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Wang Bing’s Youth (Spring) : Labour, Everydayness, and a Return to Reality

Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing, 2023)

EssayPart of Issue #21: Young Critics Workshop 2023 & 2024

In his essay ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’, Harun Farocki, in his characteristically mordant manner, makes the following remark: “The first camera in the history of cinema was pointed at a factory, but a century later it can be said that film is hardly drawn to the factory and is even repelled by it.”Haroun Farocki. ‘Workers Leaving the Factory’. Senses of Cinema 21 (July 2002): https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/harun-farocki/farocki_workers/ (Translated by Laurent Faasch-Ibrahim) Farocki wrote this in 2001; now, more than twenty years later, one can very well claim that this tendency has only become more prominent. Swept in the mad rush of consumerist entertainment, ideological battles, and an endless play with film form, cinematic representations of labour have increasingly been relegated to the side-lines, either completely done away with, or, worse, treated as minor plot points.

If there is one contemporary filmmaker who, despite all odds, has single-handedly continued to push back against this historical (cinematic) neglect of labour, it would be the Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang Bing. Indeed, it would not be wholly incorrect to refer to Wang’s filmography as a whole as a cinema of labour. Employing his trademark observational style, Wang has, in film after film, indefatigably striven to depict the tumultuous history of labour and the labouring subject in contemporary China in all its guises: be it the inevitable decay of one of China’s biggest industrial sites in the heyday of communism (West of The Tracks [2002]); the history of Chinese labour (“re-education”) camps in the Gobi desert (Dead Souls [2018], Traces [2014]); the exploitative working conditions of the crude oil and coal industries (Crude Oil [2008], Coal Money [2009]); the floating migrant labour population struggling to make a living amidst the textile boom of East China (Bitter Money [2016]); or even the solitary labour of individuals pushed to the brink of society (Man With No Name [2010], Three Sisters [2012], Til Madness Do Us Part [2013]).

Wang’s latest documentary Youth (Spring) follows the same lines as his previous works. Shot over five years (around 2600 hours of footage), Youth trains its gaze on the workshops of Zhili City—famous for its manufacture of children’s clothing—and their young workforce, most of them in their late teens or early twenties. Unlike other state-funded industries, the workshops in Zhili are privately owned and controlled by individual family units. The workers are thus “free” to change workshops, and to charge individual rates for items rather than a stipulated minimum wage, which is generally lower. Youth constantly alternates between life on the factory floor and in the dorm rooms, on a street ironically called “Happiness Road”. Compared to Bing’s earlier works, there is a sense of optimism, even bonhomie here; the young workers endlessly bicker, tease, giggle, flirt, and fool around amongst themselves. The flip-side, and what they desperately seem to be escaping from, is the crushing sameness of fifteen-hour workdays and the almost dystopian surroundings of the factory space. The use of the word “youth” as the film’s title also ironically relates it to recent Chinese history: what was once associated with revolutionary fervour in China, a hope for a better future, has now devolved—like in most parts of the world—into a commodity, a readily available and disposable means of labour.

Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing, 2023)

Labour and Everydayness

Youth, like Wang’s first feature West of The Tracks, makes use of a decentralized narrative structure, unfolding as a sequence of discrete twenty-minute episodes stretched over an almost four hour runtime. Instead of focusing on a single character, Wang offers a kaleidoscopic view of diverse individuals working in the factory, in a sense merging the personal with the sociological. Indeed, most of his films eschew the maudlin character-driven story of the humanitarian documentary. Here, there are no salt-of-the-earth heroes to be admired, no sentimental score propelling the narrative ahead, and no attempt to elicit forced pity or indeed fetishize the very act of looking. This follows from Wang’s own unique approach to documentary cinema, where the narrative is quite literally sculpted from the process of observation, from events in the “real” or “pro-filmic” world that the camera spontaneously manages to capture.

In Wang’s formally rigorous mode of observational cinema, the social actors, rather than serving as stand-ins for a larger social/political cause, instead come across as irreducibly and singularly unique. This could be why Wang’s films are not considered political in the conventional sense; there is hardly any overt critical commentary, or a conventional reckoning with politics. However, at a deeper level, beneath all the humdrum events of life that Wang insists on showing is an overarching emphasis on how national events and the everyday subtly refract each other. In Youth, for instance, what underwrites each passing sequence, despite the absence of climactic drama, is the wider phenomenon of the massive expansion of privatized manufacturing in southern China, the increased demand for cheap labour, and the subsequent migration of people—mostly youth—from rural to urban areas in search of work.

