4.
Fengming, Anchor of China In Conversation with Julien Gester
Three hours of static shots and one testimony of a survivor of Mao’s purges, that’s all Wang Bing needs to dig into the suppressed memory of the Cultural Revolution. The voice of Fenming is patient, cautious and her words, though occasionally interspersed with phlegmatic tears, seem matured by an infinite modesty. For three hours, this nearly immobile little lady looks at us and narrates half a century of intimate contact with China’s abominations. Little by little, the fifteen-something long static shots dusk, as the night plunges into her story and the apartment. Facing Fengming and examining her through his deployment of lenses is Wang Bing, the new titan of documentary film – a title bestowed on him since his 2002 monster film West of the Tracks, which wanders the ruins of neo-capitalist China corroded by rust and economic obsolescence. In front of Wang Bing’s impassible camera, Fengming, who wrote her memoirs recalling her passages in the gulags of the People’s Republic of China, the laogai. Both lucidly and utterly literary, Fengming narrates her life story. First, ingenuous enthusiasm in 1949 – she’s 17 and prefers the grey uniform
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of the early revolution above her former dresses. Subsequently, innocent disbelief when eight years later she hears the accusations of ‘Rightist’ conspiracy, the public abuses of the executives of the Party. Finally, her deportation to a camp, where she’s separated from her husband and for a long time longs for a reunion, until she learns of her husband’s death in one of the most horrendous colonies for ‘re-education through labour’ in the Gobi desert. Modestly sobbing, she pours out her heart and speaks of their love, which became ‘softer’ when confronted by the torments of the regime. She also talks about the Cultural Revolution that followed and its new cortege of horrors, the terrible impossibility of mourning... Of a paralysing simplicity, this immense film proves to be the only one to document the ‘Anti-Rightist’ campaign of the 1950s and its ravages, from deportation to anthropophagy, which remain an absolute taboo. An era that, according to Wang Bing, in its monstrous obstinacy of rewriting both present and history has only left spectres as its survivors and witnesses.