BLIND
SHAFT
(MANG JING)
Germany / Hong Kong o 2003
BLIND
SHAFT
(MANG JING)
Germany / Hong Kong o 2003
Story:
BLIND SHAFT tells the story of two itinerant miners (Song
Jinming and Tang Chaoyang) who risk their lives under dangerous working conditions
and develop questionable morals in order to survive.
Li Yang has spent most of the past decade and a half in self-imposed exile in Germany, and it must have been there, certainly not in the unadventurous filmmaking climate of today's China, that he decided to treat compromise as a dirty word.
His first feature film, "Blind Shaft," spares nobody in its devastating portrait of murderous grifters in the poor coal mining region of northwest China. It skewers mine owners, who returned the favor by hounding him with security agents and threatening him at gunpoint when he filmed on location...
Other Reviews:
To many of us in the West, modern China remains as elusive as ever: fourteen years after Tiananmen Square, the Party is still in charge, but the economy is burgeoning. A Chinese man goes into space, while social woes multiply. A Chinese writer wins a Nobel Prize, but his books are largely unknown in his own country. Chinese films - now, there's a litmus test for a society. Only recently, a lot of good stuff has been coming out of China - including Platform, Not One Less, and Together - though many Chinese films are unlikely to get nationwide distribution either in China or America (for completely different reasons). A good feature film can tell you more about the society than pages of op-eds and volumes of analysts' reports.
Writer-director Li basically shot himself in the foot with this remarkable film debut. It's a gripping and deeply sardonic thriller unlike anything we've seen from China before. And of course, since it criticises the society, it was banned in the country ... and Li was told he'll never make a film there again. The story follows conmen Song (Yi) and Tang (Wang Shuangbao), who have a particularly brutal system for making money from owners of illegal coalmines in rural China.
Labor unions are forbidden by our favored-nation trade partner, China; and Communist officials make deep trouble for those who whistle-blow in a country where, routinely, thousands perish each year on the job. In October 2003, the Chinese government revealed, said The New York Times, that 11,449 workers had died through September of that year. Of these, 4,620 were coal miners.
Life is cheap in Yang's feature, which opened in London
cinemas this week. It shines a searchlight on the shocking conditions and endemic
corruption in parts of China's mining industry, which has probably the worst
safety record in the world.
The film's two main protagonists, grizzled miners Song and Tang, have a lucrative
scam going.
"Blind
Shaft" is a savage satire about Chinese miners at the end of communism
when life is cheap, everyone is for sale, and the once-vaunted working class
is as corrupt as the government.
In the opening scene of Blind Shaft, a hard-boiled thriller from first time writer/director Li Yang, a trio of men descends into the bowels of a fly-by-night Chinese coal mine. As darkness blots out the men's faces, the camera swings upward to linger on the shrinking rectangle of light above their heads. Then it, too, disappears. And for a claustrophobic moment we and the actors are left in stifling blackness. Headlamps eventually snap on, but the film itself remains deliberately, and powerfully, murky.
You
are very, very lucky if you do not live in China. Not because the oppressive
Communist regime frequently imprisons people who voice dissent about it or
that "New" China's economic situation means regular work is scarce
under its national misgovernment. No, as bad as these are, the reason why
you, kamera reader, are lucky you are not a resident of China, is that you
would be unable to see the excellent new film that has been made there.
"Blind Shaft" is a gritty, socially conscious drama that takes place in China. It is the feature directorial debut of Li Yang, a former documentary filmmaker. He also produced the film and wrote the script.
Renowned
as a documentary filmmaker, Li Yang crafts his first fictional narrative with
mostly successful results. Banned by his native China, Blind Shaft is a crime
drama with traces of thriller elements, and political commentary which lies
subversively underneath regarding the underground upwelling of capitalism
in the seedy underbelly of the socialist regime. The almighty dollar is what
everyone is seeking here, some willing to kill to possess it.
Coalmining, a dangerous and dirty business, is the occupation of the protagonists of Blind Shaft (Mang jing). China has plenty of coalmines, some of which operate illegally. Tang Zhaoyang (played by Wang Shuanghao) and Song Jinming (played by Li Yixiang) are veteran coalminers who have come up with a scheme to profit from serial murders in the mineshaft.
Blind Shaft director speaks about filmmaking in China