This volume offers an organic discussion of Wang Bing's filmmaking across China's marginal spaces and against the backdrop of the state-sanctioned 'China Dream'. Wang's work has contemporary China as its focus and testifies to the country's contradictions, not dissimilar to those of contemporary societies dealing with issues of inequality, labour, and migration.
Without being an activist, Wang Bing gives voice to the subaltern. His internationally awarded documentaries are recognized as world masterpieces. His unique aesthetics bears references to film masters, therefore this investigation goes beyond the divide between Western and non-Western film traditions.
Each chapter takes a different articulation of space (spaces of labour, spaces of history, spaces of memory) as its entry point bringing together film and documentary studies, Chinese studies, and studies in globalization issues. This volume benefits from the author's extensive conversation with Wang Bing and from insider's observations of film production and the film festival circuit.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Editorial Note
- Foreword by Alberto Barbera
- Introduction
- The relevance of Wang Bing’s filmmaking
- Themes, form, and narrative structure: A linked approach to Wang Bing’s filmmaking
- Wang Bing à la Wong Kar-wai
- The book’s genesis and structure
- 1. Wang Bing’s Cinematic Journey: A Counter-Narrative of the China Dream
- The centrality of space in Wang Bing’s narrativized reality
- Chinese marginal spaces and uneven development
- Wang Bing’s counter-journey of the China Dream
- Spaces in Wang Bing’s oeuvre: An overview of the films and the issues at stake
- 2. History in the Making: The Debut Epic Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks
- The debut epic Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks and its context
- Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks as a contemporary cinematic reportage
- Filming ‘history in the making’ and the legacy of the Lumière films
- Towards an epic of labour: From Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven to Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks
- 3. Spaces of Labour: Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Bitter Money
- Filming spaces of labour and cinema as labour
- The transition from the industrial space of the Tiexi district to rural and marginal spaces
- Three Sisters: An epic of survival reminiscent of John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath
- Duration in Wang Bing’s cinema: The case of Three Sisters and Alone
- No Way Out: From Three Sisters to ’Til Madness Do Us Part
- ’Til Madness Do Us Part: The camera work between ‘madness’ and ‘love’
- Reaching the new centres of labour: From Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks to Bitter Money
- Earning money in hardship: Bitter Money
- 4. Spaces of History and Memory: The Works on the Anti-Rightist Campaign
- PART I – A Space Too Much: The Ditch
- The genesis of The Ditch (2003–2010)
- The Ditch: Carving out a space for documenting the past
- Historical spectacles: Wang Bing’s The Ditch and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò
- Ghosts of the past: Wang Bing’s The Ditch and Brutality Factory and Pedro Costa’s Colossal Youth
- PART II: Spaces of Memory: Dead Souls
- From Fengming, A Chinese Memoir to Dead Souls
- The genesis of Dead Souls
- Spaces for survival: Archiving audiovisual witnesses
- The act of filming and spaces of death
- Wang Bing’s Dead Souls and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
- 5. Collective Spaces – Individual Narratives
- Man With No Name: Individual spaces of self-isolation
- Father and Sons: Individual spaces and deteriorating family structures
- Mi Niang and Ta’ang: Spaces of refuge and escape
- Mrs Fang: Individual spaces of death
- Beauty Lives in Freedom: Individual spaces of exile
- 6. Concluding Remarks: Spaces of Exhibition and Spaces of Human Practice
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
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