It is surprising then, for a film purportedly about work and labour, to spend so much time focusing on “leisure” activities. Indeed, much of Youth’s running time in the first two hours is spent depicting life outside the factory floor. In typical Wang fashion, there are long shots of people walking, eating, smoking, and talking in the streets during night-time, of everyday life in the worker’s cramped living quarters, and multiple scenes of male workers endlessly attempting to flirt with their female counterparts, stories ending either in budding love or unrequited aloofness. Bing patiently documents the everydayness of these rituals: of makeup being applied, a custard pie being cut and smeared on a face during a dorm party, and the ribald and oftentimes prurient humour that the young adults engage in. And yet, it is through ingenious editing choices and the overall narrative structure that the centrality of the factory, and of lives entirely centred around the factory, are brought to the fore. Wang punctuates such quotidian scenes with sudden, almost brutal, cuts back to the factory floor. As viewers, we are suddenly wrenched back to the windowless workshops, to the incessant whirring of machines, to hands moving with lightning speed, and to mountains of cloth piled everywhere. As the film unfolds, the structured repetitiveness of these events—everyday life interspersed with wanton exploitation—becomes emblematic of the day-to-day precariousness of life within the industrial district, a harrowing realization of how virtually every aspect of life here—love, family, friendship, leisure, independence—revolves around the production of labour.

The everydayness in Wang’s cinema is thus not just about the minutiae of everyday life, but in a more radical and charged sense, also the everydayness of labour. Despite the obvious circumstances of exploitative work, his style rarely evokes pity or engages in direct critique. The labouring subjects of his cinema are not, as is typical of most “political” cinema, revolutionaries or emotionally charged figures. Instead, Wang spends an inordinate amount of time on the uneventful or the ordinary: on young people who stolidly go about their day, hunched over sewing machines, smoking cigarettes during breaks, or rushing around carrying piles of clothes. By choosing to film precisely those moments where there is nothing conventionally interesting or cinematic to film, he is able to draw, indeed provoke attention to, the drudgery that has become an inescapable part of their daily lives.

Towards the latter half of Youth, a semblance of a dramatic plot develops. The young workers, having come together, demand a better pay rate for each item they make. The boss and the workers haggle back and forth. There is a hint of suspense and climactic escalation, a possibility of the film finally embracing a “triumphant” polemic. However, as the negotiations are repeated and protractedly etched out, the optimism wanes, in turn replaced once more by a feeling of helplessness. In perhaps Wang’s final coup de grâce, the bargaining itself becomes part of the everyday, symbolic of a system already stacked against them, a matter merely of authoritarian state-controlled industry replaced by free market exploitation, with little to no change for those at the lowest rung of the ladder.

Wang’s framing choices equally complement this sense of entrapment. Most of the factory scenes in Youth are shot in wide shots, which not only accentuate the space, but also firmly emplace the workers within the factory floor. This interplay between the factory space, characterized by ceaseless activity, chaotic work stations, and continuous sounds and motion, and those who inhabit it is crucial to Wang’s preferred aesthetic, which above all provides a visceral engagement with the material sphere. Indeed, central to Wang’s cinema is a kinaesthetic impulse, an emphasis on the movement and rhythm of the human body as it manoeuvres its way through specific spaces, be they cramped hallways or the chaos of the factory.

On the few occasions when the camera isolates a particular individual (almost always through contrasting medium shots, seldom a close-up), it is usually as a body surrounded, indeed framed, by factory tools and the granular textures of sewing needles, threads, cloth sleeves, and machines. Wang’s claustrophobic, self-enclosed images further reinforce a feeling of being hemmed in, of an almost carceral world that the young workers find themselves trapped in.

