We are pleased to present this conversation between Wang Bing and Jung Sung-il in English for the first time, translated and introduced by Jawni Han.
Night and Fall in Zona (Jung Sung-il, 2015).
After the fall of the military dictatorship in South Korea in 1988, the country entered a period of wholesale political, social, and cultural transformation. At the heart of its newly blooming cinephile culture was Jung Sung-il, who remains one of Korea’s most prominent film critics. Jung founded the generation-defining film journal KINO in 1995, known for erudite film criticism that drew influence from Lacanian psychoanalysis, critical theory, French philosophy, and the writings of Shiguéhiko Hasumi. On the occasion of the journal’s seventh anniversary, Bong Joon-ho, one of its most avid readers, contributed a Se7en-inspired comic strip.
Jung’s first encounter with Wang Bing was at the 2003 International Film Festival Rotterdam, where the nine-hour cut of Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks premiered. He came out of the screening a new convert. In the inaugural issue of Nang, Jung praised the lengthy shots taken from a moving freight train that bookend the film:
In the current century ... we are witnessing a second beginning of cinema—this time on the other side of the world. I think of Wang Bing as the Lumières and Apichatpong Weerasethakul as Méliès.
Since then, Jung has consistently championed Wang’s work, and the two have struck up a friendship. In 2009, Jung joined Wang in Yunnan Province, where the director was making Three Sisters (2012) and ’Til Madness Do Us Part (2013) at the same time. Jung’s own documentary Night and Fog in Zona (2015) documents Wang at work, the film’s form often mirroring the meditative style of its subject; at 235 minutes long, it is close in length to Wang’s 228-minute Madness. Reflecting on what he learned from Wang, Jung remarks: “Not the question of what to shoot, but of what not to shoot and when to stop shooting and leave the location.”
The following is Jung’s most recent interview with Wang, conducted at the Busan International Film Festival in 2022. Initially published in the Korean film magazine FILO, it is also the concluding chapter of Jung’s new book on the director, My Auteurism (2024). Jung maintains that an interview is the highest form of criticism; a director’s insights often withstand the test of time in a way that most prose reviews cannot. Their discussion revolves around Wang’s monumental 485-minute Dead Souls (2018). In 2005, Wang began interviewing the survivors of Jiabiangou Labor Camp in northwestern China, where those branded as “Rightists” were interned during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s. Over the next few years, he recorded testimonials from 120 people, accumulating nearly 600 hours of footage. Jung writes elsewhere in his book that Dead Souls, one of four Wang films to engage with the history of Jiabiangou, bears witness to “history made of flesh and blood.”
The interview was conducted with an interpreter, and Wang's responses in Mandarin were translated into Korean for print publication. This is the first time the text has appeared in English.
—Jawni Han
Night and Fog in Zona (Jung Sung-il, 2015).
We had not seen each other for a long time. There were many reasons for this. While he was editing Dead Souls (2018), Wang Bing did not see anyone. To be more precise, he did not want anyone to know that he was working on this project. Things got very complicated shortly after Dead Souls had a surprise premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018. There is one thing we must remind ourselves of: While the Communist Party of China officially acknowledged the failures of the Cultural Revolution and apologized to the people of China, it remains silent about the Great Leap Forward of 1957. What does it all mean? To criticize the Great Leap Forward is to challenge the legitimacy of the People’s Republic of China. In just under five years (according to unofficial statistics, as nobody knows exactly the magnitude of what happened during this time, including even those in the Beijing government, some historians argue), 47 million people died from starvation, physical violence, or illness—whatever the cause may be, they all died. Yet the leader of the Party insisted that “it is better to let half the people die so that others can eat their fill.” Countless intellectuals, students, community leaders, Party members, and sometimes even clueless citizens were branded as “Rightists” and sent off to a labor camp in Gansu Province. They returned only after the Great Leap Forward had come to an end. But this is a country where authority is infallible. Chairman Mao Zedong referred to right-wing elements as counter-revolutionaries and justified the purge as a struggle caused by the contradiction1 between himself and the enemy. Those who barely survived the struggle against the Chairman had to live in silence after they had returned home.
