“好吧，我从头开始说。”
The opening words spoken in Wang Bing’s film “He Fengming: A Chinese Memoir” are humble ones. But what follows is a record of cataclysmic times in postwar China, recounted by Ms. He, a survivor of forced labor camps. She methodically speaks of how it happened, how she was separated from her husband, all while seated in her cluttered, dimly lit, utterly ordinary home.
王兵的电影《和凤鸣》有着谦虚的开场白。但接下来，是一份战后中国灾难时代的记录，讲述者是劳教幸存者和凤鸣。她坐在杂乱、昏暗、再普通不过的家中，有条不紊地叙述一切是如何发生，她又如何与丈夫分离。
The result is by turns shattering and sedate — a testimony that one critic called “both a cry of pain and a sigh of relief.”
后来她时而精疲力尽，时而镇定自若——一位影评人说，她的证词“既是痛苦的呐喊，又是如释重负的叹息”。
“He Fengming” screened at Cannes in 2007, the same year as “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” and “No Country for Old Men.” Now Mr. Wang returns to the festival with a work that gives voice to more living veterans of history like Ms. He. “Dead Souls,” his new documentary, has its world premiere this week, clocking in at 8 hours 15 minutes.
《和凤鸣》于2007年在戛纳放映，同年该电影节还上映了《四月三周两天》(4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days)和《老无所依》(No Country for Old Men)。现在，王兵重返戛纳，带来了一部作品，令更多和凤鸣这样饱经历史沧桑者能够发声。他的新纪录片《死灵魂》时长8小时15分钟，于本周在全球首映。
“The only objective is to obtain, from their memories, the knowledge of the people who can no longer speak of what they went through,” Mr. Wang said in an interview.
“唯一的目标就是通过他们的记忆，去了解那些不能再谈起自己经历的人们，”王兵在接受采访时说。
The subjects of “Dead Souls” were condemned in the Communist Party’s “anti-rightist” campaign in the 1950s. Like Ms. He, they were imprisoned, enslaved and starved in “re-education” camps like Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert.
《死灵魂》的拍摄对象在1950年代共产党的反右运动中被打为右派。像和凤鸣一样，他们在位于戈壁沙漠夹边沟那样的“劳改”营地忍饥挨饿，遭受监禁和奴役。
“Dead Souls” is only the latest film in an ambitious, outsize oeuvre that seems to take Frederick Wiseman as the benchmark for capturing the experience of a nation.
王兵的作品全都雄心勃勃、规模庞大，似乎以弗雷德里克·怀斯曼(Frederick Wiseman)为标准，力图刻画一个国家的体验，《死灵魂》是其中最新的一部。
Mr. Wang’s previous works include his gargantuan chronicle of obsolescent factories and their workers, “West of the Tracks,” which The New York Times called a “nine-hour masterpiece.” His 14-hour installation “Crude Oil” tracked the process of oil extraction. “Mrs. Fang,” his most recent, is a comparatively brief (86 minutes) but devastating elegy of an older woman’s final days.
王兵之前的作品包括他为几座即将拆除的工厂及其工人拍下的宏大编年史《铁西区》，《纽约时报》称其为“九个小时的杰作”。他14个小时的作品《原油》跟踪石油开采过程。 他的近作《方秀英》比较短(86分钟)，是关于一位老年女性人生最后几天的悲哀挽歌。
Mr. Wang sits at the pinnacle of the Chinese documentary groundswell that arose with the country’s social and economic upheaval in the 1990s. Last year, he won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno film festival, bestowed by a jury led by the filmmaker Olivier Assayas. His work has premiered in Berlin, Venice (garnering another prize), and Documenta (which has also commissioned projects of his), with retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou and the Harvard Film Archive.
1990年代正值中国社会和经济动荡时期，中国纪录片随之迅速高涨，王兵的作品居于其巅峰。去年，他在洛迦诺电影节(Locarno film festival)获得由电影人奥利维耶·阿萨亚斯(Olivier Assayas)领导的评审团颁发的金豹奖。他的作品在柏林电影节、威尼斯电影节(他在该电影节获得另一奖项)和国际艺术文献展(也是其多个项目的委约方)首映，并在蓬皮杜艺术中心和哈佛电影资料馆做过回顾展映。
“Wang brings us inside the world he is chronicling so thoroughly that, if we watch it in one go, we are apt to lose track of what things outside are like,” the critic Luc Sante wrote of Mr. Wang’s “epic and intimate” cinema.
“王兵带我们进入这个他正在全面记录的世界，如果一口气看完，简直会让人忘记这个世界之外的事情，”评论家吕克·桑特(Luc Sante)这样评价王兵那些“宏伟而又私密”的电影。
“‘Fengming’ stands alongside first-person precedents like Shirley Clarke’s ‘Portrait of Jason’ (1967) and Errol Morris’s ‘The Fog of War’ (2004) in its ability to wrest powerful effects from the deceptively simple setup of a lone raconteur,” the critic Ed Halter wrote. Other admirers include the filmmakers Jia Zhangke, Arnaud Desplechin and Pedro Costa.
