Until this past weekend, Wang Bing was a director whose
name I knew only by reputation, and whose work I knew only by a nine-minute
excerpt of his first film, Tie
Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), that I had seen on YouTube while reading
about early digital cinema a few years ago. The clip, of Wang's lo-res DV camera
mounted on top of a train as it slowly travels through an industrial town in
China during a snowstorm, is hypnotic, its limited perspective revealing new
spaces as it moves forwards on the tracks. These nine minutes had
fascinated me to such an extent that I wanted to see the film in its 545 minute
entirety, but as with many works of such extended length, its availability in
the UK is virtually non-existent. In fact, West of
the Tracks screened in the UK for the first time in 2014, more than a decade
after its initial premiere, over the course of three days as part of a
complete retrospective of Wang's work during the AV Festival in Newcastle — a
festival that has previously screened works by Lav Diaz, James Benning, and Fred
Kelemen, among others rarely seen on these shores. This lack of availability
(not just for West of the Tracks, but for all of his work) and my
geographical and financial distance from Newcastle - around 350 miles
and a number of long train rides - forced Wang further back in my mind and,
understandably if not fairly, pushed the directors of more readily accessible
work to the forefront.
Last Sunday, after Wang's name re-emerged during a train
of thought inspired by something I don't remember, as is often the case, I
discovered two of his works on YouTube: Coal
Money (2008), and Man With No Name (2009, pictured above).
In Cinema Scope, Robert Koehler describes the formal properties of Wang's
second film, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir (2007), as "intensely ascetic", which
would also apply to these two films. Both are comprised almost entirely of long
takes, sometimes cut-up but mostly left unaltered, and shot digitally in a
handheld, fly-on-the-wall style, and in both works, Wang observes the difficult
lives of his subjects objectively from a (middle) distance. Coal Money, while brief at 53 minutes,
offers a comprehensive examination of a supply chain of coal in the northern province
of Shanxi, from the mines to the trucks to the roadside traders, focusing
specifically on the people: labourers, drivers, negotiators, wholesalers; involved
at each stage of the process, all fighting to make a profit in a competitive market.
Man With No Name, on the other hand,
is both bigger, at 92 minutes, and smaller, in terms of scope, and sees Wang silently
shadow an isolated, self-sustaining man as he lives and works alone in the arid
plains of Hebei, a northern province which surrounds Beijing. He grows crops to
eat, uses mud to build the walls of an unfinished house, and cooks; sometimes
the drone of traffic can be heard in the distance.
I can't speak generally about Wang's work having only
seen two of his films, and both of those only once, but this fleeting aural detail
stands out. The unnamed man is introduced as a lone figure emerging from his
home in a cave into a seemingly endless landscape, yet the distant sound of car
horns suggests he isn't as isolated as he first appears: which begs the
question: why is he here? Geographically speaking, he could return to town relatively
easily and earn a living without necessarily having to struggle to such an
extent, so why doesn't he? Wang doesn't provide any answers, nor does he ask
the man any questions during the long periods in which they are together in his
cramped home. Instead, he allows this brief glimpse of civilisation to enrich
and complicate his simple study of the man's life without changing his role as
a passive observer. It's just a sound his microphone picked up in the
background of a shot.
This attitude of imposing meaning while maintaining objectivity
can also be seen in the editing of Coal
Money. Wang follows a number of people as they try to make as much money as
possible from their positions in the supply chain, from its beginning in the
mine to its end with the traders. As such, its structure is more systematic
than Man With No Name, drifting away
from people as their roles in the process end to pick up whoever appears next along
the line. Throughout this journey, Wang lingers on the various hurdles each
person has to overcome to do their job: truck congestion, corrupt bosses,
treacherous roads, police interference, finding buyers in the overcrowded coal market,
bad coal, ruthless negotiations, and, most importantly, not knowing how much
money is coming in, or even where it's coming from. Wang frames the process in
such a way to emphasise its relentless cycle, cutting away from the (eventual) end
of a negotiation and returning to the mine as around thirty trucks queue up to
start the process all over again. It's obviously a terrible business to be in, but
people have to make money to survive, no matter how tough the job. At one point,
Wang briefly observes a labourer, covered head-to-toe in black dust, as he
unloads a trailer filled with large lumps of coal. After finally pushing one of
the larger pieces over the side of the trailer, he says: "what a fucking
shit job," briefly pausing before carrying on with his work; Wang stays
with him, watching as he starts to push another lump around, before cutting to
the now-empty truck pulling away, and its driver counting his money as the
labourers stand in the background.
All of these men are caught up in the cycle, but
it's the labourers who come out of it worst. In one heated exchange, a group of
workers refuse to unload a truck until they can agree a fair fee for their
labour with their boss, who responds by shouting: "suit yourself, you just
won't have any work." They give in because they have to, otherwise they
won't make any money at all — and it's this idea that forms the crux of both
films. If Man With No Name documents a
struggle to survive away from the world, then Coal Money is about the labourers fighting to survive within its
systems. And by objectively watching these struggles repeat themselves ad
nauseam without comment or participation, Wang makes it all seem so hopeless. This
is just how life is for a lot of people.