Apart from their depiction of work, Wang’s films offer another way of conceptualizing labour, one that lies in his own physically strenuous style of filmmaking. To watch a Wang Bing film is to be intuitively aware of certain stylistic tendencies that are favoured: a jerky handheld camera, protracted walking shots, a predilection for durational imagery, and an almost visceral emphasis on the material practices of labour. The same holds true for Youth, where the camera is often squeezed in amongst the workers and the machines on the factory floor, or else walking or running behind youngsters as they go about their everyday lives in the dorms or out on the streets. Occasionally, the narrative also self-consciously draws attention to itself, as when someone directly addresses Wang, or when there is a sudden jerky movement or an unmotivated pan or tilt. His aesthetic choices then invariably make one aware that there is an embodied camera—a human presence—that physically interacts, and indeed endures through the same material spaces that its subjects interact with. This is most evident in Wang’s installation films. For instance, 15 Hours (2017), a single fifteen-hour take, shot in one of the garment factories in Zhili, documents one day in the lives of some of its three-hundred thousand workers. Similarly, Crude Oil, with a runtime of almost fourteen hours, tracks an entire workday in the life of crude oil workers in the Gobi Desert. In both films, the very continuity of space and time, maintained by its uninflected duration, carries traces of its own inscription. The formal strategy adopted here is necessarily reflective of the presence of a filmmaker who was there at that precise moment.

This doubtless is murky ethical territory, for no one would argue, and rightly so, that a filmmaker’s tribulations in making a film are somehow tantamount to the subject’s everyday hardships. And yet, there is something to be said about Wang’s unwavering commitment towards those who find themselves on the wrong side of China’s economic boom. Throughout his career, he has relentlessly sought to document and chronicle the dreary existence of China’s underclass, and has been an active witness to the lives of those rocked by the country’s turbulent history. Equally important a factor to consider is Wang’s modus operandi: the time it takes for him to make a film and also the long-standing relationships that he develops with the subjects he films. (In the case of Youth, Wang filmed for almost six years, spending most of the time in Zhili with the factory workers.) It is in this sense that one could refer to Wang’s method of filmmaking—and also the viewing experience of the spectator—as labour-intensive, a committed process that engages as fully as possible with what is being filmed.

To talk of Wang’s cinematic style is also to situate him in a particular tradition of Chinese documentary filmmaking that burst onto the world cinema scene in the 1990s. In an era of rapid changes amid globalization and marketization (socialism with Chinese characteristics), a strand of independent filmmakers—Jia Zhangke, Wang Bing, Liang Zhao, Ou Ning, and Yu Yan, among others—began to develop a socially engaged strand of documentary cinema, often focusing on the lives of people at the margins of Chinese prosperity. Crucial to their practice was a particular aesthetic style called jishi zhuyi, or on-the-spot realism, characterized by cinéma vérité techniques such as unscripted action, location shooting, natural lighting, handheld camerawork, and long-term filming. Such an aesthetic of spontaneity—letting the camera observe whatever unfolds in front of it—was also linked with the rise of an unofficial public culture that undermined the master narratives propagated by the state.

Wang’s style of filmmaking is certainly characterized by an on-the-spot aesthetic, and yet what differentiates him from his contemporaries is his signature use of duration as a structuring device. Indeed, time in Wang’s cinema carries the weight of history, but also the brutality and resistance of the present. There is something monumental, even deeply inexorable, about his use of long takes. In an ironic sense, they evoke something of the inexorable “progress” of modern China, its relentless and fast-paced drive towards modernization that has left immense human suffering in its wake.

In Youth, as Wang repeatedly cuts back to the factory space and to the dehumanizing acts of labour being performed inside, time also becomes something to be actively and painfully endured. Wang’s emphasis on duration, one that he shares with the global arthouse strand of cinema, could then be another way of conceiving the actively political in his films, for it undermines a certain neoliberal tendency of tethering value to time, and productive labour to bodies. By emphasizing repetition and everydayness, and events or actions that refuse to be bogged down by predetermined narrative structures, Wang subverts the normative, ordinary notions of temporality that usually demarcate what counts as political, in the process also counteracting the notions of linear narrative, progress, and even (official) history.

Yet another way to understand Wang’s predilection for long takes would be to take a more culturally specific route. For instance, the concept of guanxi is often used to evoke the general features of social life in everyday China. A term notoriously difficult to translate, guanxi roughly refers to something like interpersonal relations or a social network, an intersubjective interdependency within people belonging to a group or community, often involving some sort of a moral obligation. Wang’s decision to hold on temporally distended shots acts as a cinematic translation of this concept, in which relations between various persons unfold across specific spaces and in real time, often encompassing a range of emotions, from love, care, and camaraderie to anger and hatred. To think with the concept of guanxi also offers us an opportunity to look at film techniques using concepts from local cultures, rather than always having to rely on hermetic or overdetermined categories like ethnographic or slow cinema.

Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing, 2023)

Reality Beckons!

To talk of Wang Bing’s cinema is to also necessarily take into account his observational style of filmmaking. Indeed, what is most surprising in our contemporary digital context is the continuing adherence to an observational realist aesthetic by a dedicated strand of documentary cinema. Despite the increasingly virtual lures of the digital—CGI, easy manipulation, and the very possibility of doing away with pro-filmic reality—filmmakers such as Wang (and others like Ben Russell, Nikolaus Geyrhalter, Kevin Jerome Anderson, Maeve Brennan, Harun Farocki, Shambhavi Kaul, and adherents of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab [SEL]) have made use of digital technology to do precisely the opposite: record real locations and characters, thus implicitly believing in the mechanical power of the camera to capture some sort of reality.

This resurgence of the observational mode follows on the heels of a wider history of documentary cinema, one involving the implicit denigration of the lens-based capture of physical reality. The conventional conflation of non-fiction cinema with the social-activist documentary can be traced to one of the early theorist-practitioners of documentary, John Grierson, for whom aesthetic concerns were to be subordinated to the goal of serving a social purpose, in as immediate and didactic a manner as possible. Bill Nichols would famously describe the Grierson approach as a “discourse of sobriety,”Bill Nichols. Representing Reality. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994, 3-4. which, like the positivist discourses of science, economics, religion, and warfare, invests the formal conventions of documentary realism with an impression of authentic, direct, and immediate truth.

Over the decades, however, the diverse strains of observational cinema, including direct cinema and cinéma vérité, gradually came under attack. Following various historical and ideological junctures—post-colonialism, post-structuralism, neo-imperialism, and the rise of digital media—the indexical claim made by documentary to reality was severely undermined. Reality, rather than something out there, came to stand in for the play of representational codes. To now believe in documentary’s referential power to access unmediated reality was to be mistakenly infatuated by a “passion for the real”, and thus fall prey to a naive and discredited scientism. Accordingly, the mechanical lens-based capture of physical reality (an observational aesthetic) was soon replaced by representational forms that self-consciously displayed their distance from the real. Notions of artifice, hybridity, and fictionalization became the new buzzwords, and the goal of sophisticated documentary practice became, through recourse to subjectivity, imagination, and endless reflexivity, to produce a truth superior to the facticity of recording. Herzog’s famous Minnesota Declaration provides a hugely influential example of the latter, where ecstatic truth—to be reached through fabrication and stylization—is pitted against the superficial “truth of accountants.”Werner Herzog. ‘Minnesota Declaration.’ Werner Herzog official website. Delivered at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. MN, April 30, 1999: https://www.wernerherzog.com/text-by-werner-herzog.html

An instance emblematic of this schism could also be found at the 2023 edition of Film Fest Gent, where accompanying Wang’s Youth (Spring) was a non-fiction work by the American-born filmmaker and visual artist Naomi Uman. An intimate triptych of life in a rural Albanian village, Three Sparks (2023) functions as an ethnographic account of their history, mythology, traditions, and everyday rituals. What is of relevance here is the film’s specific formal choices. Uman finds inspiration in both experimental visual ethnography (Trinh T. Minh-ha and her concept of speaking nearby) and avant-garde cinema (Jonas Mekas and his predilection for diaristic forms). Accordingly, Three Sparks is a work characterized by what one could refer to as a patchwork aesthetic, a smorgasbord of techniques that constantly interrupt the narrative and call attention to its form, while also foregrounding Uman’s position as an outsider. It is a film replete with intertitles, jump cuts, disorienting camera moves, and other distancing devices meant to remind the viewer at every possible moment that what we are watching is something entirely constructed and made up.

It might be worthwhile at this point to enquire into what or whom this aesthetic serves. Uman’s self-reflexive (almost to a fault) techniques belong to a wider lineage of anthropological cinema which, following various postcolonial and postmodern critiques in the 1980s, began to concern itself solely with authorial perspective and the constructedness of texts. In such a view, there is no ethnographic authority, no privileged perspective from which to make neutral claims, and hence no possible knowledge of a culture that is not already mediated by one’s subjectivity. In the case of film, it amounts to a relentless critique of the film form, a constant doubling back to remind the viewer of one’s own subjective stance and the manufactured nature of the filmic experience.

