“Dead Souls,” the new three-part, eight-hour-long film, from the Chinese director Wang Bing (screening, in three parts, at Anthology Film Archives through Friday), focusses on one particular “re-education” camp in northwestern China, where accused “rightists” were deported in the late nineteen-fifties. Wang interviews about twenty of its survivors, all elderly, who speak to him about the accusations they faced, their deportation, their experiences and observations at the camp, and their return home afterward. In a title card, Wang presents historical background, explaining that the number of deportees in the Anti-Rightist campaign is unknown but likely ranges between five hundred and fifty thousand and 1.3 million people. Approximately thirty-two hundred people were deported to the camp that’s the subject of the film, Jiabiangou, in the Gobi Desert, and only about five hundred survived.
When Wang’s film “Fengming: A Chinese Memoir” was released here, in 2008, I likened it to Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah.” “Fengming” is a single, three-hour-long interview with He Fengming, an elderly woman who speaks in detail of the persecution that she and her husband endured in the Anti-Rightist campaign. (He died while held in a camp; she survived her internment and returned home, only to face further political persecution.) That film’s similarity to “Shoah” is rooted in its aesthetic extreme. By contrast, I consider “Dead Souls” to be closer in tone and import to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” than to “Shoah.” In addition to being a work of memory that brings the past imaginatively to light, “Dead Souls” is a film of resistance that, in discussing the past, also confronts the present-day activities of the Chinese government. It’s as if “Shoah” had filmed Holocaust survivors exclusively in Germany—and as if the one-party Nazi regime that had sent them to concentration camps were still in power.
“Dead Souls” was made under a government that still maintains re-education camps, and is currently engaged in a massive campaign of deportation and imprisonment—not of so-called rightists but of Uighurs and other Muslims. It’s also a movie that was made in the face of ongoing government opposition. As several interviewees make clear to Wang, the Chinese government is still attempting to conceal those crimes against humanity from sixty years ago and still attempting to efface their traces. These interviews were filmed clandestinely. (One survivor, who maintains copious files of documentation about Jiabiangou, believes that the government is spying on him and keeps track of the comings and goings of his visitors.)
The title of “Dead Souls” comes from a funeral oration by the son of one of the interview subjects, who uses that phrase to address his father and other deceased victims of the camps. The phrase is doubly appropriate: because of the half-century gap between the subjects’ imprisonment in camps and the time of the interviews, most of them have died in the time since they spoke to Wang. Unlike the deportations of Jews to Nazi concentration camps, which targeted people of all ages, from newborns to the aged, the victims of the Anti-Rightist campaign were adults, in their twenties and up, already embarked on careers—teachers, bureaucrats, army officers—who faced charges of a manifest absurdity. The charges, they explained, were brought on the basis of a wide range of causes, owing to political activities during or prior to the Second World War, family background, stray remarks, personal conflicts or workplace differences with Communist Party functionaries, sheer haphazard selection to fulfill a quota of arrests, or an express campaign of entrapment.
Jiabiangou wasn’t a death camp in the literal sense—there were no gas chambers, no random selection for murder. But, according to interviewees, the camp’s living conditions were gruelling, with hard work, little hygiene, and exposure to heat and cold. Many prisoners slept not in dormitories but in dugouts, small cave-like holes bored into short, sheer hillsides that weren’t deep enough for their entire bodies. One man speaks of sleeping, in wintertime, with his head inside and his feet outside, and suffering from frostbite that caused horrific pain. The prisoners wore rags; they went unshaven and without haircuts; their blankets and their bodies were covered with lice, which they tried to sweep away by the handful or became accustomed to.
By 1960, food supplies dwindled. Despite reported statistics, several survivors estimate that eighty to ninety per cent of the detainees died in captivity, and that most of the deaths were a result of starvation. The discussions of their deprivations are horrific; cannibalism was rampant—when prisoners died, others sometimes eviscerated them and ate their organs. Some survivors got by as kitchen workers who were able to steal extra rations. One worked as a shepherd and was therefore given extra rations. Others, who worked in the fields (though the land was barely fertile), made sure to walk past nearby train tracks to scavenge for noodle scraps and other edible garbage that passengers threw from the windows.
Visitors who came to the camps to deliver food packages to family members were routinely robbed by other prisoners. Inmates suffered grievous health issues—paralysis, edema, digestive agony, hallucinations—that were compounded by other deprivations. One man, who survived by eating from a concealed bag of roasted flour, denied another starving man a spoonful and knows that his own survival was at the price of the other man’s life. Though the camps weren’t literally death camps, they were places of—at the very least—depraved indifference to the fate of their inmates. Several survivors contend that the starvation of prisoners was no side effect or accident but part of a plan to dispose of ostensible political opponents of the Party—so, for that matter, does a former low-level government official who was assigned to help run Jiabiangou. He says, simply, “They wanted them to die.” Prisoners lived among corpses. When buried, most were barely beneath the surface and merely wrapped in straw.
The false and fabricated thought crimes for which people were deported to Jiabiangou, and the cavalier cruelty with which those people were left to their fate, is only a subset of the misrule that prevailed in China at the time. The famine that afflicted the camp also afflicted the surrounding areas outside its confines, as several witnesses who travelled there (such as women whose husbands were among the deportees) attest. One man relates a story of a family who decided to slaughter and eat the youngest of their five children—the only boy—but one sister, considering him the future head of the family, volunteered to be slaughtered in his place, and was.
Wang visits the current sites of Jiabiangou, which have largely been transformed into farmland. In 1988, one farmer says, the entire area was bulldozed to efface the vestiges of the camp, but it nonetheless bears the traces of its earlier use. Crags and hillsides still show the holes in which prisoners slept. Bare and untilled fields yield bones—skulls, femurs, pelvises, ribs—that lay exposed to the elements. When survivors and the families of internees sought to place memorials to the victims of Jiabiangou, the government denied their request and demolished the ones that they had built themselves. “Dead Souls” takes those memorials’ place—and foretells of others for the victims of today’s camps and the bearing of witness to the cruel injustices of the country’s reigning overlords.
Sourse: newyorker.com
