The Ditch

This chapter focuses on The Ditch , which is Wang Bing’s only foray into feature-length fiction, and shows how the recourse to fiction and reenactment raises important ethical issues about the representation of labor camp guards and survivors played by semi-professional and nonprofessional actors and about the recreation of the camps themselves. The chapter argues that the representational and ethical issues in the film depend on “techniques of creative repetition,” which correspond to how adaptation and reenactment allow for the creative repetition of past events and experiences. The chapter draws on documentary scholars’ writings on reenactment and Gilles Deleuze’s reflections on repetition to argue that what Wang Bing ultimately sought to accomplish in The Ditch was to find a new audiovisual strategy to represent historical events, and that the two techniques of creative repetition used in The Ditch make the spectator reconsider key moments in twentieth-century Chinese history concerning the horrors of labor camp life.