An eight-hour-and-15-minute documentary is not something you walk into lightly, especially when its subject is the imprisonment and slow-motion murder of human beings.
But Wang Bing’s “Dead Souls” is a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony.
Wang, like Claude Lanzmann in “Shoah,” isn’t just making a historical documentary; he’s using oral memoir to forge an artifact of history.
“Dead Souls” has its longueurs, and it may not be as staggering a work as “Shoah” or Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” but it does just what a movie that’s this long should: It uses its intimate sprawl to catalyze your view of something — in this case, how the totalitarianism of the 20th century actually worked.
(One is tempted to say: quite well.)Almost the entire film consists of interviews with survivors of the Jiabiangou and Mingshui re-education camps,
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