Introduction 

In Wang Bing’s films, the presence of the author usually is hardly noticeable: most of the time, he follows the tradition of direct observation, meaning that the people on the screen tend not to express their attention towards the process of filming; instead, they “continue what they are doing”,  as if life was not interrupted by the presence of the camera. The minimalist way of recording done by a small crew (Wang Bing himself or one of few cinematographers) allows the camera to remain almost unnoticed and penetrate the small spaces in which the characters of his films live. In fact, observational cinema is not purely observational: the participation and the influence of the filmmaker on the life of the people he films cannot be avoided, and it is not limited to glances of the characters into the lenses of the camera. On the contrary, if one pays enough attention, in most of Wang Bing’s documentary films, there are multiple traces of his presence: a hand appears in the frame, a shadow of a man with a camera pops up, the voice of a person asking a question is heard, and so on. These signs of the physical presence of the author are, perhaps, unintentional, but 1) they appear more than once, even throughout one film, and 2) they are left by the director in the final cut. In other words, this “unintentionality” is left intentionally, attracting our attention exactly by its desire to be disguised. Nevertheless, this aspect should be studied, as it is not only a part of Wang Bing’s visual or audial aesthetic but also one of the keys to his ethics.

Theorizing Filmmakers’ Presence in Documentaries

Here, by “presence framing”, I reference Bricca’s book (2023), where he identifies it as the relationship between the director, the camera, and the subjects used in a particular film/selection of films (Bricca, 2023, p. 84). In other words, this concept draws our attention to the figure of the director [1] and the “degree of his/her presence”, which, in turn, determines the frame through which the audience receives information about the world presented in documentaries [2]. Even if Bricca’s classification of various forms of “presence framing” is quite simplistic, we can still single out the major line he is following: from the illusion of the complete absence of the director (observational cinema, mentioned above) to the reflexive frame, where the author puts the discussion about his/her role as a creator of meaning in the documentary at the center of the film, thus transforming it into meta-cinema. Most documentaries, we can suggest, are located somewhere between the two extremes, including Wang Bing’s films.

The same logic towards the unrevealing presence of the author is elaborated by Ruby (1977), but he expresses his unequivocal conviction that filmmakers must be self-reflexive for the sake of the audience’s critical and comprehensive understanding of film and the part of reality the author tries to present. Ruby claimed that ideally, the filmmaker should introduce not only the “product”, i.e. the result of his investigation, but also himself (“producer”) and uncover the details of filmmaking, namely the interaction and negotiations between the filmmaker and the subject of the film (the “process”) – a tripartite system borrowed from Fabian (1971, as cited in Ruby, 1977). This notion, we must repeat, he identifies as “self-reflexivity”, and it goes, through the transparency of the medium, against the grain of the positivist idea of objective reality to be discovered and unrevealed by the author to the audience. These moments of self-reflexivity are often made, as Ruby suggests, unintentionally because they indicate the lack of total control over the process of filming, but, as I pointed out in the case of Wang Bing, are left in the film intentionally, not only as a part of the post-modern desire for fragmentation and eclecticism but as a backstage showcasing the reality beyond the reality, and, more importantly, as a sign that warns us about the impossibility of the objectivity and, thus, the “createdness” of knowledge, i.e. the film. The only way of dealing with this problem is to “reveal” yourself, namely to present awareness of this fact and the two other parts of the trinity: the producer and the process.

Therefore, the film inevitably becomes subjective. The tension between objectivity and subjectivity itself could be attributed to the central issues in the documentary: Bruzzi formulates it as the “tensions between the documentary pursuit of the most authentic mode of factual representation and the impossibility of this aim” (2006, pp. 6–7). Leaving aside the “objective” part, we shall consider how the filmmaker explores the subjective aspect of the documentary through the lenses of shifting and adjusting the presence framing. Namely, it could be done through the “authorial figuration”, using Barthes’s term (1975), which in Sayad’s interpretation (2010, pp. 134–135) means the presence of the author’s physicality, his/her body. Thus, through the figuration, the author is present in the text in the form of not merely a narrator of the story but as a separate character (which can be easily found in literary fiction, like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin). The fact that the physical body of the author occupies an intermediate state by remaining an integral part of the film (as somebody who is represented as well as others on the screen) and at the same time standing out, being a foreign element, gives us, the audience, a sobering feeling of watching the film, i.e., the product, and not just a recording of reality, exactly as Ruby suggested. The body of the filmmaker, in a sense, exposes the body of the film. Following these preliminary observations, we now move to the discussion of Wang Bing’s cinema in terms of his physical presence and discover what the particular reasons for it are and how it is related to the content of his films, i.e., the issues he engages in dialogue with.

