MAN WITH NO NAME Duration : 52 minutes Support: vidéo Director : WANG Bing (China) The film is still in production. Wang Bing presents a state of his researches in a study of this film. This study has been projected at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2008 in the frame of the Cahiers du Cinéma's Festival, where it meets with popular and critical acclaim. The final version will be presented at the Galerie Chantal Crousel in October 2009, on the occasion of the first solo show of the artist at the gallery.
Synopsis The story sets into the ruins of a deserted village, surrounded with an old wall, where lives only a man of 40 years old. He has no name. During the day, he works like an animal into the ruins, the night, he sleeps like a primitive in a cave. The winter, he goes out of the cave early and walks far away, in deserted fields, in order to find sheep and cow dirt for feeding his garden. In Springtime, the ruins of the village are grass-covered, he cultivates his garden and sows the seed. In summertime, he picks up little stones in the grass for building his house. In fall, he harvests a crop. His food comes from his own picking or from what he finds in another villages. He never speaks a word. Sometime, he speaks to himself. Sometime, he bursts into laughter. The bowl, the water keg and the other objects of everyday life are industrial waste. Day and night, month and year, he lives this way until his death in the cave or in the ruins or in the fields.
Director’s note The character of this story lives far from the worlds of the material and the spirit. He has built his own subsitence conditions. He often goes to the neighboring villages, although he doesn’t communicate with another people. He collects some waste but doesn’t beg. He prowls about the ruins of deserted villages, as an animal or as a ghost. Under double political and economical pressure, most of people are depriving of their last dignity into a world where it exists a lack of material and spirit. But a human being stays a human being. He is looking for reasons to continue to live.
FENGMING, A Chinese Memoir 2007 Duration : 4 hours Support: vidéo Director : WANG Bing (China)
Synopsis Winter in China. A town in the snow. Night is falling. Wrapped in her coat, an old woman walks slowly through a housing complex to her simple appartment. Inside, Fengming settles into her armchair and remembers. Her memories take us back to 1949 - to the beginning of a journey that will take us through 30 years of her life of the New China.
Director’s note It was in 1995 that I first met He Fengming and learned how whe and her family, and many others with destinies similar to her own, lived through the successive political movements that swept China over those long years. Those memories cannot fade, but live on in her today, like a spectre constantly returning to take us back to that time of extremism and terror, filling me with a growing anxiety.