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Dead Souls (Wang Bing, 2018)
🕑 Added 2018-12-17 00:11:08 +0000 UTC
I have already logged a review of this film in my coverage of TIFF Wavelengths 2018, based on having watched four of its eight hours -- not something I'm particularly proud of, but an absolute necessity given the sheer bulk of material I had to plow through in a short amount of time. Fortunately, my original review stands, with the possible exception that I have a greater admiration for Dead Souls now that I have seen it in its entirety.
This film represents a total of 13 years' worth of research, interviews, and editing, and although there is a kind of spectatorial numbness that sets in as the testimonies amass, I believe this is quite intentional. Much like the cadres during the Cultural Revolution (one of whom Wang speaks to in the penultimate interview), we eventually lose our ability to be shocked and mortified by the horrors that Mao's armies and bureaucrats inflicted on the so-called Rightists. The white blanket was gray with lice. The men damaged each others' anuses with chopsticks working out dried fecal matter after they stopped having bowel movements. One man witnessed another man succumb to hunger by eating human flesh. How are we to process this?
The film ends with shots of the now-barren landscape where the Mingshui re-education camp once stood. Compared to it, as we learn, the camp at Jiabiangou was practically humane. At Mingshui, prisoners had to dig shelters for themselves, "troglodyte homes" in the side of hills. Most were too weak to dig out full structures, so they slept in ditches that came up to their waist, their heads and torsos exposed to the elements. Starvation was a matter of course. Some loyal family members came to stay with imprisoned Rightists, while others merely smuggled small portions of food to them in the mail. (Few ever received these meager morsels.)
The landscape bears witness to what went on there. Unlike Lanzmann's Shoah, which relies in many cases on memory and testimony alone, Wang is still able to find human remains at Mingshui with little difficulty. Why hasn't the government covered up these atrocities? The accused Rightists were rehabilitated in the 1970s, but one imagines that there is still a reticence to acknowledge the enormity of the wrong committed, because the Party cannot withstand criticism to this day. Wang ends Dead Souls by demonstrating that the bodies remain unburied, unidentified, and to this day there has been no reckoning.
