It is possibly the first time that I’m writing about a specific video installation here on this blog. I have read quite a bit during my PhD research in order to understand the uses of cinematic slowness in video, but I hadn’t come across an installation which combined not only everything that I had learned, but, most importantly, also what I had come to feel whenever I saw a slow film. Les Champs Libres in Rennes currently host an installation by South Korean artist HeeWon Lee, called Memory of Time and it is a truly intriguing example of the combination of cinematic slowness and aspects of memory.
The two main elements of HeeWon Lee’s work are contemplation and immersion. Both are achieved by the use of slow-motion, which is usually not an important factor in Slow Cinema. Slow films achieve their cinematic slowness by minimising movement, dialogue, music, the number of characters, etc The Korean artist uses slow-motion, which, combined with the darkness of the gallery space and the size of the screens, hypnotises the viewer, surrounds him/her but also has a disorienting nature to it. Infinity II is a vertical slo-mo piece. It shows a waterfall, I believed, and it was confirmed by the young woman outside the gallery who gave us a bit of extra information about what we had seen. Before I got to know that the waterfall was, in fact, Icelandic and keeps a painful secret, I was not even sure I was seeing a waterfall. The slowness as well as the fact that the video runs backwards creates for a fascinating experience, which allows your thoughts to flow freely.
Just recently, I published an article in which I tried to answer the question as to whether it was possible to escape time. I came to the conclusion that it was possible, depending on how you looked at it. Film and photography make it possible to alter time, and this is what HeeWon Lee does here. I briefly mentioned the secret the waterfall was hiding: it is the very waterfall, where the Icelandic population, forced by the Catholic Church, had to separate themselves from their icons. What the artist does here, is inverting the flow of time. She not only slows time down, but inverts it, allowing for a passage into the past. She turns back time and invites us to step into history.
There is something else going on in her two other pieces Infinity IV and Infinity V. One shows the full breadth of a waterfall, the other is a view from a cliffside, with a wave breaking at rocks slightly to our side. There is a beauty in there, which cannot be put into words. Again, it is immersive and despite the accompanying sound track (drone music?), there is a deafening silence somehow. Even though I was with people, I felt alone, in my own world, in my own thoughts and also, of course, alone with my imagination. I don’t know about the history behind this specific waterfall, but the beauty of Lee’s work is that it can also be considered universal. I couldn’t help think of the beauty of the very nature which we are destroying. I couldn’t help think of the loss we are encountering as a permanent, continuous condition in the here and now.
Lee’s work is not only about slow-motion as such, however, and it is this, which struck me most. I actually had my first VR experience thanks to her short film The Rain. It gave me a lot of food for thought in regards to the experience of history. Slow Cinema has, in many cases, often been about the immersion in a different culture, in a different time. In short, it is about the immersion in a different world. The lengthy works by Wang Bing, for example, are important to mention here. Of course, the immersion we get from one of Wang Bing’s films differs from that we get from a gallery piece and yet, both HeeWon Lee and Wang Bing channel (and limit) our attention in such a way that we become truly enveloped by the stories they tell.
The Rain is a short film about a painful and still unacknowledged part of South Korea. When Japan occupied the country during the Second World War, they turned many women into sex slaves. In The Rain, we hover over a river, slowly but steadily. This is the first point to notice about VR: you’re imprisoned in this world the director wants you to see. One is trapped in a world that isn’t one’s own, which already makes one become highly attentive and alert. While Lee takes us slowly around the peaceful landscape which retains its scars from the war, invisible and unknown to us in the present, we hear testimonies of those women who had been sex slaves to the Japanese. They’re powerful statements, brutal, gut-wrenching and stand in contrast to the peaceful landscape we traverse. The combination of contemplating a peaceful landscape, in which we’re fully immersed, and the testimonies of atrocities committed is particularly painful and difficult to handle. It reminded me of the early films of Lav Diaz in which you don’t see atrocities, but which are so hard-hitting, precisely because you don’t see violence and only hear about it. Lee walks a similar line here, but the use of VR creates a special experience that transmits history in a different and much more palpable way.
I have written a lot about the combination of slowness and testimony/a re-staging of history and the ways in which it can be effective in transmitting the nature of trauma to an audience. Because of the immersion it offers, Virtual Reality creates new possibilities for the exploration of painful histories, of silenced storied and brutal atrocities. Several slow-film directors make films in order to keep history alive. VR is, perhaps, an even better way forward. I have always wondered whether VR and slowness could work. But HeeWon Lee’s The Rain showed me that it is, in fact, a truly haunting combination.
