Dead Souls

“What we lived in Jiabi­an­gou, no-one wrote it. With all the suf­fer­ing we had there, who would have want­ed to write about it? Those who lived Jiabi­an­gou don’t write. What’s the point?”

A quick search of the index of Frank Dikötter’s bril­liant, three-vol­ume his­to­ry of Mao’s Chi­na unearths a sin­gle men­tion of Jiabi­an­gou, a labour camp that oper­at­ed in the arid, north-west moun­tains of Gan­su province between 1957 and 1961. Of the 3,200 ​‘right­ists’ incar­cer­at­ed at the camp, a mere 500 survived.

The brevi­ty of its men­tion in such an exhaus­tive tome doesn’t sig­nal insignif­i­cance, by any means, but stands for its lack of excep­tion­al­ism in a sys­tem that housed some 1.8 mil­lion pris­on­ers by 1960. Jiabi­an­gou was just a speck in a con­stel­la­tion of lao­gai – reform-through-labour camps that spread through the wilder­ness of the country’s most inhos­pitable regions, one part of a wider gulag system.

Not that accu­rate data is easy to come by. Whether through dis­tor­tion or sup­pres­sion of records, suc­ces­sive Chi­nese admin­is­tra­tions have shown lit­tle inter­est in an hon­est reck­on­ing with a régime under which, by some esti­mates, 45 mil­lion peo­ple were starved or worked to death in just four years.

Much like Claude Lanz­mann, the French film­mak­er who made doc­u­ment­ing the Holo­caust his life’s work, Wang Bing returns to one of the great­est man-made cat­a­stro­phes in human his­to­ry for his lat­est, epic doc­u­men­tary. By virtue of its 495-minute run­time and focus on oral his­to­ry, Dead Souls inevitably invites super­fi­cial com­par­i­son to Lanzmann’s 1985 mas­ter­work, Shoah.

It’s a gru­elling, shat­ter­ing view­ing expe­ri­ence, culled from over 600 hours of footage shot across 12 years. Lanz­mann was famous­ly against the inclu­sion of his­tor­i­cal footage in his films, feel­ing that it was no sub­sti­tute for direct, sur­vivor tes­ti­mo­ny. Giv­en the pauci­ty of con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous doc­u­men­tary mate­r­i­al at his dis­pos­al, it was hard­ly a choice for Wang, who goes one fur­ther than Lanz­mann in strip­ping even the barest niceties of form to their very basics.

Some two dozen inter­views make up Dead Souls’ eight hours, most­ly cap­tured in fixed, medi­um close-up. Foren­si­cal­ly detailed, the sur­vivors recount their expe­ri­ences in Jiabi­an­gou camp, and the spu­ri­ous charges that led to their incar­cer­a­tion. Wang keeps him­self off-screen, his ques­tion­ing voice very rarely intrud­ing. A lone excep­tion comes late in the film, when inter­view­ing a cadre (or prison guard) of the camp. His approach remains the same, he sim­ply lets the elder­ly man speak, but his pres­ence on-cam­era affords the sub­tle impli­ca­tion that there are ques­tions to be answered.

The film isn’t a tell-all his­to­ry of the Mao régime. You’ll find lit­tle con­tex­tu­al infor­ma­tion regard­ing the dev­as­tat­ing poli­cies of the Great Leap For­ward that paved the way for the all-con­sum­ing famine that fol­lowed. Dead Souls cov­ers a peri­od of bru­tal­ly dis­pas­sion­ate bureau­crat­ic incom­pe­tence and author­i­tar­i­an rigid­i­ty before the more open­ly-waged atroc­i­ties of the Cul­tur­al Revolution.

Title cards attest to the pass­ing of many of the film’s sur­vivors, all in their eight­ies and nineties when the inter­views were con­duct­ed. ​“You’re inter­est­ed in Jiabi­an­gou?” one asks, ​“No one wants to dis­cuss it, and most are dead.” The occa­sion­al excur­sion from inter­view under­lines his point, as the film takes in a funer­al and the mass graves of Jiabiangou’s annex, Ming­shui – a waste­land lit­tered with human remains, scorched bril­liant white by forty years of sun.

As news from Chi­na just last week spoke of a ​‘social cred­it’ sys­tem with dark par­al­lels to ​‘right­ist’ labelling under Mao, it would seem that the voic­es final­ly and urgent­ly raised in Dead Souls are more essen­tial than ever. If cliché sug­gests that the key to under­stand­ing the present lies in the past, the most press­ing­ly trag­ic impli­ca­tions of Wang’s film lie in the inabil­i­ty of his fel­low coun­try­men to see it.