The Ditch (Jiabiangou)

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• Mohammed Rouda | October 4, 2010 4:20 AMReply

  It was the "surprise" film in Venice film festival this year (2010). Some accepted it as a good surprise, some as a bad one. On those opposing, did that for one of two reasons: They either hated the subject matter, which is not an enough reason at all; or they found it, artistically, less important than its promise. In fact, any festival aims at preserving a certain film and presents it as something very special, regardless what film it's and what country it came from, stands a fair chance to be over or under-rated. The problem with "surprise" films lays also on the fact that it will attract unfair attention in comparison of other films in the competition. And The Ditch was in the competition. It's like selecting a certain film out of the whole bunch and asks the jury to see it again where it's supposed, theoritically at least, that all competition films treated equally. Well, the above of course has nothing to do with the quaility of Wang Bing film. It's very interesting piece of work that could have been better under someone else's care. The story of a group of men who live in ditches out in north-eastern deserts not by choice, but by the rule of sever punishment. These are some of the thousands who went through all sorts of inhuman treatment just because they believed that the 60s cultural revoluion means they could express some of their ideas. As the case on one character here, all what he did was believing that this is an invitation for the people to share power. The result was capturing those freedom seekers, "right wing extremists" and "bourgouise and reactionary" elements and scatter them in working camps around the country. According to the direcotor, this camp was one of many and the few hundreds that lived there as a way of redirecting them to the principles of the revolution, were some of thousands who ended up living, and dying, in such a place. The film, with its doc-drama narrative style, and with a camera that wants to use the least amount of make-up in order not to lighten up the harsh circumstances these people living in, presents us with a grim look at the conditions of the suppressed and their supprossors. When the food runs very low, the alternative is eat whatever a hand could reach (rats, vegetation roots, or dead human flesh) or simply die. Dwelling on this condition goes for almost an hour with no event to speak off. Suddenly something else is happening: the wife of one of the captured souls, who just died a few days before her arrival, wants to visit her husband's grave. A friend of his tries to persuade her not to do so. She spends two days searching a vast land full of open graves and eaten up corpses. During, she doesn't stop crying and weeping. Of course the mind is with her tragedy, but the drama is not. The art is not. It takes so much time of repeated run here-run there and a lot of tears just to disappear at the end of this long sequence as she finally has nothing else to do but going back to where she came from. The sequence also breaks the story in half. The husband is previously presented as one on the two dozen men the camera has sorted out to present, so why he is suddenly a specified case? If you want to take a character out and choose to talk about him or about something that relates to him so strongly, you have to gives him some more space to be recognized later as a semi main character. Perhaps I'm traditional in this aspect but I don't believe that choosing any character in a sudden turn of direction to distinguish him from the rest serves the film. In general, you sympathize with these men who were treated so bad it makes mere looking at their experience a hard act to do. But even a documentary mounted by a narration, or vise-versa should have certain artistic qualities to go for. That I couldn't find. Which makes the case of a bleak film for a bleak sake- almost.