Wang Bing, the Director of *West of the Tracks*, Has Made Another 15-Hour Documentary

He is willing to do the slow, unglamorous work of recording these things properly — enough to leave most of his peers behind.

Wang Bing has put on a good deal of weight. Sitting in a chair, he can bring his hands together in front of him and ring his round, bulging belly. He is a documentary director who habitually points his camera at small, overlooked people. His earlier subjects have included labor-reform farms, workers in the Northeast, and drivers hauling coal.

On May 13, Wang Bing turned up in a sunken courtyard in Beijing. At the invitation of the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation, he had come to discuss his new films 15 Hours and Fang Xiuying with Wang Hui, the well-known leftist scholar from Tsinghua University.

Both works will screen at documenta in Kassel, the most important art exhibition of our time. 15 Hours is a film installation, and when documenta closes, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens will take it into its permanent collection.

As the title suggests, 15 Hours runs 15 hours. It is hard to imagine the film achieving anything commercially. Its subject looks entirely unrelated to anything currently in the news: it records, from 8 a.m. until 11 p.m., the workers in the children's-clothing workshops of Zhili, a town in Huzhou, and its themes carry straight on from several of his earlier documentaries.

Until now, Wang Bing's best-known film was West of the Tracks, from 2003. He spent four years shooting 300 hours of DV footage, then cut it down to nine hours in three parts — Rust, Remnants and Rails — which set out plainly the decay of heavy industry in Shenyang's Tiexi district and the lives of the workers inside it.

Even looking back from today, Wang Bing thinks West of the Tracks is "basically perfect." As he puts it: "When you pull the footage out and look at it segment by segment, the shooting is remarkably orderly and rich. The wholeness within each scene, the wholeness of the narrative, is all there in the raw material. So the editing went very smoothly — that film has almost no flaws."

After its release, West of the Tracks won international documentary prizes in Portugal, France, Japan, Canada, Mexico and other countries, and Wang Bing's name spread widely. The style and method of West of the Tracks carry through into 15 Hours.

The conversation between Wang Bing and Wang Hui about 15 Hours was a small screening salon for an audience of about 40. It had been scheduled for 2 p.m. but started 20 minutes late, because too few people had shown up.

The images in 15 Hours often stay on one person for several minutes at a stretch, and most of what happens is simply repeated labor, over and over. Paid by the piece, the workers rarely speak and rarely leave their stations to move about. The audience sat wrapped the whole time in the low, unbroken noise of electric sewing machines, until Wang Bing and Wang Hui began to talk.

Wang Hui appears to have real common ground with Wang Bing. In 2005 the leftist scholar published an investigative report, Restructuring and the Historical Fate of the Chinese Working Class, on what happened to the workers when Jiangsu's Tongyu Group was restructured. He had also screened Wang Bing's West of the Tracks at his university.

Wang Hui rated 15 Hours highly, calling it a work of anthropology and an anti-montage film. But next to Wang Hui, who sat with his legs crossed, loose and at ease, Wang Bing clearly has not acquired the knack of speaking easily in public. He held the microphone in both hands, sat up straight, and looked shy and stiff.

His tone stayed gentle and even throughout. The idea behind 15 Hours, he explained, was a film with no editing. "Telling a story inside an exhibition hall doesn't work. Visitors come in to see the work of many artists, so they walk in, watch for a few minutes and leave." Wang Bing wants audiences to pick their own beginning and end: "I hope museum visitors will watch however they like — if you want to watch more, watching all day is fine too."

Shooting was broken off several times to change batteries, but 15 Hours is, on the whole, a work strung together out of extremely long takes. Wang Bing said he hoped this would keep the film raw and true. "Films used to rebuild a story through a script, actors and a director, but I prefer something freer and truer, where film and life feel like they run at the same time. I think that is a contribution to contemporary cinema. When film was first born it ran alongside life, in parallel with it. I want this simplest of methods to carry the plainness film had at its birth."

