Films byTexts by Wang Bing
Manifesto NL FR EN ZH
21.12.2022

中国电影在30 年前出现了独立电影,慢慢的独立电影变成中国年轻导演电影创作的主要途径,大量独立电影作品也改变了中国电影整体的创作生态,使中国原先单一国家体制内电影制作限制有所改变,这些好的发展也曾经给很多电影人非常大的信心,对未来中国电影报着很大希望。但是,这几年中国政治的变化和疫情的影响,使中国独立电影基本上创作和拍摄全面终止,只有很少的导演还在坚持独立电影创作。

Manifesto NL FR EN ZH
21.12.2022
Wang Bing 2022
Translated by

After independent films first appeared on the Chinese cinematic landscape three decades ago, they gradually became the method of choice among young Chinese filmmakers. The large number of Chinese independent films also transformed the broader creative ecosystem by bending the constraints of China’s once-monolithic state-controlled film system. These positive developments gave many filmmakers great optimism and confidence in the future of Chinese film. In recent years, however, domestic political changes and the effects of the pandemic have essentially put a halt to the development and production of independent films in China. There are very few directors left who continue to create independent films.

Manifesto NL FR EN ZH
21.12.2022
Wang Bing 2022
Vertaald door

Drie decennia geleden verscheen de onafhankelijke film voor het eerst in het Chinese filmlandschap, om daarna geleidelijk aan de creatieve methode bij uitstek te worden van jonge Chinese filmmakers. Het grote aantal onafhankelijke films transformeerde de ruimere creatieve context door de beperkingen van het zo specifieke, door de staat gecontroleerde Chinese filmsysteem naar hun hand te zetten. Door deze positieve ontwikkelingen keken veel filmmakers met optimisme en vertrouwen naar de toekomst van de Chinese film. Binnenlandse politieke veranderingen en de gevolgen van de pandemie hebben de ontwikkeling en productie van onafhankelijke films in China de voorbije jaren echter vrijwel tot stilstand gebracht, zodat vandaag nog slechts een handvol filmmakers doorgaat met het maken van onafhankelijke films.

Manifesto NL FR EN ZH
21.12.2022

Le cinéma indépendant a fait son apparition en Chine il y a 30 ans et s’est progressivement imposé comme la voie principale des jeunes cinéastes pour réaliser des films. Beaucoup de ces œuvres cinématographiques indépendantes ont transformé l’environnement créatif général du cinéma en Chine et ont fait évoluer les contraintes de production au sein de ce système si particulier qu’est le cinéma officiel chinois. Ces développements positifs ont donné confiance à de nombreux cinéastes et ont porté de grands espoirs pour l’avenir du cinéma chinois. Pourtant, l’évolution politique de la Chine et l’impact de l’épidémie de Covid de ces dernières années ont pratiquement mis à l’arrêt la création et le tournage de films indépendants chinois, si bien que seule une poignée de réalisateurs persévèrent encore dans cette voie aujourd’hui.

Article EN
14.12.2022

Wang Bing explores how people’s ideals and dreams relate to reality, how cinema makes it possible to affectively rethink one’s subjective relationship to society. Wang belongs to a generation of Chinese filmmakers who since the 1990s, but exponentially since the turn of the century thanks to the introduction of lightweight affordable DV cameras, document society from the bottom up, independently, (mostly) outside of the state-sanctioned film industry.

Conversation EN
1.12.2021

In 2018, Wang Bing stayed in Ghent as an “Artist in Focus” in the context of the Courtisane film festival. In the margins of the festival, students and former students of the KASK School of Arts Ghent invited Wang Bing to talk about filmmaking and to cook noodle soup with dumplings together. The director kindly agreed. The conversation that followed was shaped and guided by film fragments shown in between the questions. (...) The following text is an edited transcription of a part of this conversation and deals with filmmaking from the position of the filmmaker.

prisma NL
16.09.2020

De Amerikaanse kunstenaar Gordon Matta-Clark snijdt een gat door twee aangrenzende zeventiende-eeuwse panden die voor de sloop bestemd zijn. Filmmaker Wang Bing ontleedt urenlang de binnenkant van een fabriekscomplex dat zijn laatste lange adem uitblaast.

