Category: documentary

Image Forum Festival 2018 イメージフォーラムフェスティバル 2018

The 32nd Image Forum Festival ended last Sunday in Tokyo. The nine-day-long event, hosted at two different locations in the Japanese capital, the Theatre Image Forum and the Spiral Hall, screened in total more than 80 films, including 23 in the East Asian Experimental Film Competition, the main section. Established in its present form in 1987, the festival succeeded and replaced an experimental film festival that was held, in various phases and different shapes, in the capital from 1973 to 1986.

To this day the festival continue to embody the mission and the legacy of its predecessors. Primarily dedicated to experimental cinema and video, the event provides a special opportunity for the viewers to experience on a big screen a mix of feature films, home cinema, documentary and experimental animation.
After Tokyo, the festival will move to Kyoto, Yokohama and Nagoya, with slightly different contents, there will be special sections dedicated to artists of each city. This is a right and welcomed decision, since too often Tokyo ends up cannibalizing the cultural and artistic events taking place in the archipelago.

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This year’s special retrospectives were dedicated to the provocative films of Christoph Schlingensief, German director who expanded his works beyond cinema to touch theater, television and public happenings, Kurt Kren, Austrian artist associated with Viennese Actionism, but also author of structural films, and the experiments on celluloid by Japanese photographer Yamazaki Hiroshi. I wasn’t aware of the films of Schlingensief, and I have to say that it was at the same time a discovery and a delusion. While I really liked 100 Years of Adolf Hitler (1989), claustrophobic and parodic reconstruction of the last hours of the dictator and comrades in his bunker, I couldn’t digest the other two movies of the so called German Trilogy. German Chainsaw Massacre (1990) and especially Terror 2000 (1992) are too much of a mess and stylistically all over the place , and probably too bound to the events of the time, the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequent unification of the two Germanies, for me to decipher them.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to check the works of Yamazaki, but I’m planning to see them at the end of September, when the festival will come to Nagoya. As with his conceptual photos, the shorts made during his entire life explore the relationship between time and light, a topic I’m very attracted to.
I also missed the screening of Caniba (2017) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, about the “cannibal” Sagawa Issei, if I’m not wrong, this was the Japanese premiere of the film, and the special focus Experimenta India, a collection of visual art from the Asian country.
Interesting was to catch Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. (Steve Loveridge, 2018), about the famous ex-refugee of Tamil origin, now a pop icon and singer, an artist I was completely unaware of. The documentary is based on more than 20 years of footage filmed by herself and her friends in Sr Lanka and London. While I didn’t connect with the first part of the movie, too self-indulgent for my taste, the film gets much better in the last 30-40 minutes when, albeit briefly, touches on complex and fascinating topics such as immigration and art, fame, and social awareness in the show business.

The East Asia Experimental competition was pretty solid, besides several short films coming from a variety of areas like South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and naturally Japan, two were the long documentaries screened. A Yangtze Landscape (Xu Xin, 2017), a visual exploration of the social and geographical landscape along the longest river in Asia (you can read my review here), and Slow Motion, Stop Motion (Kurihara Mie, 2018) a movie that positively surprised me and won both the Grand Prize and the Audience Award. A review is coming soon, stay tuned.

Inland Sea 港町 (Sōda Kazuhiro, 2018)

Screen at this year edition of the Berlinale (Forum), Inland Sea is the latest documentary by one of the most interesting and original voice working in Japanese non-fiction today, Sōda Kazuhiro.  Based in New York, Soda in the last 10 years or so has built an impressive body of work, Inland Sea is the seventh documentary in his ongoing observational series, among my favorite Theatre 1 and 2, a diptych about playwright Oriza Hirata and his theatrical company, and Oyster Factory, a documentary premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival in 2015. Inland Sea was filmed soon after Oyster Factory, in fact the town is the same, Ushimado, a small village facing the Seto Inland Sea in Okayama prefecture. While in the previous film Soda focused his gaze on a small oyster factory and the problems of surviving in a globalized world (you can read more here), in Inland Sea he follows three elderly people living in the village and their daily activities. Here the synopsis:

Wai-chan is one of the last remaining fishermen in Ushimado, a small village in Seto Inland Sea, Japan. At the age of 86, he still fishes alone on a small boat to make a living, dreaming about his retirement. Kumi-san is an 84 year old villager who wanders around the shore everyday. She believes a social welfare facility “stole” her disabled son to receive subsidy from the government. A “late – stage elderly” Koso-san runs a small seafood store left by her deceased husband. She sells fish to local villagers and provides leftovers to stray cats. Foresaken by the modernization of post-war Japan, the town Ushimado’s rich, ancient culture and tight-knit community are on on the verge of disappearing.