To meet the survivors, Wang traveled all over China with a camera in hand. Unauthorized activities and illegal filming took place. Some whispered even while in their own homes, and when Wang returned for a second interview with one survivor, he found himself at a funeral. The survivors took turns testifying to their times at the labor camp: starvation, abject poverty, the cold, and endless struggle sessions. Afterward, some were buried while others sank into silence again. Dead Souls comprises testimonies from those who are still on the Party’s registry as “right-wing elements.” After the Cannes premiere, Wang kept delaying his return flight to China and remained in Paris. Beijing kept silent about Dead Souls as if it did not even exist while Wang brought it to European film festivals, cinematheques, art galleries, and film schools. As a result, he was supposed to attend the Busan International Film Festival that year, but only the film made it there. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic began.
Dead Souls (Wang Bing, 2018).
We stayed in touch via email. I learned that Wang’s wife and daughter had relocated to Paris, but he hesitated to tell me what he and his family were up against. He kept saying he was “in waiting.” Waiting for what? I asked myself. He seemed to be in temporary exile but, despite his friends’ objections, continued to fly back and forth from China to Paris. A French film producer and friend of Wang’s, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me that they had asked the director why he kept risking so much by returning to China. His answer: “I am a filmmaker. People I need to document are over there. Therefore, I must be there, not here. Only when I am around these people do I become a filmmaker.” This reminded me of an anecdote I heard in Yunnan from Huang Wenhai, a friend of Wang’s from the Beijing Film Academy, who traveled from Beijing to assist Wang with additional shooting for Alone (2013):
Our generation is under Hou Hsiao-hsien’s influence. Everyone says they admire him. But Wang never brought up Hou. So I asked him if he had never seen Hou’s work. He said, “Of course I did.” Then he added, “If you had the time to see Dust in the Wind [1986], you would be better off seeing Andrei Rublev [1966]. I’m not saying one is better than the other. We are still living through a moment in history very far from the romantic era depicted in Dust in the Wind. As I watched in Andrei Rublev the depiction of a barbaric epoch that artists have to endure, of the anxiety that comes with it, and of the solitude caused by the fact that nobody but a mad woman can understand one’s art, I felt like I was facing myself.”
I am thinking about what Wang said once again. To watch a film, one must grapple with the question of what to see in a film. The cinephiles in my circle, my peers—well, people who go to see films in general—tend to go to great lengths to explain cinematic forms, concepts, theories, and aesthetics. I do not think that is necessarily bad. But only Wang equates the question of seeing a film with the question of facing oneself. At this point, my mind drifts to that winter when I roamed around Yunnan with him. And I am reminded of the girl I met after traveling 70 kilometers along the forest path from Menglai Township in Xishuangbanna. She must have been either four or five. She constantly bragged about her dog. She liked it when I patted her head. Sometimes, she would stick her head toward me. When I patted her head, I could feel the lice in her hair. I never refused her request. On the day this stranger left, all the children in the town came out to wave farewell to me. The girl tried to stop other children from waving their hands, yelling, “He is mine.” She must be a young woman now. All of a sudden, I would like to wander around China with Wang again and observe him at work. The following conversation originates from that desire.
Three Sisters (Wang Bing, 2012).
JUNG SUNG-IL: Let me first share some of my impressions after watching Dead Souls. The film left me shocked. Not only is it your masterpiece, but I realize it is also the center of gravity in your body of work. I also learned that your second film, Fengming, a Chinese Memoir [2007], was initially shot as part of Dead Souls. Your only narrative work to date [The Ditch, 2010] is set in Jiabiangou Labor Camp in Gansu Province. You spent hundreds of hours working on Dead Souls, which comprises interviews with Jiabiangou survivors. The Great Leap Forward—also referred to as the Great Chinese Famine outside of your country—lasted from 1957 to 1962, during which time the witnesses in Dead Souls were incarcerated in the labor camp. What significance does that period hold for you?
WANG BING: The most important event from the first 30 years of Communist rule in China is the Cultural Revolution, which lasted for ten years. The mass purge of non-Communist intellectuals began immediately upon the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It was the most significant Party-led initiative prior to the Cultural Revolution. If I were to divide the first three decades of Communist rule into three stages, the first would be the Land Reform Movement in 1949, amid the Civil War. Then came the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. Finally, there was the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966. The Anti-Rightist Campaign is sandwiched between the two other major events, and I know those who participated in the campaign very well. I wanted to unveil all of China’s history by zeroing in on one major historical event. We say “Anti-Rightist Campaign” in China, but what we call “the right” in China does not conform to the Western left-right paradigm, and sometimes it’s even contradictory, so please keep that in mind.
