As the postscript to Zhao Liang’s Behemoth notes, China currently boasts hundreds of “ghost towns,” hyper-modern planned cities which, despite their immense scale, are conspicuously short on actual human inhabitants. These bizarre anti-settlements have cropped up for a variety of reasons – as tax dodges, sops to an underserved national workforce or just over-ambitious construction projects gone awry – but collectively identify the contemporary mindset of a country in which people are being bent to serve the needs of bureaucrats and developers, rather than the other way around. The metropolis spotlighted here is Ordos, a gleaming shell of a city set amid expansive, otherwise wild Inner Mongolian grasslands; kept spotless by wandering sanitation men but otherwise devoid of life, it looks like something out of post-apocalyptic science fiction. The rest of the film, which traces the production route that yields the raw materials for such a colossal architectural undertaking, feels equivalently dystopian by design.
Behemoth opens on another stretch of Inner Mongolian countryside, where strip mining is rendering once fertile stretches of verdant mountain valleys into a craggy hellscape resembling an outer-space mining colony. Here Zhao establishes his template, not quite documentary, not quite fiction, a sort of long-form video art that accentuates the surreal aspects of routine labor. Work is the primary focus, and while a vague sense of the processes being carried out is imparted, greater attention is paid to how human tools orbit around this hive of activity, the scale of which renders them minute and insignificant. What might have been a dreary procedural treatise on labor thus becomes a staggering visual display, as Zhao skillfully shuffles stifling close-ups with vivid long-shot landscapes. Contrasting the natural with the mechanical, he sets up scenes of fiery industrial pandemonium which bring to mind William Blake’s “The Tiger.”
Literary references form an undercurrent beneath a top layer of otherwise stringent realism; the film’s primary fictional flourish involves appearances and voiceover from an unnamed man, who in one of the film’s first grandiose tableaux is glimpsed lying nude and supine on the rough ground, an inversion of the opening image from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. In that ludicrous libertarian fever dream, Übermensch architect Howard Roark looks down upon a prospective construction site, his naked body cast as the sinewy physical analogue to the glorious structures he’ll soon create. What follows in Behemoth instead highlights the true toll of the Randian emphasis on the grandeur of individual accomplishment, with tremendous amounts of labor and energy expended to meet the tastes of a privileged few, the less-fortunate masses blending anonymously into the background.
Zhao accentuates this point through complete silence from the workers featured, forcing us to focus on their enforced subservience, hunched postures and coal-blackened hands. The only words featured are narrated excerpts from Dante’s Inferno a fitting choice considering the hellish atmosphere of the plants depicted, as the film moves from the mulching up of the earth’s surface into blazing foundries and smelting sites. Further panoramas of environmental carnage segue into a concluding sojourn in a workers’ camp, culminating with time spent with a variety of former miners now suffering from black lung, a historical scourge that’s still ruining the lives of many in this isolated corner of the world. A large number of these are migrants, rootless people whose plight – hooked up to machines they now need to keep themselves breathing – typifies the hopeless of people trapped in the neo-liberal network of corporate greed and individual isolation.
Zhao’s 2009 project Petition portrayed people trapped in a similar limbo, desperately attempting to address governmental grievances in Beijing, menaced by marathon waiting periods and the aggressive hostility of local “retrievers,” hired to coerce them into dropping their claims. That film ends where this one begins, as the expectant petitioners’ shanty-town is cleared to make way for a rail-system expansion in the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, an act of erasure mirrored in Behemoth’s silent workers, who are swallowed up by the creation of a soulless, largely vacant metropolis. Again focusing on how powerless people operate in the context of a hopelessly complex system, Zhao now traces the issue back to its roots. In doing so, he captures both the dark underbelly of the modern chain of production and those most affected by its excesses, shaping a profoundly poetic statement that doesn’t require words to persuade.
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