J.P. Sniadecki’s The Iron Ministry opens in the shadowy bowels of a passenger train, the camera hesitantly exploring surfaces and textures, darkness gradually giving way to light. Cold, steel and hard plastic likewise fade into the background as the focus expands outward to a car full of workers messily preparing skinned animal carcasses for consumption, bloody parts transforming into meat. This wavering between the mechanical and the organic, creating tension between precision and squalor, continues throughout the film, which incorporates the manifold contradictions and complexities of modern China into a single, sinuous journey through these narrow corridors and pocket-sized compartments. Another compelling work from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography laboratory, it achieves a satisfying synthesis of fly-on-the-wall observation and casual reportage, collecting aural and visual snippets to form a patchwork picture of this rapidly changing nation.
The train is one of cinema’s classic settings, its enclosed confines providing occasion for disparate narrative threads to intermingle and for conflict to bloom. It’s also one of the prevailing symbols of progress, an icon of mounting speed and inexorable momentum. Combining these two concepts in a non-fiction context, Sniadecki manages to tell a coherent story without the help of plot or characters. Words and images carry equal significance, conveying an overall sense of fractured uncertainty. Some scenes focus on wordless action and mundane, repetitive tasks. Others engage in discussion and debate, covering a satisfying array of topics and opinions. Along the way, the presence of the camera elicits a host of different reactions: one irate police officer demands that the crew to stop filming, while another opens up about the insufficiencies of the Chinese railway system.
Throughout all this is a consistent feeling of constriction, with little space for movement and no direction to move but forward. The resulting conception is of a nation on the move. Tensions and changes are documented as the train hurtles forward at top speed, filled with a diverse crowd of passengers forced into close contact with one another. The noisy atmosphere and limited visual scope confirms the film as a companion piece to Sniadecki’s People’s Park, which addressed similar concerns within the more tranquil setting of Chengdu’s municipal gathering place. The Iron Ministry lacks that film’s sense of formal experimentation, eschewing single-shot theatrics for a composite depiction formed from dozens of train trips, but makes up for it by expanding the scope of content and discussion, expounding upon ideas only hinted at in that previous film.
Also significant is the fact that People’s Park seemed specifically focused on the collision between past and present, the sight of commerce and communion conducted in a Communist-established public space and the structures and divisions which mark modern Chinese lives. Here the conflict is between present and future, the unstoppable flow of progress and a society that may not be totally ready to handle these demands. One prevailing concern is the potential loss of cultural identity; key conversations involve the unwillingness of ethnic minorities to embrace the Chinese way of life and the ongoing stampeding of Tibetan culture. This ambivalence is echoed by a profusion of shots and scenes highlighting doorways and people framed by the pressing negative space of these potential passages. The Iron Ministry may take place entirely within the confines of a speeding train, but it’s ultimately less concerned with the thrill of progress than the potential trepidation which accompanies it, of the fine details and nuances that are lost as things begin to rush by in a blur.