Brush away everything that sounds like a discussion of art and what remains is Wang Bing's attention to the fate of ordinary people. "People think farmers are the freest, that they can arrange their own lives, but workers can't," he said. "The manager — I don't even know what that is — makes everyone move forward in its direction without a sound, with no way to disobey. The people who work hardest every day are the ones who can't earn money. Where does the money go?"

Wang Hui was keenly interested in the relations of production behind Zhili's children's-clothing industry, and kept putting questions to Wang Bing about how the local trade runs. Wang Bing lowered his head slightly and listed, one after another, things that had happened to the friends he knew there: the fastest hand could sew 600 pairs of trousers in a day; one boss handed goods over on credit to someone unreliable, who then vanished; children came to Zhili with their parents after finishing middle or high school, repeating their parents' path through life.

In August 2014, in Yunnan, Wang Bing met a young girl who had once been sold into Anhui. She had just come back to Yunnan and was about to leave for work in Zhejiang. Wang Bing decided to take the train with her group to see where exactly they were going, and only when they reached Hangzhou to buy bus tickets did he learn that the place was called Zhili.

Zhili is China's largest center of children's-clothing production. It is only a town, but registered children's-clothing manufacturers there already number more than 18,000. Styles turn over quickly, and large firms with big production runs fall behind easily and lose money, so from the 1980s onward many small private workshops grew fast in Zhili on the strength of how flexibly they could produce. By now some 300,000 workers have gathered there.

Wang Bing lived in Zhili for two years, pointing his camera at its workers and piling up more than 2,000 hours of footage, meaning to make a film about how people from the upper reaches of the Yangtze move downstream to work and get by. That longest film has yet to be edited. To apply for production money, he still has to turn out some films in the shorter term. Bitter Money, cut from the same footage, has already won Best Screenplay in the Orizzonti section of the 2016 Venice Film Festival.

Last August, documenta invited Wang Bing again, asking him to make two works for the exhibition, one to screen in Kassel and one at the Greek venue. Short of time and money, he decided to go back to the Zhili he knew well and make a small film. That is how 15 Hours came about.

During the Q&A, a film fan who had once sat through all nine hours of West of the Tracks asked him, in a Shenyang accent: "What is the biggest change in the way you construct a film over these years?" Wang Bing answered a little gravely: "My films now are much quieter than before. A lot of things can't be talked about, but the story and the force behind it are both much stronger."

Wang Bing is no longer the Wang Bing who made West of the Tracks. Back then his film language came mostly from the classics he had watched while studying at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang. West of the Tracks, four years in the making, was full of his young, singular energy. The Wang Bing of today tries out film and film language across a visibly wider range.

After West of the Tracks in 1999, he went on to shoot a run of low-budget independent films — Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, The Ditch, Three Sisters, 'Til Madness Do Us Part, Ta'ang and others. In Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, Wang Bing used three hours to record He Fengming's own recollections of doing reform through labor on a farm in the 1950s and 60s; the old woman sits in a living room that slowly darkens, calmly telling the story of her past. Wang Bing was trying, through this unusual form, to show what plain language alone can do in a film.

Talking about 15 Hours, Wang Bing reaches for phrases like "the fluidity of the image" to explain his method, but he also says that even audiences who do not watch the whole film can take something direct from it — a sense of how, "in a space like this, these people work like this and live like this," through one day.

In the film, people in short sleeves sit back to back in a bare children's-clothing workshop, hurrying one small pair of black trousers after another through clattering sewing machines like water through a channel, racing the clock, not daring to stop. What 15 Hours shows is a fate the workers cannot get out of. "You can hardly change it," Wang Bing says.

For a director this shy and this bad at talking, the best confirmation may still be the life he records. Being willing, as he is, to do the slow, unglamorous work of recording these things properly is enough to leave most of his peers behind — and China, as it happens, is living through the rise and fall of manufacturing, the churn of social classes, the rearrangement of city and countryside. Say what you like: this is a big era, and it is still worth recording seriously.

