Youth (Spring) (Wang Bing, 2023).
In a crowded living room, a girl shoos her uncle away from in front of the television set, though no one is really watching, blocking the stage for what will be a pivotal scene of her life. So much the better for Wang Bing’s camera, which gets a clear view of the family as they discuss the teenager’s prospects in tones of alternating anticipation and concern. She has lied about her age in order to obtain a work permit and will soon travel across the country, from Yunnan province in the southwest to Zhejiang in the east, and spend a season sewing children’s clothing in one of the thousands of workshops of Zhili, a district of Huzhou City. For the next two and half hours, Bitter Money (2016) will chart her journey and many others’: After days and nights on buses and trains, they arrive wide-eyed in an unfamiliar city, then acclimate uncertainly to cramped lodgings. Bouts of homesickness, moments of camaraderie, and episodes of abuse punctuate the press of production demands in an industry of brand-name counterfeits, operating on the thinnest of margins.
The film drifts from one subject to the next, always finding someone nearby who doesn’t mind being followed, sometimes returning later to see how they’ve fared. Wang has likewise allowed chance encounter to guide him from project to project, creating a career-long sense of continuity. While shooting The Ditch (2010), his only narrative feature to date, he met a man who became the subject of Man with No Name (also 2010). After production on The Ditch wrapped, he visited the tomb of Sun Shixian, a contemporary author he admires, in Yunnan, and on the way back happened to meet the girls who became the subjects of Three Sisters (2012). In the course of that shoot, he fell in with the teenagers whom he followed to Zhili for Bitter Money. 15 Hours (2017) came soon after, an unbroken day-in-the-life shot of such garment workers, presented as a 900-minute-long installation.
Now, the Youth trilogy finds Wang settling in, devoting even more time and attention to the setting he has been looking at for ten years, which proved too vast for just a single treatment. Nearly ten hours of film were culled from roughly 2,600 recorded over the course of five years, from 2014 to 2019. (The films are incidentally a pre-pandemic time capsule, documenting a situation that has doubtlessly changed in the intervening years.) When Wang ran out of money to shoot, he began editing, and it was only then that he realized he was making a trilogy. Unlike some previous projects that remain with a solitary subject throughout, often in protracted takes, Wang was here compelled to “compress time,” generally structuring the material into twenty-minute sections, in the course of which on-screen text introduces scores of new subjects by name, age, and hometown.
Bitter Money (Wang Bing, 2016).
Zhili provides an atypical example of Chinese garment work. Its small, private enterprises, few employing more than twenty workers, stand in stark contrast to the huge factories that predominate in what was until the late 1990s a state-run economy (China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001). Most of the clothing made here is for the domestic market, not for export. The people who stitch these millions of articles are drawn to the city on a seasonal basis from far-flung rural provinces along the Yangtze River. Their migration recalls past national relocation projects, but rather than compelled by the state it is now driven by market forces. It is not uncommon to work from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. or later, with an hour for lunch and another for dinner; one day in every week, the workers may be permitted to leave at 5 p.m.
Bitter Money, named for way such workers refer to the rewards of their labors, finds its subjects mostly in their precious off-hours. It becomes understandably fixated on moments of high drama: a harrowing scene of domestic violence, a drunken confrontation between a man and his employer. We don’t hear the whirr of a sewing machine until the one-hour mark. As a result, the film struggles to give an accurate and compelling account of its subjects’ lives. In retrospect, it seems an experimental prototype for Youth, the vast majority of which takes place in the workshops, under the harsh fluorescence and amid the maddening din of servo motors and pop music. When the workers finally leave the factory, Wang’s camera follows them up a flight of stairs to their shared dormitories, where their torpid, downturned faces glow in the shifting blue light of their phones. The factories are strung end to end, distinguishable only by their addresses (many on Happiness Road): always the same rooms with different people inside.
