Long Movie Marathon 2.0 Part III
“where are you going?”
——
“nowhere.”
——
“what?”
——
“nowhere.”
once again Wang Bing delivered in great fashion with this bleak and miserable masterpiece.
Wang Bing, the man at the forefront of documentary cinema, has refined and perfected making raw, depressing, and grim documentaries that explore dystopian and neglected hellscapes mankind is unfortunate enough to inhabit. he uses length like a blade to etch its excruciation into the depths of your mind, he is constantly reminding you this is reality, this is life for many people, hopelessness has become their god, and we are just a fly on the wall, observing a small fragment of the totality of their penance, their decay, their total mental desolation. whats truly genius about films like this to me is how empathy is used against you. you sit there watching these sufferings unfold, wanting to help but completely unable to, you become enslaved by the chains of powerlessness, and in this way, you too suffer, be it to a far lesser degree, and then by the end of the film you’ve given up, you’ve given in to not being able to do anything, not being able to change anything, and so you too somewhat join them in their fate of helpless subjugation.
i wouldnt say this is quite in the same league as ‘Tie Xi Qu’ (not much is), but its still a phenomenal piece of nonfiction cinema. im starting to see why people say Wang Bing can hold his own against the likes of Les Blank, Werner Herzog, or any of the other legends of documentary filmmaking.
Long Movie Marathon 2.0 Part III
“where are you going?”
——
“nowhere.”
——
“what?”
——
“nowhere.”
once again Wang Bing delivered in great fashion with this bleak and miserable masterpiece.
Wang Bing, the man at the forefront of documentary cinema, has refined and perfected making raw, depressing, and grim documentaries that explore dystopian and neglected hellscapes mankind is unfortunate enough to inhabit. he uses length like a blade to etch its excruciation into the depths of your mind, he is constantly reminding you this is reality, this is life for many people, hopelessness has become their god, and we are just a fly on the wall, observing a small fragment of the totality of their penance, their decay, their total mental desolation. whats truly genius about films like this to me is how empathy is used against you. you sit there watching these sufferings unfold, wanting to help but completely unable to, you become enslaved by the chains of powerlessness, and in this way, you too suffer, be it to a far lesser degree, and then by the end of the film you’ve given up, you’ve given in to not being able to do anything, not being able to change anything, and so you too somewhat join them in their fate of helpless subjugation.
i wouldnt say this is quite in the same league as ‘Tie Xi Qu’ (not much is), but its still a phenomenal piece of nonfiction cinema. im starting to see why people say Wang Bing can hold his own against the likes of Les Blank, Werner Herzog, or any of the other legends of documentary filmmaking.
