Dead Souls

In Dead Souls, Wang Bing alternates between long-form interviews with survivors of the Mingshui labor camp and landscape sequences, aligning this film with the work of social historians who have emphasized the agency of survivors and the role of oral history to archive labor camp life experiences. The filmmaker’s marked interest in the vivaciousness of the spoken word testifies to both his belief in the self-presence of the survivor in human form and the plastic nature of human memory as represented in the nonchronological treatment of the interviews. This chapter argues, perhaps most provocatively, that Dead Souls is equally interested in documenting nonhuman survivors, which take the form of nonhuman remnants such as bones scattered across the land where the labor camps used to be. The nonhuman perspective of the film has not received any critical attention, even though the landscape sequences function as crucial markers of critical distance for the minjian filmmaker, who uses them to pause from heart-wrenching interviews with survivors. The chapter concludes that these landscape sequences are no mere transitional moments in the film: they allow the spectator to understand landscape as both a view and a site in terms of ontological, epistemological, and practical considerations.