Video-Essay by Sergey Zanchevskiy

Wang Bing: His Cinema and His Physicality

To begin with, we should demarcate different modes of Wang Bing’s physical presence. We should separate these modes of physicality from other forms of representation of the author’s power over the film, such as subtitles, editing, and supplementary materials (like postcards or photos presented separately in Dead Souls (死靈魂, 2018), as the latter ones are more common and work in the same line as the “voice of God narration”[3], i.e., for the depersonalization. On the other hand, there are multiple ways in which Wang Bing is present as a character, “in the flesh”, in his cinema: audial presence (voice and sighs), shadows, visual presence (direct or through the reflections), too noticeable manual camera movements, or direct remarks of the characters in relation to the director (e.g., “You are from Xi’an, you should know”, or “Did you see the photo?” – the examples from the video essay). These aspects, indeed, establish Wang Bing’s physicality, and even though they are not so pronounced – and do not appear as often as in works of other contemporary documentary filmmakers who deal with marginalized people, such as Eduardo Coutinho (see Cecilia Sayad, 2010) – these modes still contribute to self-reflexivity. However, we still cannot understand the meaning of his self-reflexivity in Wang Bing’s case only judging by the forms; we should investigate the major narratives of his films instead.

In his cinema, Wang Bing directs his gaze toward the marginality, discovering both geographical and social peripheries of the People’s Republic of China during its rapid economic and political development. Wang’s oeuvre, thus, works as a counter-narrative against the imagination of contemporary China as an ultimate prosperous society; it challenges the mainstream notion of the Chinese Dream, pronounced by Xi Jinping (Pollacchi, 2021). I presume it would be incorrect to label Wang Bing as an activist; however, his area of interest is, indeed, extremely politicized: he records the life of people from remote rural areas, low-wage workers of light and heavy industries, migrants, and ethnic minorities residing on the borders, former political dissidents – in other words, about highly sensitive issues in the Chinese context, the representation of which the Chinese state seeks to maintain control of.

Therefore, Wang Bings is concerned with creating an alternative to the big institutionalized history produced and distributed by the seemingly omnipotent and omnipresent state: a network of micro-histories sometimes interconnected with each other – as shows his project about the Jiabiangou (夾邊溝) labor camp, for example. Consequently, Wang Bing’s cinema works as an oppositional force to the state: one official history versus many private stories; this multivocality is especially emphasized in his “big” films, such as West of the Tracks (鐵西區, 2002), ‘Til Madness Do Us Part (鳳愛, 2013) or Dead Souls. At the same time, Wang dedicated several works to specific people, such as Fengming, a Chinese Memoir, and Mrs. Fang (方繡英, 2017), even though it could also be argued that these people also represent the phenomena: the former “right-wing” element and a dying person in rural China, respectively. Both of these multivocal bodies or personified stories struggle between personal and social, as much as between objectivity and subjectivity, as we discussed above.

Most importantly, through the representation of people who otherwise, in most cases, could not be presented in the social and even political arena, Wang Bing gives them power, gives them voices, and bring these voices to the public discussion between the viewers with minimal distortion and intervention, as I pointed out elsewhere. To seize the opportunity, it is not surprising that Wang Bing utilizes the contemporary technology of video, which, as Fiske claimed (2002), could be used politically in two opposite ways: by the state and other authorities to monitor people and, on the contrary, by people or activists to keep an eye on those in power and distribute this “low-tech” form of video among others effectively. Obviously, in China, where the first manifestation of video technology is exemplified by its absolute form – surveillance cameras – the second aspect is also present: take The Memo (備忘錄, 2023) and the enormous flow of videos among the WeChat (微信) users during the COVID quarantine as an example. In the case of Wang Bing’s cinema, people also get the opportunity to speak up about the actions of the authorities[4], but through the mediator (the director).

The idea of a mediating body that often can become an authoritarian transmitter (or even refractor) of information is inherited in documentaries. It is foreseeable as the origin of this genre of cinema, according to Ruby (1977, p. 8), lies in the hands of the Western middle class (later – mostly intellectuals, we should add) who wanted, through the discovery and representation of socially excluded people or ethnic communities in distant countries, to symbolically control the world; what also matters is that documentary was not the place for self-representation and self-analysis – enough time passed before the first diary films appeared. Since the advent of early documentaries, quite a few changes have occurred, but the figure of a mediator still remains; however, through the shift in presence framing discussed before, there was also a shift in power: now documentary cinema can also be used not to control the subject, but to tive control to him/her.

So the same is here: it may seem that the old song is being repeated again, and an intellectual (Wang Bing) is passionate about ethnographic observation of the lives of dispossessed poor people whom he can control thanks to his camera. Indeed, there is a noticeable difference between the director and the people he is filming, which is doubled by another aspect of physicality – language: while he speaks standard Mandarin, the other characters often communicate (or even reply to him) in various dialects, which created problems with understanding, especially when filming in the southern and eastern provinces (Wang Bing discusses “Youth (Spring)”: Whose utopia is this primitive garment town? [Wang Bing tan “Qingchun”, Zhege yuanshi yunzuo de zhiyi xiao zhen shi shei de wutuobang?], 2023). The fact that this difference is presented means that it was also acknowledged by the author and, again, works along the line of transparency of the filming process and recognition of the subjective nature of the film.