While, as mentioned above, the film is part of his observational series, from the very first scene is clear how Soda with his camera and his voice is an important and catalytic presence in the relational texture that is Inland Sea. As Nichols would put it, while Sōda is filming and representing a certain reality, the documentary and the act of filming itself becomes also an important part of that reality. More than in his other works, his voice and that of his wife and their presence is here a fundamental part of the movie, often the people filmed converse with Sōda and we, as spectators, are always aware of the relationship between the camera and its environment. Naturally all documentaries are works of fiction, to one degree or another, but to my eyes acknowledging the presence of the camera and its effects in a documentary shot in an observational style, is one of the main qualities of the movie. It’s a honest and ethic filmic approach that I really value as important, especially in the contemporary documentary landscape, an approach that stems also from the style and methodology adopted by Sōda:

I spontaneously roll my camera, watching and listening closely to the reality in front of me, banning myself from doing research or prescribing themes or writing a script before shooting. I impose certain rules (‘The Ten Commandments’) on myself to avoid preconceptions and to discover something beyond my expectation.

The movie is shot in its entirety in black and white, the only case in Sōda’s filmography, just the very last scene, a boat floating, is in colour. I haven’t read so much about the movie, I wanted to experience it without preconceptions, so I don’t know the reason behind not shooting in colour, but certainly this choice gives a very distinctive elegiac tone to the movie, and a flavour of obsolescence and marginality to the places and the people depicted in it. Compared to Sōda ’s previous movies there is, at least in the first hour or so —  the last 30 minutes are basically a very long and touching monologue of one of the old ladies, Kumi-chan — less talking and more insistence on the daily routine of Wai-chan and Koso-san, long periods of time are spent with the old man on the boat, fishing, and with the old lady, selling the fish.

By focusing on a place on a relatively far corner of Japan, far away from the metropolitan excitement that too often is associated with Japan, a place not yet forgotten, but on the edge of disappearing, and where the population is shrinking — the akiya (empty houses) seen in a sequence are becoming part of the present and near future of the archipelago — Sōda is also hinting, consciously or not, to one of the crucial issues of contemporary Japan and its geopolitical construction as a nation. That is, the parasitic relationship between sprawling urban centers and countryside, often forgotten, exploited (as highlighted by the situation in Fukushima or the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant), or reduced to the folkloric image and touristic destination of Japan National Railway’s posters. In a post on his blog last year commenting on the Ogawa Pro’s Sanrizuka series, Soda wrote that, I’m paraphrasing, the struggle and resistance to the construction of the airport, because of the thick dialect spoken by the farmers at the time, almost incomprehensible to a person born and raised in Tokyo, felt like an act of exploitation perpetrated by the central state towards its colonies.

Another aspect of Sōda’s style that really stands out in Inland Sea and a direct consequence of his methodological approach, is the absence of any explanation on the historical background and context of the subject filmed. His films do not offer any extra information about the people he meets and the places he shoots, but the camera and his documentaries are, in a certain way, an extension of his gaze. It is up to us the viewers to decipher and image what stories lie behind the landscapes and the people captured on screen, for instance we don’t know if the stories told by the very talkative Kumi-san, to whom the movie in dedicated (she passed away in 2015),  are completely true or to what degree they’re even truthful, yet this is life and it is here presented in all its complexity, sadness and beauty.

https://player.vimeo.com/video/250935060

Inland Sea – Trailer from Laboratory X on Vimeo.

Record of a Marathon Runner あるマラソンランナーの記録 (Kuroki Kazuo, 1964)

The Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, the next edition of the Summer Olympics in Tokyo on the horizon, and the massive 100 Years of Olympic Films box set released last year by the Criterion Collection, revived and rekindled my interest in sport documentaries. I decided to revisit one of my favourite non-fiction films dedicated to sport, Record of a Marathon Runner, a movie made by Kuroki Kazuo between 1963 and 1964 about Kimihara Kenji, a Japanese marathon runner active during the 1960s and 1970s. Kuroki was a director who, long before establishing himself as an author somehow associated with the Japanese New Wave (Silence Has No Wing and Ryōma Assassination are two of his best work of the period), was a respected and innovative documentary filmmaker at the Iwanami Production, where he and other friends, Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Ogaka Shinsuke among others, formed the Ao no Kai (Blue Society), a group that tried to experiment and find new ways of expression through non-fiction cinema.

