China: industrial purgatory and ghost cities

miner's face, Behemoth

Image by Behemoth

Liang Zhao’s documentary, Behemoth, says that the price of development can be too high.

His camera stares unflinchingly at a coal mine in the Mongolian grasslands and at a nearby iron works.

It conjures up an inferno of noise, explosions, dust, rubble, smoke, vibration, molten heat; of danger and sickness on a gargantuan scale; of an implacable Leviathan devouring the workers and the surrounding countryside.

The miners and furnacemen look stunned by the overwhelming forces they struggle heroically to harness. Assaulted and battered, they are like rag dolls entangled in a giant, unstoppable industrial machine. They fight on, driven only by spirit and a will to survive. At night, they scrape and scrub in a despairing attempt to let their bodies breathe. Only towards the end do we glimpse their inevitable defeat in hopeless struggle, as broken men fight for breath in hospital wards and families stand by placards demanding fair treatment.

The film is almost wordless: it’s not a documentary that details pay and perks and conditions or offers insights through the words of the workers.

Liang Zhao occasionally allows his own musings on the carnage he is witnessing, as well as flashes of a vulnerable naked curled up body in the ravaged landscape and a man slogging through vast wasteheaps with a heavy mirror on his back,, but the visual poetry and commentary are largely superfluous.

The usual justification for such exploitation and inhumanity is that it’s the price of development. But the argument cannot stand scrutiny. Allowing this blight, these conditions, makes a sham of development.

And that’s true even without the film’s extraordinary coda: deserted, traffic-free, constantly tidied streets in one of China’s new “ghost cities”.

Is that what industrial hell in Inner Mongolia is for?

* Behemoth is showing at the ICA, The Mall, SW1 on 19-25 August, £11/£9/£7. Info: 7930 3647/ ica.org.uk

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from 19 August, Home Cinema, Manchester, and IFI Dublin

22 August, Duke of York, Brighton

from 26 August, Watershed, Bristol and FACT Liverpool

from September, Showroom, Sheffield

Tyneside, Newcastle and Picturehouse Cambridge (dates tbc)

From December, Palace, Kent