11.00am: Tiexi District: West Of Tracks
This might be a stupid idea.
Computer industry conferences being what they are, I didn't get to bed till after 2am on both Wednesday and Thursday night, and had to be up by seven the following morning. And after that, I spent Friday night seeing three movies back to back, and getting to bed after 3am. Still, this is Saturday morning, so theoretically I could be spending the morning catching up on much-needed sleep. But I'm not. Instead, I'm at the NFT watching a nine-and-a-quarter hour long documentary about the slow decline of an industrial town in north-east China.
This might be a fucking stupid idea.
In fact, the structure of Wang Bing's epic documentary isn't quite as intimidating as it first sounds. The film comes in nine one-hour episodes (the eighth one running a little longer than that), each of which has a distinct beginning and end: it would play quite happily as a weekly series on TV. For theatrical presentation, the episodes are collated into three long movies, each one dedicated to a particular aspect of the Shenyang region being investigated. The first part, Rust, is four hours long and looks specifically at the various smelting factories that constitute the heavy industry of Tiexi. Entirely shot by Wang on a single DV camera (camcorder users will recognise the distinctive creak of the hand strap all the way through the soundtrack), the digital format allows for lovely-looking contrasts between the cool white of the snowy exteriors, the dull green of the workers' break areas and the hellish reds of the factory floor. But after decades of success, the factories are starting to fail through lack of investment. "Film it now, it won't be around for much longer," says one worker glumly: and over a period of two years we watch as one by one the factories close and the life drains out of the town.
The decline is filmed entirely from the workers' point of view: in a series of articulate interviews, they explain their frustration at not knowing what's really going on, and the film doesn't try to get a management perspective. Because this is a documentary about a community, rather than economics. We never really get to know the people here as individuals, but we come to like them a hell of a lot as a group: having drunken arguments over money, making plans about what they can loot from the factories before they close, singing a cheesy Cantopop version of The East Is Red at a karaoke night. If this was about the factories, the story would end after three hours when the last smelting factory is closed: instead, we get a welcome one-hour coda which follows their post-employment treatment for lead poisoning and their attempts to collect overdue salary.
The second three-hour film, Remnants, is based around another community: the one living in the optimistically-named Rainbow Row estate. Its poverty level is shown quite early on with a lottery winner claiming that he's currently between jobs, and has been for the last ten years. Unlike Rust, Remnants is keen to introduce us to the people here as individuals, and its first hour is cunningly dedicated to doing that by concentrating on the Rainbow Row kids. The children, conning can collectors out of money and swapping insults about their mothers' panties: the teenagers, hanging out at the local shop and trying to cop off with each other. Some of the funniest sequences in the entire film are in this first hour, but hanging over it all is the vague threat that suddenly comes to the foreground at the sixty minute mark: the area's been slapped with a compulsory purchase order for demolition and redevelopment, and everyone has to move out by the end of the year.
The rest of Remnants feels a little overstretched because of its forced three-act structure: act two covering the events leading up to the eviction deadline, act three focussing on the small number who stay on in their homes despite intimidation and the loss of power and water. As a result, the material feels a little more manipulative, and you become aware of the work that's been done to coax a narrative out of two years of events. Most notably, those people who take up the offer of a replacement flat elsewhere are never seen again in the film, so there's no indication as to whether the undeniable community spirit of Rainbow Row was relocated in those flats or destroyed completely. But this focus does give the final shots some extraordinary power, as we realise just how much physical damage has been done to the area, to say nothing of the emotional damage.
(Oh, in case you were wondering, this was the section where three nights of lost sleep started to catch up with me, so some of my memories of the middle hour of Remnants are a little vague. At one stage, I found myself listening to the Mandarin dialogue with my eyes closed, and somehow phonetically hearing it as English, taking several seconds to realise that the resulting English was utter nonsense. Remember that Hatten Är Din web animation of a few years ago, which showed the surreal consequences of transcribing an Arabic song lyric as if it was Swedish? Well, it was just like that. I can't remember too much about what I actually thought they were saying in the film, sorry.)
