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Youth
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Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy focuses on the lives of a group of young textile workers who, each year, leave their rural villages and migrate to the manufacturing city of Zhili, 150 kilometers from Shanghai. The project follows on from Alone (2013), and has previously given rise to the feature film Bitter Money (2016) and the installation 15 Hours (2017). Wang’s observational approach and the amount of footage filmed (over 2,600 hours in a period of five years for the entire trilogy) allow him to build documentaries in which the experience of place and time is paramount. He takes non-interventionist cinema to its radical extreme. Eschewing all voice-over commentary, musical accompaniment or subtle, editorial tricks, he aims to integrate himself, over long periods of time, into the everyday behaviour of those he films. Yet Wang does not seek to render himself and his crew invisible; the participants sometimes refer (jokingly or critically) to his close presence. Despite its seemingly formless objectivity, Wang creates – across the total length of Youth – variations on motifs that, ultimately, become quite poetic: people travelling by foot or on vehicles; the camera following its subjects or stopping to view them from a distance. In Youth (Spring), the first instalment of the trilogy (released in 2023), we are taken into independent workshops and inhospitable dorms shared by the workers. We see them performing repetitive tasks with sewing machines for long hours. We see them joking, fighting, flirting, remembering, planning – discussing the latest iPhone, making online purchases, eating take-away noodles, falling in and out of love, re-negotiating piece-work rates … It is impossible not to recognise the socio-economic conditions that heavily shape their lives. Wang’s miracle in Spring consists in showing how, even in a society where productivity reigns and imposes its enslaving conditions, life – nonetheless – happens. Youth (Hard Times), the second part of the series, moves away from the atmosphere of occasional frivolity within the punishing context of the textile workshops. Focusing entirely on the type of workplaces and cramped living spaces that Youth (Spring) introduced, the central matter here is the problem of getting paid – at a just rate, or indeed at all. We see the consequences of bosses who are in debt, haggle down pay rates, or simply skip town altogether. And we learn of an historic occasion in 2011 when similar tensions led to violent clashes between workers and police. Wang’s approach to editing the enormous mass of collected, raw material is carefully organised. He wishes neither to privilege individuals and their ‘story arcs’ (as many documentaries today do), nor to produce the portrait of a faceless collectivity. Both these approaches, he believes, flatten possible perspectives and omit too much important detail. Rather, with each person filmed, he allows us time to grasp them in their particularity, to notice how they cope or struggle with the work situation. It is across the entirety of the project that we are implicitly asked to see the general, social dimension of the problems of contemporary China. Wang well remembers that the heroic, revolutionary rhetoric of Mao’s era cannily romanticised the driving idea of youth as those who will a new social order. The Youth project, taken in its entirety, cites this idea ironically: its youthful subjects are an ever-exploited, ever-replaceable population. The third and final part, Youth (Homecoming), expands what we only briefly witnessed in the previous part: the occasions when these workers return home to see their friends and family, or to marry. The vibrancy of local rituals (music, dance, laughter, fireworks galore) brings an unexpected note of joyfulness to the Youth series. But not for long: soon it will be time to return to the noisy machines and messy spaces of Zhili. © Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin December 2024 |