For every project I work on, perhaps by fate, I encounter new people and get to know them deeply. I stumbled upon Jiabiangou’s history and its survivors by pure chance, and decided that it was the right time to tell their stories in relation to the Anti-Rightist Campaign in a film. In some ways, what happened in Jiabiangou is representative of social and political life in China between 1949 and 1979. In depicting the early history of the Communist rule, I hoped to compare history and cinema, and strike a balance between cinema and the real. The stories from Jiabiangou allowed me to do just that. But Dead Souls is still incomplete. At the time, the budget would allow for a nine-hour film [the film’s running time is eight hours and fifteen minutes]. So, I have only completed about one third, and I plan on making two more films with additional funding in the future.
JUNG: Part of Dead Souls was shot prior to Fengming, a Chinese Memoir, the first film of yours to deal with Jiabiangou. Is there a reason you decided to present He Feming’s testimony in that standalone film?
WANG: There is no particular reason. I initially wanted to make a narrative film about Jiabiangou, and that is how the project began. However, after my first conversation with a survivor, I realized I needed to shoot more material. In the beginning, I gathered material without having a fully formed idea about what this Jiabiangou film should be. I came across He Fengming in the early stages of production, so I ended up making a standalone film instead of incorporating her into Dead Souls. Because I was still an emerging director back then, and due to other needs, I had to make Chinese Memoir first for a gallery exhibit. The film did not start with careful planning of how to structure the Jiabiangou project as a whole, or from a predetermined temporal relationship between the two pieces. Since Chinese Memoir already exists and He’s time at Jiabiangou was very brief, she is not part of Dead Souls.
Fengming, a Chinese Memoir (Wang Bing, 2007).
JUNG: I had a chance to converse with some critics and film theorists outside of China about your work. When Night and Fog in Zona, my documentary about you, traveled to festivals abroad, critics and scholars from Europe and the United States asked many questions about you. I noticed that they are only interested in your methodology and pretty clueless about the contexts within which your subjects exist and the history of the People’s Republic of China at large. Of course, form is important, but I believe that not grappling with the contents of your films, their greater contexts, and the history of these contexts is a grave mistake. I get the impression that coming face to face with the PRC’s history and, more precisely, documenting the survivors of this history is your life’s mission. What does your work mean to you?
WANG: As the 21st century commenced, China came to be at the center of global attention. The international community hoped to see reform in China and wanted to work with this emerging country. In response, China did open up, and it prompted many to put the past behind them and look forward to a new and different China. Perhaps it is for that reason that many critics [outside of China] remain uninterested in the Chinese history depicted in my work. Even back then, when I was working on my early films, I could sense that international relations were headed in that direction, but I was indifferent to all that. I do welcome the changing trajectory of history. However, it takes a long time to produce art. In that process, we need to reflect on ourselves through a specific historical period or a particular artwork. I find it better to not dwell so deeply on things happening concurrently while I make a film. Yet, there remained a very important issue: China’s post-1978 reform and opening up. Nothing really changed about the state’s political structure, and culturally, intellectuals throughout the ’80s and ’90s barely tried to affect change. Much more should have been done to elucidate historical facts about the previous 30 years. The intellectuals who gathered under the banners of “we look ahead” and “we worry about the future” swept the past under the rug and stopped grappling with it. All they cared to discuss was what to take from, and how to absorb, Western culture.
Such is the major trend in the cultural ideology of post-1978 China. All the national issues of the twentieth century were buried deep in the sand and forgotten. Too much time passed, and digging up the past and looking at it head-on became basically unviable. For reasons of political ideology, the Chinese state chose not to reflect on the history of its twentieth century, and the same holds true for Chinese intellectuals. This is not just my personal opinion; objectively speaking, there have been very few works of art that critically examine the events of the past century. A countless number of major world-historical events took place, yet no one critiqued this history or tried to right the wrongs. Major works that dare to grapple with and soberly reflect on this history are few and far between—just sporadically here and there. I do not mean this as criticism necessarily, but I can only think of a handful of works that do this. A small number of literary works from my generation reflect on this history, but there was virtually nothing of that sort before then. I do not enjoy talking about other people, but in literature and other mediums, it is rare to come across a work that faces history honestly and reflects on itself accordingly.
