Wang Bing is arguably China's pre-eminent non-fiction filmmaker. Since the release of his three-part epic Tiexi Qu: West of the Tracks in 2002, his work has featured regularly at festivals, in gallery spaces, and on television. Often positioned as a proponent of slow cinema due to the extended duration of his films, he also shares a predominantly observational approach with contemporaries – ranging from those working at the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab to Nicholas Geyrhalter – who have retooled this previously unfashionable mode of filmmaking for the 21st century. In her book, Elena Pollacchi takes a slightly different tack. While insisting both on the auteurist integrity of Wang's oeuvre and on his place in the world filmmaking canon, she argues that his cinematic signature is neither temporal nor observational, but spatial. For her, it is Wang's interest in marginal social spaces, combined with the spatial poetics of his style, that lends the director's body of work its coherence.
Pollacchi lays out this structuring logic in her opening chapters. A brief introduction argues that Wang's aesthetics cannot be separated from his subject matter, and that while certain issues recur throughout his films – the relationship of individual and collective, the tension between style and narrative form – the monograph's focus is on space. The latter's significance is further elaborated in the first chapter. Here, Pollacchi maps the geography of Wang's shooting locations in China to illustrate his interest in marginal spaces that lie outside state-approved narratives of economic and historical development (the China Dream of the title). This interest in spaces of underdevelopment connects Wang's work to broader global dynamics. Pollacchi suggests it also translates into a recurrent diegetic focus on particular representational spaces: spaces of labour, of history and memory, and of collective and individual narratives.
These representational spaces form the backbone of the chapters that follow. Chapter two uses Tiexi Qu: West of the Tracks as a point of entry for these discussions. Pollacchi interprets the film as a layering of all these spaces, both an archive of the decommissioning of the Tiexi district factories, and an attempt to narrativize this process. She locates the documentary in a long line of global factory films, from the Lumière Brothers to Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven – a tradition she believes Wang Bing is aware of, and which his style seeks to reference. Chapter three shifts to focus on spaces of labour in the films Three Sisters, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part and Bitter Money. The labour here is not simply of these films’ subjects, but also the work of filmmaking, made apparent by the movement of the camera through spaces ranging from the Yunnan mountainside to the interior of a psychiatric hospital. Chapter four, the longest of the book, considers Wang's work on the Anti-Rightist Campaign. Using The Ditch and Dead Souls, and through comparisons to Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, Pedro Costa's Colossal Youth and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Pollacchi explores how Wang opens a space to address the history and memory of this campaign through tensions between re-enactment, witnessing and the indexical trace. A degree of camera reflexivity is again key to this process. Chapter five focuses on films and installations that largely feature individual protagonists, arguing that they foreground the relationship between spaces of collectivity and individual stories. Finally, a brief coda serves both as a conclusion and to highlight how the circulation of Wang's cinema through gallery and festival spaces has secured the director's global profile, facilitated the development of his style, and diversified the ways in which audiences might view and attribute meaning to his work. The book also includes a useful filmography detailing the works discussed, the awards they have received, and locations of Wang Bing retrospectives and exhibitions.
Wang Bing's Filmmaking of the China Dream makes a strong case for understanding Wang's work both as an integral whole and as part of the global canon. Pollacchi's close relationship with the director, a product of her time programming for the Venice International Film Festival, ensures interesting insights into both his production processes and his personal convictions (the latter necessarily not always referenced). However, the book's scope is on occasion its undoing. Intriguing as they are, the bases for comparisons with European and American feature films are not always obvious. Key concepts sometimes require more space for development. Pollacchi returns regularly to the idea that Wang creates narratives from documentary footage. Given that none of Wang's films adhere to classical narrative structures, the meaning here of “narrative” is ambiguous. Similarly, the spatiality of Wang's chosen subject matter is often clearer than that of his aesthetic choices.
Perhaps most intriguingly, though, what Pollacchi reveals about Wang Bing's production practice complicates the auteurist framing of her argument. Wang's willingness to work across TV, film and the art gallery hints at a more pragmatic filmmaker than his festival profile suggests, raising interesting questions about his refusal to frame his television work as part of his oeuvre. Although Pollacchi stresses the primacy of Wang's sensibility in the editing suite, the impression of a collaborative practice that emerges from the book, which indicates the director works closely with other professionals both while editing and while shooting footage, is slightly at odds with this emphasis. Pollacchi clearly sees Wang's recognition at Cannes, Venice and Locarno as an acknowledgment of his inherently auteurist qualities. But it is clear that the increasingly rarefied spaces of exhibition through which Wang's work circulate have also helped shape his critical reception abroad, smoothing out the contradictions threaded through his spaces of production. It is these tensions that I personally would have liked to hear more about.
