Critics reviews

“Dead Souls” is a film of resistance that, in discussing the past, also confronts the present-day activities of the Chinese government. It’s as if “Shoah” had filmed Holocaust survivors exclusively in Germany—and as if the one-party Nazi regime that had sent them to concentration camps were still in power.

Some will find this approach artless, but it has a certain hypnotic quality. These subjects speak for 30 or 40 minutes at a time, and our eyes may catch little details and patterns: the way an individual grabs his knee, or scratches his face.

A monumental achievement. In over eight hours, shot over the course of more than ten years, Dead Souls, too, is an intimate portrait, or rather a collection of intimate portraits that go under the skin, albeit in a different way than Mrs Fang. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to compare the film to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. On the contrary, one could go as far as arguing that Dead Souls was the Shoah of the 21st century.

There are not many films that compare with the moral clarity and humanistic importance of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, but Dead Souls is one such film.

It’s a national chapter that remains largely undocumented—and with frequently skewed facts when acknowledged officially—so Wang’s decision to produce and assemble a collection of first-person accounts acts as an essential intervention, a people’s history from the ground up.

Whatever else can be said against its name, the 71st edition of Cannes was still a festival that, for its first full day of films, opened with jaw-dropping artistic ambition.

As sessions accumulate—some go on for 10 to 15 minutes, others for over 30—the lengthening film becomes essentially so, confirming and reconfirming the factuality of what’s being revealed. Dead Souls doesn’t tell a story, it gathers and presents evidence through a series of grimly harmonized personal narratives, inviting the viewer to not simply follow along but receive, reckon, and synthesize.

The sense that this history is too vast, is impossible to contain within a single film, is further suggested by the eight-and-a-bit-hours running time of Dead Souls. The longest film to ever be included in the Official Selection at Cannes, it screened in two parts, with an interval. And yet, as with much of Wang’s intimate and immersive oeuvre, the hours melt away.

Most of the men who appear in Dead Souls have since died and although they constitute only a miniscule fraction of all those persecuted during the Anti-Rightist Campaign, estimated to be between one and three million people, their voices unite in a resonant commiseration of the unspeakable injustices they collectively suffered.

The cinematic “effects,” if they can even be called such, are fully the products of circumstance: a momentary flight of the camera occasioned by a shot change; the furious vibrations of the frame, from the harsh winds of the Gobi desert; the flecks of dust and grime on the lens of a camera as it ascends a mountain, observing a funeral procession. . . . Bracing and monumental, Dead Souls is a film to reckon with.