In itself, this was no doubt radical and necessary at the time. However, it is imperative that aesthetic styles also be considered in relation to larger socio-historical circumstances. Given how much has changed in the 21st century, one ought to now acknowledge the transformation of the institutional and spectatorial contexts that have accompanied the rise of our media-saturated culture. Surrounded as we are by a never-ending plethora of images, it might very well be anachronistic to state that anyone ever confuses representation for reality. Indeed, it has become somewhat of a truism to state that intervention is always already there. To use a clichéd argument, even description—a fly on the wall approach—is a form of interpretation (the turning on and off of a camera, where one places it, the framing, and the selection of shots). Moreover, for a cinematically aware festival-going audience, such strategies as used in Three Sparks—distancing, fragmentation, ruptures ­aren’t exactly ground-breaking. One has only to think of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jean Rouch who were experimenting with narrative structure and participatory praxis as far back as the 1960s. It might be time to admit that the relentless playing around with self-reflexivity in the name of sophisticated moving image practice has lost some of its radical sheen. Instead, it has become entirely commonplace, a safe and assured way of ensuring that one’s work isn’t construed as naive, simple, or uncritical (terms usually reserved for observational cinema).

Equally emblematic of our times is the unique situation we find ourselves in today. We are now awash with fake news, post-truth politics, and the rise of alternative facts. Climate change is being denied, history continually rewritten, and everyday life being turned into a deep fake media spectacle. Critiques of the constructed nature of truth, power, and knowledge, once progressive and emancipatory, have now become the preferred arguments of those very people and institutions they were once directed at. The vaunted groundless ground of the hybrid documentary is no longer an aesthetic choice; it is slowly becoming our very reality.

Indeed, what seems of paramount importance in times such as ours is precisely to wade through this deluge of images—to cut through the relativist clutter—and continually reaffirm those images that have a modicum of existential referentiality; or, as film scholar Erika Balsom remarks in the context of documentary cinema, to believe “that there is a world out there, the traces of which persist in and through codes of representation.”Erika Balsom. ‘The Reality-Based Community’. e-flux 83 (June 2017): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/142332/the-reality-based-community/

If, as denunciations of documentarism go, the observational mode is inherently characterized by a destructive “passion for the real”, then it would be equally fitting to talk of its “experimental” counterparts as being characterized by its very opposite, a veritable terror of the real. The point is to be able to reassert the ontological status of the documentary image, and to demand belief in what we see and experience, in a world that exists and which we inhabit together. As Balsom eloquently puts it, “What would it be to instead affirm the facticity of reality with care, and thereby temper the epistemological anxieties of today in lieu of reproducing them? How might a film take up a reparative relation to an embattled real?”Balsom, ibid.

A possible answer could lie in the descriptive power of lens-based capture, and in the automatism of the filmic machine. To continue to rely on the observational form then is to testify to the experience of a shared and enworlded existence, to a phenomenological encounter with the world as mediated through cinema. It is to believe that it means something to have a relationship to actuality, this perhaps being the major difference between fiction and documentary. And this precisely is what Wang Bing and other filmmakers like him who continue to adhere to an observational aesthetic (and ethic) attest to, despite the lures of an increasingly digitalized world.

To affirm reality, however, is not to claim mastery over it. It is not to hark back to the traditions of direct cinema, where the world can be grasped, dominated, and structured under the guise of complete objectivity (precisely the critique levelled against traditional observational cinema). There is no didacticism here, no totalizing takeaway, or even a possibility of complete understanding. Reality here is not as simple and explicable as it is conventionally made out to be. Indeed, underlying this reconceived strand of observational cinema are limits both visual and epistemological: insofar as one has access to the world, it is to a reality that is irreducibly complex, chaotic, intractable, and ambiguous. This recalcitrance of sorts also permeates the formal structure of these films; while firmly asserting a claim on reality, they are at the same time opaque, partial, and deliberately structured. Here, the act of perception is as fraught as the act of representation. Objectivity, and thus knowledge, is necessarily situated, bound to the particular and the specific.

