“Mrs. Fang is a study of a face and a sober essay on death,” writes Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage. “It’s also about fishing. As profoundly moving as it is troubling, this new masterwork from documentary filmmaker Wang Bing might ask a great deal of anyone sitting down to watch it, both ethically and otherwise, but also, in cinematic terms, it delivers a great deal. The face in question is that of Fang Xiuying, an elderly farmer who died of advanced Alzheimer’s in 2016. Wang’s film is an uncompromising document of the last ten days of her life. Indeed, for obvious reasons, death filmed in this way remains something of a cinematic taboo, but any viewer willing to give in to the rigorous format and somber nature of what’s on screen might just find something cathartic.”
“In the cramped downstairs lounge where Fang resides, we observe the family bicker about her condition, second-guess her feelings, question her sentience and mourn her impending loss,” writes Joseph Owen at the Upcoming. “This is not a sentimental film, but more a stark, honest and reflective one.”
At Cineuropa, Giorgia Del Don finds that “Wang Bing uses Mrs. Fang’s last gestures to write a visual poem of rare intensity: both desperate and sublime.”
“Increasingly,” writes Lorenzo Esposito for the Locarno Festival, where Mrs. Fang is competing, “in Wang Bing’s works (the latest seem to form a single discourse, from Ta’ang to Ku Qian) there is a magic circle where attachment to life and disorientation for the fractures that compose it signify both a poetic sign of ancient archaism and centuries-old myths before they are lost.”
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A full retrospective of Wang Bing’s films, accompanied by an exhibition of archival materials, is currently on in Kassel, Germany as part of documenta 14. “Born in 1967 in Shaanxi Province, northwest China, Wang remembers the social and political upheavals of the late twentieth century,” writes Zhang Yaxuan. “He had a hard childhood, marked by the death of his father when he was fourteen years old.” While studying photography at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts in Shenyang, Wang “chanced upon Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1818–29), which might have contributed to what he has acknowledged is the ‘conservatism’ of his aesthetic approach. Yet this classical sensibility, extended into the contemporary situation, has been transformed into a modernized aesthetic impulse. Wang Bing, by capitalizing on the democratizing possibilities of digital filmmaking, pushes the boundaries of documentary language. And this breakthrough of the limits of documentary as a genre redefines and expands its relationship with film.”
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