The Ditch – Wang Bing (2010)

Wang Bing’s films have been high on my watch list for quite some time. West of the Tracks, a nine-hour documentary, is still waiting for me. But DVDs can be exceptionally patient, more so than humans! I finally got round seeing The Ditch (2010) after a recommendation by Michael Guarneri, who thought that the film’s content chimed well with my work on Lav Diaz. And it sure does, and yet it’s so very different.

If you’re looking for a nicely photographed film, then The Ditch is not for you. It’s a simple film. The style is pretty rudimentary at times. I’m not saying that Wang Bing has chosen to make the film look amateurish on purpose. Nor am I saying that he cannot do any better. For some reason, regardless of the director’s reason and background, the style fits well to the content. Set in 1960, The Ditch tells the story of inmates of Jiabiangou, a “prisoner correction camp”, or simply a labour camp, in the Gobi Desert. The film was shot without official permission on the actual location. So that gives you an idea of how far Wang Bing is willing to go in order to tell repressed histories of his country. It also explains the rudimentary aesthetics.

Wang Bing is best known for his documentaries, and if you didn’t know that The Ditch is supposed to be a feature film, you could be fooled. I found the aesthetics very documentary like. I had the feeling that Wang Bing was present at something that was, in reality, unfolding in front of him. It may have been the handheld camera. It also felt as though the characters didn’t mind the camera. They just “lived” their roles, so I felt torn between what The Ditch really was; documentary or fiction. I knew that it couldn’t be a straightforward documentary, and yet the aesthetics reminded me of it.

The film is a strong image of suffering and slow death, exactly what you find in Diaz’s films. But it’s portrayed more head-on, down-to-earth without any intention to create something special. This would have turned the suffering into spectacle. By remaining at a distance, Wang Bing counters this risk.

I do feel as though The Ditch should have been longer and I’m not saying this because I like long films. In order to get to the bottom of such a subject and the psychology of the characters you need to spend more than 90 minutes with them. I’m aware of the restrictions the secret production brought with it. Nevertheless, an hour more would have been sufficient to add more power to the film.

The prisoners suffer from cold and hunger. One inmate is seen eating the vomit of another. Another is killing and cooking a rat, for which he is later punished. We also learn in conversations between characters that inmates cut flesh off dead inmates out of sheer desperation over their hunger. The characters’ psychology isn’t as visible as it is in Diaz’s films, which use their duration in order to demonstrate the power of the concentrationary system, i.e. terror, degradation, reducing the inmates to bare life, aiming for psychological disintegration.

And because all of this needs time (the main component of the concentrationary), the film is too short for its in-depth portrayal of the subject. It’s good but too short. Some shots are beautiful and give you a sense of the vastness of the Gobi Desert. There’s no escape possible for the inmates. There’s nothing but emptiness surrounding them. There’s no hope. Even if you tried to escape, it’ll likely mean death. Nevertheless, I would like to see The Ditch as part of a bigger project, a project that positions time/duration more in the centre because it is essential for this subject.

I believe that The Ditch needs a second viewing. I became extremely irritated by the arrival of a female character, who shattered my sensation of seeing something unfolding in real time. She’s the wife of an inmate who had died 8 days earlier and I don’t understand Wang Bing’s decision to include her. His film was extremely focused, to the point, and powerful. The woman was terribly artificial in her acting. She was over the top and got on my nerves. I found her unrealistic. Coming from the city, carrying a handbag – that’s fine. But carrying the handbag around in the desert while looking in despair for her husband? Taking shovel and handbag? And while the men are all wrapped up and freeze, she can stay a night without blankets and is perfectly fine.

It all felt like stupid mistakes as seen in Hollywood films; completely over the top, nonsensical things. With her arrival, I became impatient with the film, which until then had been great. The female character was not necessary and took away screen time for the actual portrayal of suffering. This may be the reason why I thought that the film was too short.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to more Wang Bing films. I was my first, and certainly not my last!

