Chinese director Wang Bing is a master of patience, as evidenced by his latest documentary, Youth (Spring), which premiered at Cannes and runs a whopping three-and-a-half hours. His second Cannes film, Man in Black, is considerably shorter at just 60 minutes, but it still unfolds with a deliberate and measured pace. The film, which premiered on Monday night in the festival’s Special Screenings section, opens with an elderly man moving slowly and silently in the shadows of an empty auditorium. It takes a moment for the audience to realize he is nude, but this vulnerability only adds to the film’s power.
This man is Wang Xilin, one of China’s leading classical composers, and the camera follows him as he makes his way to the stage, entering a key light. Though unlined and strikingly handsome, his face radiates with the gravity of a man who has endured brutal torture at the hands of Chinese authorities. The film is a portrait of an artist who brought beauty and creativity into the world at immense personal sacrifice.
Wang recounts his painful memories, confronting his past alone. He joined the People’s Liberation Army at the age of 13, and later studied at the Shanghai Conservatory. But he chafed against the ideological bent of the instruction. “I was tired of their preaching,” he says. “They said to compose music, first and foremost you need correct thought and a knowledge of Marxism-Leninism.” He split from the Communist Party, a decision that earned him abuse from his fellow students. “The whole class condemned me for wrong thought.”
Things took a more dire turn with the advent of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, with its rigid imposition of ideological correctness. Wang publicly criticized making art subservient to politics, a controversial statement that made him an immediate target for persecution. He recalls being taken into custody, tortured and beaten so severely that he partially lost his hearing and had his teeth knocked out. He and other prisoners, he says, were paraded on grueling marches, signs hung around their necks that read “Counter-Revolutionary.”
Despite the intense repression, Wang managed to write numerous symphonic works. His compositions, shattering in their intensity and foreboding themes, are interspersed in the documentary. At times when he is unburdening himself of his memories, the score swells, drowning out his words. The music speaks for itself.
Man in Black is one of the most unique “biographical” documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s not an assemblage of archive clips and interviews, the kind of stuff typically seen in films about artists. This is more like an evocative tour of a man’s mind – a man who bravely pursued his art in defiance of a regime that tried to control or silence him. The exceptional lighting and elegant camera moves create the atmosphere of a dark study, in keeping with the subject’s contemplation of his painful experience.
As to why Wang Xilin is nude throughout the film, I cannot say. But it does give one the sense of witnessing a person in a private moment of reflection, alone with his thoughts and memories. And stripped bare of any artifice or armature. It’s a powerful and moving portrait of an artist who refused to be silenced.