FILM
The Ditch
Wang Bing, 2010, 112’

During the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1961, Mao’s Anti-Rightist Movement resulted in the “re-education through labour” of middle-class intellectuals and government officials that were declared to be “rightist.” Some three thousand political prisoners were arrested and sent to the Jiabi

DOSSIER EN
29.05.2019

At the turn of this century, the Chinese documentary maker Wang Bing entered film history when he boarded a freight train with a small rented DV camera and started filming the industrial district of Tiexi in northeastern China. This Dossier aims to trace Wang Bing’s trajectory by way of a series of writings and interviews, published between 2009 and 2018, accompanying the ongoing ventures of a filmmaker who has taken on the invaluable task of weaving a map of this other China, to film the trials and tribulations of a land in flux.

Conversation NL EN
29.05.2019

“A mental hospital is not, as such, an original theme. The story told by ’Til Madness Do Us Part could just as well happen anywhere else. It is a common story. The fact remains that mental illness is of course an interesting subject, particularly in China. Somehow, mental illness frees mankind, as it liberates mankind from the yoke of the law. At the same time, it makes man more vulnerable... […] The life we see on the outside of an asylum is fundamentally not very different from the one we can see on the inside. What interested me was less the hospital than the patients and the life they were living... They don’t consider this place a mental hospital but the place in which they live. […]  It is their house. That’s where they live as if it is their home. Some of them even stay there for the rest of their lives. Very early on, I was struck by the impression that in a lot of ways there is more humanity on the inside of a hospital than on the outside.”

Conversation EN
29.05.2019
Didier Péron 2014
Translated by

“Yingying lives in hard circumstances. First, she was separated from her mother. Then, she was obliged to live several months without her father. And thereafter, she had to live without him and her two sisters. She has a difficult relation with the human community around her, her family and friends. But when she’s with the animals, you can feel her innocence, a certain human truth, very primal, very basic.”

Conversation EN
29.05.2019
Julien Gester 2012
Translated by

In He Fengming [Fengming: A Chinese Memoir] (2007) Wang Bing recorded in barely one take He Fengming’s startling testimony of the persecutions that she and her family endured throughout the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution in China. “I wanted to assure her the most ample freedom of speaking. The core of the film has been shot during one afternoon. Fengming was 76 years old, she’s a woman who entirely lives in the past, in her memory. In fact, it seemed correct to make an immobile film, a ‘talking heads’ film and I did not want to stage anything else. It’s about understanding her for who she is: a spectral woman locked up in the past, wandering about in an apartment that has been reduced to a tomb.”

Conversation EN
29.05.2019

Before the premiere at the 2018 Cannes filmfestival, Emmanuel Burdeau talked to Wang Bing about his colossal documentary work Dead Souls. “As it is often the case, though, the problem was the solution: I finally understood that it was this gap that would be the subject of Dead Souls. I finally realized that what interested me through the memory of the survivors was to be able to touch upon the reality of those who had died. But all this remains very theoretical... From a practical standpoint I still didn’t know how the reality of those who were dead was going to come forth from the testimonies of those who were, on the contrary, still alive and who, when they were interviewed, spoke mostly of just that: the fact that they had survived. ”

Conversation EN
29.05.2019

“There is no absolute freedom for any filmmaker. There will always be limitations on various levels, according to the particular conditions a director works in: “less money” causes the “less freedom” of “less money,” and “more money” causes the “less freedom” of “more money”. For certain filmmakers, having little money means having little freedom, for other filmmakers – like myself – having little money means having more freedom, because the low budget makes things simpler and more straightforward. So I would say that a director has first of all to find the suitable conditions to create, to do what he wants to do. A good director always manages to work around – and sometimes break through – these limitations, and achieve his aims.”

Article EN
29.05.2019

Everything, you know, is nothing. The patients in every psychiatric hospital in the world do not exist. Their identity is denied. They have no name. They are simply crazy. In Wang Bing’s cinema we meet two types of characters. Those who have no name, but who describe themselves through action, and those who have a name and act through words. Dumbed by medicines, the madmen of Wang Bing are deprived of the opportunity to tell their story. This is the main issue that the film tackles and solves.

Article EN
29.05.2019

But fire also burns in the face of Yingying, the dutiful, stoic eldest daughter who yearns to read and write and study, to discover something unattainable in this tiny, remote village. There is fire even in her dirty, white-hooded jacket with the words “Lovely Diary” on the back, a jacket she never takes off throughout the film. She never demands anything, and she barely speaks, yet she is one of the most compelling, most affecting figures in all of documentary cinema.

