I have been thinking for a long time about Wang Bing’s role in this film. During most of the film we don’t feel the presence of a “director” because of his remarkable restraint in not deploying shots that would remind the audience “it’s a film”, for example, camera positions beyond a casual spectator’s view, and in not being heard talking. I then came to an analogue of his role: a worker’s grown-up nephew who went to his uncle’s factory to play around and have a bath. This role gives him an identity somewhere between an outsider and an insider.
This “roleplay”, by both the director and the audience, starts from the beginning scene. Following Wang’s eyes, we are introduced to Tiexiqu in an immersive manner: on a small goods train, travelling on the railway that goes through residential areas and factories, stopped several times at crossroads, with view being blurred by snowflakes. The long shots wash off the audience’s characteristics like “observer”, “intruder” and “outsider”, subsequently making them part of the diegesis.
A very unique phenomenon in the film is what I call “natural stage”: the settings in the scene by fixed camera position naturally form a stage-like environment, where characters “perform”. Examples including an arguing scene confined by walls and roof of the break room (10:08-13:33), a billiards-playing scene (1:31:02-1:31:32), and recurred chatting scenes in copper smelting workers’ small break room (i.e., 4:59-7:25, Disk 2). Those scenes reinforce the role of “nephew”: he is close to the workers enough to let them ignore him, while detached enough to gaze at them.
The contrast of color between working area and resting area forms a rhythm in the early half of the film. Workers’ break rooms are colored with pale white light from the bulbs, dirty grey from cement, and timeworn brown-green from lockers, which generates a sense of coldness, dilapidation, and poverty. The plants, however, are very different. The copper-plating plant is filled with bright warm red light and white steam that create the feeling of extreme warmth, humidity, even suffocation. The two sites, together with two systems of color, appear alternately, and constitute a metaphoric indication of workers’ situation consisting of an illusion of factory’s past collective glory and the hard and cold individual lives.
Wang Bing said the true protagonist of the film is the factory itself. We see this tendency from several points. First is the “tracking”, or “tailing” shots. Wang followed different workers going through corridors and rails, to plants and bathrooms. The tracking scenes are usually distanced and low, again showing the director’s restraint: he follows a person without knowing where he is heading. The camera language here transforms workers to simple another apparatus of the factory, automatically operating on their own track.
The editing also reinforces this impression. When in the plants, the shot cut from people to machines are usually abrupt, showing an indifference between human and machinery. Workers, dressed in dark and dirty uniforms, tend to blend in the complicated steel structure of the plants. As Lu said, “the workers appear as mere appendages of this vast complex”.
There are two “forced-to-gamble” scenes echoing with each other (one starts at 10:08, the other starts at 1:11:35 of Disk 2), which I think is the directors’ intentional move. In the first scene, a drunk worker refused to stay and gamble with his colleagues, got mocked by some, and started to exchange profanities with one of them. The conversation got heated up, and finally evolved into body conflict. In the other scene, workers were received medication in a hospital. One of them, who plays saxophone, were asked to play mahjong by colleagues who threatened to sell his saxophone and burn his musical notes (and they did) if he refused. While I don’t want to make too much of those two scenes, they obviously serve to look into the spiritual world of workers, which is more dramatically revealed after lead plant workers were sent to hospital for one month’s medication and vacation, where they sang together in their room while the musician was playing his saxophone, and watched pornography together in a small ball room, everyone looking serious.
As a typical observatory film, the director finally becomes (restrainedly) expressive and poetic near the end of the film. He went back to the factory after it’s shut down, and filmed its demolition. He focused on the falling dust from the above steel structure of the plants being dismantled (1:44:40-1:45:57, Disk 2). The dust might have stayed on the steel structure for decades, witnessing modern China’s chaotic history. When it falls, it is history that is falling.
