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Ambition is a strange thing. By most people's reckoning, Wang Bing's nearly four hour documentary Youth (Spring) is the more ambitious of the director's two 2023 releases. It is expansive, comprehensive, and relates directly to the social collision of Deng Xiaoping's capitalist reformism and Xi Jinping's repression. By comparison, Man In Black is another one of Wang's postmortems on the Mao era, and extended interview with a survivor who testifies to the horrors he endured.

Thing is, Man In Black is unlike any film Wang has made thus far. It's closest cousin is The Ditch, his docu-fiction about the "re-education" work camps. But even making that comparison is a stretch. In its own way, Man In Black is a musical, a one-man performance, an angry defense of aesthetics over propaganda, and a brave act of self-portraiture. 

In Man In Black, we spend an hour in the company of Wang Xilin, possibly China's greatest living composer. He is alone in a small concert hall in France, and he is completely naked. In addition to the ravages of age, we see the large vertical scar on his right leg, the varicose veins in his feet, and slight bulges in his arm and leg muscles, suggesting repeated injury and unattended healing. After a promising start as a music student in the Communist Party, Wang was condemned as a Rightist, because he refused to sacrifice the teaching of musical technique in favor of Maoist sloganeering. In prison, he nearly died.

In the opening fifteen minutes of the film the composer takes to the stage and thrusts his arms behind him as if they were bound. We see him pantomime carrying large backbreaking burdens, or crawling around on all fours as he responds to invisible strokes of the whip. He is showing us, with horrifying candor, the various stress positions and torments his body was subject to, and as he makes clear, these events are never far from his mind. "I have had nightmares every night ever since," he says.

But this is not just a catalog of atrocities. Wang Xilin is defiant, explaining that he has devoted his life as a composer to communicating the unfathomable events of the Cultural Revolution, but through the abstract medium of symphonic music. He describes screeching violins as the sound of burning flesh, or the guttural blats of tubas as the feeling the body being beaten. As Wang Xilin explains, Chinese Communism must be understood as exhilarating hope followed by cruel betrayal, and this seems to provide the sonic arc of many of his compositions.

At several points, Wang's words are drowned out by his music swelling on the soundtrack. Wang Bing's point is clear. If words were sufficient, Wang Xilin would never have needed music in the first place. But more than this, if the composer had felt that political events could somehow take precedent over the sculpting of sound, he might never have run afoul of the Party. His art is his triumph, and this offers a slightly different context for the exposure of Wang's naked body. He is a fragile, mortal man. We could be imprisoned, beaten, and he will one day die. His music, because it is immaterial, will live forever.

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