Documentary Cinema as An Epic Narrative of Our Times
Returning to the Zhili district in eastern China for the second part of his Youth trilogy, Wang Bing once again puts the viewer in an environment of sensory overload. Loudly humming sewing machines, blaring pop music, and workers’ chatter fill the workshops, which are littered with piles of cloth and fabric. Using an agile camera that reminds us of the person(s) behind it—panning, walking through corridors, running down stairs—the film becomes an intensely physical experience, portraying the working conditions of the textile industry while embodying the labor of documentary cinema itself.
Whereas the first part, Youth (Spring), emphasized the paradoxical ways in which the workshops sometimes resemble a youth holiday camp—the work constantly being interrupted by jokes, laughter, quarreling, and romance—the reality we encounter in Youth (Hard Times) is decidedly harsher. As the season approaches its end with the Chinese New Year, the migrant workers enter difficult salary negotiations with their employers. Many find themselves earning less than last year, seeing their endless hours of repetitive work result in a meager income that will just about cover their expenses until the next season. Especially dire is the situation in a particular workshop where the owner has taken the money and left town, leaving employees whose only option is to sell some of the left-over equipment to try to cover their journeys home to their rural provinces.
The situation is made worse by an apparent lawlessness and lack of labor unionization, which places the owners of the countless small workshops in Zhili in a position to rule arbitrarily. As in Wang’s three-part debut work Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002)—chronicling the decline of the steel industry in northern China in the years around the new millennium—the new trilogy bears witness to the struggles of the working class in times of change. Youth (Hard Times) paints a picture of the labor conditions of global mass production, with a validity far beyond its specific geographical setting.
Such a description of the political implications of the film, however, fails to capture the richness of Wang’s work. Rather than the implicit macro perspective, what lingers on after the film are the intimate moments we viewers spend with the workers. We encounter a young woman agonized over her failure to work at the same breakneck speed as her colleagues, too tired after a long day to start over with a failed batch of clothes. Rather surprisingly, a young man confides that he hopes to return to Zhili next year, afraid to get stuck in his rural hometown without friends, work, or a future. An older and more experienced worker, lit up by the cold light of a computer screen, recounts his memories of how political protests a decade ago met with brutal repression from the police, forever destroying his belief in the grand narrative of the Chinese Communist party.
Such piercing observations are the result of an impressive group effort by the documentary crew, filming with several cameras on and off for a period of five years. And yet it is through the editing that Wang shapes his complex narrative. Using the spaces of the workshops as a starting point, Wang crafts several powerful storylines from the massive material, often exceeding the expectations of the form of documentary cinema.
Taken together, the many narrative strands of the Youth trilogy approach the richness of an epic 19th-century novel. Similar to the way Émile Zola used the wholesale markets (Le Ventre de Paris, 1873) or department stores (Au Bonheur des Dames, 1883) of Paris as starting points for multifaceted tales of his times, the textile workshops of Youth (Hard Times) function as the heart of an epic story of the migration patterns and working conditions of China’s youth. Within this bigger arc emerge several poignant stories. One such narrative thread reminds us of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), and follows the trials of a young worker quitting his job after a confrontation with the manager. In order to collect his final pay, he has to present a log book containing the figures of his work over the last few months. Tragically enough the book is lost, and the young man is forced on a fruitless hunt through workshops and dormitories, akin to the search for the bicycle in De Sica’s pivotal film.
This story is only one of several powerful narrative threads in a film characterized by an attention to both physical and emotional detail made possible by its generous running time. Wang’s unwillingness to simplify or streamline his narrative makes way for a plethora of impressions, forming a rich, novelistic tapestry of life with a powerful, beating heart. With the premiere of the final chapter of the trilogy, Youth (Homecoming), at this year’s Venice film festival, the tapestry will surely grow even richer.
Johannes Hagman
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2024