Filmmaker who revealed horrors of Mao’s Chinese gulags talks about exposing the hidden China
- Wang Bing says he doesn’t think about whether his films will foster social change, but is happy to ‘plant the seeds’ in Chinese audience members
- Making documentaries with a small crew has allowed him to stay under the radar of Chinese authorities in a way feature-film makers can’t
Capturing life as it happens, and recording life as it happened, could be the twin mantras of Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang Bing. Since his epic nine-hour 2002 documentary Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, which followed the lives of workers in the decaying state-run factories of China’s rust belt northeast, 51-year-old Wang has become one of China’s most important filmmakers, and earned an international reputation.
Wang, whose films are not screened in China because of their controversial political and social subject matter, was recently the subject of an all-encompassing retrospective in New York, hosted by three prestigious venues and institutions: The Metrograph, which screened a six-film selection of his work; the Film Society of Lincoln Centre, which screened West of the Tracks in three parts; and the Asia Society. The event was put together by the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation.
His camera probes far and wide, covering a range of issues, historical and social. He films his subjects over a long period of time, capturing the minutiae of their daily existence – their conversations, their family relationships, their mealtime habits, their daily work, and their friendships. What emerges is a substantial portrait of his subjects’ hopes, fears, problems, and, inevitably, their overarching relationship with the state.
Wang says he has no agenda, and simply films subjects that interest him – for instance, Three Sisters, which documents the lives of three children who have been left to fend for themselves since their parents left their village to find work, came about after a chance meeting. But he notes that the aim of his work is to record the bits of Chinese life that exist below the radar of most media, and to document historical events that have been expunged from the record by the government.
He is prolific, having made more than a dozen films since 2002. His most recent is Dead Souls, a documentary about the Jiabiangou labour camp in the Gobi Desert in Gansu province where 3,000 people were imprisoned at the start of Mao Zedong’s Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. Around 2,500 of the inmates starved to death in the famine of 1958 to 1960.