The Oxidation of the Documentary – The Politics of Rust in Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks

This article interrogates the audiovisual politics of Wang Bing's documentary practice by focusing on his film West of the Tracks (2003). The existing literature has unanimously celebrated West of the Tracks as the most significant example of the New Chinese Documentary Movement but it has failed to examine in depth its singular cinematic language. This article does so by understanding that the film develops a process of audiovisual oxidation that gives rise to questions concerning the capacities of the documentary image. Wang is concerned in West of the Tracks with documenting decay, but also with the capacities of the moving image to oxidise itself in order to disclose a second life or possibility for the relation between social realities and documentary images. The author argues that the singularity of Wang's inventive practice lies in a politics of rust, a politics generating fields of possibility that call into question hasty equations between what we observe and what we know