camera eyes staring, Wang Bing announced the presence of the author, completing a slight revolution in the language of documentary films. In "15 Hours", the camera's picture often stays on a person for several minutes, and the content is mostly just a constant repetition of labor. Workers rarely speak, and rarely leave their workstations to walk around. Spectators have been wrapped up in the constant muffled noise of electric sewing machines.

In works such as "Crude Oil", "Fang Xiuying", and "15 Hours", Wang Bing's documentary language is more towards the end of contemporary art on the spectrum of film language, which reminds us of Works such as Andy Warhol's "Sleep".

The contemporary art I am talking about here is not a concept of time, not contemporary art, but a concept of style. This style can probably use Marcel Duchamp as the originator of his ideas, and a large number of subsequent artists such as Picasso and Andy Warhol as models of subsequent development. If you want to cite the current Example of China, in addition to Wang Bing, you can also take Ge Yulu, who makes "Ge YuLu" road signs, and Xu Bing, who makes "Book of Heaven", as representatives of contemporary art.

Wang Bing's lens deviates from the recording language of classical realism, and there is a bit of innovation in the recording language and recording attitude, so that we can see the author's solemn expression.