We also talked with Wang Bing about his years of making documentaries

Q: QDaily W: Wang Bing

Q: Most of your films run long. What is your standard for choosing footage?

W: On one hand you have to tell these people's stories clearly; on the other you have to build a film language. In our past experience, film has been built on montage relationships, but montage is only one kind of narrative logic for film. Film's real foundation is the image, the world of images, not a world assembled subjectively through montage.

The world of the image is a vehicle for form; the true matrix of film is the image. The language of the image is larger than the language of montage. The image supplies space; montage is only the logic of narrative itself. Film montage sits inside what the image can hold. The image is a container — think of setting down a basin — and all the narrative is what goes inside it. So by the time we get to contemporary cinema, the world of the image becomes especially important. Films of the past followed an orderly narrative logic, but modern film is forever breaking that up, forever searching, moving toward a relationship among story, drama and life that is parallel, even unknown. The logic of the whole history of film has been to build a story in a script and then restore it through actors and a director, but that story always sits inside a known, copied logic.

Q: How do you define "truth" in a documentary?

W: "Truth" is itself a word loaded with judgment; there is no absolute truth in this world. But does that mean truthfulness doesn't exist? Of course it exists. At that point it comes down to our own subjective logic and our experience of life.

Q: But you have tended, up to now, to keep an objective stance.

W: Yes, and that objectivity comes from somewhere else. Part of it comes from your morals, your moral judgment. I've turned it over and over, and I think everything is bound up with a person's conscience. The judgment lies in how you judge, and why you judge that way. There is no physical truth. I think a documentary is a transparent go-between, standing between the person filming and the person being filmed.

Q: Documentaries can touch people's private space. Where is the line for "truth"?

W: I think if it doesn't threaten anyone or do them harm, you can film it. Or put it this way: as long as the images do no damage to someone else's life. That is the line.

Q: What is the right way to handle death? When you were filming Fang Xiuying, for instance, she could no longer speak.

W: Personally I don't think that problem exists. I think my camera is quite kind, because we were always trying to make the camera answer the ripples inside her, not to film her fear of death, her pain, her unease. That kind of thing that makes people squirm is not in my films. When she was about to die, my camera moved away, because I wanted to protect something — I didn't want my camera to destroy the beautiful quality in her that the audience would still feel after the film ended.

Q: How did you come to film in the first place?

W: My father was a technician at a design institute, a man trained in architecture. He died fairly young, so I started working early, at 14. At first I swept floors and did all sorts of odd jobs, handled the phones, and gradually moved on to other work.

I was already around photography by then. Everyone at that unit had done fairly well in the college entrance exam, because architecture required high scores. And because the architecture course meant studying a lot of art history, that group knew art history very well. I lived among them and gradually got interested and started reading — reading their books. Everyone had a big box of books tossed in the dorm, so I'd just take one and read it. It turned out to be a good thing for me. From 1986 on I read enormous numbers of these books, right up until I went to school, so by the time I got to the Lu Xun Academy and the teachers were teaching us art history, I had in fact already read all of it.

Before that, my parents had no knowledge of art at all; it was my colleagues who gradually drew me into this world, and I gradually grew interested in images and photographs. I bought a camera of my own, took pictures, and then thought about studying it. At the time, only the Beijing Film Academy and the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts had photography departments in China. All of it came down to circumstance: before I went to the Lu Xun Academy I already knew the head of its photography department, so that is where I sat the exam. After graduating I went to the Film Academy for further study.

Q: When you first started making documentaries, were you influenced by the New Documentary Movement of Wu Wenguang and others in the '80s and '90s?

