Urban displacement and eco-trauma in documentary testimony and surrealistic vision

Abstract

Independent Chinese documentaries have depicted life in urbanizing China in contrast to mediatized images of communal harmony. With emphasis on immediacy, spontaneity, and honesty, digital documentaries of the past decade have taken the vantage point of the marginalized of the city and the borderlands to push back against restrictions imposed by the official system and the film market. Documentarist Zhao Liang, whose Petition (2009) uses a combination of observational approach, interviews, and hidden cameras, has sided with powerless petitioners whose stories of untried incarceration, police beating, and horrific losses did not get resolved through the state petition system. In many vignettes of the documentary, the Beijing cityscape with high-rises appears in a distance with shanty shelters and wastes occupying the foreground. This framing approach makes a spatial analogy of unattended injury that serves as a compelling visual strategy in addition to the demonstrative shots, interviews, distance views, and empathetic depictions in the documentary to give witness to displaced lives. In this paper, I examine the refinement and poetic remaking of the spatial analogy from Petition to Behemoth (2015), the latter depicts the lands of the Mongolian steppes ravaged by mountaintop mining and foundries. Taking Zhao Liang’s reference to Dante and reading selected images and scenes, my paper examines the eco-aesthetics, symbolic and near surrealistic spaces of purgatory/hell and silent workers in Behemoth. It discusses the ways that literary imagination is integrated with the non-fiction mode to visualize ecological traumas in the mining regions of Mongolia.(245 Words)