A CHINESE NEW YEAR

Curiously the annual music festival seemed to end before New Year's 
Eve this year. No bass notes reverberating from the distant glow of 
lights, and no mini fireworks display to watch while the sounds of 
their countdown reaches me. I did see a few glows from more distant 
fireworks somewhere, and hear rumbles from a seemingly different 
direction, before going inside to watch the rest of the display in 
Sydney where they pretend to set the bridge on fire every year. 
Actually I turned out to a grass fire just next to the music 
festival that afternoon, which got fairly large considering there 
was little wind, though was largely out by the time I made it over 
there and just did blacking out.

To make up for that lost time I'm meant to be starting work now, 
but I get lax working on public holidays, so I'll continue trying 
to get to my point. In the last evening before the routine calendar 
apocalypse, I watched the first part of "Tie Xi Qu: West of the 
Tracks", "Rust". I'm not exactly recommending this documentary 
series to everyone, part one is over four hours long and it really 
is too long. The fact it's apparantly highly acclimed furthers my 
conviction that a requirement for film academics to consider a film 
"great" is that it's actually damn hard work to watch. There are 
some pretty shots, and emotive moments, but it's so sparsely edited 
that it feels more like raw footage for a documentary than the 
finished product.

But having said that, I actually found it really interesting. 
Filmed from 1999 to 2001, it shows a huge state-owned combined 
metal smelting facility in Tiexi, China, consisting of many 
factories producing sheets of different metals: copper, lead, and 
zinc, as well as making electrical cable. The first factories were 
built during the Japanese occupation to support their war effort, 
and after the communist revolution they continued to be expanded 
with aid from the USSR in the 1950s. Although still state-owned, in 
the new semi-capitalist China the individual factories were going 
bankrupt one by one. Curiously there still seem to have been 
customers, one worker comments their factory owes 7000 tons of 
sheet copper that hadn't been delivered, but it seems like a lot of 
money was being pocketed at the upper levels (allegedly for ore 
purchases in particular), while the workers were hardly getting 
paid at all.

The main focus is on the workers, in their grubby old locker rooms 
with mismatched steel lockers near to showers which they seemed to 
spend a lot of time in. I would have liked to see the actual 
factory work in greater proportion, but due to the overall length 
there's really a great deal of that shown as well, including a 
molten copper spillage from a furnace at one point. It's an OHS 
nightmare, yet ironically the only death occurs when a worker 
drowns while fishing in a pond, furthering the excessively strong 
conviction held by some workers that everyone should spend their 
spare time gambling instead.

The factories close one by one, as seen from a train line running 
through the facility (yes train-lovers, if you hang in to about the 
three hour mark there's footage onboard the anachronistic steam 
train as well), and in the locker rooms on the last day, eventually 
to footage of their abandonment and demolition. The most ironic 
aspect of the film is that while criticising their abondonment by 
the state, all the songs that the workers sing, and presumably 
know, are patriotic revolutionary songs heralding worker's 
liberation!

There's no narration, and the subtitles went out-of-sync in the 
copy I found on YouTube which made it hard to follow, but having 
wondered before what happened to the cradle-to-grave industries of 
communist China once the country went all capitalist, this seems to 
answer that question quite completely. It's also very much a 
glimpse into a lost world, even though only from a quarter-century 
ago.

Parts two and three promise fewer industrial scenes, based on the 
Wikipedia descriptions, but there's only five hours viewing in
them together. I might as well give them a go too.

gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Tie_Xi_Qu%3a_West_of_the_Tracks

Some less hardcore, but also very interesting, later documentaries 
I've seen about working life in China:

China's Road to Fortune or Peril (2024)
 - Independent truck drivers facing poverty as demand shrinks and 
competition increases.

Ascension (2021)
 - Somewhat in the same vein as Tie Xi Qu with long uncut shots in 
manufacturing settings, but much more varied. This film contrasts 
the lives of factory workers in the modern Chinese market economy, 
with the new upper class of China embracing western luxuries. The 
filmmaker clearly got better access to the former than the latter.

The Chinese Mayor (2015)
 - A window into the rather strange lower-level political world in 
China, where a mayor embarks on a massive and grandiose project to 
transform his polluted city in China into a top tourist destination 
by rebuilding the old city wall.

Lost in China (2009)
 - A surprisingly insightful travel show hosted by two brothers 
who, athough American, grew up in China themselves.

 - The Free Thinker