It seems as though Chinese director Wang Bing gets better and better. Each film improves on the previous one, and with this I don’t mean that he improves on his aesthetics. Wang Bing stoically, stubbornly continues to pursue his traditional aesthetics, which means nothing more than that he simply films in whatever way necessary or possible. His films are not about beauty, about photographic framing, about characters walking towards a horizon and returning (see Béla Tarr). No, each of his films instead dives deeper into Wang Bing’s overall aim of telling the story of his country, of (re-)writing China’s official history. His films are like lengthy books à la Dostoievsky or Tolstoy, using the entire span of 900 pages or more to create a fundamental piece that outlives a single generation.
His previous film, Mrs Fang (2017), had already been an astonishing film, an important cinematic exploration of Alzheimer’s, of our slow death in the face of an impossible disease that doesn’t allow us to go gracefully. The director’s intimate portrait drew controversy. The ethics of filmmaking became an important part in our discussion as critics and cinephiles alike. What everyone was in agreement, however, was that Wang Bing had created something special, something that goes under the skin and that is not so easily shaken off.
Dead Souls, the director’s new film, is 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. It’s difficult to explain in words. Both films need to be seen in parallel in order to see the similarities. Yet, I don’t want to place too much emphasis on this, because I believe that Dead Souls needs to be, and deserves to be, seen in its own light.
Wang Bing has always used film in order to tell untold stories. His films, shot without official approval and without treading the official way of making films, i.e. submitting scripts for approval with a final censorship part at the end, fill in those blanks left by history books that merely tell the heroic parts of a country that is fascinating and scarily powerful and dangerous at the same time. History is used to form a common basis for national identity. History is always written by those who have fought and won a war, those who have heroically fallen into the hands of the enemy during the fight for his/her motherland. It is written by those who have ideological interests, by those who have to justify their gruesome acts.
Every country has this famous skeleton in the closet, and China certainly is no different. They seem to be even more secret about some of their excesses than other countries and those “black holes” make for a mysterious and frightening atmosphere. Dead Souls pierces this black hole. Wang Bing holds a torch into it to shine light onto the plights of hundreds of thousands so called rightists, people who have, in the eyes of officials, not been supportive of the movement, or have even been critical of the government. It was the late 50s, and there was a broad sweep particularly against intellectuals. Jiabiangu, the name of the camp complex, where people had been sent for re-education, has hoovered over Wang Bing’s work before. His film He, Fengming was part of his ongoing effort to collect testimony about the period. And so was The Ditch, a failed feature film that aimed at showing what life in the camps was like.
In Dead Souls, Wang Bing returns to his way of filmmaking which he had used for Fengming. This means that what mattered most to him was the recording of testimony. He put the camera on his lap, on a table, somewhere stable (or not necessarily) in order to record a person’s memories of the time. “I am a former nationalist. I had to re-educate myself and adopt communist thought.” This is how Wang Bing’s new film begins. Zhou Huinan, 85 years old, speaks about the time when people had been encouraged to criticise the Party. It was a cunning way of the Chinese government to lure people into the trap that would kill hundreds of thousands in a form of auto-genocide that resembles measures takes by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia later on, or which the Stalinist rulers undertook twenty years ealier. Zhou Huinan’s fault was his criticism of the lack of democracy. The result: a lengthy period at a camp, in which people died slowly in front of him of starvation. Sitting on a bench next to his wife, who visited him several times and who struggles to make herself heard in front of the camera, he seems a proud man, someone who has put the events behind him. He mentions his brother, a highly intelligent man who had been tasked with evaluating already validated town plans. He had been promoted several times, before he, too, was taken to a camp.
A harsh cut brings us into a completely different world. Despite his age and his experience in the camp, Zhou Huinan still embodies life. On the other hand, his brother, Zhou Zhinan, 82 years old, is a shadow of himself. Wang Bing films him in bed, suffering, dying, and tries to get a testimony. This very scene, painful and heart-rendering, hearing the whispers of a once strong man, is essential for the rest of the film. After a rather brief testimony, Wang Bing cuts to Zhou Zhinan’s funeral. In a lengthy sequence of scenes, we witness the burial of the man we had seen earlier, his son struggling with accepting the death of his father. Several times throughout the film, the director notifies us about the passing of those he spoke to. What this creates is a sense of urgency that wasn’t as clear in Lanzman’s Shoah. When I watched Lanzman’s opus, I had the feeling that the director had time for his project. Those he interviewed were elderly, but not yet on the threshold of death. With Wang Bing, this is different.
