Sjoukje van der Meulen
Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Keywords: Wang Bing, garment industry, floating population, slow cinema, migrant image, migration, hypermobility, suspension
DOI: 10.5509/2021942371
This essay examines two films by the Chinese documentary filmmaker Wang Bing about temporary migrant workers in small, privately owned garment workshops in Zhejiang Province, China: Bitter Money (Ku Qian; 2016) and 15 Hours (Shi Wu Xiao Shi; 2017). Wang’s films portray Chinese garment workers’ lived experiences of “suspension,” as defined by Biao Xiang in this issue, in unique cinematic ways. Social sciences have paid close attention to the experiences of migrant workers, but art documentaries use audiovisual and aesthetic means to explore their everyday reality, producing what D. MacDougall calls distinctive “affective knowledge.” Wang’s films are usually categorized as part of the Sixth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, known for capturing social issues through observational methods. In this essay, I identify Wang’s works with the aesthetics of “slow cinema” and a global documentary trend in the visual arts as theorized by T. J. Demos in The Migrant Image. Based on close observation coupled with empathetic insight, Wang develops his own subjective method to portray people in a transformed and still changing China, where suspension is a common state of being. Ultimately, Wang’s films not only make the personal experiences of migrant workers visible and tangible, but also problematize their underlying, collective condition of suspension due to the contract labour system and associated hypermobility. The suspension approach suggests a productive way of bringing documentary art and social sciences into dialogue.
纪录中国制衣业:王兵对合同工制度下流动务工者的悬浮生活的描绘
关键词:王兵, 制衣业, 浮动人口, 慢电影, 流动者形象, 超级流动, 悬浮。
本论文考察了中国纪录片导演王兵拍摄的关于浙江省小型私人制衣厂的临时外来工人的两部影片:《苦钱》(2016)和《15小时》(2017)。王兵的影片用独特的电影手法描述了中国制衣工人的“悬浮”(正如项飙在本期特刊做的定义)的生活经历。社会科学一直对流动务工人口密切关注,但是艺术纪录片利用声像和美学手段来探索他们的日常现实,生产出反映他们的处境的独特的“情感性知识” (D. MacDougall) 。 王兵的电影通常被归类为中国第六代导演的作品,以依靠观察法捕捉社会问题著称。在本论文中, 我认为王兵的电影更符合“慢电影”美学,以及 T. J. 德莫丝(T. J. Demos) 在《流动者形象》一书中所理论化的视觉艺术中的全球纪录片潮流。利用切近的观察,辅以同情的洞察,王兵发展出一套自己的对于生活在已经转型但仍在变化中的中国——其中悬浮已经是一种常态——的人们的主观描述方法。 最终,王兵的电影不仅使得流动务工者的个人经历清晰可见,而且对深层的由合同工体系以及相应的超级流动性造成的集体性的悬浮处境加以问题化。悬浮视角展示了一种纪录片艺术和社会科学之间进行富有成果的对话的方式。
Translated from English by Li Guo
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