The Xi’an documentarian, whose style brings to light the harsh and hidden folds of Chinese microcosms, is part of a cinematic exhibition in Italy.
Wang Bing is one of the 12 film directors of ‘Il nostro tempo’ (Our time) – CinéFondationCartier, the show at the Triennale Museum in Milan curated by Chiara Agradi, where different cinematic oeuvres offer a reflection on the world we live in. Amongst the works on display, Wang Bing’s 15 Hours follows for an entire day the activities of a Chinese textile factory containing around 300,000 workers.
As an integral part of the exhibition, Triennale Milano and Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, together with Fondazione Piccolo America – Cinema Troisi, organised a screening programme focusing on several contemporary themes. The one called ‘I penultimi del mondo’ (The penultimate of the world) focuses on marginal and invisible individuals to whom cinema has provided a platform, through films such as Miracle in Milan by Vittorio De Sica, Oasis by Lee Chang Dong, Stray Dogs by Tsai Ming-liang, I Hired a Contract Killer by Aki Kaurismäki.
The first evening of the event, which took place on Wednesday 19th February, welcomed Wang Bing in conversation with the Director of the National Cinema Museum of Torino Carlo Chatrian. The topics of conversation that emerged throughout this Talk disclosed the dedication to the craftsmanship of video-making, along with the idealism at the heart of the unconventional approach used by Bing in his profession.
The film 15 Hours — just like Wang Bing’s previous works — requires time and focus, which is something that we might have lost in today’s world. However, it truly immerses us in the surroundings he brings to the silver screen. Chatrian was the perfect fit for this Masterclass, since he had included Wang Bing’s Mrs. Fang of at the Locarno Film Festival when he was artistic director — which eventually won the Golden Leopard — and he also had the chance to have him as a jury member at the Berlin Film Festival in 2022, when he was artistic director.
Wang Bing’s style condenses geometric shapes with a huge empathetic power, and opts for a temporality that goes beyond traditional running times. This choice is determined by a continuous quest for truth, as Wang Bing described: “Ever since I started making films, I’ve always tried to pursue a feeling of authenticity, especially when it comes to the idea of time. It’s almost like when cinema was invented: to capture a train arriving in a station, a plot was not required, the only goal was to record an event that was happening. I did not work with video until 2006, and when I started using this medium I told myself I wanted to do so to show the real life of a human being. If I could have watched 10 minutes in the life of a person who lived thousands of years ago, I would rather it had not been edited.”
The title of the exhibition ‘Our Time’, opens the conversation to a dual meaning: one that pertains to the hours that make up our days, and the other that embodies the era we are living in. Thus, it has a collectivist significance, just like Wang Bing’s filmography with works such as Youth, that was presented in Cannes and other festivals, and of course 15 Hours. Therefore, sharing the exact same time of the factory workers, like the 900 minutes they spend toiling, makes “their time” also “our time.” As viewers we can somehow put ourselves in their shoes, and it makes this style of filming very political.
As the Chinese filmmaker explained: “China is well known for its big population and for having a political structure that focuses on collectivism. Consequently, I try to shine a light on the life of each individual in the midst of a complex group. In this way, every person can emerge with his or her character. I always seek that balance. During our time, we are all overwhelmed by so much information and situations, whether the themes are political or spiritual. For me the cinematic art is to tell stories of people who are at the bottom of society, who feel oppressed and fragile. The perk of making documentaries is that you can show the authentic life of people. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that people are forced to live in such conditions. When you face this truth, you start to question whether this can be considered a civilisation. This is the challenge of documentary-filmmaking, it puts your stability to the test and pushes you out of your comfort zone.”
The Chinese director is currently based in Europe, which inevitably allows him to have the liberty to scrutinise the society of his country of origin. As he highlighted: “I’ve noticed that in China there are no authentic documentaries since 1949, with the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Most works are fictional, whereas I try to give an objective perspective. This is another reason why my works are so long, because there is a lot of content. I try to fill a void. The Chinese political regime forbids to tell the truth of the past and present. I live in the present and I try to capture what is happening before my eyes.”
The way he unveils China shows us how this country has an impact also on the Western world, since the workers from this textile district produce the clothes we wear. This is why Wang Bing’s taste for objective verity clashes with writers from China who adopt a postmodernist or avant-garde style, such as Yu Hua. “I don’t like those kind of novels that are metafictional and don’t have realism in them. It’s not a critique, but they don’t resonate with me,” Wang Bing said.