Record of a Marathon Runner is a PR movie (a sponsored movie) founded by Fuji Film, but paradoxically shot almost entirely on a Eastman Kodak film. If you want to know more about the movie’s troubled production and have more insights on Kuroki career, this interview is a must read.

It is possible to watch the relatively short documentary (only 62 minutes) on The Science Film Museum’s Yutube official page, unfortunately it’s without English subtitles.

For some scholars, and I couldn’t agree more, Record of a Marathon Runner represents the other side of the official discourse about the Olympics, the one exemplified, with great artistic results I have to admit, by Ichikawa Kon’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965). In Record of a Marathon Runner the connections with the big event are very thin if not completely absent, in fact someone could argue that the movie is not even about the Olympics at all, we don’t see the marathon or the games themselves, the camera “just” follows Kimihara Kenji, who would eventually finish in eighth place at the competition in Tokyo, throughout his training and running in the winter and spring of 1963-64, as he prepares for the big event.

Although originally the documentary was conceived by Kuroki without narration, the movie uses a traditional narration alternating with the words spoken by the marathon runner himself and his coach. However, the tone of the words is so flat and has an almost matter-of-fact quality in it, that there’s no glamour nor pathos, on the contrary, everything, from the endless and solitary training, to the foot injury and the recovery, is displayed like some sort of natural phenomenon. Drained of any passion, the style of the movie reflects the act of running as felt by Kimihara himself, or at least as it is presented in the film, mechanical and without a real purpose, but it is also a way of transferring on screen the gray skies and the dull landscapes depicted, Kitakyūshū city with its industrial suburbs often drenched in rain, or the very ordinary countryside roads in Kagoshima prefecture.

This sense of necessity and that of the loneliness of the runner is amplified by the use of an eerie, dissonant and minimalist music, and by a cinematography that often uses long shots when depicting the athlete while training on the track, on the beach or on the streets. Even in the only scene when Kimihara is shot on a close-up while running, the monotonous sound design and the circularity of his movements form a hypnotic run that seem to lead nowhere. Another scene towards the end is also exemplary about this aesthetic approach: Kimihara after recovering from his injury participate in a competition- the Asahi road relay as the last runner – the only proper race we see on screen. After he wins and crosses the finish line though, he goes on running for a couple of minutes among people and trees like in a state of trance and without goal.

Focusing on the experience of running in preparation for a competition, highlighting its harshness and solitude, Kuroki also depicts indirectly the social background which Kimihara belongs to, the working class of a highly industrialized Kita Kyushu, and the life of an athlete before the brief and ephemeral light cast by the Olympic event.

Remembering Matsumoto Toshio

…good starting point for this (re)discovery could be the recent release (by Cinelicious Pics) of Funeral Parade of Roses on Blu-ray and DVD, Matsumoto Toshio’s masterpiece newly restored in 4K, released in Japan in 1969 and recently screened in selected theaters around the U.S.A. The release is significant not only for the film itself, a unique movie experience indeed, but also because included in the package are eight extra works that Matsumoto made between 1961 and 1975: Nishijin, The Song of Stones, Ecstasis, Metastasis, Expansion, Mona Lisa, Siki Soku Ze Ku and Atman.
More than ten months have passed since the death of Matsumoto, and this release is a good and timely opportunity for me to collect my thoughts, trying to position his oeuvre in the context of post-war Japanese cinema, and to draw connections between Matsumoto and others filmmakers and the cultural milieu he grew up in as a filmmaker and artist.
In a career spanning more than fifty years Matsumoto made short and feature movies and moved freely from documentary to art-house films, and from pure experimental cinema to expanded cinema and video installations, in a very unique process of hybridization and genre overlapping that has few parallels in the world of cinema and image making.
In the seven months since his passing, prompted by the tragic event, I decided to

Continue reading “Remembering Matsumoto Toshio”

Yamagata 2017 – day 5 (finale)

October 10th

My last day in Yamagata. The festival will officially wrap up in a couple of days, but there are only a few screenings left and the main part of the festival ended de facto today. It would be a good idea if the organizers could spread the movies a bit more, as the festival is designed now, everything tends to be concentrated during the long week end (Friday to Monday) when film buffs from other part of Japan visit Yamagata.