Dead Souls is an urgent film. Testimonies of men aged over 90, as is the case with Gao Guifan (97) who, filmed with a shaky handheld camera, says little else than “It’s the end. I want to die as quickly as possible. Dead, I’ll suffer less,” are common and one feels the director’s desire to get those testimonies on record in order to allow their voices to live on. Men eating human flesh, men cutting open the dead in order to collect the intestines and eat them, a father killing his eldest daughter so that his family could eat and therefore survive a little longer (this story is based on a rumour one of the men heard), men turning into animals – all of this must not die with those victim-survivors.
“You lose your humanity.”
“It had become banal to see dead people.”
“People no longer resembled human beings.”
Many of those Wang Bing speaks to go into a lot of detail of their ordeal. It becomes a collection of sort, but there are certain phrases that cut into you like a knife, and it’s those that will stay with you. The aim of turning humans into non-humans, of letting them slowly die – “People didn’t go in excruciating pain, they slowly passed away,” says Gu Huimin, 84 years old – is the most evident characteristic of a concentrationary system that has sadly found its application in so many parts of the world. China is no different, but China refuses to acknowledge the existence of those camps and the unnecessary deaths of innocent men and women.
The people the director speaks to are different in the way they have dealt with their past experience. Or perhaps, they are still traumatised and what they have endured and seen has broken them forever. Lao Zonghua, 75 years old and interviewed in 2010, reminded me of Bomba in Shoah, the man who smiles all the time. Lao Zonghua became almost uncomfortable to watch with his persistent laughs about the terrible things he has experienced. Is he one of Wang Bing’s dead souls?
Or are the dead souls those who Wang Bing and survivors look for in the desert? As in Lanzman’s Shoah, those who survived return to the place where everything happened, only to find almost nothing left. Nature has taken over. What’s left are bones and skulls. One doesn’t need to dig in order to find them. They’re there for everyone to see. An open secret of China’s brutal history. Just like Lav Diaz in his eight-hour film Melancholia, Wang Bing becomes an archeologist here. He uncovers, he unearthes. In discussions with survivors, in visiting the place of a silenced auto-genocide to record what is left. Every little helps to piece the country’s unwritten, and yet certainly essential history together for future generations who must know about this, and who, hopefully, take their government to account one day.
“If we’re alive today, it’s at the cost of your lives.”
“Only death could have ended that suffering.”
Zhao Tiemin is visibly angry at what he had been put through. He is the first in the film who speaks without questions needing to be asked. Wang Bing intervenes rarely, letting Zhao Tiemin take over. His testimony is interesting not only regarding its content, but also in the way it is given; openly, freely, without fear, but with a lot of anger. Others, such as Zhao Binghun, are more reserved. This particular man reminded me of my grandpa who felt uncomfortable answering questions about his past and who had initially responded in short sentence to all my questions, followed by “And what else do you want to know?” There is hesitation. Can I say this? Do I want to talk about this? There is, of course, shame and the fear that the memories, if spoken about, become to vivid and painful. Chen Zhonghai, 85 years old, remembers having lied to a fellow prisoner who asked him for a bit of roasted flour. He told him he didn’t have any, a lie. It was about his own survival. The other prisoner died of starvation. One can see the feeling of shame, Chen Zonghai, sitting on a sofa with a jacket over his left arm and his left trouser leg rolled up, the man has endured since then.
For those who have seen Fengming or even Lav Diaz’s six-hour film Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012) it is possibly evident what the director aims to do here. He blurs the boundaries of listener and viewer. Dead Souls is not so much a film to view, but a film to listen to. While the body language of those who testify in front of the camera can certainly be interesting, it is of much larger interest to simply listen, to lend our ears to those who have something to say. Wang Bing’s film gives them a platform for their experiences, for their shame, for their guilt, for their anger. With this part of history having been silenced, so have been the survivors. Film becomes a tool to break this silence and to allow those who need to tell their stories to find listeners. Only then can a traumatic narrative be turned into a normal life narrative and free the survivors.
