As the most internationally renowned nonfiction filmmaker from China, Wang Bing’s films have received immense critical acclaim and scholarly attention over the past two decades. Following Elena Pollacchi’s monograph entitled Wang Bing’s Filmmaking of the China Dream (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), Bruno Lessard’s is the second book-length study devoted to the director’s most important works from 2003 to 2018. Rather than claiming auteur status for Wang Bing or grouping him with China’s New Documentary Movement, however, Lessard considers Wang Bing a minjian filmmaker – a concept borrowed from Sebastian Veg’s recent book, Minjian: The Rise of Grassroots Intellectuals (Columbia University Press, 2021) – concerned with documenting the plights of precarious, marginalized and disenfranchised social groups. Lessard does not focus on Wang Bing’s film aesthetics or techniques but instead develops a “sociopolitics of the documentary film” – essentially a methodology connecting textual analysis with the films’ political, social, economic and historical contexts.

The book’s eight chapters are organized in two halves, neatly entitled “The Labor of History” and “The History of Labor,” with the first chapter of each part giving an introduction and historical contextualization for the films analysed in the next three chapters. Part one examines three of Wang Bing’s cinematic monuments to the victims and survivors of Chinese labour camps in Gansu Province from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. After a basic summary of social histories of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward famine in chapter one, chapter two examines Fengming, a Chinese Memoir (2003) as an oral history film focusing on a single female survivor as “an embodied archive of the period with a specific affective and performative charge” (p. 69). Chapter three focuses on Wang Bing’s only fictional feature, The Ditch (2010), a film adaptation of Yang Xianhui’s fictionalized accounts of Jiabiangou labour camps. Lessard considers the reenactment by semi-professional and nonprofessional actors to recreate the camps “techniques of creative repetition.” Chapter four turns to the eight-hour documentary Dead Souls (2018), featuring oral history testimonies of several survivors of the Mingshui labour camp. Here Lessard pays special attention to the film’s landscape sequences shot at the camp ruins and gazing at scattered bones, arguing that Dead Souls is equally interested in documenting nonhuman survivors. Overall, part one contends that documentary works hard to access an elusive past condemned to state-sponsored amnesia.

Part two turns to Wang Bing’s documentation of Chinese factories and workers of the 21st century, from the end of state-owned enterprises in north-east China to migrant workers in the coastal cities. Chapter five gives socioeconomic contextualization to the transformation of worker identity and labour organization through the lens of Foucault-inspired “governmentality.” It then applies Allan Sekula’s notion of “critical realism” as a documentary method to Wang Bing’s cinema and distinguishes it from socialist realism. Chapter six revisits Wang Bing’s acclaimed nine-hour masterpiece West of the Tracks (2003), which bears patient and intimate witness to the inexorable ruination of Manchuria’s industrial complex and the lives of its million workers. Since much has been written about this film, it is hard to say anything new, but Lessard selectively cites scholarship to claim that insufficient attention has been paid to the last two-thirds of the trilogy on the demolition of the neighbourhood and on the father and son living along the railway tracks. Chapter seven highlights a lesser-known film in Wang Bing’s oeuvre, Coal Money (2009), which sheds special light on coal transportation and its environmental impact by focusing on truck drivers and coal sellers. This chapter contends that Wang Bing’s emphasis on human interactions across “minescapes” highlights sociocultural, material and economic exchanges as integral parts of energy resource extraction. The last chapter on Wang Bing’s Bitter Money (2016) focuses on rural migrant workers who travel to coastal provinces to seek employment in the textile and garment industry. Analysing the film through the lens of spatial politics, the chapter discusses the workers’ movement from Yunnan to Zhejiang provinces as well as between workshops and dormitories, finally touching on issues of female subjectivity and domestic violence.

Written in a clear and accessible way, this book could be useful for teaching Wang Bing’s films in classes on Chinese cinema, documentary media or global auteurs. The histories and theories presented in the study are largely derivative of existing scholarship and commentary, but the concise summaries of events and concepts could still be helpful for undergraduate students as they grapple with Wang Bing’s more recent works such as Man in Black (2023) and the Youth Trilogy (2024). The socio-poetic approach can also provide a nice model for student papers on documentary films or critical realist cinema by other filmmakers.