A scene within the artist and film-maker Wang Bing’s newest movie Man in Black has haunted me since I noticed it. The movie—which premiered at Cannes—is an awfully intense and emotional portrait of the Chinese language composer Wang Xilin, who tells his story by motion, music and phrases.
Wang Xilin, who’s now 87, is bare all through, alone within the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris. He lives in Germany, exiled for his outspoken views on Communism and Chinese language human rights, which led to his imprisonment and torture through the Cultural Revolution. Wang Xilin displays on these experiences, and the political context that prompted them. He recollects dropping his tooth in beatings. Excerpts from his music swell and fade round him as he describes the bodily harm and psychological sickness that resulted, generally drowning him out fully. After which he says one thing breathtaking: that in his Third Symphony, he wished to evoke the sound of human pores and skin being singed with a sizzling iron.
The acute energy of the second was completely concerning the distinctive alchemy of Wang Bing’s medium. Wang Xilin’s phrases alone are devastating, after all, however their full pressure is embedded in Wang Bing and cinematographer Caroline Champetier’s stark lighting and framing of his face, etched with ache as he explains his story, but in reverie as he hears his music in his head. And the impact is propelled by the music’s overwhelming magnificence and violence. Wang Bing’s achievement isn’t solely to doc an amazing creative determine, however to in some way inhabit his musical and emotional world, and illuminate it. Wang Xilin and his creative self-discipline are introduced in to the sunshine by movie. As a lot as it’s a documentary or a profile, it achieves a uncommon and marvellous communion of artwork types inside a powerful entire.
It made me take into consideration one of many dumbest phrases uttered concerning the arts: “Writing about music is like dancing about structure”. Arguably, all dance is—deliberately or not—about structure, or a minimum of house. However the acute stupidity of that unattributed phrase got here to thoughts after I witnessed a equally magnificent work: the choreographer Wayne McGregor’s Untitled, 2023, carried out by the Royal Ballet on the Royal Opera Home in London in June. McGregor labored with the late Cuban-US artist Carmen Herrera on the units for the work, however her stark, crisp designs have been excess of simply ornament. After I interviewed McGregor on The Week in Artwork podcast, he mirrored on how Herrera’s work, with its stability of “formalism” and “sense of the precarious or the liminal”, helped him to subvert ballet’s formal language.
McGregor spoke of the rhythmic high quality in Herrera’s preparations of form and pure color, in order that “you virtually hear the work, you don’t simply see it”. He responded to this notion of Herrera with exact, minimal but poignant motion. It was choreography aspiring to the situation of summary artwork, within the full data that work involving our bodies is all the time figurative; as McGregor places it, “after we see different people we will’t assist however learn story… or learn emotion”. However, he provides, “when our bodies are in correlation or relationship with one other physique, you possibly can create architectural compositions”. The impact was astonishing. It seems that dancing about structure—or filming about music, as Wang Bing does in Man in Black—can produce nice artwork.
• Man in Black, FID competition, Marseille, 7 July at 6.15pm