2 - History in the Making: The Debut Epic Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks

Summary

Abstract

This chapter discusses Wang Bing’s debut Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks (2002) and engages with history and labour issues. The film shows Wang’s way of observing ‘history in the making’ and extrapolating narratives from an extensive process of shooting. The film is discussed as an unconventional cinematic reportage. Its structure, extensive duration, and approach make this film a groundbreaking work that intertwines various film modes and connects different film traditions, from the early documentaries of the Lumière Brothers to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1972).

Keywords: Documentary cinema, China, Labour, Industrial space, Laid-off workers, Wang Bing, Terrence Malick

The grand epics in history – for example, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Commedia, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Toni Morrison’s Beloved – reconnect us collectively with the past and with the shaping myth that gave that period of history its ground, in the form of its beliefs and values to sustain it. Epics retrieve, renew, and refresh the myth, dust it off and send it back out in the world. Epics, then, are a people’s grand recollections that allow them to remember who and what they are and wish to be.

Dennis Patrick Slattery (2015), Review of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven

West of the Tracks was first screened in its full length of 545 minutes at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January 2003. It was the result of a two-year-long editing process based on over 300 hours of material. The rough images of a Chinese industrial area were shot during the years 1999–2002. The first version dates back to 2002 and is a 300-minute version, which was only screened at the Forum of the Berlin International Film Festival with the title of Tiexi District. Thanks to the support of the Dutch Hubert Bals Fund, the director – then a young filmmaker whose only previous experience was as a cameraman in TV fiction and feature films1 – could rework the first editing into the current 545-minute version, which premiered in Rotterdam and was later released on DVD.

With this nine-hour long triptych, Wang Bing documented the slow process through which the so-called rust belt of China was closed down and workers in the industrial district of Tiexi dismissed.