Fengming: A Chinese Memoir.

"In his masterful, nine-hour documentary, West of the Tracks (which surfaced at Anthology last year), director Wang Bing used a rural freight railway as a conduit into China's uneasy transition from a planned to a market economy," writes Scott Foundas, reviewing Fengming: A Chinese Memoir for the Voice. "In this equally remarkable follow-up, he finds in a single room, and in He Fengming's harrowed eyes, another uncanny metaphor for individual lives undone by the dreams of nations."

Updated through 12/7.

"In the 50s, He Fengming was a journalist who had turned down a promising academic career to become a revolutionary," writes Andrew Chan in Reverse Shot:

At the height of Mao's Hundred Flowers Campaign, during which intellectuals were advised to contribute their opinions and let "a hundred schools of thought contend," her husband wrote an essay criticizing the corruption of bureaucracy, which led to the couple being branded as rightists. A long period of darkness ensued, separating the family, and transporting the woman from one state of persecution to another in China's labor camp system....

The camera, a still and patient witness, never averts its gaze, even when she gets up to use the bathroom, or receive a phone call, or turn on the apartment's harsh fluorescent lights. Shot in murky DV, this is a film that accepts the banal cycles of everyday existence, as if to save the "atrocity genre" from its own vulgar clichés. What emerges is a consummate work of art in the guise of a bare-bones oral history, as well as a remarkable piece of nonfiction that makes the whole art vs non-art question seem beside the point.

"Fengming stands alongside first-person precedents like Shirley Clarke's Portrait of Jason (1967) or Errol Morris's The Fog of War (2004) in its ability to wrest powerful effects from the deceptively simple set-up of a lone raconteur." Ed Halter for Artforum: "Filled with paranoia, thought-policing, and opportunistic struggles for power, the world that He describes could have been lifted from Orwell or Kafka, burning with a tragic romance at its center."

Screening at Anthology Film Archives in New York from today through Sunday.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto 07.

Update, 12/7: "[T]he Dry Gulch anecdotes offers two of the year's most vivid images: a cave filled with the discarded blankets of the deceased, and, thirty years later, the mounds and faded grave-markers of a make-shift cemetery," writes Michael J Anderson. "Fengming: A Chinese Memoir in this respect is a supremely visual work, even as Wang's camera does not stray from the film's eponymous subject. However, it is an imagery generated not by potentially-problematic reproductions (given the film's inherent melodrama, an entertainment in suffering might entail) but through He's expert storytelling, shading and foreshadowing - a perfect, similarly visual moment is her description of a possibly wolf-filled winter landscape - concealing and repeating for clarity. Fengming brings her unspeakable world back into existence."

Posted by dwhudson at December 5, 2008 1:31 AM