I’ve seen only two films by Chinese documentary maker Wang Bing, but on the basis of ‘Til Madness Do Us Part (which played at Facets in 2016) and Bitter Money (which opens there today for a weeklong run), I’d aver that he’s one of the most exciting nonfiction filmmakers working today. Both movies deliver powerful lessons about injustice in contemporary China; they’re also immersive, formally challenging works that employ extended running times to make viewers think long and hard about what it’s like to live as the onscreen subjects do. Running nearly four hours, Madness took audiences into a run-down mental institution in the Yunnan province, forcing them to linger there alongside the inmates (many of whom are not mentally ill, but are in fact political prisoners). In Bitter Money, which runs a little under three hours, Wang considers the textile industry in the eastern city of Huzhou, where (according to a final title card) more than 300,000 laborers live. No less than Madness, it’s a film about confinement: the subjects here are trapped in a ruthless economic system.
Despite its air of desperation, Bitter Money is never less than engrossing. Wang keeps you on your toes by shifting focus from one subject to another when you least expect it, and the cumulative effect of the various portraits is an eye-opening. One comes away from the film with a deeper understanding of how China’s working poor live—or, rather, fail to live: consumed by constantly having to work. The film also considers some of that work through scenes of repetitive labor at sewing machines, and these moments are strangely compelling; Wang holds shots on employees until their work becomes mesmerizing, giving a sense of what it’s like to lose oneself in labor. This ties into Bitter Money’s larger theme of how working-poor Chinese lose their identities on a daily basis. By the end of this masterful work, you may find yourself as acclimated to the tragedy as the subjects are.