But what about the film’s title? Dead Souls. Over the course of eight hours, one aspects becomes undoubtedly clear: those who survived, no longer have a soul. They should have helped their fellows. And this is precisely where Wang Bing is going with this. Humans are no longer humans. They struggle for survival. They have been put into situations where humanity, where souls, don’t have a place. In order to survive, one needs to kill one’s soul, one’s human nature, one’s empathy. The men we see in Wang Bing’s film might differ from one another. They are different in the way they give their testimony, different in the way they narrate their suffering, different in how they have handled those horrible experiences. But they share the tragic loss of their soul.
It must have been a year or two that I watched my very first Wang Bing film. Stupidly enough, I chose The Ditch, a feature film which I know wasn’t really his thing. It was a good film, but didn’t quite give me a sense of the director’s brilliance. Now that I have more time for actual film viewing beyond PhD research, I’d like to return to Wang Bing’s oeuvre because I’m aware that there’s plenty to see there, not only in terms of the number of films he has directed. I mean that in terms of content as well.
Fengming, a Chinese memoir had been on my list since the PhD. I knew that it was a three-hour interview with a woman who had survived a labour camp under Mao. I thought I could bring it together with my work on “the concentrationary” in Lav Diaz’s films, but I could never make it work. Now I have a clear mind and a new angle from which I’d like to see the film. So I returned to it last week and was taken by it. Parts of Fengming’s testimony became, in effect, The Ditch, an almost word-for-word translation of her testimony into a feature film. I haven’t read up on why the director choose to do so. I don’t think he has done it with his other documentaries. This one stands out because Fengming is not just a documentary, not just a testimony on screen. It has taken on a life beyond that and unraveled as a feature film three years later.
In some ways, perhaps, his feature film might draw in more people because there is, quite obviously, more happening, even though it is nevertheless a rather slow and austere film. Fengming, on the other hand, is quite a difficult film to sit through. It is an exercise in listening, something I believe we have forgotten but something that is so vital when it comes to testimony. Wang Bing doesn’t try to hide the nature of testimony. He’s aware that it usually comes in all details. Fengming starts by saying “I should start at the beginning”, and so she does. She not only tells us about her experience in the labour camp under Mao, but also explains the conditions that have led to her imprisonment. With this, the film makes explicitly clear that in order to prevent those things from happening again, it is not enough to know only about the actual atrocities. It is important to know how these things came into place in the first place, how they could happen, what the societal and political structures were like at the time. Only then can we draw comparisons to similar situations happening nowadays.
Wang Bing sets up his camera in Fengming’s living room without ever moving it. There are few and rare changes in shot distance, ie he shifts from a medium shot to a medium close-up, but he keeps to to the bare minimum. And because he does so, and because there is little relation between the shift in shot distance and what Fengming says (as is generally the case in popular cinema where shifts in shot distance are a cue for something important), these shifts function as ruptures. They’re startling. I couldn’t figure out why Wang Bing initiated those shifts. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to figure it out either. But I believe that they disrupt the actual viewing of a testimony in progress.
From the beginning, Wang Bing sets out to record a testimony without interfering in the actual process. During the process, the daylight faded, and so does Fengming’s face. It is only after quite some time that Wang Bing asks Fengming to turn on the light. If Fengming needs to go to the bathroom, she does so, all while the camera keeps rolling. If the phone rings (or a door bell?), then Fengming leaves the room to check. Again, all while the camera keeps rolling. It looks and feels very natural, until the director cuts…either away from Fengming or in order to change the shot distance. It could easily be because of technical constraints, but I think Wang Bing is working in digital, so the length of film at least should not have confined him to shooting for only ten minutes.
Fengming isn’t an easy film. It requires you to sit for three hours and listen to a single person. It could as well be an audio book, and I would be inclined to say that people would find an audio version of the film much easier because they can do other things while listening to Fengming. But this isn’t really the point. This isn’t the point of testimony. There needs to be a listener present for testimony to be help- and useful. With “present”, I mean physically and mentally present. There is a screen between Fengming and us, but if we sit down with her, I see us as taking part in her testimony. We have a responsibility to listen, to be there to take part in this process of remembering and keeping it alive for future generations.
There is obviously more to say about the film. Plenty more, which is perhaps surprising given that it’s so austere. But I’m developing an article at the moment and don’t want to go into too much detail here right now. More will follow soon!