Yang Jisheng, a contemporary of mine, wrote a hefty book called Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (墓碑 - 中國六十年代大饑荒紀實), which contains official statistics, collected and classified by the Chinese state, concerning the tens of millions of people who died during the Famine. But the book is not so direct in how it tackles the subject; instead, it leaves room for interpretation. While I greatly admire Yang’s work, I maintain that the book fails to confront the Famine and presents this history in a way that would not ruffle anyone’s feathers. I am not trying to attack certain writers or particular books. I respect him and hold him in high regard, but I also recognize that Chinese intellectuals’ uneasy relation to politics manifests itself in his methodology. That said, he is among the braver and more responsible of the Chinese intelligentsia.
I bring this up not because I think I am better than these people, but to illustrate this particular point. When you survey how the Chinese intelligentsia as a whole responds to a certain historical event, you notice that their response ends up determining how that history is chronicled. It may not be recorded in the form of a history book; intellectuals incorporate historical accounts of certain figures into their novels or other creative projects. What more could conscientious writers have done in that political climate?
Ever since I became aware of the stories from Jiabiangou, I have tried to put together a film guided solely by my own principles as a documentarian. I bracketed off my immediate circumstances and the ever-changing tides of political history as much as I could. I was concerned with three things: the film itself, the people I wanted to document, and the history I tried to confront. What mattered the most to me in this process was whether or not I could exercise creative freedom in completing my work. Since 2017, I have had access to a studio space in Paris where I can exercise a great degree of creative freedom. It has brought out the best in me. But of course, a limited budget meant a cramped editing schedule, and I completed postproduction in five months.
’Til Madness Do Us Part (Wang Bing, 2013).
JUNG: Your filmography can be divided in two. On the one hand, you have made films about survivors of history. On the other hand, you have also made films about people who exist on the peripheries of history. For instance, Three Sisters follows three young girls living on a mountain that is 3,200 meters above sea level, completely cut off from the outside world. Man with No Name [2010] observes a nameless man subsisting in a cave. For Mrs. Fang [2017,] you recorded the final days of a terminally ill woman, Fang Xiuying, in Maihui village in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province. ’Til Madness Do Us Part documents inpatients at a mental institution located in Zhaotong, Yunnan Province. My question has to do with these latter films. How is your interest in the people who have been pushed to the margins of history both different from and similar to your interest in the survivors of historical tragedies? How do the two strands of your oeuvre relate to one another?
WANG: I have made numerous political statements about China in the twentieth century. China was a deeply political place and people’s lives were shaped by the state’s political ideology. Virtually every aspect of social life was political. Not everyone suffered from political persecution, but many did. Everyone has a role to play. Some are lucky and others are not so lucky. This is true of history and of our present reality. Marginalized people now make up the overwhelming majority of the population. Fang Xiuyung, the three sisters, and the people you encounter in ’Til Madness Do Us Part are just a few examples of the majority. The reason I tell their stories is that my status as a filmmaker was neither given to me by society nor assigned to me by the totalitarian system. My artistic practice is solely defined by the nature of my work, and it is therefore personal. For this reason, I have no obligations to fulfill certain social roles or to make films to appease the collective. In the past, cinema served either political or commercial purposes in China. It naturally followed that most films presented narratives and characters that had the potential to appeal to as many people as possible. But I am not part of the film industry. I am not a member of a political film collective nor committed to a particular ideology. My films are not commercial. So, I am free from such [political and commercial] responsibilities and duties. My work belongs only to me, and I point my camera at subjects that I would like to document or find interesting. If there is no such subject, I do not pick up my camera. In other words, my films are extremely personal. A person’s life has to be recorded for it to attain meaning in history. In the olden days, only those who held power left behind written records. Hardly anyone in our historical record is just an ordinary citizen. More often than not, they were members of the political class or notable collectives. Meanwhile, common people came and went without a trace, much like the grass that sprouts in the spring and withers in the fall. Such is history. So, the subject I would like to personally record must pique my interest. Although they may not be so interesting to anyone else, these are people I brush shoulders with. I document their stories because we met each other during our shared time in this world. Since I chose to be a filmmaker, my work is to film them and add their way of life to the history of cinema.
JUNG: This may be a strange question, but I noticed a shift in how you open your films over the years. The opening shot of your first film, Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, shows snow-covered Shenyang, a city we will observe for the remainder of the film. Your second film, Chinese Memoir, opens with a trip to He’s house. I’m not sure when, but your films later began to introduce their subjects without explanation. Three Sisters skips the journey to meet the sisters on the mountain and instead begins inside their house. ’Til Madness Do Us Part opens with a conversation between an inpatient who appears to be incarcerated and his family inside a room in the mental institution that looks more like a prison cell. These opening shots give the impression that we are watching the middle part of a film. You make the audience face your subjects completely unprepared. For this reason, it feels like there has been a shift in how your films relate to their subjects. Does this shift reflect a change in your own methodology?
