InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 21.5

FESTIVAL COVERAGE
Youth (Spring), we’re introduced to a set of teens and
twentysomethings who take up residence in various decaying
industrial towns; we see them live out near every aspect of their
day-to-day lives, from the most detached and impersonal
moments to the charged and intimate ones. Close friends make
jokes with each other, awkward first encounters with
prospective partners occur, long-term couples debate their
futures, bitter fights erupt, and in aimless moments they wander
the streets. Community is incubated among our cast through
living conditions of cramped, privacy-devoid dormitories filled
with their colleagues. Daily activities move the youths through
the space of dilapidated buildings, down messy streets, onto
public transportation, into internet cafes, to patronize street
food vendor stalls, and of course, land them in the workplace.
Work dominates the lives of our subjects, as it does the runtime
of this three-and-a-half hour film. Endless, repetitive mechanical
toil, repeated so incessantly as to become second nature, is
drilled down into the very core instincts of these young people.
So often have they repeated these tasks that some of the
studied shots of workers operating the sewing machines
showcase what approaches robotic dexterity, speed, and
precision. We see workplace conflict and negotiation with
employers; while only a rung or two up the societal pecking
order, the floor managers hold all the cards, and the youths have
only barefaced tenacity on their side.
The photography in Youth (Spring) is, as in other Wangs,
handheld, opting for predictable meandering long takes. The
camera is a character, acknowledged by those on screen; it
responds to events in a way that illustrates the
semi-participation of the documentarians (i.e., in scenes
involving more abrasive behavior, the camera becomes sheepish
and self-conscious about its act of intrusion). The setting is
captured with geometrical directness in a way that obscures
place, perhaps in an appeal to the universality of the lives
depicted. The camera circles, round and round, through the
same spaces, gradually building a sense of the textures of the
subjects’ daily lives in shades of human interest and monotony.
Duration tends to lend experiential weight to the more dreary
and mundane observations. But Youth (Spring) also feels
conceptually unmoored and fails to solve the fundamental
editorial question of what gets in and what stays on the cutting
room floor. The emotional highs feel distant, too; Wang grates
against the limits of what a slow, observatory direct cinema can
say. On balance, though, the film is still moving and deeply
human — a depiction of ordinary people making the best of a
hard lot in life, living in neither destitution nor with abundance.
Finally, it ends with an ostensible teaser for what’s to come in
the next installment of the trilogy: a handful of youths travel to
their hometown village to gather for the Chinese New Year.
It’s worth taking stock of Wang’s journey to this moment in his
career. His over-nine-hour debut feature, Tie Xi Qu: West of the
Tracks (2002), was a seminal moment for Chinese documentary
culminating a decade of increasingly ambitious independent and
outsider video works. With a unique visual language, one native
to digital video, Wang created a revelatory encapsulation of a
place, a social context, and a series of events completely alien to
his viewers. He was an artist more than a documentarian, and
West of the Tracks was immediately one of the greatest artworks
of the new millennium. The rest of the decade saw Wang
struggling to follow up this opus, in various ways — and to
greatly varying degrees of success. Eventually, after his to-date
only fictional feature, The Ditch (2010), Wang seemed to change
tack. He resembled less a "great modern artist" than a figure at
the vanguard of contemporary Chinese documentary as a genre,
which flowered into a career renaissance for him as the decade
progressed — aided, in part, by online file-sharing communities
disseminating his works. As a documentarian, Wang still
occasionally made vital films: Ta'ang and Dead Souls, in
particular, cemented his witness to history. And then, a few
years ago, came news of a highly anticipated feature following
Nigerian immigrants to China, which has thus far failed to
materialize, and is rumored to be subjected to the pressures of
aforesaid censorship. In this context, Wang’s proper return with
Youth (Spring) feels like more abdication: he’s retreating to the
same subjects with no change in orientation, a softer
sociopolitical touch, and less rigorous conceptual and aesthetic
scaffolds. The hard, expressive DV-native visual language of his
earlier works has completed its long transformation into
nondescript amorphous HD. The likelihood of this abdication is
buttressed further by his reported humble amazement at his
inclusion among this year’s competition slate. Wang simply isn’t
China's leading documentarian anymore, just as he abandoned
his claim to high artistry. But one hopes that isn’t permanent. —
NOEL OAKSHOT
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