WANG BING and NEW LEFT REVIEW
Could you tell us about your childhood and family background?
When i was born in 1967, our family was half in the city and half in the countryside. [1] My parents had left their respective villages in Shaanxi Province in the 1950s, both moving to the provincial capital, Xi’an. The early 1960s were the famine years, following the Great Leap Forward, and to reduce pressure on supplies, city-dwellers had been urged to move back to the countryside. By that time my father was studying in college, so it was my mother who left, though we three children were all born in Xi’an; my sister is two years older than me, my brother four years younger. By the time I was born, the Cultural Revolution had already started. Everybody advised—and my father agreed—that cities were too chaotic to be safe, plus it would be more convenient looking after little children in their home village. So after we were born, my mother always brought us back to the countryside. We all attended schools in rural areas.
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Did you see many films? Which ones had a particular influence on you?
We watched a lot of films, every day, of all different genres. But I couldn’t help noticing that, though the history of cinema appears to be very rich, it is also quite simple. That is to say, at first sight, you would see many different filmmakers, different schools and national traditions. However, going over the field in a systematic fashion, you could get a relatively comprehensive understanding, an overall picture of it.
Art history is very long, while film history is quite short. With a history of just over a hundred years, cinema is not an old form. Plus, not long after motion pictures came into being, the form had already permeated the culture of people’s daily life. In Europe and America, starting from the 1930s and lasting all the way to the 1970s, cinema reached the peak of its influence, as a vital part of cultural life. Various schools and traditions emerged—American, French, Italian, German and Soviet Russian—each formed by its respective environment and social context. Cinema has its own functions and requirements in each society. For example, film in Soviet Russia went on to become a propaganda instrument, whereas in the United States it quickly turned to serving commercial interests. From the beginning, experimentation and explorations differed from one country to another; the directions taken by cinematic innovation—both formal artistic features and technical advances—relates to the local socio-cultural history.
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Later on, you made two more documentaries, Crude Oil (2008) and Coal, Money (2010), which seem to continue the theme of West of the Tracks. Crude Oil lasts for fourteen hours, recording a group of workers at an oil field in the wilderness of China’s northwest Qinghai Province during a cold winter. The screening of the film in Los Angeles was in an exhibition space where the audience could walk in or stray out randomly. In fact, rarely did anyone sit there through the whole screening. It is like a work of installation art. Was that intentional?
Yes, it was. It was for the Rotterdam Film Festival. People there wanted to have a section of installation cinema. They came to ask me and I accepted their invitation. It was specially made for the purpose. It did not come with much money. As I was working in the northwest at the time, for convenience’s sake, I decided to shoot the oil field.
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