The rail tracks referred to in the documentary's title are the main lifeline of Tiexi. A driver's eye-view of the train running to and from the factories is the key visual motif of Rust, and while the trains are never seen in Remnants, they're a constant presence in the background of the soundtrack, like the helicopters in Boyz N The Hood. The final two and a quarter hours of Tiexi District (presented here as Rails) puts the railway centre stage, looking at the staff who run the trains that carry raw materials into the factories and finished products out. It appears that one of the main activities of the railway staff is scavenging bags of coal from the disused factories: and the other one is taking the piss out of One Eye Du, who initially appears to be the oldest member of the crew. In fact, he doesn't work there at all, he's just a slightly more determined scavenger than most.
The greater part of Rails follows the story of old Du and his son Du Yang, and the rocky relationship between the two. This whittling down of focus from an entire community to just two people gives this final section some serious dramatic wallop. The key scene of Rails - father and son in a restaurant discussing how they feel about each other - goes through so many emotional handbrake turns in ten minutes, that if this was a fictional film, you'd dismiss it as being unrealistic. But the resolution to all this is more upbeat than what you'd expect from the other two segments, and makes for an immensely satisfying conclusion.
I've reviewed Tiexi District: West Of Tracks as three films because it fits my page layout better. But it works beautifully as a single entity. Wang Bing's single-camera approach gives him remarkable flexibility, allowing him to capture fly-on-the-wall moments that a larger crew simply couldn't manage. There are individual images that resonate fabulously - the long walking shots through the smelting works both before and after closure, Du Yang quietly breaking down in the absence of his father, the cable factory opening up after the winter break to find everything literally under two feet of ice. A weekly TV slot is more likely to reach the general public than an all-day marathon like this, and in the current television climate even that's probably not going to happen: but hopefully someone will pick this up soon for wider distribution. You see, it's not such a stupid idea after all.
Notes From Spank's Pals
Fail Safe
Sheryl Crow Fanclub - Back in the days when the world was in Black and White, America and the Soviet Union used to delight in taking each other to the brink of nuclear armageddon. The most celebrated instance of this being the Cuban Missile Crisis (possibly more on that tomorrow). Thus Fail Safe, made in 1964 (a year after Cuba), should no doubt have resonated with topicality (is that a real word?) upon release. The word is, however, that as Kubrick's Dr Strangelove was released the same year, this cautionary tale was somewhat overshadowed.
Showing as part of the festival's Archive Treasures, Fail Safe, we are told in the program, is even more relevant today post Iraq and September 11th. Right, well first of all let's knock that bit of misinformation on the head; it has no relevance to Iraq or 9/11 whatsoever (and I challenge anyone to show me where or how it does). However it does play well as an accurate commentary on the sheer madness of the (thankfully consigned to history) Cold War. The set up is that an American bomber patrol consisting of several nuke armed aircraft has been accidentally sent a false signal, ordering them to incinerate Moscow. As they are unable to be recalled, the nearest American fighters are sent to shoot them down. However, lacking sufficient fuel to reach them, President Henry Fonda ends up having to ask the Soviets to shoot them down instead. Thus there is much speculation by the Soviet premier on the Cold War hotline, on whether this is an American trick, and merely a prelude to an all out strike. What is really focussing everyone's minds though, is that one of the bombers looks like it is going to evade all the Soviet defenses, and drop two big ones on Moscow.So here's the rub, accident or no accident, nuking Moscow is going to initiate an all out Soviet nuclear retaliatory response, and of course World War 3. Thus in order to placate the Soviets, President Fonda agrees with the Soviet Premier that if the bomber gets through, another American bomber will be sent up to destroy New York. In essence, sacrifice New York to save America. Needless to say there are dissenting voices on the American side as to that course of action, most notably a Hawkish professor (these days they call them advisors) played by Walter Matthau. His analysis is that America has never had a better opportunity to destroy the Soviets (or should that be Commie bastards) and should use this opportunity to launch an all out first strike.Interesting scenario I am sure you will agree, however my take on it is this. In the Oliver Stone film Nixon, the old rogue looks at a picture of Kennedy on the White House wall, and says: "when Americans look at you they see themselves as how they want to be, when they look at me they see themselves as how they really are". So what I am saying is, Americans might like to think they would react like President Henry Fonda: my guess is they would in reality take the road as set out by Professor Walter Matthau.
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