Despite their drudgery, the days are far from dull. In the first installment, subtitled Spring (2023), the workers—most in their teens and twenties—engage in a series of courting rituals, the likes of which you can otherwise expect to find in university common rooms. Staring, sulking, gossiping, and teasing turns to hazarded touch—swatting, sitting, groping—and finally to talk of marriage and children. All of this while sewing so fast it looks as though their hands are running at a higher speed than the rest of the image, the pattern-printed faces of Mickey Mouse and Hello Kitty often beaming up at them from under the needle. When something attracts the camera’s eager attention—when, in the midst of small talk, someone starts to ruminate on marriage or family, for instance—the operator quickly reframes the shot around them, not by zooming, but by physically moving closer. That Wang chooses to include the camera adjustments as he and his collaborators refine such a composition is an endorsement of real time, an unusual speed at which to see life unfold on film.
Under China’s residency restrictions, these migrant workers must forego their claims to public services like healthcare and education while traveling for work. Marriage is the only change of status that allows one to legally change residence, and so it represents for many the single opportunity to drastically alter the course of one’s life. This has generational repercussions, as elderly parents may be left without a caretaker if their children marry outside of the community. “If you get married to someone far away, I will have lost a daughter,” the mother moans in that first scene of Bitter Money, likening such an eventuality to the death of a child in an earthquake. In Spring, these weighty concerns are puzzled over in the hormone-choked confines of the workshop. When young men are looking for work at the top of the season, they consider the reputation of the boss, the age of the machines, but also if there are any pretty girls there.
Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing, 2024).
Hard Times (2024) is the second installment of the trilogy, though it was the last to be completed. (Its Chinese subtitle, 苦, is the same character that is translated as “bitter” in Bitter Money.) It continues Spring’s focus on the shop as a social space, though it’s far less lusty. Much of its running time is dedicated to the matter of payment, which is completely fraught in this casual economy, structured around vague and unenforceable promises and debts. The machinists are paid by the piece, but the rates are not set until the very end of the season, when the work has already been completed. As they toil, the workers speculate amongst themselves about the boss’s outlay and bottom line, about what they would do differently in his place. When the time comes, they negotiate fervently, but entirely without leverage, and end up begrudgingly accepting whatever meager terms are offered and counting their money in disbelief before they head home for the holidays. Some bosses skip town come payday, leaving their workers to strip the shop for parts. One such circumstance in the film is almost comically bleak: when the workers manage to break into the boss’s former residence, the most valuable item they find is an extension cord. Before they can use it to plug in a refrigerator or air conditioner, the power is cut and they are evicted.
The third film, Homecoming (also 2024), is organized more conventionally than the first two, gradually tracing the familial networks of its central subjects as they return to their villages to celebrate the new year, and to be married. A thrilling one-lane dirt-road mountainside minibus climb delivers us to a Yunnan village, alongside a young man and his fiancé. The setting is different in every way from the one they’ve become accustomed to—fresh air, vast landscapes, family obligations—except for the miasma of poverty and the low, gray skies that always seem to be hanging over their heads. During the celebrations dedicated to the god of prosperity, the thrum of fireworks recalls that of their sewing machines back in Zhili. The previous films end on similar homecoming codas; this one returns finally to a workbench.
Youth (Homecoming) (Wang Bing, 2024).
At a time when many documentarians have become suspicious of the observational mode and spend their time anxiously accounting for their own presence among their subjects, Wang trusts his material implicitly and absolutely. He works intuitively and expansively, giving his subjects a larger place in the world by putting what unfolds in front of his camera onto far-flung screens. “I never interfere in their lives or try to direct them in any way,” he has said, “That’s how I see a documentary film: it has to assert reality, tell the truth about people’s everyday lives.” While there are holes worth poking in Wang’s claims to noninterference—we know that the presence of a camera charges its subjects with self-representation in a way that can only distort their behavior—it is refreshing to see a nonfiction filmmaker confidently stake their work squarely within the bounds of reality, non-hybridized, un-reflexified, unreformed. He is still in the business of looking closely, with sustained attention, at that which we might not otherwise see.