“《和凤鸣》与雪莉·克拉克(Shirley Clarke)的《杰森的画像》(Portrait of Jason, 1967)、埃罗尔·莫里斯(Errol Morris)的《战争迷雾》(The Fog of War, 2004)等先例一样，使用第一人称叙事，因而能够从一个孤独的故事讲述者看似简单的环境中制造强有力的效果，”评论家艾德·霍尔特(Ed Halter)写道。王兵的仰慕者还包括电影人贾樟柯、阿诺·德斯普利钦(Arnaud Desplechin)和佩德罗·科斯塔(Pedro Costa)。
For his part, Mr. Wang can sound very modest about his continuing document of Chinese history.
王兵在谈起自己对中国历史的持续记录时很谦虚。
“In China, my life is like that of all the other normal Chinese,” Mr. Wang said. “I am one of the many from the normal class. So I filmed these people.”
“在中国，我的生活跟其他普通中国人没什么两样，”王兵说。“我是普通阶层的一员。所以我拍了这些人的生活。”
Mr. Wang was born in the north of China in 1967, after the events chronicled in “Dead Souls.” Initially studying photography, he went on to the Beijing Film Academy, part of the same generation as Mr. Jia (who also has a film at Cannes this year). Mr. Wang gorged himself on the directors Antonioni, Bergman, and Tarkovsky (partly thanks to a professor who brought thousands of videotapes from abroad), with Pasolini close to his heart.
王兵1967年出生在中国北方，那时，《死灵魂》中记录的事件刚发生。他先是学习摄影，后来又去北京电影学院学习，与贾樟柯是同一代(贾今年在戛纳电影节上也有影片参与角逐)。王兵如饥似渴地欣赏安东尼奥尼(Antonioni)、伯格曼(Bergman)和塔尔科夫斯基(Tarkovsky)等人的作品(这要部分归功于一位教授从国外带回来的成千上万盘录像带)，尤其喜欢帕索利尼(Pasolini)。
“West of the Tracks,” with its view of Chinese heavy industry in decline, put a spotlight on Mr. Wang in 2003. The film announced an artist with a mission to catch major epochs and small moments before they disappeared.
王兵2003年的作品《铁西区》展现的是中国重工业的衰落，这部作品引起了人们对他的关注。该片宣告了一名艺术家的诞生，他的使命是在大时代和小瞬间消失之前将它们记录下来。
“Dead Souls” is no different. Shot from 2005 to 2017, it covers most of China’s provinces and entailed visits to more than 120 survivors of re-education camps. Mr. Wang’s goal was to preserve memories before they disappeared, in the vein of Claude Lanzmann’s monumental “Shoah.”
《死灵魂》也是如此。该片拍摄于2005年至2017年，覆盖了中国的大部分省份，包括对120多名劳改营幸存者的采访。王兵的目标是在这些记忆消失之前将它们保存起来，它与克洛德·朗兹曼(Claude Lanzmann)的不朽之作《浩劫》(Shoah)一脉相承。
“What happened in the Jiabiangou labor camps was a page unknown in the Chinese history,” Mr. Wang said of the project, which at an early stage was titled “Past in the Present.” “Of course, it’s not only a tragedy of China, but also one of the numerous terrible catastrophes in human history.”
“在中国的历史上，夹边沟劳改营里发生的故事是不为人知的一页，”王兵在谈起该片时表示。该片原名《现在的过去》(Past in the Present)。“当然，它不只是中国的悲剧，也是人类历史上众多可怕的灾难之一。”
Hard-hitting subject matter can sometimes be a problem for filmmakers facing censorship in China, but this does not seem to have been an obstacle for Mr. Wang.
对于面临审查制度的中国电影制作人来说，题材的批判性太猛有时可能会遇到麻烦，但这似乎并没有给王兵带来阻碍。
“I’ve been free to shoot my films in China,” he said, explaining that the low commercial value of his work kept him from submitting them for theatrical release there. (“Mrs. Fang” will screen at next month’s Shanghai International Film Festival.)
他说，“我可以在中国自由地拍摄纪录片。”他解释，他的作品商业价值很低，所以没有申请在影院放映(《方绣英》下个月将在上海国际电影节上放映)。
“Dead Souls” finds Mr. Wang again embracing the immersive approach that has yielded memorable results: the touching and magical fireside moments with migrants in “Ta’ang,” or the unnervingly free wanderings of children left to fend for themselves in “Three Sisters.” It’s a form of cinema that begins to feel more like living with the people on screen than merely watching them.
王兵在《死魂灵》中再次采用沉浸式的拍摄手法，拍出了一些令人难忘的画面：《德昂》中与移民在炉边的感人而神奇的瞬间;或者《三姊妹》中无依无靠的三个孩子令人不安的游荡。这种电影形式让观众感觉更像是和屏幕上的人一起生活，而不仅仅是看着他们。
For those ready to commit the time and attention, “Dead Souls” will be an oasis of focus amid the many distractions of Cannes.
对于那些准备投入时间和精力的人来说，《死灵魂》将会是戛纳电影节诸多令人分神的活动中的专注力绿洲。
With his typical cool understatement, Mr. Wang said: “I don’t have particular expectations from the audience. I hope this film can hold the content of the stories I shot. In other words, there is a lot of content in this film. That’s why it’s long.”
王兵以典型的冷静低调的口吻表示：“我对观众没有特别的期望。我希望这部影片能承载得起我拍摄的那些故事。换句话说，这部影片里有很多内容。所以它才这么长。”
