![]() Or, to put it another way: his films, patient and unflinching, document the relationships necessary to their making. “For me my films are the main way to recollect my own past,” he's said. This isn’t about some idea of stable truth, however when Wang speaks of this point of view, he’s speaking about his point of view. He prefers 18mm wide-angle lenses because, combined with the way he manoeuvres the camera (never over the shoulder, as anything other than a straight-on approach distorts the image), it helps him to get as close as possible to a match of what the eye sees. Trained as a cinematographer, Wang is particular about every aspect of his equipment. ![]() ![]() The camera doesn't obscure his face, nor is he accompanied by lighting gear. To return to the moment in Qi’s apartment, that reflection is Wang as he might appear to the people whose homes he enters as a guest. What he often brings up instead is the idea that his body of work is made up of, though they are often described in summaries that align the documentary form with journalistic reporting, personal films. In interviews he has spoken of his desire to have nothing to do with metaphors. Wang’s films do not encourage generalization. Fluorescents give the surroundings an olive tint, and not for the first time the framing Wang uses for his subject’s recounting includes the cushions, curtains, and posters that serve as the human handprints in an otherwise spare sheltering place. By this point, Wang has spent a lot of time - almost the entirety of Dead Souls, and numerous scenes across the rest of his filmography - in rooms like these, where light struggles to get in and walls seem to offer little protection. As he pans, he appears as a reflection in a floor-to-ceiling mirror at the end of a dark hallway, the image of the direct-cinema descendent: lightweight camera held out in front of his chest, absolutely precise in what he’s choosing to point toward, in the flow of the present-tense. Qi apologizes for the cold apartment - it seems the heat may have been shut off - and offers Wang a couchseat, but the director silently demurs and trains our view on the surroundings that will be the film's focus for the next 40 minutes. The first occurs 90 minutes into the nine-hour film, as Wang enters the apartment of Qi Luji, one of the few survivors of Jiabiangou labour camp.
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