In “Rails,” part three in the documentary West of the Tracks, a young man cries to his father in a restaurant. They live in Shenyang, a dying city in northeast China where empty factories butt up against one another in nearly every single neighborhood—rubber factory, wire factory, steel factory, plastic factory, glass factory, factory after factory after factory. It is a strange, lonely word, factory. The young man pleads with his father, then he hits him, then he writhes on the floor. It is Chinese New Year, 2000, and his father has just returned from a week’s stint in jail. The young man cries about missing his father. He cries about looking through their old photographs, where his mother who’d left them years ago lies back on the grass in a delicate, flirtatious pose. Then he says he will hit his father again, and he does. He is drunk. He falls to the floor every time he hits his father. His father tries to pick him up, but the young man’s arms and legs are not strong, not with all this emotion. “Stop this,” the old man tells his son. “Everybody’s laughing at you. Stop this,” he says again, and laughs himself. “Stop this right now. Be a man.”
3 Comments
April 26, 2007 at 11:11 pm
Sounds wonderful–is it? You capture a mixture of humor and horror well. In that situation who would know what it means to be a man? It looks as though all the rules are made up…and expendable.
April 27, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I’m embarrassed to admit that I dozed in and out during the first quarter of the film—I did not find it boring at all, was just overly tired, as it had been the end of a long day. Embarrassed also because I’d dozed through the long, empty stretches detailing the train engineers’ routines, and as soon as above scene with boy and father came on, one of action and conflict, I perked up, which tells me (as I’ve always known about my film-viewing habits but hate admitting anyway) that I respond more favorably to surface cues happening on the screen. (I couldn’t stand watching Humanité, for example, because its stretches of humanity-less empty gazes had me longing to have the last two hours of my life back, while hungrier empty gazes, like from Godard’s cheeky films, are much more rewarding, don’t you think, to pull apart.) But, as always happens when I get in a good ten or fifteen minutes of napping, I am refreshed and wide awake afterward, and so I felt refreshed and wide awake during the latter half of the film. And yes, it was wonderful. And yes, who knows what it means to be a man when you’re seventeen and have nothing but your father and packs of cigarettes.
The documentary is nine hours long, by the way. I can’t wait to get the DVD for myself.
April 28, 2007 at 6:21 pm
[...] struggling between two narratives, one inspired by documentary and the other by proofreading job [...]