Evidently, there are many ways to live lives of quiet desperation in China. While they vary in degree of desperation, quiet is definitely the operative word in Du Haibin’s ruminative documentary Umbrella, which screened today at the American Museum of Natural History’s Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival.The various figures seen in Umbrella are loosely tied together by tenuous connections to a Guangdong factory of said merchandise. As a parallel theme, each stop in an umbrella’s journey is put in the context of recent Chinese migration from the countryside to urban centers. Of course, this is a dramatic contradiction of historic Chinese Communist propaganda, which celebrated peasants as the revolutionary ideal.
Now the unofficial message seems to be: why stay on the farm when there is money to be made in China’s go-go economy. However, nobody is getting rich working at the eponymous Guangdong factory. Workers are paid piece-meal at posted rates broken-down to fractions of the Yuan. However, the toiling umbrella assemblers still appear to be surrounded by slogans extolling the virtues of labor, which are often translated in the film’s subtitles.
Ultimately, Guangdong umbrellas get into the hands of consumers who represent different strategies for making it in the “new” China. Rather than places of liberal arts learning, universities appear to be cranking out graduates for the sole purpose of competing in a fierce job market. Naturally, the army is always hiring, but Umbrella shows the Maoist tradition of public self-criticism rituals is still alive and well there.
Umbrella shows a lot of unhappy people, but it lacks a true narrative structure. When Du reco
gnizes a good shot, he holds it interminably. He conveys a tactile sense of place as result of his ever so deliberate pacing. Truly, Du’s eye for composition is remarkable, but drive and focus are apparently not hallmarks of his style.Preceding Umbrella was the thematically related ten-minute short Under Construction, directed by Zhenchen Liu. Using computer generated animation to recreate demolition sites it paints a picture of urban renewal out of control, in which wrecking crews function almost like protection gangs. Together they suggest the place of the individual in contemporary China remains tenuous at best. Although at times quite diffuse, Umbrella is a good festival programmer. Cineastes are likely to forgive its brooding pace for the sake of its earnestness. The Mead Festival continues at AMNH with screenings of documentaries on international cultures and the contemporary challenges they face, all day Sunday.