Article EN
29.05.2019

The exercise is new to me. To reread what I have written in another time. Over the past decade, I was occasionally prompted to speak on Wang Bing’s film West of the Tracks (2002), which I don’t just consider a great movie but a cinematographic event that changes the state of things we still call ‘cinema’. In Corps et cadre (Verdier, 2002), I regretted not being able to produce a true critique of this film fleuve (of nine hours). The thing was beyond me; it still is. I then resolved to a different tactical approach. To examine what remained of the film in my memory. A film which is that long, a whole which is that intricate, cut into four segments each lasting more than one hour, two hours, three hours, obviously presents a challenge to the memory of the spectator that I am.

Conversation EN
29.05.2019

“Behind her eyes I saw something – a light. And that light reminded me of a child’s eyes. I thought, “She’s there and we know that she’s there looking out from behind her eyes.” Eyes talk to us in these ways. When it dawned on me that a second chance to record her was unlikely, I realized that for the most part this would be the way to have her appear in the film. I thought it would probably be the only way to make people feel that she’s there, she’s alive, she’s still alive.”

Conversation NL EN
9.01.2019

Fictie is overal. De vraag is: waar situeren we het beginpunt van fictie? Welke schikking zorgt ervoor dat er iets gebeurt? In zekere zin kunnen we zeggen dat er sprake is van fictie zodra een soort narratief ons vertelt of laat zien dat er iets gebeurt. Daarom ben ik in mijn recente werk vooral geïnteresseerd in het verkennen van de grenzen van fictie, de grens tussen ‘er gebeurt niets’ en ‘er gebeurt iets’. 

FILM
Wang Bing, 2018, 495’

“Since I began researching the history of Jiabiangou State Farm in 2004, I have met and interviewed nearly one hundred survivors of Jiabiangou.

Article EN
5.12.2018
Wang Bing 2012
Translated by

“When making a documentary film about events that happened nearly sixty years ago, an oral history format is an easy choice, but I have deliberately chosen not to take this approach. Instead I hope to show, through the lives of the Jiabiangou survivors, how the present speaks to the past.” Wang Bing wrote this text in 2012 as a treatment for the movie Past in the Present (2018). Later, the name was changed into Dead Souls.

Article FR EN
18.04.2018

Vertical cinema, films that walk. Horizontal cinema, films that are recumbent. Between them is a time outside time, the same duration alien to the laws of work, of reason and of health. How, and until when, can a life be extended once it seems to have left itself behind? What virtual actions remain latent within what appears to be the most complete inaction? From indefatigable walking to the fatigue of the recumbent, the spectacular reversal of postures is also accompanied by a shared perseverance: Wang Bing’s gesture consists in disengaging from the core of exhaustion the ultimate fragments of the possible.

ARTICLE FR EN
18.04.2018

Cinéma vertical, films qui marchent. Cinéma horizontal, films qui gisent. Des uns aux autres s’ouvrent le même temps, la même durée étrangère aux lois du travail, de la raison et de la santé. Comment, et jusqu’à quand, une vie peut-elle se prolonger, à partir du moment où elle semble comme sortie d’elle-même ? De quelles virtualités d’action l’inaction a priori la plus complète est encore grosse ? De l’infatigable marche à la fatigue des gisants, s’il y a un spectaculaire bouleversement des postures, se développe aussi une commune persévérance : le geste de Wang Bing dégage d’ultimes fragments de possible du cœur de l’épuisement.

Article NL
28.03.2018

In het midden van de film gebeurt er iets geniaals, waardoor we uit Fengmings verhaal naar het heden worden gesleurd. Op een bepaald moment onderbreekt Wang haar om te vragen of het licht eventueel aan zou mogen. Het gesprek begon in de vooravond en zonder dat we het als kijker echt beseffen, is Fengming ondertussen volledig in het duister gehuld. Haar ‘heden’ is verdwenen.

 
ARTICLE NL
28.03.2018

Wang Bings werk echoot Johan van der Keukens gedachte dat cinema “alles kan zijn, maar niets IS, behalve een oog en een oor.” Dus in de eerste plaats wandelen, de ogen en oren openen met arme middelen, waarin Wang Bing zowel genereus aandacht geeft als streng aandacht eist. “Ik kijk en luister hier en nu: kijk en luister!”

note EN
27.03.2018

On the occasion of the Wang Bing focus program at the Courtisane festival and the subsequent program at CINEMATEK, Sabzian, Courtisane and CINEMATEK compiled, edited and published this modest publication on Wang Bing. This publication aims to trace Wang Bing’s trajectory by way of a series of writings and interviews that were published between 2009 and 2017.

