After Ta’ang, his film about the uprooted people on the China-Burma border that went on release about a year ago, and the presentation of Mrs. Fang at Documenta 14 (artpress 447) leading to its selection for Locarno, where it won the top prize, the Golden Leopard, Wang Bing is now bringing out Bitter Money, which, unusually for a documentary, won the screenplay prize at the Venice Mostra in 2016. We spoke to him about his work when he was in Paris shooting for “Dead Souls.” ——— You are in Paris for several months to put together a monumental project titled “Dead Souls,” which you do not wish to discuss yet, save to say that it is about the Cultural Revolution and should last about nine hours. You seem to never stop working—you’re filming all the time, and when you’re not filming, you’re editing! Is that really true? I work a lot, yes. In fact, no, I never rest. I like it that way.
The very intense rhythm of your work also means that your films reach the screens, not exactly chaotically, but not exactly in the order in which they were conceived and made. Where would you say Bitter Money stands in relation to your films so
far, and perhaps, to those under way? It’s not easy to say, except perhaps in geographical terms. I have noticed these gradual movements in my work. Nearly fifteen years ago I shot West of the Tracks (2003) in the huge Shenyang industrial complex, in the Dongbei region of northwest China. After that I made Fengming, a Chinese Memoir (2007) followed by a fiction, The Ditch (2010), again set in northern China, but in the Shaanxi region, some way southwest of Dongbei. After that I made Three Sisters (2012) and ’Til Madness Do Us Part (2012), both in theYunnan region of southern China.
Bitter Money and Mrs. Fang, finally, were shot in the Zhejiang region, not far from Shanghai, so therefore in the south again, but a bit more to the north and, above all, the east. So you could say that in recent years I have shifted the center of my activity from Yunnan to Zhejiang. I also think that the work I’ve started in that region is only just beginning. Bitter Money lasts just over two and a half hours. What you see on the screen represents only a tiny fraction of what was shot, however. I filmed almost every day for two years, between 2014 and 2016. The material I amassed constitutes about 2,500 hours of rushes, which is a lot. As we were under pressure of time when we were working on the editing of what became Bitter Money, I focused on the journey that took a few people from their village in Yunnan to the town of Zhilif, located in the Huizhou area, about a hundred kilometers from Shanghai. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be making other films in the region, working first of all from the huge amount of material already accumulated.
How did Bitter Money come about? One afternoon in 2014, when I was inYunnan, I met a few young girls who told me that they would soon be leaving their village for Zhejiang.That really intrigued me. I had all kinds of questions I wanted to answer. How was it that these young women were prepared to go on a train journey of 2,500 kilometers, lasting nearly forty hours, to look for work in a garment factory? I wanted to follow them, even if it was a region I didn’t know. I started filming them almost at once.
Mrs. Fang was shot while you were making Bitter Money. Yes, I shot Mrs. Fang in a village just outside the town of Zhili. I wanted to shoot there because it’s a region where you find what, in Chinese, people call “water villages.” These are villages with lots of small canals running through them. They are quite important in the literature, in the collective imagination, as part of the national narrative. What I saw was very different from the legend: today, these places are almost empty, and remains of the past are rare. The houses are in poor repair, with just a few old people living there. It’s a pretty desolate picture. That only adds to the contrast between the two films. Bitter Money shows the modern, prosperous but also very brutal and very contemporary side of this region beyond the Yangtze Delta, while Mrs. Fang shows the past of China, a China that is in the process of disappearing. In the first film,
we see young people giving all their energy and doing incredibly hard hours to try to earn as much money as possible—and often they earn only a pittance—and in the other, there is this old woman with Alzheimer’s Disease who is slowly dying. When you presented Mrs. Fang in Kassel, you said that as a piece of work it was designed for the museum rather than the cinema, yet since then the film has won the highest prize at a major film festival, Locarno. Yes, that’s true. To begin with, we wanted to limit Mrs. Fang to the museum circuit, but the Golden Leopard award in Locarno made people curious, and Mrs. Fang has just gone on general release. There is another aspect to the contrast that you mention between Bitter Money and Mrs. Fang. The former is a long, slow project, while the second was completed much more quickly and with more modest means. It seems that for some years now
you have liked to alternate things in that way, and sometimes to combine them, juggling one colossal project and another that is more modest, at least in terms of
production. That’s something I started doing about a decade ago, when I began work on what, after many years, became
The Ditch. Amidst the countless difficulties— no other film of mine was as difficult to make as The Ditch— I was able to shoot
Fengmin, a Chinese Memoir in only a week. Generally speaking, I would say that, when I’m filming, I like to go with my desires, to trust to chance. It also so happens that when
You have made many films, in many different regions and on many subjects. What emerges from them all is a kind of total portrait of contemporary China, whose heart—one of its hearts—is the result of these mutations. What would you like to
film over the coming years? I have to finish the work I’m doing now first! Besides, it’s hard for me to predict. Generally, I follow my desires. And yet there is a story I’ve been thinking of for a long time now that I’d really like to make into a film. It’s set is Yunnan. It is a novel titled History of God ( Shengshi). It was written by a man of my generation, Xunshi Xiang, who died shortly after publishing it. I’ve started work on the screenplay. Even though I’m very busy at the moment, I think I should have completed a first version by the end of the year. I don’t know when I’ll shoot. I need to find backing and partners, and that always takes time. But it’s a film I’m determined to make. Translation from the French,
C. Penwarden
Bitter Money took two years of shooting! It seems that you are never happier, never more yourself than when you’re surrounded by people, camera in hand. Is that true? Doesn’t that the editing stage seem boring
to you in comparison? I wouldn’t put it like that. I like them both equally much. I see filming and editing as two related, complementary halves. You can’t shoot a film without immediately thinking of how you’re going to edit. It’s impossible. When I’m shooting, I try to get a feeling for the film, for the characters taking shape, the story that is falling into place. But all that only really takes shape and becomes concentrated at the editing stage. you’re working on a long-term project there are bound to be times when you come to a standstill. This is often for production reasons, but sometimes it’s inspiration, or something else. When that happens, it can be useful to look elsewhere, to move on and so something different. It’s important not to stay stuck. You have to learn to make the most of those fallow, blocked moments.
Mrs. Fang is a little less than an hour and a half long, Bitter Money a bit more than two and a half hours, ’Till Madness Do Us Part nearly four hours, West of the Tracks, nine hours. How do you decide how long a film
should be? Again, it’s not easy to answer that question. It’s a matter of coherence and completeness. A film lasts as long as the story it tells. Mrs. Fang was conceived from the outset as the story of a single person, even if, later, I also included the lives of the people around her: eighty-three minutes was enough. Bitter Money tells the story of a small group, hence its two hours thirty-six minutes.