Wang Bing - The Walking Eye

Presenting 170 sequences from 8 films made at the turn of the century (1999-2017), the book highlights the singularity of Wang Bing’s cinematographic language and the colossal and unprecedented scope of his anthropological project on the scale of a country-continent that has undergone a radical transformation of its society. Throughout the pages, expectation, doubt, and concentration become clear through a number of temporal motifs. Far from the great masterly narratives or denunciation films, the book translates through the accumulation of images, details, and gestures, the way in which Wang Bing slowly and patiently records the precariousness of these lives in the intimacy of their daily close encounter with reality.

A text by Dominique Païni, “The Wang Bing Phenomenon”, restores the stakes of this book and returns to the radical nature of Wang Bing’s cinematographic choices. An interview with Wang Bing conducted in 2019 in cooperation with Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains by Dominique Païni, Diane Dufour and Wang Bing allows the filmmaker to review his practice and the fundamental aspects of his work. The second part of the book offers a set of unpublished texts by authors selected for the relevance of their analyses of Wang Bing’s work: Ada Ackerman (art historian, research fellow at the CNRS), Julie Ault (artist, curator, writer and editor), Alain Bergala (film theorist and critic, former editor and director of collections at Cahiers du cinéma), Teresa Castro (lecturer in film and audiovisual studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3), Jean-François Chevrier (art historian, art critic, curator), Thierry Davila (art historian, museum curator, editor and teacher), David Le Breton (professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg, member of the Institut Universitaire de France), and Catherine Perret (philosopher, psychoanalyst, currently professor of aesthetics at the University of Paris 8).