To clarify this ambiguous image of an intellectual with a camera, we can borrow an identification term used by Lessard for Wang Bing and other independent Chinese documentary filmmakers – “minjian (民間) intellectual” (2023, pp. 8–14). This word, “minjian”, means “among the people”, or “grassroot” and “unofficial” in this context and points to the independence of the author from the state, limited amount of funds, and non-elitism; therefore, these minjian intellectuals’ view of the issues they study cannot be a view from above – it is, rather, a view from the side, or sometimes even from within. Therefore, it is not a surprise that in such “grassroot” Chinese documentaries, the body of a filmmaker cannot avoid appearing on or near the screen, for example, in Tang Danhong’s Nightingale, Not the Only Voice (夜鶯不是唯一的歌喉, 2000), Hu Xinyu’s Family Phobia (家庭恐懼, 2010), or Zhao Liang’s Paper Airplane (紙飛機, 2001) – the list may be easily continued (Edwards, 2015; Yu, 2018); the presence of physical body here, in other words, is also a sign of equality, of unity with others.

Finally, we should not ignore the fact that the physical presence of Wang Bing is the most prominent in two kinds of circumstances: when the cameraman is left alone (or almost alone), “wandering” and filming empty spaces and landscapes, and when he is recording the testimonies. In the first cases, one gets the impression of the director’s personal involvement in the unfolding story, namely that this is his private investigation[5] – during these moments, we often see his shadows, hear his sighs, and cannot but notice his shaky camera. Speaking about the second type, Wang Bing also takes a step forward because the testimony should be received privately or, as Griffiths rightly noted, “history does not ‘tell itself’ but is told, by individuals, to individuals, through representation” (2013, p. 65); it is at this moment that Wang Bing acquires his full human form as a character. The manifestation of this is the only, to my knowledge, direct on-screen physical appearance of Wang Bing in Dead Souls in the scene with a guard of one of the labor camps (see in the middle of the video essay). Here, this extreme authorial physicality plays many roles: as Wang Bing himself pointed out, it helped him to concentrate more on the interview (This Grey Zone, 2018); also, as I mentioned elsewhere, it separates this interview from the others in the film (concerning the testimonies of those accused as Rightists) and thus represents a moral position: Wang Bing’s body becomes a representation of those who suffered, it replaces them in this scene.

In both types of presence, the emphasis is placed on the subjective and personal character of history as a phenomenon, which should be studied accordingly. “History – is a personal matter”, an idea that could serve as a reflection of the issues that the director touches on in his films. He addresses these issues by giving voices to individuals who have been deprived of it. But in order to give somebody a voice, one should not hide his/her own: both his/her “social point of view”, as described by Nichols (1983, p. 18), and a physical one.

Conclusion

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Bricca, J. (2023). How Documentaries Work. Oxford University Press.

Bruzzi, S. (2006). New Documentary. Routledge.

Cecilia Sayad. (2010). Flesh for the Author: Filmic Presence in the Documentaries of Eduardo Coutinho. Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 51(1), 134–150. https://doi.org/10.1353/frm.0.0061

Edwards, D. (2015). Independent Chinese documentary: Alternative visions, alternative publics. Edinburgh University Press.

Fiske, J. (2002). Videotech. In N. Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (pp. 383–391). Psychology Press.

Griffiths, T. (2013). Representing History and the Filmmaker in the Frame. Doc On-Line: Revista Digital De Cinema Documentário, 51(1), 134–150.

Lessard, B. (2023). The Cinema of Wang Bing: Chinese Documentary between History and Labor. Hong Kong University Press.

Nichols, B. (1983). The Voice of Documentary. Film Quarterly, 36(3), 17–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/3697347

Pollacchi, E. (2021). Wang Bing’s Filmmaking of the China Dream: Narratives, Witnesses and Marginal Spaces. Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9789048551156

Ruby, J. (1977). The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity and the Documentary Film. Journal of the University Film Association, 29(4), 3–11.

This Grey Zone: Wang Bing Discusses “Dead Souls.” (2018, May 14). MUBI. https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/this-grey-zone-wang-bing-discusses-dead-souls

Wang Bing discusses “Youth (Spring)”: Whose utopia is this primitive garment town? [Wang Bing tan “Qingchun”, Zhege yuanshi yunzuo de zhiyi xiao zhen shi shei de wutuobang?] (Yan Y. & Alex, Trans.). (2023, May 26). The Paper [Pengpai Xinwen]. https://view.inews.qq.com/k/20230526A082M300?no-redirect=1&web_channel=wap&openApp=false

Yu, K. T. (2018). My Self on Camera: First Person Documentary Practice in an Individualising China. Edinburgh University Press.