By Michael Scoular (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: October 2, 2013
The Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) remains the best way for anyone looking for foreign or independent films to see them in a non-media saturated setting. Unlike the festivals a number of the selections are curated from or shared with (Cannes, Toronto), VIFF is a pretty low-key two weeks, offering nothing but the films and a few Q&As with directors. Following the closure of the Granville 7, VIFF spread out its offerings among a number of other theatres around the downtown core, reaching from a few screens on loan at the International Village cinema to the Rio Theatre. Though this break has perhaps lent a little desperation to drawing in new attendees, evident in the poorly-conceived MST3K-style faux-blockbuster assemblage of clips that plays before every movie, VIFF’s quality in its selection remains the same – there’s a mix of titles you’ll end up hearing come award season and movies you’ll never be able to see again in a theatre in North America.
The proliferation of people wanting to learn things from documentaries is, sure, something to be critical of from a film perspective: most documentaries do nothing an essay or longform piece couldn’t, neglecting the visual radicalism of the best examples of non-fiction film in favour of lazy still slideshows and talking heads. But it also indicates a dissatisfaction and lack of trust in television or even print journalism to report on things with any degree of real research or care, whether it’s human interest or the most significant stories of a year. Everything from wars and market crashes to musicians and painters gets a documentary now, many of them playing at festivals like VIFF, but many of them also end up on Netflix and people’s recommendation circles.
The question often following these documentaries is so what? Is awareness really that useful except to spark a circular conversation of how “terrible” or “sad” or “interesting” a topic was? While many documentaries fall back on awareness, or documentation of something significant, or giving someone a voice, or providing a pamphlet to pass around, the ideal of a documentary is that there must be somewhere between inciting revolutionary fury and returning audiences to the same old, same old.
“Mourn nothing and you’re a monster. Mourn everything and you’ll crack. Mourn selectively and you’ve chosen sides.” – Teju Cole
Wang Bing’s ‘Til Madness Do Us Part takes place, with only a few minutes’ exception, inside a mental facility in China’s Yunnan province. Lights are inadequate, space is limited, and a central square walkway opening up to a skyward view only enhances the sense that everyone staying there is trapped. Wang (also credited as a camera operator) stays inside, trapped on the men’s floor of the building, closed off by gates and shouts that suggest security, observing the inhabitants in long takes, refusing to turn away. The film documents the place’s routine in extreme detail, where each day repeats the search for food, forced medication, and the desire to go outside even if nothing seems to wait for them there. Wang structures the documentary to feature a main subject, perhaps glimpsed in the background or encountered in earlier shots, but in any case given a chance to speak. As in any documentary, there is the question of how much truth is on the screen and how much of the events are at least partly influenced by the presence of a camera, but over the film’s running time, that seems like something far secondary. The subjects give a hint at how they arrived, describe their feelings about their stay, and ultimately provesarticulate about their experiences, blurring the borderline between illness and lucidity. The prison-like surroundings and words from authorities point to unreliability, but their own partially-formed answers ask for understanding. Many seem like they hardly need the place, are threatened with punishment by doctors if they resist shots and commands to settle down, and prove adept at criticizing the way the place is run, which falls in line with the mainland China of first-hand reports, which for the uninitiated puts the lie to the one of Olympic ceremonies, advertisements, and Hollywood-shot action scenes.
“It’s impossible to determine whether a mental illness has altered someone’s preferences, or whether than person has simply changed.” – Rachel Aviv, “God Knows Where I Am”
While this information can be read and understood, Wang is not simply setting up notecards on a wall to fit together into an understanding of an experience. The film is four hours long – previous ones by Wang have run as long as 10. It seems impossible to imagine someone sustaining their full attention for that span of time. But that is partly what Wang is doing. Each subject is introduced with their name and the span of time they have spent in the institution, but even a strong amount of identification with or feeling for each person that appears before the camera is insufficient. Each person has been there long before the film has started, and no amount of sympathy can change the duration of their stay or its effects. Wang is able to shoot so much material due to the availability of digital cameras, which are mobile, but poorly suited to low light – many scenes are full of crushed blacks, deteriorated images, a not-quite-representation of what it is to see these conditions. Even if a viewer is absorbed by the unfolding situation, the film goes on – Wang doesn’t let anyone off the hook. While someone could extrapolate it to their own known experience, standing as possibly universal, the only claims the film has are of briefly being, as the camera shows it, and then passing. Every time a portrait of documentation reaches a peak, the film moves on. Wang’s film’s running times suggest an attempt at capturing the everyday in all of its duration, but even at this extended length, it can only be a very small piece of something unknown. This digital presentness resists the romantic idea of a film existing through time, to accumulate memories and live on beyond any single life. It will do this, but only in an unsettling, ungraspable way. Over four hours, and especially in the context of a festival, everything is in a precarious state of being forgotten, and so what is left is a partial image of something immediate and serious, but ultimately distant and unchangeable.
