Country: China
Director: Li Yang
Time: 1 hour and 28 minutes
What It Elicits: Economic transformations, fathers and sons, social critique
Where Can I Get It: YouTube (free)
Here’s the play: You and a friend find a rural job seeker and tell them you’ve got three mining jobs lined up. You explain that your third—your brother or nephew or some relative—has dropped out at the last moment, so you need someone to fill in. The catch is that the third has to be a relative given the terms of your employment contract. The job seeker agrees because, well, a job is a job. You find someone to forge a fake ID indicating that this third person is your relative. The three of you then head to the mine and work for a bit. At an opportune time, you kill them inside the mine and stage the scene to look like a coal seam has collapsed and crushed them. Next, you and your co-conspirator extort the mine owner. “We need to call my family to come bury him,” you say. “We need to file a police report.” The mine owner, who hasn’t been observing every safety protocol rigorously and has no interest in scrutiny from local party officials, negotiates a price to make the problem (i.e. you two) go away. You’re up 30,000 yuan and an urn full of your “relative’s” ashes. You toss the urn. You rinse and repeat the play.
This is the set-up to Li Yang’s Blind Shaft—and essentially the first five minutes of the film—a critical, darkly comic, sensitive and tough portrayal of the ways in which China’s economic opening has facilitated greed and immorality on both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, as well as a trenchant examination of the country’s (unregulated) mining industry. The film centers on Song—the story’s (im)moral compass—and Tang, who travel to remote mines in northern China murdering unsuspecting victims and scamming coal owners, and their newest target, sixteen-year-old Yuan Fengming. Unlike the older Tang, Song justifies his actions in the name of his children’s education, sending extorted money back to his family to help pay their school expenses. Unfortunately for Song’s conscience, it emerges that Yuan, who at first seemed like an easy mark, turns out to have accepted the coal-mining work in part to pay his sister’s school expenses after having been forced to abandon his own education due to poverty. Song’s relationship to the young Yuan, encompassing paternal care, frustration, resentment (at Yuan’s kindness drawing out the moral consequences of Song’s plans), and genuine sorrow at circumstances mirroring his own, throws a wrench in Tang and Song’s scheme, generating tension between the partners and bringing the film to its final crescendo: Will they or won’t they kill Yuan?
Throughout, Blind Shaft sets itself the difficult task of transforming our initial impressions of Song and Tang—they are, after all, cold blooded murderers. The film accomplishes this through a nuanced portrayal of the two men’s self-justifications, insecurities, hardships, and hopes, rendering them sympathetic without offering them absolution. Instead, Blind Shaft locates their motivations within a broader economic configuration that rewards malfeasance and scorns selflessness, exploring the human costs of lax regulations and poor working conditions, while sensitively underlining certain forms of solidarity that emerge within those circumstances. (The film’s source material derives from the former coal miner Liu Qingbang’s novella, Sacred Wood.)
As a result, China’s economic, social, and environmental transformations following Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening-up” programs of the late 1970s come under scrutiny. If the picture of China as a technological and economic behemoth borne aloft endless rural-to-urban labor migration, planned mega-projects, and an aggressive class of upwardly-mobile managers and entrepreneurs has tended to obscure the social costs accompanying these transformations, then Blind Shaft aims to redress this by underscoring the ways in which the active encouragement of unbridled profit-seeking has generated social anomie, unstitched communal fabrics, and undermined basic decency. At a certain point in the film, Song and Tang go to a karaoke bar with two sex workers, who caustically inform the men that “US dollars” have now replaced “Mao” in the lyrics to the song “Long Live Socialism.” In this brave new world, nothing remains sacred.
Given the Chinese Communist Party’s sensitivities, the film has had a rather interesting reception history. Though shot and produced in China, it first played abroad and never received approval for domestic release. Following its completion, Li Yang himself briefly became a persona non grata in the country, splitting time between Hong Kong and Germany before eventually returning to make Blind Mountain (2007). Since then, conditions have become far less permissive for Chinese filmmakers interested in interrogating their country’s less savory aspects, while the CCP has commissioned and funded huge domestic blockbusters—most recently, the Lake Changjin series (2020, 2022) and The 800 (2020)—extolling certain moments in Chinese history on rather nationalistic terms (this tendency is obviously not unique to China). For reasons I don’t quite fully understand, excellent mainland Chinese cinema often remains difficult for Americans to access (in contrast to works from Taiwan and Hong Kong, which have historically tended to receive somewhat broader distribution). Happily, Criterion has recently done us all a huge solid by making available films by the incredible Jia Zhangke, director of the previously discussed Still Life (2008). Nonetheless, this broader state of affairs does little to aid cross-cultural understanding in a period of increasing geopolitical tensions.
A film without heroes, Blind Shaft articulates the ways in which economic and political constraints entrap individuals, constrain choices, and encourage malfeasance. Borrowing from aspects of neo-realist cinema (in particular the use of non-professional actors) and film noir, Li Yang’s work centers difficult men in difficult circumstances who self-consciously sacrifice lives (their own, others) for future generations. Yet even within this world of calculating self-interest, humanity and decency can be tough to kill.
Go Down The Mid-2000s Chinese Rabbit Hole With:
Hou Hsiao-hsien — Three Times (2005)
Jia Zhangke — The World (2004)