(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Workers in blue canvas stand on either side of a mine shaft, the flashlights on their helmets pointing to the viewer. Everything is motionless until the chain between the tracks leading down the mine begins to move with a deep, rattling, monotonous, sustained and strangely soothing sound.
This is the opening scene of Xiaoshuai Wangs Chinese Portrait, which premiered as a documentary at the Busan International Film Festival in October. The movie has no plot and no dialogue. The material has previously been shown as an art installation where the portraits are blown up on four walls with the viewer placed in the center of the room, but have now been edited to an 80 minute format in a quirky but breathtaking form of documentary.
Through Wang's camera brush, the audience meets people, material structures and landscapes in China's cities and rural areas. A family of five eats a meal in a narrow courtyard, two men chatting with each other, a child playing around the table, while a woman and an old lady look silently directly into the camera, as many of the portraits of human subjects do.
A Changing China
In another scene, a man sits on a concrete block – neatly, with a straight back – with a welcoming, slightly uncertain smile as the camera paints his portrait. His yellow helmet matches the yellow grave cow working in the background. In a later scene, the viewer is taken to the area behind the construction site: old single-storey brick houses connected to the rest of the city by a muddy road, which an elderly woman in orange work clothes is patiently sweeping. People, cars and bikes pass by the picture frame, which remains locked throughout all the scenes of the film.
One gets the impression that these brick houses, and the life that takes place in them, will soon be replaced by high-rise buildings inhabited by newcomers, and left with the idea of what will happen to the people who appear in the portrait.
A similar fate of expulsion and oblivion may lie ahead of another motif in the film: In front of a hut, two shepherds stand silent and look into the camera with eyes that have seen things most viewers will never see, surrounded by a mountainous landscape. The only movement in the portrait is the lamb that one of the shepherds calmly holds in his arms.
From abandoned cities in remote provinces to big cities, factory production, beaches and mountain valleys linger Chinese Portrait by that China, which may not be here tomorrow. We are taken into office landscapes, along train tracks, to street markets, Friday prayers and nursing homes. All composed as portrait paintings, and in almost every scene there is someone who looks us in the eye with an unfathomable look.
A beginning without an end
The instructor himself has said that he does not know what to call the method he has used in Chinese Portrait, but the idea arose when a friend asked him to film while painting outdoors. After occupying various parts of the country for decades, Wang also felt called upon to preserve some of the landscapes, cities and lives he encountered along the way, to further explore what China was – and is – and how it has shaped him while it itself is undergoing rapid transformation.
One gets the impression that these brick houses, and the life that takes place in them, will soon be replaced by high-rise buildings inhabited by newcomers
The documentary has a certain melancholy, but no longing for anything specific – the portraits are moving in their immobility, which contrasts with the speed with which China is changing in these years. Wang's concept was that people should stand completely still in front of the camera, which also stands completely still. Other things move in the subject – machines, chains, animals, grass in the wind – and sometimes people do too, or their facial expressions do, and this conceptual loss of control adds tension and tenderness to the portraits.
Eye contact is a sensitive activity, even for a viewer that the people in the portraits for good reasons cannot see. We get an insight into life and mind and memories and worries in the context they – perhaps – were shaped, but we know no more than what the moment of the portrait reveals. We know nothing about the people and the places, only what is within the camera's frame in the specific minutes.
The project had a beginning, in 2008, but no end, as Wang explains it. Much of what he and his film crew recorded Chinese Portrait, did not join the final edit. Hopefully some of the extras can be used in other films and the project can continue. Each portrait leaves one with thoughts about the past, present and future and about the ways in which places shape the people who populate them.
