黑衣人 (Man in Black). 2023. France/USA/UK. Directed by Wang Bing. DCP. In Mandarin; English subtitles. 60 min.
For his first film made outside of China, Wang Bing assembled a team of French collaborators—Claire Atherton and cinematographer Caroline Champetier—and staged an unforgettable encounter with Wang Xilin, one of China’s most important modern classical composers. Stepping fully nude onto Paris’s Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord’s proscenium stage, the 86-year-old artist achingly recounts the political persecution, forced labor, and torture he endured during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The camera circles around Wang Xilin, attentive to the contortions of his body and the scars and flesh that carry the weight of history, while passages from the composer’s symphonies erupt, at times drowning out his words, before receding. For Wang Bing and Atherton, music does not merely accompany the images—rather, it is its own form of testimony. A seeming departure from the director’s multihour observational documentaries chronicling the marginalized in contemporary China, Man in Black is an electrifying portrait of artistic creation and resilience in the face of historical trauma.