The Cruelty in Youth (Spring)

I took a bathroom break during the screening of Wang Bing’s new documentary, Youth (Spring). On my way back to the auditorium, there was an old man standing next to the door, and he looked at me and said, “I can’t with this movie... it is so boring.”

As much as I would look down upon him for his “bad taste,” I could relate to what he felt.

This three-and-a-half-hour-long documentary focuses on the mundane lives of several young workers from the lower class in the sewing factories in the small town of Zhili in China. It is anthropological, as you can expect from Wang Bing. It includes every aspect of the subjects’ lives, from their labor and relationships (flirting) with each other to their household, bargaining wages, or any relaxation they can have in their free time. It is a universe of another life.

Not my first time watching Wang Bing’s work, it became very self-evident that Wang Bing tries very hard not to insert himself into the narrative. The film is not edited in a way that includes a beginning, a middle, and an end or to stimulate any emotions, or to send out any messages to the audience. Of course, the film is not, so to speak, “100% objective” (for there is no such thing), but as an audience, you cannot feel an opinion from this film about its subjects. The film has no political agenda, and some might even say it has no stories. It only tries to be a true-to-life representation of these young lower-class workers in China.

I grew up in Guangzhou, one of the biggest cities in China. My family was working class turned middle class during the early 2000s, benefiting from the economic reform. Back then, my parents seized the opportunity they had and made themselves a better life. As a result, they could afford me to study in New York City, and now I can pursue my dream to become an indie filmmaker here.

Knowing the privilege I have, it is not easy for me to watch Wang Bing’s film. These earnest images of the young lower working-class people have stirred up some hard thoughts and feelings in me. And I couldn’t help dissecting their situation from a sociological perspective:

It occurs to me that they are trapped in this small world in the factory. They are poorly educated. They only listen to music that is considered “cheap and vulgar.” All they care about is the gossiping and melodrama in their social circle and the money they can make at the moment. I think a lot about Pierre Bourdieu’s note about taste and class. I can’t help asking, what is the future like for these young people? What is the potential for them if they are given the same resources and chances as I? What can be done to improve the situation in front of my eyes?

A portion of the film is about the workers trying to bargain with the factory owner about their salary at the end of the year. It was a small amount of money, at least from our perspective. None of the workers nor the owner would back down, even though they all seem frustrated with the bargain. It becomes a back-and-forth, very repetitive and uninterrupted process. At first, it can feel indulging to see the same conversation happen again and again because it shows more of the characters. But as it kept going on and on and on, the lack of progress made it “boring and tedious” to the audience: I could hear deep breaths, sighs, and yawns from people around me, including myself. But the same conversation just keeps going on. Wang Bing forces the audience to spend “real-time” on this bargaining process with his subjects, meaning the bargain can feel like it consumes as much energy from the workers as the film consumes from the audience. While this was “boredom” for the audience sitting in Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center, New York, to bear (some left the theater at this point), it is a fight for living for these workers in Zhili, China, to persist in.

The realities of different worlds and classes somehow clash in this dark, quiet room. Because the film has no opinion or analysis on their social status whatsoever itself, my thoughts and feelings about these workers only come from my social status and experiences, in this case, the privilege of a higher class. The absence of opinions or even a message in the documentary forces me to look at my way of looking at the subject itself. Sitting in the dark, I had to stare at my privilege and my own powerlessness to do anything about my privilege. I feel ashamed that, while the documentary tries to show the vivid life of these people, most of what I see are class, inequality, labor abuse… problems to be solved. There is no judgment of their social status in the film until I brought it in myself.

I think it is a part of human nature to seek meaning, an explanation, in things around us. While usually we can’t find them, we give them to ourselves so the world feels comprehensible and manageable and, hence, safe: the world is in our control. The meaning we seek is often in the form of the relation of cause and effect: this happens because of that, we do this and it causes that, etc. In a way, religions and science are not too different from such a perspective, in which they hold human society together. Cinema, especially in modern times, is a great example of our obsession with causality and meanings: a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it goes beyond the subjects. It is about a bigger picture, a story, a pattern or perception, an insight into the world.

Wang Bing is not interested in meanings. He mentioned a few times in different interviews that he is not interested in politics and he doesn’t want his films to be a tool for politics either. All he wants and does is to preserve the life of these people as authentic as it can be in an anthropological way. When we are used to looking at underrepresented people on screen as problems to be solved, situations to be improved, Youth (Spring) offers an experience to unlearn such perspective, to see lives as they are and wake up our senses to just watch and feel these fellow human beings on the other side of the earth. But such earnestness in Wang Bing’s cinema is also cruel because the absence of the filmmaker in the film leaves the audience to the dark nature of reality: the world is chaotic, and we are not in control.

But I also couldn’t help thinking about the technological nature in cinema and photography, which is to capture and recreate the information of light for human eyes, and in this case, light is time and space. When the Lumière Brothers made The Arrival of a Train and caused a disturbance in the audience, they set out to showcase the cinema’s ability to preserve and transport a slice of reality. At that time, they called it actuality film, which is essentially “b-rolls” that are “not structured into a larger narrative or a coherent whole.” Seemingly unconventional, perhaps Wang Bing actually brings back one of the original purposes of cinema in his practices, to preserve lives from some forgotten corner of this world of capitalism and deliver it to the present and the future as a gift of remembering.