A Feature Film?

The HKIFF has begun for me last night! It began with a bang! I am not so sure I like the bang. It hit me. It dazed me. It puzzled me. It hit me with boredom. It dazed me with stupor. It puzzled me how easy one could pass for an author of a so-called "art film".

As the film "The Ditch"  (2010) opens, we see some people huddling on the ground of some yellow dirt. On screen right, there appears part of what looks like the side of a tent. Two figures approach. Then a third appears in the distance.The last figure was the director of a labour camp. The two newcomers were asked to go into a hole dug into the ground: a ditch, euphemised as "Dormitory No.8".  To the left was a row of  a dozen beds with some yellow dust covered quilts. To the right there was an opening serving probably to let in a bit of light and fresh air. Along one side of the dug-in mud wall we see some worn out looking wooden sideboards with hot water flasks and eating utensils. People moved about in silence, expressionless, with little interaction. We are then shown people sitting on their bed greedily slurping something up from a shallow metal soup bowl. Some workers moved in, approached one of the beds, wrapped something up, tied it with pieces of strings and bundled it out. It was a dead body. Outside, we are shown a row of people shovelling listlessly, without enthusiasm, without strength, at the side of what appeared a long ditch in the vast expanse of the Gobi Desert. Some one fell. Others tried to drag him up. He had no strength even to stand up. He was hauled upon higher ground to give him more air and probably left to die.

This goes on and on and on. We are shown more people dying, people scraping, struggling for every bit of food, eating seeds from what sparse vegetation there may be on the ground, an old man vomitting, another picking up the undigested seeds from the vomit on the ground and putting them into his own. Two of those inside that underground room got letters: their wives were divorcing them whilst in another corner, an  illiterate old man was asking a literate one to help him write a letter home, asking them to send more food supplements. We are shown more scenes of bodies being bundled up and dragged out from the "ditch", every morning and of people knowing that they are going to die and asking their friends to help them deal with their bodies after they go. One young man Lao Dong told another Xiao Li to hide his body at a corner in the hole for several days until his wife Gu arrives from Shanghai and for her to bury him but if Gu does not, then to take him outside and bury him. The wife arrives, discovers him dead, cries in ear piercing shrieks and wants to find his body, but not before she has given away in despair the biscuits she brought for her husband for those in the cell to share, then begs to be brought to where her husband is buried. Nobody knows. She begs again. Then she was told to go see the supervisor. She goes, sees a pettty proletarian official, got a lecture on evil middle class rightist value from that keeper of the death register book because she demanded to know where her husband's body was and swore not to leave until she did so. She returns to the cell and begs for more information. Nobody gives her any. She goes out all alone. She looks around. There were hundreds of earth mounds about. She digs one, two.... She does not find her husband, digs the dirt with her bare hands, covers up the corpses again when she finds a body other than her husband's. Finally with information of her husband's cell mates who initially were reluctant to let her know the horrible truth that later corpses were not buried but simply left piled up along the dust, she finds it. Her husband's mates help her burn it with scraps of twigs and leaves, setting up a bon-fire amidst the wasteland. 

The scenes depicted were those at Jiabiangou, one of the thousands set up during the Anti-Rightist movement following the "Let A Hundred Flower Bloom" movement launched after the spectacularly disastrous "Great Leap Forward" 1958-1961 in which Mao urged the Chinese people to do in one day what the West would take twenty years. In the "Hundred Flower Bloom" movement, later described by Mao as "luring the snakes from their den", Chinese intellectuals were encouraged to voice their opinion on how the Socialist Revolution might go forward. The result was a flood of criticism more than the Chinese Communist Party could swallow.Those who honestly voiced their opinion were accused of having rightist bourgeois thinking , the equivalent of being accused of being a devil or a witch in Medieval Europe, and sent to so-called Labour Camps for "re-education". Jiabiangou was one of them, in the middle of nowhere in the Gobi Desert. Some three thousand political prisoners were arrested and sent to the Jiabiangou Labour-Re-education Camp – which was only built to hold fifty inmates – in the middle of the Gobi Desert, more than 2,500 of whom either were starved to death or if not died of dysentry or simply exhaustion.

Partly inspired by Yang Xianhui’s novel Goodbye , The Ditch is said to recount the harrowing story of life at the labour camp. The co-maker, screenplay writer and director of the film ,Wang Bing devoted several years to interviewing survivors of the camp, who shared their devastating and chilling experiences. Because of unbearable hunger, prisoners were forced to forage for scraps of food: leaves, seeds, rats, even human vomits and feces and human flesh from dead bodies of other inmates, so severe was their hunger. As the film ends, one of the inmates was told to stay behind to help the camps's director  because the authorities knew that it was impossible for the current batch to do any useful work because they were rationed only 8 ounces of fluid food per day and had to be sent home by a train because the daily deaths was more than they could handle.

It was a film with potentially explosive emotional impact. But director Wang Bing chose to use a spare documentary style, without music, without story line, just bare, stark "reality": the reality of hunger, death, despair in that darkest hour of Chinese history. Nothing is made of the stunning immensity of the Gobi Desert or its desolation. There was no plot, no explicit drama, no use of the camera through panning, close-ups or camera movements etc. The camera was static. So were the scenes depicted. There was no music. Nor any contrast between the silence of the dormitory of death and the howling cold winds of the Gobi Desert outside nor that between the spectacular sunrise or sunset of the desert outside and the murkiness of the dormitory of the dying within. Nothing stands out: a landscape of uniform boredom, unrelenting bleakness and unmitigated gloom. I find it particularly unedurable that the director subjected us to the non-stop shrieking of Gu for more than two minutes when she learned of her husband's death. It was positively ennervating and shows an utter lack of artistic sensitivity or restraint. Probably, the director never read LaoTzu. Others may like it. But for me, it's a colossal flop. It is an artless "documentary" which passes itself off as a feature film or more likely its reverse. Perhaps, it was deliberately "artless" so as to enhance the sense of "verisimilitude". I can understand Wong Bing's dedication to unearth for us this now forgotten episode of Chinese history, he having spent three years tracking down and interviewing survivors and wardens of this forsaken corner of the Gobi Desert on what actually went on there but I suppose there are more interesting ways of doing so than merely "reproducing" what obviously is a "staged reality".  As it is, I find it as dry as the sands, as monotonous as the landscape and about as moving as the empty expanse of the vast Gobi Desert skies. But I do like that dramatic scene in which an old CCP party cadre who had served the Revolution since 1938 confronted the camp director. There should have been more scenes like that to create more dramatic conflict and emotional tension! 

 

        Communist Labor Re-Education Camp officials waiting for new arrivals

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The new Arrivals entering into their "ditch" 







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Man scraping for seeds from stunted desert plants to abate his hunger





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An inmate's wife looking for her husband's make-shift grave





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Men awaiting other arrivals





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           Co-producer, screenplay writer and director Wang Bing

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