The digital revolution has undoubtably enabled the Chinese filmmaker’s realistic style: the equipment is light and discreet, which enables to capture harsh realities. Consequently, a film like 15 Hours could not be conceived in the time of the analogue medium. Wang Bing himself emphasised: “Since Chinese cinema is under censorship, I had to use small cameras to grasp as much footage as possible. Digitalisation has surely given me a lot of freedom, filming for hours, in any weather condition, capturing the daily lives of people. Without it I would not have been able to make my documentaries, the way I do. When I shot Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks I used to film for 3 or 4 days in a row without sleeping, so I could work non-stop.”
The process of preparation is very pure, since Wang Bing studies his surroundings and prevents any interaction that may contaminate a spontaneous behaviour from the people he his capturing on camera. “I don’t speak to the people involved in the storytelling,” he clarified and continued: “I don’t want to influence them. I observe, I don’t talk. Who am I to judge other people’s lives? I have no clue of what someone else is going through, so I use my video camera to share their life.”
In terms of technical details, Wang Bing equally values time, space and sound. “When I shot Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks I thought about the way people moved through these factories. I had also planned in my head the shoot of the train. In my mind I was thinking not just about what I had to capture visually, but also through the audio.” But besides these clarifications, the documentarian’s ethics of precision made him reveal that what intentionally had to be 15 hours of uninterrupted shoot, had some minor glitches. He said: “I conceived it as a 15 hour shoot, but for technical reasons there have been three brief interruptions, because we had to change the battery of the camera and we had to adjust the lens and optics. I did also a second day of shoot, without interruptions, but it didn’t have the same vibe, so I kept the first version of the film.”
His relentless, indomitable and and tireless ability to work for such long hours has been forged by his childhood days as he shared with his audience: “When I lived in China I was the first child and we were in the countryside. I worked in the fields, being the eldest, since my dad passed away very soon. I never get sick, still today.”
Wang Bing’s films can be considered as a tribute to the defeated. As Carlo Chatrian underlined, Bing looks for pieces of reality that are disappearing, places and people on the margins and places them centre stage. The style definitely goes against the tide of conventional filmmaking, making his target audience rather niche, which is something that doesn’t worry the Chinese cinéaste. “Since I began filming in 1999, I’ve never been for a wide audience,” he said and added: “Today there’s an abundance of audiovisual works, therefore my films are there for those who are interested. For instance, the film I made in 2007, Crude Oil, that lasts 14 hours, had the intention of showing oil field workers as they go about their daily routine. When I’m shooting I set aside the thought of a narration or a plot, I try to convey the real. I’m aware that this approach narrows down my audience, but I feel it’s important to have this film genre too.”
Dedicated to this cause, Wang Bing, continues in this direction also with his upcoming projects, as he explains: “I’m working on the second and third part of my 2018 film that premiered in Cannes, Dead Souls, that was about 9 hours long. This other part will be another 9 hours long, and I feel it is necessary to document the survivors of the hard-labour camp in the Gobi Desert in Gansu.”
As for his early days studying cinema Wang Bing shared his admiration for film directors of the Old Continent. “I like the films by Andrei Tarkovsky, and Italian directors such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni. I don’t make films similar to theirs, but these are the filmmakers who inspired me.”
Wang Bing’s 15 Hours might differ in style from the motion pictures of his idols, but is equally compelling in dismantling society’s complexities. The same applies to the other works featured in the exhibition ‘Il nostro tempo’ by Raymond Depardon & Claudine Nougaret (The Pleasure of Mathematics), Jonathan Vinel (Martin Pleure), PARKing CHAnce (Decades Apart), Artavazd Pelechian (Our Century and Vie), Andrei Ujică (The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu), Paz Encina (The Scent Of The Wind), Eryk Rocha & Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha (The Falling Sky), Morzaniel Ɨramari (Mãri Hi – The Tree of Dream), Agnès Varda (The Triptych of Noirmoutier). The latter impressed Wang Bing particularly, along with Pelechian’s Vie, as he concluded “I recognised the music by Giuseppe Verdi, which has been used effectively in many films.”