In the morning I saw Genet in Shatila (1976) by Richard Dindo, long time ago I read the book the movie is based on (Four hours in Chatila) and it was a pleasure to rediscover its poetry and Jean Genet’s attachment to the Palestine cause. The second movie of the day was Here and Elsewhere by J.L. Godard and J.P. Gorin, a turning point in Godard’s career because it trailblazed and anticipated an approach towards the image and the use of it and many stylistic elements that would fully thrive and bloom in his next movies, culminating with Histoire(s) du Cinéma.

The last movie I saw at the festival was The Targeted Island: A Shield Against Storms by Mikami Chie. Although the movie is shot like a TV documentary and I have some other issues with it, it ends with the most powerful final scene I’ve seen in Yamagata this year, a very young female protester and a very young policeman facing each other in silence under the rain. Breathtaking.

I guess that’s all for this year in Yamagata, the festival is always a special experience, even though keeping the quality of the movies selected high is becoming every time more and more difficult.
I’d like to give special thanks to all the people (directors, critics, scholars, film lovers and volunteers) I met and I discussed with during these five days, it has been an enriching experience.

Yamagata 2017 – day 4

October 9th

Today I had to write an article for Il Manifesto about the Politics and Film: Palestine and Lebanon 70s–80, so I could not see as many movies as I’d have liked to. Anyway, the first work of the day was Tremorings of Hope by Agatsuma Kazuki, a movie depicting the struggles of the people of Hadenya, one small community in Miyagi prefecture, to rebuild their lives after the tsunami completely erased their town. It was as I expected, not a bad movie but nothing exceptional or new, definitely too long though.

The only other movie I had the time to see was Once Upon a Time in Beirut: The Story of a Star by Jocelyne Saab, a complex interweaving of history and history of Lebanese cinema through the personal and fictional gaze of the director. A mesmerizing, tragic and fun film composed by images taken from Lebanese and not Lebanese movies of the first half of the 20th century. The icing on the cake was a Q & A with Saab herself via Skype.

Yamagata 2017 – day 3

October 8th

In the morning I attended the screening of my favorite documentaries by Satō Makoto, Self and Others and Memories of Agano, the latter just confirmed its powerful impact it has every time on me and its endless rewatchability. In the afternoon the panel with Mark Nornes and Akiyama Tamako, Satō Makoto Seen from Abroad, was very enriching from many different points of view and it cemented my belief that Satō, especially at the end of his career, was more in tune with the international context that the Japanese one.

I also had the chance to catch up with Ex Libris—The New York Public Library by Frederick Wiseman, not my favorite of his works perhaps, but still a compelling documentary masterfully constructed. I feel it’s a very American film, all his works are “very American” of course, but this one, just my opinion, can be appreciated more by people who live or have lived in the U.S.

The two night screenings were really different, both experimental, but one a complete let down (Hurrahh! by Jung Jae-hoon) and the other a small and unexpected jewel of a movie. Rubber Coated Steel by Lawrence Abu Hamdan mixes video art, documentary and a strong political stance like few other works have been able to do recently. Time permitting, I’ll write something in the near future.

Yamagata 2017 – day 1

October 6th

Arrived this morning in a gray, cloudy and a bit chilly, but not too much, Yamagata. My first day at the festival was welcomed by the screening of Funeral Parade of Roses, and it could not have been otherwise, this is the first edition of the festival without Toshio Matsumoto and attending the screening of a movie I’ve seen so many times, but never on the big screen, was almost a duty and my way of paying respect to the great director.

Funeral Parade of Roses was followed by Cats, Dogs, Farm Animals and Sashimi, the story of Dondon, a boy “trapped” in a rural area of the Philippines from one dead-end job to another. The movie is directed by Perry Dizon a member of Lav Diaz group, for which he often works as an actor.

For the afternoon/evening slot I’ve opted for the documentaries made by Jocelyne Saab during the 1970s about Lebanon and Beiruit instead of Ex Libris, the latest from Wiseman that I’ll catch the day after tomorrow, and the decision turned out to be a bliss. The early works by the Lebanese director and former journalist are a rarity, unfortunately Saab wasn’t able to attend the festival, some health issues kept her in Paris, but the movies were an absolute revelation. Part essay-films and part a personal view of the horrors perpetrated to Beirut and Lebanon between from the breaking of the civil war in 1975, the three movies, Beirut Never More (’76), Letter from Beirut (’78) and Beirut My City (’82) are also a deep reflection on identity, memory, and the meaning(less) of images in war. Saab, especially in the first and third documentaries, tries, I am here paraphrasing the words spoken in the last film, to capture the reality of war, its horror and tragedy, paradoxally before it could cristyllize in images, consequently becoming something different and detached. I’m still elaborating the impact that these works had, and are still having, on me; once the festival is finished, I’ll try to write something.

Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2017

The Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, one of the most awaited film-related events of the Japanese archipelago, will kick off its fifteenth edition next week on October 5th. For eight days the city of Yamagata will be the capital of documentary cinema, hosting not only an international competition with movies from all over the globe, but also a plethora of  more or less known documentaries presented in other sections, special screenings and retrospectives. For the cinephiles and the film lovers visiting the northern Japanese city, the festival will be an occasion to discover hidden gems of historical importance and an unmissable chance to meet directors, scholars and documentary-obsessed people.
Festival opens on the 5th with a special screening commemorating the passing of Matsumoto Toshio, one of the true giants of Japanese cinema. Two of his best known documentaries, Nishijin (1961) and Ginrin / Bicycle in Dreams (1955) will be presented for the occasion in their original format (35mm), while For My Crushed Right Eye (1968) will be screened as it was originally conceived, that is in 16mm and with 3 projectors. Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) and other experimental works made by Matsumoto during the 1970s and 1980s will also be shown during the festival, including one of my favourite, Atman (1975), a kaleidoscopic trip to the philosophical source of movement and image.
Among the titles presented in the International Competition a must-see for me is Ex Libris—The New York Public Library, the latest work by Frederick Wiseman, but I’m also looking forward to I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck and the long-awaited new work by Hara Kazuo, Sennan Asbestos Disaster, the first feature documentary the director of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On made in more than a decade. The movie follows the victims who suffered asbestos-related damages in the city of Sennan in Osaka, during their eight years fight for compensation.
Also in competition the beautiful Machines by Rahul Jain (I wrote about it here), Donkeyote, a subtle reflection on dreams and hopes through the eyes of a donkey and its ageing owner, directed by Chico Pereira, and Another Year by Zhu Shengze, a movie that has received much praise in the international festival circuit. Wake (Subic) by John Gianvito, about the pollution afflicting the residents of a former US naval base in Luzon Island, the Philippines, looks interesting and so does Tremoring of Hope, the difficult recovery of the people of Hadenya in Miyagi, six years after the Great East Japan Earthquake.
Here the complete line-up.
A promising section that will probably sparkle heated post-screening debates is Politics and Film: Palestine and Lebanon 70s–80s, a selection of films made in Palestine and Lebanon during the Lebanon civil war (1975-1990) and in recent years, movies that show and reflect on the struggles and politics of the area. Among them the (in)famous Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War, filmed by Wakamatsu Koji and Adachi Masao in 1971, and Genet in Shatila (1999), about the French writer and his relation with the Palestinian revolution as he witnessed the aftermath of the Shatila’s massacre in September of 1982.

Introducing Asian documentary filmmakers, New Asian Currents is usually one of my favorite section for its scope and the variety of films shown, this year 21 works from the continent will be presented, giving us a glimpse of the life, difficulties and struggles the people inhabiting the huge and diversified area have to cope with in their daily life. A Yangtze Landscape by Xu Xin is an interesting movie (more here) that deserves to be seen on the big screen, exploring the geographical and social landscape surrounding the Yangtze River in its long course of more than thousands kilometers. While the works of Yamashiro Chikako are a rare example, rare in Japan at least, of how to tackle a series of thorny historical issues, Okinawa and its relation with mainland Japan and with its past, merging documentary with the experimental.
Here the section’s complete line-up.
I’m ashamed to admit, but I know almost nothing of African documentary. Africa Views will thus be my entrance gate to it, “a program that introduces over 20 films created since the year 2000—with a particular focus on the Sub-Saharan region—depicting a contemporary Africa that lets off a considerable racket as it creaks toward progress, and introducing us to the people who live there.” What caught my attention in Perspective Japan are the new films by Murakami Kenji and Onishi Kenji, two short experiments in 8mm whose screening promises to be, like two years ago, a real cinema-event.
The Festival will also hold a retrospective on Fredi M. Murer, a Swiss director that the program describes as “a leader of the internationally-acclaimed Swiss Nouveau Cinema movement that was active from the late 1960s through the 1980s, together with Daniel Schmid and Alain Tanner. (…) Depending on the period in which they were made, Murer’s works may be classified variously as experimental film, documentary, or narrative film.” The retrospective that interest me the most though is Ten Trips Around the Sun: Sato Makoto’s Documentary Horizon Today, a tribute to Sato Makoto on the 10th anniversary of his death, that will include screenings of his major works accompanied by discussions and panels.

