The value in repetition.
Plastic China
dir. Jiuliang Wang, China, 2016
Genre: character-driven
I am behind on catching up with the wave of independent documentary coming from China, but I have watched a number of festival documentaries from China, either from Chinese makers or ex patriots, that wrestle with the drastic and rapid social changes in contemporary China.
Which is to say that I’ve seen a number of repeated motifs: the strains of the one child policy, the difficult life of industrial laborers (often migrant), the reliance on education as the hope for class mobility, and the tension between China’s officially communist national identity and a considerable wealth gap.
Plastic China has all of these motifs. Its novelty, and hook for funders and viewers alike, is its close up view of a small-scale plastic recycling business in the provinces. The film begins with a montage of shots that established the globalized logistics bringing used plastic from Europe and North America. It’s a sequence that’s common enough in poetic docs today (Walden comes to mind).
While repetition can certainly wear on viewers who watch a number of documentaries, only to find repeated ideas, I do also think that there is an experiential quality to documentary. Much as a fiction film can repeat themes and narrative formulas and still be effective, something about documentary as cinema exceeds .
Which is to say that Plastic China worked for me in its particular combination of issue and scope. The major complaint lodged against character-driven documentaries is that they constrain the social into a pat formula. But I’d argue that the dynamic can work the other way. For instance, I’m generally knowledgeable about the one-child policy and have seen other documentaries exploring it. But when the migrant workers, in long take, go to buy train and bus tickets back home and are thwarted by their lack of paperwork, the scene is both intellectually and emotionally forceful because of how unexpectedly it appears in the overall documentary structure.
This is where character driven doc is strongest, I believe: in exploring the interplay between social structure and lived experience. It’s too pat to say that viewers are going to be unaware of broader social dimensions or that they will ignore solutions beyond the individual.