WANG: These days, I like to cut to the chase and begin my stories more directly. My two forthcoming films this year [Man in Black and Youth (Spring) (both 2023)] dive straight into their stories without any establishing shots, getting on with the story with no detour. The narrative itself is also very direct. There is no special reason for the change, but I suspect it might be influenced by French cinema. For nearly two decades, I have worked and grown as an artist under the French system, exposing me to the way a French crew works and to French film criticism. Even though my editors and DPs may not have changed my style dramatically, I believe that, unbeknownst to myself, I absorbed what was in my environment, which changed how I edit and shoot. I think the change is still ongoing.
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2002).
JUNG: I visited your house in Beijing in 2012 and saw a DVD of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah [1985] sitting on your desk. The train shot seen early on in West of the Tracks reminds me of a similar shot from Shoah. Your approach to interviewing He Fengming in Chinese Memoir is reminiscent of the absence of archival footage in Shoah, which instead only presents testimonies. But whereas Lanzmann directs his subjects and intervenes in what is unfolding before the camera, you keep your distance. What did you learn from Shoah? What kind of affinity do you feel toward it, and to which aspects of Lanzmann’s methodology are you resistant?
WANG: I think it comes down to differences in our points of view. To tell you the truth, Lanzmann’s works didn’t influence my practice all that much. I only came to see Shoah after making Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks. The single greatest inspiration for my work is Andrei Tarkovsky, followed by either Michelangelo Antonioni or Pier Paolo Pasolini. I also like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, but we have very different sensibilities. Actually, the filmmaker who influenced my formal strategy for Fengming, a Chinese Memoir was Jean Eustache, who made The Mother and the Whore [1973]. Later on, I familiarized myself with Lanzmann’s films, and I got to meet him in his studio once. At the time, I was wrestling with the question of how to approach the history of the Communist International. In the twentieth century, China existed in the context of the Communist International, and so did Lanzmann. In his studio, director to director, we discussed the history of the Communist International and the role of intellectuals in this history. He gave me a special-edition DVD of Shoah as a gift, but unfortunately, I lost it at the Beijing Capital International Airport.
I admire Lanzmann, but I find his approach to filmmaking too constraining for my liking. My own practice tends to be more easygoing and spontaneous. As for his way of thinking, I believe that of all filmmakers, he is the one who elevated documentary as a form and its vocabulary to the highest possible level. I am not sure if we will ever encounter a greater filmmaker in this tradition. If one wishes to adopt his approach, well… This is something I need to take into consideration as well. Personally, I like films that are on the more spontaneous and less austere side, and the same goes for narratives. So I try to carve out my own little corner in the world of cinema and seek cinematic possibilities that suit me. This is true of any creative endeavor. Just as every artist develops their own unique style, I try to find my own filmmaking language and style that does not just replicate great directors like Lanzmann. Another difference between me and Lanzmann has to do with the fact that the austere quality of his work comes from his relationship to the twentieth century and his commitment to justice. In the West, I imagine, being among the victors of the Second World War makes you face the history of past atrocities and genocides with a sobering sense of justice. It makes sense that Lanzmann himself takes on the role of a relentless interrogator in his films. His style, then, is an extension of the historical reality he found himself in and the responsibilities he had to his society. But I am different from him. I tackle the issues of a collective strictly from the vantage point of an individual in China. This means that my relationships with those who participate in my projects are of a personal nature, and these personal relationships go on to reveal inter-collective issues. As you can see, Lanzmann and I have very different roles as directors, and the way I intervene in my documentaries is not as determined as the way he does.
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, 2002).
JUNG: In one interview, in a lengthy footnote, you mention that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich made a lasting impression on you. I have also read the novella. It is set in the Soviet Gulag during the Stalinist period. I imagine what caught your attention was how two different socialist states, the Soviet Union and China, went through nearly identical histories. Of course, your interpretation is probably very different from mine since I live in a capitalist state. I would like to ask how the novella shaped your perspective on approaching the history of the Great Leap Forward and the Jiabiangou Labor Camps.
