Critics reviews

There are, as always, questions to be raised about that approach, but Zhao avoids exploitation. "I don't think that artistic works can change society," he told The New York Times. "They are very weak." He said he has moved toward making movies for himself, rather than out of a sense of social responsibility. And yet, with this movie, Zhao has given us the kind of illuminating art the issue deserves. He opts to reveal and persuade where others deign to preach.

Beautiful to watch and horrifying to contemplate, Zhao Liang's experimental documentary BEHEMOTH considers China's coal industry, its negative effects on the environment, and some the people directly impacted by its devastations. Zhao captures stunning landscape shots of the mines in Inner Mongolia, presenting them like Renaissance-era paintings of Hell.

At the movies, it's Dump Month, which stretches into February: no film with award aspirations will open until the end of winter. But there are exceptions in this dominion of crap, including Behemoth, a lyrical documentary by the Chinese director Zhao Liang.

It opens with a distant shot of some kind of excavation project. Mechanical shovels and earth-movers sit on ridges of land carved out by other machines and while all is still for a short time, that quiet is torn apart by a loud explosion that sends sheets of dust into the air. Black and red and grey and yellow dust. It's beautiful, just as the strafing of a tropical shoreline at the opening of "Apocalypse Now" was beautiful. Catastrophe seen from afar sometimes looks positively awe-inspiring.

Exposing the ill effects of China's drive to develop, the mesmerizing Behemoth, a boldly visual essay film by the political documentarian Zhao Liang, depicts the successive stages of industrial manufacture as a de facto descent into hell... Zhao evokes—and, indeed, practically invokes—Werner Herzog's 1992 improvised masterpiece Lessons of Darkness, a triumph of framing and footage that surveyed the Kuwaiti oil fields blazing after the first Gulf War.

If the movie's goal is to accord humanity to forgotten workers, it's easy to be of two minds. Zhao does not identify his subjects or — for the most part — give them a direct voice. Yet, "Behemoth" can be uncomfortably intimate. It ponders faces and blistered hands, and shows bottles of black fluid being extracted from workers, a consequence of pneumoconiosis, or black lung disease... Its haunting power grows in retrospect — as if you've returned from a journey and can't believe what you've seen.

Zhao forgoes any sense of identification, attempting to get the level of myth, casting the destruction of the landscape and the exploitation of the workers—who return blackened at the end of every shift, until they end up wheezing in a bed with a nasal cannula looped over their ears—as a cycle of elemental forces. It could stand to be more fluid, but it leaves a heck of an impression.

The acclaimed Chinese documentarian and video artist assumes a poetic view of industry — here made exquisite in its violence, ravishing in its destructive power. Much as Antonioni did in the petrochemical plants of northern Italy, Zhao finds in the coal mines and ironworks of Inner Mongolia a devastating, infuriating splendor.

The best of them is Zhao Liang's monumental Behemoth, which fuses an aesthetically audacious vision of Chinese coal mining with Dante's Divine Comedy, conjuring the dehumanising scale and eternal struggle of the people versus the machine.

The sublime devastation of massive industry has appeared in documentaries before, but for his portrayal of Inner Mongolian mines, Zhao reaches for the lyrical to express the scale and ruthlessness of Chinese industrialization. Vast valleys, machines, and explosions sprawl across the screen, interspersed with voiceover quotations adapted from Dante and punctuated with the image of a nude, embryonically curled man poised in the landscape, emblematic of human fragility.

Zhao's miraculous film is extremely simple in its political aims... He toys with the form, including the occasional fictional insert of a naked wanderer observing the desolation from afar. Sometimes, the manner in which he films a subject transforms it into something otherworldly.

The images in Behemoth would be as much at home in a gallery as in a cinema; in a sense, the film revives an old tradition of poetic documentary, and does so with rather more backbone than recent films from the 'sensory lab' at Harvard. If that means that Zhao will be more a visual artist than a filmmaker in future, so much the richer for his audience.