Article EN
21.03.2018

Wang Bing’s film is at once epic and intimate – epic because of the sheer scale of the constructions, and the long, straight railroad tracking shots Wang employs to render its geography; intimate because of its focus on the daily life of the last workers and the soon-to-be displaced. Wang’s film is not journalistic in that it does not show us, for example, the bureaucrats who made the various life-altering decisions, and it doesn’t show the rest of Shenyang – the bourgeois neighborhoods, shops, hotels, highways.

FILM
Bitter Money
Wang Bing, 2016, 152’

Film Comment: What’s your next move?

Wang Bing: Traveling, shooting, editing, more traveling, more shooting, more editing. [...]

FILM
Wang Bing, 2017, 86’

“Fang Xiuying is the mother of a good friend of mine. I was going to make a documentary about her in 2015, but it was postponed because I was too busy at the time. In 2016, the friend called to tell me that her mother’s illness had grown severe, and she might not live very long.

FILM
Fengming: A Chinese Memoir
Wang Bing, 2007, 186’

“The American poet Muriel Rukeyser asked, ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?’; her answer: ‘The world would split open.’ The tragic extremes of Fengming’s biography seem to demand such a cosmic response, or at least some physical manifestation or visual correlative ons

FILM
Three Sisters
Wang Bing, 2012, 153’

New Left Review: How did you meet the three little sisters there? As your film shows, they are living mainly by themselves, without parents to take care of them.

FILM
West of the Tracks
Wang Bing, 2002, 551’

West of the Tracks details the slow decline of Shenyang’s industrial Tiexi district, an area that was once a vibrant example of China’s socialist economy. Part I: Rust focuses on the daily lives and work routines of Chinese workers in three different financially troubled state-owned

FILM
Wang Bing, 2016, 148’

“Cinema can’t get more iconic than this, as the Ta’ang, made itinerant by war, create shelter with whatever they can find, which usually means sticks and stones. Wang watches as a group tries to build a frame for a tarpaulin roof with bamboo poles scavenged from what grows along the road.

Conversation NL EN
20.09.2017

“Fiction is everywhere. The question is: where do we situate the starting point of fiction? What kind of arrangement makes something happen? In a way, we can say there is fiction whenever there is some kind of narrative that tells, or shows, us that something is happening. That’s why, in my recent work, I have mostly been interested in exploring the edges of fiction, the edge between nothing happens and something happens.”

Conversation NL EN
9.11.2014

“Een psychiatrisch ziekenhuis is, op zich, geen origineel thema. Het verhaal van Feng ai [’Til Madness Do Us Part] had zich zeker ook elders kunnen afspelen. Het is een alledaags verhaal. Toch is geestesziekte natuurlijk een interessant onderwerp, met name in China. Geestesziekte bevrijdt de mens, in zekere zin, want ze bevrijdt hem van het juk van de wet. Tegelijkertijd maakt ze hem kwetsbaarder … [...] Het leven dat men buiten een inrichting waarneemt is in wezen niet zo verschillend van het leven dat men binnen kan waarnemen. Wat me interesseerde was minder het ziekenhuis dan de patiënten en het leven dat ze er leidden. Zij beschouwen die plek niet als een ziekenhuis maar als een plaats waar ze leven. [...] Het is hun huis. Ze leven er alsof ze thuis zijn, sommigen blijven er zelfs tot hun dood. Ik was al vroeg getroffen door de indruk dat in veel opzichten er meer menselijkheid binnen dan buiten het ziekenhuis was.”

Conversation EN
22.10.2014

“I don’t usually worry about whether the audience will accept the way my film is designed. You are the filmmaker; it is your job to make a convincing work. Instead of worrying about the audience, you should search for ways to make your film a good one. To me, it means to look for, or create, a potentially better cinema that fits your needs in making this particular work. At the same time, your film must be capable of accommodating the living reality of its subject. [...] The technique and style you choose for a film should be appropriate to your subject matter. What is really important is to establish a relation between the subject of your film and your audience. It is the camera that creates this connection.”