WANG: Although I had long been aware of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and had the book with me, I did not read it during the shooting of Dead Souls. The Jiabiangou-related material was mostly shot by 2008, but I did not start editing right away. I spent countless hours trying to figure what kind of film I should make, but I couldn’t decide. In the meantime, I made Chinese Memoir, Three Sisters, and ’Til Madness Do Us Part. Only then did I begin to wrestle with Dead Souls again. In 2014, I finally gave The Gulag Archipelago a read as concerns about the project weighed heavily on me. I forget the exact words, but after reading a few lines of the preface, everything came into focus—what to do, what not to do, and how to do it. Thanks to The Gulag Archipelago, truly a masterpiece, I came to understand my own thought processes, and I realized what I had to do.2
China and Russia share a foundational communist ideology. China’s governing and administrative structures are modeled on Russia’s. The same is true of the state’s overall policy decisions. For centuries, China was not a modern nation-state, and during the Qing Dynasty, China was a feudal state under an emperor’s rule. During the Kuomintang period, the country was not unified and was practically a military state—so again, not a modern state. Then the Communist Party seized power in 1949 and imitated the Soviets’ system of governance, and all elements of the state apparatus soon followed suit. Hence, their policy trends resemble each other’s, and numerous Chinese public officials either studied or worked in Russia. Not to mention the similarities between their respective planned economies and administrative management models.
Soviet paintings and literature were hugely influential in the development of China’s cultural ideology. Ever since the Party chose Lu Xun as the flagbearer of its cultural ideology in 1930, any form of cultural activity that deviates from Lu’s sensibility has been pushed to the sidelines. Lu Xun was essentially synonymous with the politicized cultural ecology in China. Lu was neither a communist nor a Party member, but his name paved the way for China’s modern culture.
This is what set me on a journey to discover a new artistic language of my own. I spent a decade trying to escape from old cultural traditions and wanted to search for something new and independent—I’m not sure if I should call it a mood or psychology, but in any case, a new cultural form. I did not want to conform to the preexisting culture or the mainstream. I have been working since the first decade of this century, and my work has been less about creative endeavors as an attempt to distance myself from the past and from the mainstream.
Dead Souls (Wang Bing, 2018).
JUNG: Two moments from Dead Souls in particular moved me very deeply. I got a lump in my throat looking at the image of a field in Jiabiangou that you photographed. The wind is so fierce that the image is all shaky, and the camera barely stays upright in the field. And then there is the ending. The sun has begun to set, and evening shadows are emerging. You roam around Mingshui field, where we see human skulls everywhere, in a hurry, as if you are trying to shoot as much as you can in that limited amount of time. We can even hear your heavy breathing. Watching these two moments, I came to the conclusion that for you a location is a condition and a circumstance you must accept as is, and furthermore, a central question in your methodology. In your filmography, I think Ta’ang [2016] is the film in which you take this question to its extreme. What significance does a location have in your filmmaking practice?
WANG: When I prepare for a project, I think in advance about how external environments would be rendered in images. How I previsualize differs from project to project, but I visit the location before shooting and think ahead to several things, including people I’ll film and the shot designs. It becomes necessary during preproduction and the shoot to map out how to put these things together. But in the case of Ta’ang, I just happened to be in Yunnan at the same time as the events recorded in the film, so I began shooting without an adequate amount of preparation. My team and I had always wanted to shoot something in the south of Yunnan, so we frequently traveled there. Perhaps as a result, I was prepared on a subconscious level. That’s how Ta’ang came about.
Ta’ang (Wang Bing, 2016).
JUNG: This may be a sensitive subject, but I will summon my courage and ask because I believe in our friendship. While I was visiting you on location in Qiaojia County to make Night and Fog in Zona, we went to a market one day. There, you bought children’s book bags, sneakers, notebooks, and colored pencils. You told me that you had promised the three sisters that you would buy them these items the next time you went to a market. Without a doubt, I was touched by your kindness. Then I began to wonder. At that point, you were not yet done with Three Sisters, and you had told me that you would continue to film the girls. Your gifts run into the issues of a documentarian’s intervention and intrusion into the integrity of recorded events. I thought that the gifts could potentially damage your film. I also thought this question might be too thorny, so I kept putting it off. Since then, I have been mulling it over, but to no avail. Now I have the courage to ask.
WANG: I am well aware of the issues you raise. To answer your question, even in documentaries, you cannot physically separate the person behind the camera from the person being recorded. Even as we consider the so-called “intervention” question, there is really no way to completely seal off interpersonal dynamics and mutual influences.
