“No, no, stop thinking,” mumbles composer Wang Xilin in Man in Black, as he concludes a series of physical contortions that represent the forced labour and torture he endured as a banished “anti-revolutionary” during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. For the 86-year-old composer, that short outburst might be a sign of self-defence mechanisms kicking in, as he reminds himself the perils of reliving those traumatic times. For the viewers, however, it could be taken as advice about how to approach Chinese cineaste Wang Bing’s intense and visceral personality portrait of the elderly man.
Running just an hour and shot entirely in the 147-year-old Bouffes du Nord theatre in Paris, Man in Black is steeped in gothic visual beauty and a swirling score. Working for the first time with another cinematographer, Caroline Champetier, Wang Bing plunges his tortured protagonist into a setting lit and filmed as if it’s hell on earth. Claire Atherton’s editing, the cornerstone of many a Chantal Akerman film, brings about a visual rhythm that fits with Wang Xilin’s stuttering physical movements and his relentlessly storming music.
Man in Black is less a documentary about the life of a much-persecuted intellectual, and more a performance piece in which the octogenarian literally lays bare his physical and psychological scars through his body and the sounds he conjures out of it – not just the piano-playing and singing, but also his gasps as he struggles for air and the shuffling of his feet against the cold, hard floor of the theatre.
While running to merely one third of the screening time of Youth (Spring), his other title bowing at Cannes this year, Man in Black is packed with just as much an emotional punch. The film offers an immersive experience that warrants viewing in cinemas – a double-bill with similarly music-driven shorts might be an option, as programmers at Cannes did by scheduling it as a double bill with Pedro Costa’s split-screen, operatic The Daughters of Fire.
Wang Bing sets the tone of Man in Black from the start, as Wang Xilin enters the Bouffes du Nord on balcony level and walks down the spiral stairs to the stalls. His descent is backed with the loud stanzas from his Third Symphony, a piece he would explain later in the film as a musical representation of the violence of life under tyranny. Once downstairs, he begins to act out his suffering at the hands of his tormenters in the 1960s: sprawled on the ground with his hands stretched behind his back, he’s beaten by the Red Guards and then forced to perform backbreaking labor during his exile in a rural outback.
Here, Champetier zeroes in on his broken toenails and varicose veins, thus turning Wang Xilin’s naked body into a living, breathing vessel through which channel all those traumatic episodes marring China’s turbulent contemporary history. Under the glaring spotlights of the theatre, he resembles a modern-day Chinese Sisyphus, an old man condemned to meaningless toil and pain in perpetuity.
This grueling first part ends with Wang standing up and sitting briefly on a seat in a thinker’s mode. He walks over to the piano to hammer out a few strains of his music, and then to the toilet where we hear the sound of flushing behind closed doors. This comical sign of Wang returning to mundane reality marks the beginning of the film’s second part, in which the composer talks about his life and the raison d’être for his best-known Third Symphony (a musical lament on the betrayal of political ideals, he says) and his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (a j’accuse towards the state appropriation of music as party propaganda, he explains).
This talking-head interview is shifted off-kilter when Wang Bing interweaves the composer’s music in and out of the soundtrack, sometimes dialing it up to the point of overwhelming Wang Xilin’s voice. What seems to be an eccentric (or even disrespectful) move could be interpreted as the ebbing and flowing fortunes as lived by the composer and his peers among the Chinese intelligentsia. Wang Xilin himself doesn’t hide the contradictory moves he had to make during his youth, having once joined the Red Guards and helped write officially sanctioned musical numbers during the Cultural Revolution. Despite being a prominent critic of the Chinese government, he worked on state commissions before he finally exiled himself to Germany in 2017.
In the film’s final part, Wang approaches the piano again and performs parts of his 1993 musical adaptation of Forging A Sword, a short story by legendary Chinese novelist Lu Xun from 1926. A fable damning dictators and satirising the masses’ blind faith in these autocrats, the story actually provides Wang Bing’s film with its title. In Lu’s piece, the “Man in Black” is a mysterious swordsman who managed to get into the royal court and kill a tyrant.
As Wang Xilin sings, one imagines the composer thinking of himself as a kindred spirit to this black avenger, someone who dares to raise a ruckus against those in power. He’s the lucky one, in a way, as so many have perished before him for doing exactly that. And it’s perhaps what Man in Black’s final shot suggests, as the camera whirls around the theatre, showing Wang sitting alone amid rows and rows of empty seats. As if paying tribute to the dead souls who fell victim to the purges which plagued China throughout the generations, it’s a poignant ending to what is at once a poetic experiment and a political statement.
Director: Wang Bing
Cast: Wang Xilin
Producers: K. Lihong, Sonia Buchman, Nicolas R. De La Rothe
Executive producers: Karin Chien, Liza Esser
Director of photography: Caroline Champetier
Editor: Claire Atherton
Music composer: Wang Xilin
Production companies: Gladys Glover, WIL Productions
World sales: Asian Shadows
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Special Screenings)
In Mandarin
60 minutes
