Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks - Part 2: Remnants

A clock might tell us the time, but it also reminds us of the pressures, problems and economic trappings of its keeping. In this moment, Wang gives us so much: the young man is crying because his father is held prisoner . . . ; the silent observation also signals the futility of time in relation to incarceration without sentencing, as well as how it bears upon the unofficial incarceration of poverty.

Wang Bing uses the camera not only to record history, or rather history-in-the-making, but to write history. West of the Tracks is a cinematic document that, despite its running time, needs to be seen. It is not a beautiful film. You will look for beautiful frames in vain. It’s an ugly film, it is not aesthetically pleasing. But neither is the subject matter. What Wang Bing shows shouldn’t and cannot be made aesthetically pleasing. It’s a simple document that asks to be taken as it is; raw, brutal, ugly.

When Wang arrived on the international festival circuit in 2002 with Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, a nine-hour portrait of three declining state-owned factories in northeast China, his voracious documentation felt like the ideal redress to the scarcity of art cinema grappling with China’s modern-day predicament.