Dead Souls

Watching Wang Bing’s at Cannes a few days apart from a restored screening of Safi Faye’s (1979), the citation by Hampâté Bâ that opened the latter felt particularly resonant, with its declaration that “In Africa, when an old man dies, it’s a library burning.” Faye’s finely observed tribute to local traditions and oral cultures is more sombrely echoed in Wang’s latest opus, which is structured around a series of testimonials from survivors of the Chinese government’s horrific activities directed at so-called “rightists” in the late ’50s. It’s a national chapter that remains largely undocumented—and with frequently skewed facts when acknowledged officially—so Wang’s decision to produce and assemble a collection of first-person accounts acts as an essential intervention, a people’s history from the ground up.