Now, Wang Bing is especially famous for The West Of The Tracks, a monumental masterpiece whose merit needs no further recall. Such an early achievement tends to obscure the rest of his work, which shows a director in full possession of his wits and eagerness to document even further the sickness of a country where his voice is not welcome.
Xi Yang Tang, otherwise distributed under the title "Traces", has Wang filming the site of what had been a Chinese work camp, where many thousands men had died of hunger. A friend of him, who worked with physical film, had 1 hour of spare reel, which he freely gave. Wang, in return, decided to use this reel while shooting on the location of his next documentary, and as he prospected, he discovered humans bones and vestiges of human lives scattered all over the desert ground. From the 1 hour footage, he made a 17 minutes cut.
What is remarkable is how Wang rushes through the sand, head down, holding his 35mm camera in a firm perpendicular way to the ground, only stopping for a few seconds when he finds a vestige of human life (a bone, a cloth, a foot print, ...). That alone would have been sufficient for an interesting movie. But Wang decides to make full profit of the 35mm film, a format he never used before in his work, for he simply had no funds whatsoever. He thus submits the film to various effects, rippling the surface with dendrites, for instance.
One effect in particular is worth an analysis. On some occasions, Wang will re-film his footage : instead of re-filming the actual frame (the 1/24th of a second), so that you wouldn't see a difference between the frame re-filmed and the filmed frame, he composes a new frame, where the upper third consists of the bottom third of a frame ; the middle third is taken by the blank space between two frames ; and the lower third is the top third of the next frame. What happens then is that we're seeing, in a single frame, the past (what Wang shot in the first frame), the future (what Wang shot in the second frame) and a present (NOT the blank space between the frames, but the whole frame as such). This technique makes an even deeper impression, since the lower third is usually the top part missing from the upper third, blurring the distinction between what has been and what is yet to come.
Wang achieves a way to suspend time, or more accurately, to render our common conception of time obsolete. In these vast wastelands where human remains lay in silence, almost unnoticed through the clear sand and the crude light, where the past lives have taken an unmoving form, time seen as linear is no longer relevant. This place has sunk into a dimension of its own, neither made of space nor time, but of silence, of traces, of light. Closing the 17 minutes, is a shot made in a small cavern, where people had chiseled words in the stone ; one of them reads "freedom".
Xi Yang Tang, otherwise distributed under the title "Traces", has Wang filming the site of what had been a Chinese work camp, where many thousands men had died of hunger. A friend of him, who worked with physical film, had 1 hour of spare reel, which he freely gave. Wang, in return, decided to use this reel while shooting on the location of his next documentary, and as he prospected, he discovered humans bones and vestiges of human lives scattered all over the desert ground. From the 1 hour footage, he made a 17 minutes cut.
What is remarkable is how Wang rushes through the sand, head down, holding his 35mm camera in a firm perpendicular way to the ground, only stopping for a few seconds when he finds a vestige of human life (a bone, a cloth, a foot print, ...). That alone would have been sufficient for an interesting movie. But Wang decides to make full profit of the 35mm film, a format he never used before in his work, for he simply had no funds whatsoever. He thus submits the film to various effects, rippling the surface with dendrites, for instance.
One effect in particular is worth an analysis. On some occasions, Wang will re-film his footage : instead of re-filming the actual frame (the 1/24th of a second), so that you wouldn't see a difference between the frame re-filmed and the filmed frame, he composes a new frame, where the upper third consists of the bottom third of a frame ; the middle third is taken by the blank space between two frames ; and the lower third is the top third of the next frame. What happens then is that we're seeing, in a single frame, the past (what Wang shot in the first frame), the future (what Wang shot in the second frame) and a present (NOT the blank space between the frames, but the whole frame as such). This technique makes an even deeper impression, since the lower third is usually the top part missing from the upper third, blurring the distinction between what has been and what is yet to come.
Wang achieves a way to suspend time, or more accurately, to render our common conception of time obsolete. In these vast wastelands where human remains lay in silence, almost unnoticed through the clear sand and the crude light, where the past lives have taken an unmoving form, time seen as linear is no longer relevant. This place has sunk into a dimension of its own, neither made of space nor time, but of silence, of traces, of light. Closing the 17 minutes, is a shot made in a small cavern, where people had chiseled words in the stone ; one of them reads "freedom".
