Naked, an old man walks through an empty theatre. His movements suddenly seem choreographed. Wang Xilin, the 86-year-old composer, re-enacts the scenes of violence from his life in Mao’s China: the forced labour of the Cultural Revolution, the public humiliations and so on. Wang Bing’s camera circles round him, but this seismograph of suffering evolves into a recording of the force of resistance. When he begins to tell his story, the editing brings in his music, almost drowning out his words – a pointed way of transforming this music into speech, of making it the direct representation of vocalised anger, of linking these different forms of presence into a continuum expressing the same refusal to bend.
Nathan Letoré