Such adherence to the observational mode sets the occasional moment of intervention in stark relief. In some scenes, especially in Homecoming, we know it is Wang himself behind the camera because we can hear his heavy breathing at the top of a long flight of stairs—setting his own age against their youth. In others, the smoke from his cigarette wafts out into the scene. Sometimes, he poses direct questions to his subjects, but mostly they ask each other the questions that a director otherwise might, about wages, working conditions, family life, and all else—whether out of curiosity, compassion, or self-interest. We have cause to consider the effect of the camera when the subjects look toward it to see if a certain joke has registered, or if perhaps they have gone too far. At other times, they can be heard conducting the camera’s movements, advising Wang to film in a certain workshop where a labor dispute has broken out, or else sending him home so they can get some sleep.
The spare, purpose-worn shops serve a dual function as worksite and social space, containers of and witnesses to the attendant joys and miseries of adolescence. On the walls are layered several generations of scrawled writing. Scraps and clutter swirl at their feet. Everything in the room swims in lint; the workers emerge with a fine layer of it coating their bodies, adhering to their sweat. Many times, a stray thread or fiber can be seen on the camera lens. With the countervailing weight of his own commitment of time and energy, Wang plumbs a deep well of metaphor and actuality: a seemingly endless series of repeating rooms and corridors, the sites of material and social reproduction nested neatly inside each other.
Even as the cinematography articulates the limitations of the architecture—frequently, the camera must move out of the way so that someone can squeeze past in the course of their work—it also locates at every opportunity moments of compositional balance and even beauty. In Hard Times, a couple leaves Zhili empty-handed, their efforts to extract payment from their employer having proved futile. As they descend from the dormitories to a waiting cab in the rain, the camera finds their shadows and that of their umbrella on each stairwell landing, bobbing lower and lower until they finally disappear: it might be the final shot from a Nouvelle Vague romance. Some of the film’s dialogue likewise rivals the most classic exchanges of the dramatic corpus. (“You’ll never see me again,” one worker threatens her would-be suitor. “Maybe better than seeing you every day,” he retorts.) Credit is due to the translator of the subtitles, who has rendered the workers’ dialect, which Wang professes not to always understand himself, in immediate, deeply poignant, and often hilarious idiomatic English—though there must be still more that we miss.
Youth (Homecoming) (Wang Bing, 2024).
Well-meaning critical appraisals have compared the experience of watching the Youth trilogy to the labors depicted therein—“arduous,” “wearisome,” “grueling,” “a lot of work”—a solecism that can probably be attributed to the films’ duration more than anything else. As we are encouraged to consider the productive potential of our leisure time, engagement with cultural objects becomes an investment from which we expect a return: a readymade indictment of the Chinese state, a pious polemic against poverty, or at least a salve for our guilty conscience, none of which are on offer in Wang’s project.
Any audience will be distressed by the plight of the people who appear in these films, but pity is besides the point. Despite their subjugation to the demands of capital, they are not cast in the role of the victim. Before his own name appears on screen, Wang credits the “amazing, lively presence” of his subjects. The hours we spend in their company confound an attitude popular in the West and essential to placating its cognitive dissonance: that the lives of the “less fortunate” are so abased as not to be worth living, that they are “lives nobody would want,” according to one particularly garish assessment of the subjects of Youth. The unwillingness to imagine another’s interiority as equal to one’s own implicitly abets their brutalization, a trick of the mind that explains much of the queasy acquiescence to the atrocities of our day.
These films do not dehumanize their subjects by despairing on their behalf; rather, the overwhelming sensation is of life growing through and around the ironclad bondage of the dispossessed. Interesting himself as much in their powerlessness as their potency, as much in their doomed negotiations as their frenzied romances, Wang endeavors to exhibit the vast range of experience which fills a life, even when certain material possibilities are foreclosed (as they always are, except in our fictions). In locating beauty and levity amid desolation, he does not excuse or romanticize the fact of exploitation but honors the lives that exceed the sense of that term or any other.