3 - Spaces of Labour: Three Sisters, ’Til Madness Do Us Part, Bitter Money

Summary

Abstract

Wang’s focus on workers constitutes a unique entry point for studying labour conditions throughout China’s economic development. This chapter offers an in-depth discussion of Wang’s filmmaking in relation to spaces of labour and labour issues. Through the close analyses of Three Sisters, ‘Til Madness Do Us Part, and Bitter Money, the discussion expands on the topic of labour which Wang first explored with Tiexi qu: West of the Tracks. These works also re-connect to the flow of laid-off and migrant workers of the Tiexi industrial district and evoke the overarching power of the economy in defining people’s lives and destinies. This chapter also offers a comparative reading of Wang’s Three Sisters and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

Keywords: Documentary cinema, China, Marginal spaces, Rural spaces, Left-behind children, Wang Bing, John Ford

As far as space is concerned, Bergson’s warning about the temptations of spatializing thought remain current in the age of the intercontinental ballistic missile and the new infra-red and laser system of which we are so proud; it is even more timely in an era of urban dissolution and re-ghettoization, in which we might be tempted to think that the social can be mapped that way, by following across a map insurance red lines and the electrified borders of private police and surveillance forces. Both images are, however, only caricatures of the mode of production itself (most often called late capitalism), whose mechanics and dynamics are not visible in that sense, cannot be detected on the surfaces scanned by satellites, and therefore stand as a fundamental representational problem – indeed a problem of a historically new and original type.

‒ Fredric Jameson (1992)

Wang Bing’s focus on workers over the course of his career constitutes a unique entry point for studying labour conditions throughout two decades of China’s economic development. In this chapter, I will look at a series of documentaries that expand on the labour issues that were first explored with West of the Tracks. These works reconnect to the flow of laid-off and migrant workers of the industrial district and evoke the overarching power of the economy in defining people’s lives and destinies.