Workers Leaving The Factory:the Social Mise-en-scene Of Wang Bing And Jia Zhangke's Documentaries

In chinese contemporary documentaries,as it's pointed by Bérénice Reynaud in the article " The Good Cats of Chinese Documentary",the increasing accessibility of small-size,highly portable digital recording and editing technologies allowed filmmakers to independently seek for new material outside Beijing and away from government control.More particularly,a daring approach to documentary filmmaking enable questions about the deep transformation in chinese society to be captured in a straightforward vérité filmming.Allowed by those new technologies,the Cinéma vérité starts to be redesigned and relocated to a Chinese social reality.This encounter between author and material is mediated by the camera and the result of the collision between apparatus and subject is what constitutes those documentaries.Stella Bruzzi,in the book "New Documentary-A Critical Introduction",enlightens a key question to understand which forces govern the relationship between the raw material(the real)and the camera/director by stating that documentary film is traditionally perceived to be the hybrid offspring of a perennial struggle between the forces of objectivity(represented by the 'documents' or facts that underpin it)and the forces of subjectivity(that is the translation of those facts into representational form).Proceeding from this standpoint-the questioning about the relationship between the real and the camera-this research project aims to discuss two movies-Jia Zhangke's "24 City" and Wang Bing's West of the Tracks”-about the life of chinese workers in factory towns that were closed and demolished during China's economic transition.In Jia Zhangke's "24 City",3 different dispositifs are mixed-first person interviews,real and staged by actors,and images from real locations-to tell a oral story of a factory relocated to make way for a shopping mall in Chengdu.In Wang Bing's Tiexi Qu(West of the Tracks,2002)a long and complex critical portrait of a collapsing industrial system and,most important,the life of those factory workers.Close to a cinema vérité dispositif,Wang Bing insistently follows real workers during their labor.In Wang Bing's movie,what does revel to be a pre-existing raw material of social codes? And what does turn out to be a natural reaction to the presence of the camera? And what do both lectures reveal about the daily reality of those workers? On the other hand,in Jia Zhangke's movie,what can be admitted as social Mise-en-scène in the relationship between the real and the staged? This action of introducing a foreign object,the camera,whatever the size and quality,in a space that in one way or another until then had not been inhabited for it,is an act of narrativization and contextualization.