Rampant capitalism at the movies
One thing I particularly like about winter is that I can go to the movies guilt-free. Not that I ever feel particularly bad about spending so much time at the cinema, but when the sun is shining I always feel that I should be outside enjoying it rather than sitting in a darkened room.
So to make the most of this winter, I’ve managed to get to the cinema at least 8 times in the past two months. And out of those films I’ve seen, two have particularly managed to stick in my head: Oscar winning Daniel Day Lewis showcase, There will be Blood, and Chinese director Zhang Ke Jia’s Still Life.
Set in the early part of the 20th century, There will be Blood is essentially the story of one man – Daniel Day Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview – a ruthless, single minded oil prospector who transforms a loose collection of houses and a church into a makeshift town focused on liberating the lucrative oil beneath their feet. The real impact of the film comes from its focused, relentless examination of a power driven loon dealing with life’s quintessential issues – family, relationships, community, faith, death etc., but I was also taken by the casual daily risks that people took in the oil drilling work that often resulted in disability and death. Wow, I found myself thinking despite myself and my cynicism, I just can’t ever believe that people actually lived like that – isolated, alone, in the middle of nowhere, doing such tough, dirty high risk work. Then I saw Still Life.
Still Life is two different stories about a nurse and a coal miner both going to Fengjie, the site of the infamous Three Gorges Dam project in China, to find lost loved ones. The film is beautifully shot, almost documentary style, and the story is so-so, but what really strikes is the absolutely believable depiction of everyday life for people in this rapidly changing part of China. People are being forced to leave places they have lived all their lives because of the dam construction, others have travelled hundreds and hundreds of miles across the country to find work there (usually bloody hard, unrelenting manual type work). Everyone is living amidst either half demolished buildings or rapidly thrown up new ones. It’s a masculine society full of people isolated from their families trying to make do. And like in There will be Blood, there is absolutely no concept of health and safety – people die at work and accept this as par for the course.
And this is today, not 100 years ago. I know that Still Life is a film and that Zhang Ke Jia is political film maker, but there is a point where you have to trust what he is saying. Still Life suggests that China at the moment is like the West was during the industrial revolution – rapid change, no workers rights, the individual slave to rampant capitalism at the expense of all else. This is a daily reality for millions of people. And here I am at work having to have training on how to pick up a box.
Tags: j'aime le cinema
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Very well observed.
I wonder if industrialisation has to be like this. Presumably at some point various African countries will undergo the rapid change and rise in living standards that characterise industrial revolutions, we can only hope that they will manage to do it without the risk and conflict that seem to characterise such episodes in other countries.
March 3rd, 2008 at 10:37 am
Hello Tom and welcome,
You’d like to think, wouldn’t you, that countries about to embark on their ‘industrial revolutions’ could learn alot from what went wrong in the past. But the very nature of the forces behind it – globalisation, capitalism, post-colonialism – doesn’t really give you much hope. I can’t help but think, that at the very least it’s all an environmental disaster waiting to happen. But I’ve always been a bit of a doom monger…