W: I know very little about Wu Wenguang. I only watched one of his films after I finished West of the Tracks, and that was already 2003. At school I watched a lot of people's films, but those people were not on my mind then. Film education in China was very simple at the time: Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, European cinema, Russian cinema, and Hollywood films. At first I liked Antonioni's films, and I understood how Antonioni's method was put together — his blocking, his feel, the metaphorical quality running through a whole film, the way he shaped time. Later I watched Bergman and others like him, and came away with my own experience of them. So when I was shooting West of the Tracks I had no experience at all with documentary. I didn't shoot it the way traditional documentaries are shot; I went entirely on the experience in my head, which you could say came entirely from what earlier fiction-film directors had taught me.

Q: Making West of the Tracks took four years from start to finish. Where did you find the nerve for a first film?

W: By the time I was shooting West of the Tracks, I had been living an artist's life for many years. I stopped working in 1991, and by 1999 I had adapted to that life. While I was studying I would take odd jobs now and then for living expenses; I was used to it. And I was very clear that art is not a utilitarian state of mind. For me, making West of the Tracks was about finishing my own film; what would come of it, nobody knew. But first you should work hard.

Q: Looking back at West of the Tracks now, is there anything you would improve?

W: No. Honestly, with West of the Tracks I put all my strength into it; my creative ability was almost entirely let loose, and let loose thoroughly. So that work is basically perfect, even seen from today. The footage too — the footage I shot for West of the Tracks, in every section, is so orderly. When you pull the footage out and look at it segment by segment, the shooting is remarkably orderly and rich; the wholeness within each scene, the wholeness of the narrative, is all there in the raw material. So the editing went very smoothly — that film has almost no flaws. And at the same time it brought out a kind of language that I don't think Chinese documentary had before.

Q: How would you describe that language?

W: It is standing in the middle of life the whole time with a portable digital camera. While you shoot, the convenience that life and digital material give you makes a certain sameness between film and life real. You couldn't do it on film stock, but digital did it — it gives you an around-the-clock capability. It gives you the possibility of shooting however you want, whenever you want, which the film-stock era never had. There's a French one called Paris in May? I'm not sure. A fairly good French documentary director, a contemporary of Godard's. I've watched his films too. He shot on film back then, and that film was very famous, but it didn't have my freedom, that smoothness, that closeness to daily life. The reason is that the material he was shooting on limited him, while West of the Tracks had no such limit. You feel the camera is that free inside life, that much at ease, and the story keeps extending inside it. You could say this way of working was rare in earlier cinema. Hardly anyone in the film world shot digital then; they still refused that material. But our circumstances forced us to use cheap equipment, and that cheap equipment fit our subject and our way of working perfectly.

Q: Fengming: A Chinese Memoir, which you made later, is mostly one person sitting at home talking the whole time. What is the difference between that and livestreaming today?

W: I think the difference is huge. If you watch it in a cinema, it isn't a livestream. It is a film — the narrative quality of film. If you want to bring out the element of language inside a film, it can do that very well; language is the weakest form of narrative in film generally, but in Fengming it comes across very strongly.

Livestreaming is different. In Fengming, what she is telling is her own wholeness, and I don't think a livestream can produce that kind of wholeness. Filming the old woman in that home, you watch what kind of person she is, where she lives every day; for me, those are the factors I weigh. When I wanted to film her, she was really like a ghost — she lives every day in a dim, tomb-like home, in a space like that, like a spirit, and her mind only ever turns over the same things, never changing with the outside world. To us the past may be a distant story, but not to Fengming; for her it is the present. When a person hears someone else's story, or a story from before they were born, you take it for history. But when it is something a living person went through herself, she does not take it for history; to her it is the present. She is talking about the pain and confusion in front of her, and her life is shut inside this small dark room. My camera brought out almost everything the language of that dark room had in it.

Technically a livestream might manage it, but is there a work like this? Does holding a pen make you a writer?

Q: Do you adjust your films for the audience — shortening them, for instance?