One can glimpse this tendency even in Wang’s Youth (Spring), most noticeably in the manner in which Wang structures the film as a whole, eschewing individual stories in favour of a decentralized narrative where a multitude of lives crisscross and interconnect. In Wang’s own words, such a narrative structure is “more natural and less constructed—it’s closer to how we live our lives.”ArtReview Asia. ‘Wang Bing: Filmmaking Is Not That Complicated’. ArtReview Asia (September 22, 2023): https://artreview.com/wang-bing-filmmaking-is-not-that-complicated/ Elsewhere, he remarks: “When you concentrate the action and importance on one character, you feel you’re getting a 360-degree view of their life, but it’s an illusion; there are all kinds of things you don’t see. I use a piecemeal approach because I think that’s how things are: dispersed and fragmented.”Dennis Lim. ‘Interview: Wang Bing on Youth (Spring)’. Film Comment (June 2, 2023: https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-wang-bing-on-youth-spring-by-dennis-lim-cannes-2023/ Wang’s framing and editing choices in Youth equally complement this approach, as when he films a difficult conversation about teen pregnancy with the two figures hidden behind a billowing white sheet, or when he abruptly cuts away from a factory floor fight at the very moment when the dramatic stakes—a possibility of gruesome violence—are escalating. Such formal decisions are strewn across Wang’s filmography, in a sense replicating the filmmaker’s own stuttering experience of getting to know a place and its people.

The ending of Dead Souls, one of Bing’s most acclaimed films, could very well epitomize this piecemeal approach. After an implacably long stretch of testimonies of survivors from the brutal Anti-Rightist Campaign (almost all of them in long unbroken shots), the film suddenly cuts to a handheld camera roving around in the site of the former camp, with human skulls and bones littered all over the ground. As the movement gets more frenzied, the sequence—and the film—suddenly cuts to black mid-stride, as abruptly as it started, offering no final resolution or catharsis. Despite its vehement emphasis on durational realism, Wang’s cinema is then also equally concerned with the limits of representation, and with our failure to ever fully comprehend the Other.

An interesting parallel can be drawn between Wang and one of his contemporaries, one probably closest to him in terms of their overall approach to narrative form, the SEL anthropologist-cum-filmmaker J.P Sniadecki. Sniadecki shares with his fellow SEL brethren, along with an inventive combination of aesthetics and ethnography, a defiance of traditional non-fiction frameworks of narrative. There is a refusal of didacticism, and a near-total absence of information provided either through interview or voiceover. Instead, what comes to the fore is an immersive sensorial engagement in atmospheres, soundscapes, and the materiality of everyday life. Indeed, Sniadecki’s early films, made during his fieldwork visits in China, combine a (structuralist) preoccupation with temporality with an almost artisanal focus on quotidian living. Thus, in Demolition (2008), a film about a demolition site in the centre of the Sichuan capital of Chengdu, Sniadecki documents the everyday lives of workers amidst the visual and aural ruckus of the site, juxtaposing an ever-changing urban landscape with an embodied account of migrancy and physical labour. Similarly, in The Iron Ministry (2014), a result of three years spent travelling around on trains, Sniadecki zeroes in on the Chinese railways—the quintessential Chinese narrative of national greatness—capturing conversations, gestures, faces, movements, and thoughts of ordinary citizens on the move, all the while favouring experiential understanding over explanation.

In both Sniadecki and Wang’s cinema, signification and meaning recede behind witnessing and being. To watch their films is to pay attention to a world that is open-ended and multivalent, beyond all ready-made categories of meaning-making. It is to be attentive to everyday textures of living in all their fleeting complexity and frailty, and to encounters with the alterity of a world we together share and inhabit.

It seems fitting then, by way of conclusion, to end with a quote by one of Wang’s most fervent admirers and a fiercely independent non-fiction filmmaker in his own right, Pedro Costa. Over a freewheeling interview-conversation organized by the magazine Metrograph, Costa, while discussing the limitations that independent filmmakers like them face, comes up with a deeply profound and encapsulating statement about Wang’s cinema, perhaps also equally redolent of this new strand of observational cinema as a whole:

But even with all these limitations—from society, and from film itself—I still feel that Wang Bing has this confidence vis-à-vis reality that that will always be there for him. It’s a two-way conversation he has with reality. He talks to reality and reality talks back to him.Annabel Brady-Brown. ‘Wang Bing in Conversation with Pedro Costa’. Metrograph. (Sept, 2023): https://metrograph.com/wangbingpedrocosta/