The Man With No Name

The Chinese film director Wang Bing, who is regarded as one of the leading documentary makers of our time, is currently the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. One of the film-maker's most extraordinary achievements is a 2009 documentary The Man With No Name, the portrait of a man living on his own, far from other people, in a cave in a remote part of northern China. From this rudimentary home the man sets out each day to carry out the essential activities that ensure his survival; looking for dung, ploughing the corner of a field, collecting dead wood...For the entire hour-and-a-half of the film not a single word is uttered by the man. Four years after making the film, Wang Bing returned to see the man and to photograph him in black and white. The resulting photographs can be seen currently at the Pompidou exhibition and then from April 29th to June 7th at the Galerie Paris-Beijing in Paris. A preview of some of the images are shown here by Mediapart.