W: That is not something I think about. What I think about is the film, not the running time. Film has nothing to do with length. Someone walking out of a film happy is not the point of my making films. My point is to make the film well and tell one thing clearly.

Q: Very pure art?

W: Art is pure to begin with; if it isn't pure, what kind of art is it? I can't judge what other people do, but for me this is my work, and this is how I'm willing to face film.

Q: Jean-Michel Frodon, formerly the lead critic at France's Cahiers du Cinéma, once said: "Wang Bing is good at pushing back to the front the people whom society and media images have thrown away, and for that very reason he is especially overlooked in his own country — the very place that most needs, and most ought, to recognize his film art." What do you make of that?

W: For me, I can't dwell on it. I think plenty of people have in fact watched my films, and plenty of people like them. Because for me film is always full of the unknown, something you have to enter and come to understand, something that carries a desire to create. I think film will always be that for me. I don't think I'm that proud of myself, and I don't think I have all that much talent, but I can slowly make my own films as I wish, realize my own films as I see them — and that is enough for me. Other things, other people's views, honestly don't matter that much to me.

Q: You have been working at this since your twenties. Are you still waiting for some particular work to arrive?

W: I'm not waiting anymore. I just go on slowly making my own films. When we were studying, we learned a great deal about so-called high-budget, big films — the kind everyone wanted to make, works that look grand, or films with very high production costs that could really deliver, the possibility of industrial cinema. But after more than a decade of this, we've found that this business, this industry, is not going to hand work like that to people like us.

Q: But you've won many international awards. Have they brought you nothing?

W: I don't think these awards matter; they're not much use. What matters most to a person, I think, is not a prize but having the chance to do the work you want to do and being able to finish it.

For me, every award I win and the next one after it really do feel the same. Nothing changes for me (laughs).

Q: Have any commercial blockbusters come to you to direct?

W: No. Nobody is going to come to me (laughs). My life has always been like this, but I don't hope for that kind of thing either. I'm quite all right as I am — working by my own methods and my own original intentions for film, inside a scope I can fully control myself. I think that's pretty good.

Q: What do you think the mission and function of documentary are?

W: When documentary was born, television wasn't developed, and documentary carried a large share of journalism, of the exchange of information. Once television and other media became highly developed, documentary no longer had to carry that kind of content, and it went back to the plain level of cinema: questions of narrative, of film form, of film aesthetics. I think that is what documentary is now. Because news has already been taken over by television and other mass media, my films give not the slightest thought to news value.

Q: Should documentary deliberately carry the job of pushing society forward? Do your films take that into account?

W: That is hard to say, because pushing society forward involves many factors. Maybe one day it will land on some particular documentary — anything is possible — but it doesn't have to be one of mine. Documentary did have that kind of history in the past, but now I think it's hard to say; there's no way to be certain about these things.

Q: Some people say independent documentary in China has become formulaic, always looking at the gray zones of the bottom and the margins, which don't fully overlap with reality. What do you think?

W: I don't know who said that. I think anyone who says that is being irresponsible. Why don't they say who isn't marginal? The perfectly ordinary people we film — he calls them marginal, so who is mainstream? Outside the cities, close to a billion people live exactly like this. Low-income people are the great majority of that population. I don't think a comment like that needs any answer, because it isn't a view of documentary offered in good faith.

Q: Compared with 2000, when you were just starting out in documentary, has the overall environment for independent documentary in China improved?

W: It's all right, I'd say normal. Work comes down to resources: how many resources does a person have to occupy before they feel comfortable working? That's a bottomless pit. Resources are constantly being reallocated across society; conditions are sometimes good, sometimes bad. Everything in this world works that way. You can't demand that an industry be wonderful, and it can't be terrible either, but as long as you can work, I think that's fine. Because you have no commercial value, you can't take more profit, so you can't occupy more resources. That's normal.

Cover image and in-body images provided by the Beijing Contemporary Art Foundation. Some stills come from Douban.