Wang Bing — Le BAL, Paris
The BAL presents The Walking Eye by filmmaker Wang Bing, which finds in this format an exceptional echo of his work. Recognized on the international film scene in the early 2000s with a documentary of more than nine hours devoted to the dismantling of one of the largest industrial sites in China, Wang Bing’s cinematographic work is tainted by his grip on reality and its capacity to make the viewers feel its gravity.
The radical nature of the approach therefore involves the abstraction of a context that the viewer has to reconstruct in order to find its fundamental place. Figure of the filmmaker at work, obstinate narrator of a present that he constructs in the relentlessness of an approach that can only symbolize the struggle, Wang Bing practices a cinema of “action”, an ongoing testimony that does not miss yet to take, by his approach, his choices and his cuts, a singular look on the fight of the men to tame their machines, on the fight of the men to hold the reins of the machines which they themselves are. A look like a window on what is not shown, a look at the anonymous which is therefore far from being transparent.
The paradox, quite involuntary, of Wang Bing is however to be situated between two paradigms, a China which refuses to show its reality and blocks its own voices and a Western world delighted to update the infamous aspects of a politics of the censorship. In this ideological struggle assumed and now openly affirmed on both sides, the blows strike even more sharply and open up new perspectives in a work which, for its part, is only of interest for the way it resonates. How can you free yourself, even when the cause is right, from all servility and preserve yourself from excess?
Certainly through work and the ability to mobilize one’s energy without entering into symbolism, contenting oneself with documenting, laying down as many elements as possible to bring to the attention the essential pieces to understand the forces of oppression. In this sense, Wang Bing tries to maintain this lateral posture. A modesty and restraint that in no way detract from the deep strength of her work, the tidal wave that seems to be calling for to offer a way out of this sprawling hold of a State over a people.
Paradoxically, the excessiveness evoked in the presentation text of the exhibition is correlative to the purely human scale of the filmmaker, a lonely man and his camera set off to attack an organization that was once colossal and structurally linked to more distant stakes.
In the first room, the rhythms intersect, we walk on the heavy tracks of a freight train, we follow the filmmaker in his progression within a building whose vapors, light ocher and the dilapidation of its common rooms contribute to the heaviness of an atmosphere made unbreathable.
Resulting from his first cinematographic blow of light which stunned the world during his projection of nine hours in search of traces and answers in the heart of one of the largest dismantled steel factories of China, these images are integrated in a successful device which multiplies the counterpoints to the testimonies which then constituted an isolated part of the film A l’Ouest des rails (2003). A titanic job and yet a drop in the ocean facing the Leviathan of industrial development on site, its constant mutation and the invisible history of each of its members. The capture of a bath taken by a worker, repeated here over and over, without a word, stands out as a necessity for survival, putting us at grips with an industry that requires men to endanger their integrity in order to work. A truth that is current not only in China but undeniably echoes all the industries of our world and refers to all the continents as a whole, using the endangering of the health of some.
In this sense, the ramifications of his position, far from being a diatribe against China alone, puts the whole world face to face with its responsibilities, faced with the incessant demands of an economy that feeds on the authoritarianism of the companies for which it pays. economically the submission. No angelism here, each tool necessary for the very demonstration of this reality used by the filmmaker (projection, movement, digital camera) contributes to this reality.
In the foreground, this very evocative quote: “I did not use any method, I only kept getting closer and closer”. A description mirroring the movement of digging and, strangely analogous to real-time images of news reports, following the filmmaker as he progresses, then sharing the causal chain of his research directly with the viewer. It is this proximity, this twinning of points of view in the progression of time that makes his work so strong. We then almost naturally join the intimacy of these bodies that we have followed, evoking the conditions of their work as Wang Bing himself seems to have met and worked.
The heart of the exhibition, which follows this first room then alternates rhythms and, if it puts men and women forward, shows the biases to dehumanize them, parking them in small cages (Father and sons, 2013), automating them, in a hypnotic gesture (15 Hours_) or following their daily life in the confinement of an asylum (_’Til Madness Do Us Part, 2013), interspersed with epics of vertigo monologues which deport the injunctions of a country and the fears of a people left behind, on the dead side of an economic development in trompe-l’oeil.
Wang Bing films all the passing times, the time of clocks, regulated and implacable, like that of affects, more terrible still, of illusions and desires lost in a multitude of stasis which oppose the bubbling of activities that the economy asks for. Without preamble, avoiding wide shots and other descriptive introductions, he sets us up in turn on a workstation in a garment factory, in the dilapidated interior of a family, in asylum cells and we thus plunges into the heart of his subject, the human being, in his manifestation as well as in his abandonment. It is precisely this proximity that makes cinema, which gives its plasticity and complexity to an image that refuses artifice but does not assume less of a terrible thickness. Cinema in its constantly reinvented relationship between time and space, with the image imposing its own temporality. Because Wang Bing, if he does not hesitate to multiply the shots lengthwise to the limits of the bearable, actually installs us in this experience that he himself has lived, slips us from spectator to inhabitant, prisoner for long periods.
In this characteristic fixity, his cinema slides from the most formal objectivity to the most intense emotion and we doze alongside an idle child, insensitive to the cries of a television that we no longer hear, while the dogs continue their wanderings under the bed (Père et fils).
An exhibition whose strength is measured by the sobriety of a device that makes it possible to confront each time and with a singular experience (several screens, single projection, etc.) of this terrible reality of a humanity that seeks itself. Even with L’Homme sans nom who is above all a man without words, multiplying actions whose exact goal cannot be understood. Here again, a fascinating point for this work which moves away from any humanist perception, scrutinizes the human in what destroys him, loses him with the declared ambition to denounce this reality. However, in the time of the image many actions are carried out and materialized, and there is always an efficiency that constitutes the narrative thread of these sketches.
If Wang Bing, despite the fixity of his plans, is a filmmaker of borders, it is because he himself always deviates from his objects, we thus discover that his works presented here stem almost exclusively from encounters during another shoot, leaving it to the improvisation which becomes a place of dialogue and resonance. These detours become so many new paths which take us in new directions as a second quote from the filmmaker, highlighted in the exhibition, echoes: “Everyone is isolated, everyone is looking for a path but destinies do not converge”.
The points which could call the criticism in his cinema, like his film Madame Fang, of which many observers deplored the discomfort of a form of “voyeurism” are renewed in this exhibition. The movement of the spectator seems to participate in the rapprochement with the filmmaker’s shots, meticulously choosing the staging serving as a framework for his actions. Often still, the camera seems to be waiting for something to happen, within it. Likewise, the spectator can browse in space, abandoning the deserted screen to find it, a few minutes later, inhabited by a new presence. In this way, the event seems all the more striking as it in turn implies his consented involvement.
The BAL thus presents an astonishingly strong exhibition which gives a new standard of showing any filmmaker’s work. Wang Bing reveals himself here as a true virtuoso of images which give him the ability to grasp, even when his remarks are a little simplistic, a phenomenal complexity where his humility hides in reality the breath of astonishing artistic anger, a detachment from the symbolism which further underlines the visceral commitment of the artist alongside the subjects of his works. An inner struggle that he ardently attempts, with all the force of a silent howl, to make resonate as a low vibration in the movement of his images.