Between Suspense and Time Terror

As a result of the paper I gave at the University of Stirling at the beginning of the month, I looked more into aspects of terror. In my paper I used the term “time terror” to describe the feeling Lav Diaz generates in Florentina Hubaldo CTE (2012), Melancholia (2008) and Death in the Land of Encantos (2007). One question that came up in the Q&A after my presentation was for whom Diaz created this “time terror”. I originally only thought of the characters, who are always found in situations of anxiety, paranoia, fear, hopelessness, and uncertainty.

But then there is this odd feeling I get when I watch those films, and I concluded that the “time terror” applies to both film character and film spectator. It was in a different context, namely the use of endless duration in scenes of characters walking along roads, that Diaz one said he aimed at making the viewer feel time. I don’t think this is the only circumstance where this feeling of time comes into play. I see his films as trying to convey the sensation of what life is like for the characters.

In any case, I’m only playing around with thoughts, so I have by no way an answer to another really interesting (and helpful) question: what do I see as the difference between suspense and time terror? This is a very good point, and there is somewhat an agreement that Lav Diaz does not create suspense as such. It is something else, but what exactly is it?

I found a book I thought could be interesting, called The Aesthetics of Terror. It had very little to do with what I actually wanted. However, there was one argument in the book that made me think: terror comes quick, often without expectations. It appears as quick as it disappears. From that point of view, my idea of terror in Diaz’s films does not seem to fit. Not if we take the modern post-9/11 sense of terror.

My thought about terror stems from my reading on sociological and psychological aspects in concentration camps, where the prisoners’ time-consciousness was deliberately shattered so as to remove frameworks they could hold on to. The shattered time-consciousness led to disorientation. As I detailed in my paper, time in the camps was either experientially stretched by endless roll calls, or accelerated by sudden beatings. There was thus a persistent switch between slowness and speed. This was called terror, or totalitarianism, but because all writers came back to the same aspects of time, I termed it time terror, which suited my research, and makes this specific form of terror much clearer.

Now, you do find the same aspects in Diaz’s films. There is an endless duration in his films, obviously mainly evoked by extreme long-takes, but also by long periods of silence or little action. All of this together slows down the narrative and stretches time, often to an extreme. And then you have brief intermissions, for instance in Florentina, where those stretches of endless duration are interrupted by sudden violence. This is obviously not only felt by the character. It is also the viewer who is put into states of shock after periods of peace, followed by periods of sudden violence.

This all makes sense, and it only needs a few clarifications, which I’m working on in my head at the moment. But how about suspense? Hitchcock’s approach was mentioned…put the bomb under the table and have the family have dinner at it. You don’t need to see the bomb going off or anything. It’s just there. This is indeed similar to Diaz, who often prefers not to show violence, but who much rather creates sensations. So why am I speaking of ‘time terror’ and not of suspense?

I’m not entirely sure at the moment, and I’d be grateful for any thoughts on this. My own thoughts were going back to the play on time. I do see a link between terror/suspense and time. I do not necessarily agree with the above mentioned argument that terror comes quick. The actual act of violence comes quick, but terror is a much larger concept. If we face it, the (Western) world has lived in fear since 9/11. This is terror. The violent attacks that we have seen since then are only a part of it, but they are not terror in itself.

For me, time terror means endless duration first of all, often quite literally because we have no idea when something ends. I also think that terror is a long process, and it therefore goes well with Diaz’s extremely long films, in which he uses the time he has at his hands to create a sensation of terror. Suspense for me is more short-lived. We know suspense from pretty much all contemporary films; horror, thrillers, even comedies do contain suspense at times. But these scenes of suspense are short-lived. You do not live through hours of uncertainty before something may or may not happen. It is rare that you feel suspense for an entire two hour long film. Horror films may be a different thing to look at here. I’m not sure whether duration alone is enough to explain terror (as opposed to suspense). I think I could make a case for it, but I’m happy to hear any feedback on this issue that could help me explain my time terror theory in clearer terms.