Regardless of the circumstances in which I point my camera at someone, the fact remains that an encounter has taken place. It does not matter how much I objectify the person. I still run into the material reality in which we coinhabit the same space and time. The boundaries of our shared space are right there on location. Our relationship has already formed in the cosmos, so severing that tie through some contrived logic would bear no cultural significance.
What’s so interesting about documentaries is that complete strangers come together and share the same time and experience through filmmaking. That shared time becomes a film, and that is the role of cinema. This is an indisputable fact, and the issue of interference ceases to exist.
Every filmmaker has a distinct temperament. A working method, or a way of recording a documentary film, reflects the characteristics of its maker. Depending on their temperament, some actively intervene while others stand back. Some inject themselves into the lives of those being documented. This is an individual choice and action. Individual filmmakers should decide how they work, and it would be inappropriate to enforce absolute moral standards on films. One perplexing problem with cinema is that it can so easily become a powerful tool of propaganda. Because a film can pursue profits and be exploited as effective propaganda, once a film is made, we are forced to grapple with its purpose. This raises a lot of questions for documentarians like me, as cinema can easily be co-opted. In that context, the role of a film, and the director’s role in it, can become highly complicated. The social environment and the industry’s ecosystem can’t be neatly defined. It is a spectrum, and it is a question of finding the balance. If you reject commerciality, distribution becomes impossible. The same holds true if you exclude any elements from your film that can serve political interests. Since art circulates via the same network that also disseminates political messaging and commercial goods, you will not get very far if you subscribe to absolute purity.
I try my best to exert control over these things as much as circumstances allow. A relationship emerges between me and my subject over the course of a shoot, but we are neither friends nor strangers. I am merely observing their life in our shared space and time. I do not think donating food or clothes amounts to providing substantial material help. It’s not so much a mutually beneficial transaction as something that naturally arises in any interpersonal relationship. So I do not believe I compromised the film’s ethical commitment and transgressed beyond the boundaries of a relationship permitted between a documentarian and a subject.
Three Sisters (Wang Bing, 2012).
JUNG: Thank you so much for answering my question. I’ve been reading what other critics have written about your work, and many argue that your films are made in a way that “the labor of the filmmaker is visible.” I do not think that’s quite right. Having seen your films and then having observed you at work, I get the impression that your films are extensions of your physical body. The emphasis is on the word “extension” here. I believe you invented a way of filmmaking that allows the viewer to experience your sensory experiences. Although you never appear on screen, you do not shy away from having your shadow in the frame. For instance, when you climbed the mountain with the three sisters, the microphone picked up the sound of your heavy breathing, and you did not take it out in post. Your decision reinforced my conviction. How would you define your presence in your films?
WANG: I’ll say “in the same place, at the same time.” That gets pretty close to it. I do not care if you can hear my breathing on the soundtrack. What is important is that I was there, and that the subject, the camera, and I lived the same life. I tend to shoot over a very long period of time, and I do a minimal amount of prep work. My subjects and I spend a lot of time together, and everything is spontaneous. We are not there to serve each other’s interests—simply coexisting independently of each other in the same space.
JUNG: I wish you good health. [Laughs.]
WANG: Thank you.
JUNG: It has already been ten years since I shadowed you in Yunnan to make Night and Fog in Zona. That was a time full of joy and learning for me. I still think about those scenes and landscapes from time to time. If an opportunity presents itself, I would like to shadow you again at work, filming the people of China.
WANG: Please do. I will complete two films this year. One was shot in Paris [Man in Black] and the other one, which was shot in China [Youth (Spring)], will be completed soon.
JUNG: I can’t wait to see the remaining two installments of Dead Souls.
WANG: You will. But I will take my time. I do not want to rush my producer. Postproduction costs in France are pretty hefty, so things will be slow. It’s not just about the money, though. I will first have to finish my current project before I can resume working on Dead Souls.
JUNG: I will wait.
On the morning of October 12, 2022, in Busan. Weather: Sunny.
- Translator’s note: In “The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” from Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao outlines different kinds of social contradiction in China and ways of resolving them. He writes, “Those with a Rightist way of thinking make no distinction between the enemy and us and take the enemy for our own people. They regard as friends the very persons whom the broad masses regard as enemies.” ↩
- I could not ask which lines from the preface in particular because we didn’t have the book at hand. Fortunately, though, the preface is short, so I recommend reading it. ↩