North Korean missiles permitting, I’ll be in Yamagata from October 6 to 11, and, as I did two years ago, I will try to keep a diary of my viewings experiences, here or more likely on my Twitter account.

P.S. I’ve also created a list on Letterboxd with most of the movies that will be in Yamagata.

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Machines (Rahul Jain, 2016)

Prompted by several online comments describing it as a cinematic experience close to the works by The Sensory Ethnography Lab or Aragane, I finally had the chance to watch Machines, the debut documentary directed by Rahul Jain and set in a textile factory in Gujarat, India.
It’s not a documentary made or about East or Southeast Asia, thus strictly speaking it is out of the areas usually covered in this blog, nonetheless I found it so compelling that I made an exception. Here the description of the movie from FestivalScope:

To the south of the Indian metropolis of Surat in Gujarat province lies a vast industrial zone that has been growing ever since the 1960s. Director Rahul Jain filmed the grueling daily routine in just one of the many textile factories there. In the factory, man and machine seem to have fused into one being. It is dark and dank, and barely any daylight penetrates the space. The labor is heavy and mind-numbing, and the work days seem endless. We are drawn into a gloomy world where the cacophonous beat of machinery sets the rhythm of toil. Jain is as interested in the mysterious connection between worker and product (the fabrics are treated mechanically, but also with love) as he is in the degrading conditions. Each shift lasts 12 hours, for adults and children alike, and wages are extremely low. Short interviews are interspersed throughout the observational sequences, some of which are captivating in their beauty while others are painful to watch – such as when we see a boy nodding violently in his struggle to stay awake.

Formally one of the focal points of the movie is the cacophonous sounds of the factory as experienced every day by the workers, here as in many contemporary documentaries similar in style and scope to Machines, works that stress the sensory experiences captured on video/film, the sound design plays a key role in the construction of the movie. The use of light and the color palette are also two aesthetic elements that stand out from the very first scenes. The neon lights inside the factory resonate with the cold tonality of the gray walls and the metallic machines, making the milky white of the textiles stand out as if ethereal rags. Particularly compelling is also the contrast between the warm and thick colors of some textiles, red, yellow and purple, and the darkness and coldness of the working environment,  formally one the best qualities of the documentary because it symbolizes the gulf between the beautiful and refined textile produced and the inhuman labour conditions inside the factory.

Machines2

The reason the movie is one of the best non-fiction pics I’ve seen this year however is the shift from a documentary purely focused on the sensory and the visual, to a more socially charged work. It is around 20-25 minutes into the movie that we see some workers been interviewed, a man who made debts to travel to the factory and support his family, but who has almost accepted the fate of being poor, a young boy revealing how everyday at the gate he’s so exhausted he wants to go back, and another man more critical of the system and particularly of the absence and weakness of unions.
Towards to end, the movie introduces also the owner of the company, a figure speaking empty words and lamenting how the workers want more money just to spend it in tobacco, alcohol and leisure he comes out as the epitome of the capitalist.
Machines however does not offer a simple and Manichean picture of the exploited workers against the evil owners, but a problematized and more complex depiction of the situation. A worker for instance, candidly admits he likes his job even if it is very hard, “God gave us hands, so we have to work”, after all they are still workers proud of their manual skills, and others, while criticizing the harsh conditions, state how this is the destiny of the poor and something almost unavoidable. I’m not an expert on India, but this could be directly linked to the class division of society that still permeates and shapes the country, or more probably to the production of subjectivity that characterizes this late phase of capitalism, especially in the new emerging superpowers. While these could be honest statements, and they probably are, we shouldn’t forget that the workers know this is a movie that eventually will be seen by the owners, thus forcing them to hold back part of the truth. To add a further layer of complexity, towards the end the documentary has an interesting meta-filmic shift when a large group of workers addresses directly the camera and Rahul Jain behind it, essentially criticizing him for exploiting them by making a movie and not helping them improving their working conditions instead.
One final not on the title. The machines of the title are of course those seen and heard during the whole movie, and the workers reduced to the status of a machine. The machine however is also the bigger picture and the given state of affairs, the capitalistic machinery that permeates society and shapes its people. As Deleuze wrote, I’m paraphrasing, you cannot escape the machine, out of the factory/office, the machine is everywhere, in the school, in the family, in everyday relations, in yourself, everywhere.