Dislocation is Wang’s great theme and the subject of “Bitter Money,” his 2016 portrait of young rural migrants who leave their villages for low-paying jobs in the booming garment factories of Huzhou. (The film, along with five of his other documentaries, is available on the new OVID.tv subscription streaming service.)
Wang’s camera wanders among the lives of the men and women who have flocked to the sewing factories. Sensation precedes explanation. Using no narration in his fly-on-the-wall vérité, Wang resembles the American documentarian Frederick Wiseman. But where Wiseman explores institutions, Wang focuses on individuals. He follows them — into their workplaces and homes (often the same), recording their conversations and family relationships.
Wang spent two years filming “Bitter Money,” maintaining that he shot 2,000 hours for this 2 1/2-hour film. Working alone with a small digital video-camera customized with an autofocus lens, he seemingly blends into his subjects’ lives. Because he edits less and holds shots longer than more conventional documentarians, his films are akin to Warhol screen tests — full of revealing behavioral tics and transcendent empty moments. Wang’s presence is not exactly invisible but only occasionally addressed. “Time to sleep — you can film tomorrow,” one man tells him. One wonders if the existence of China’s extensive surveillance network has accustomed his subjects to this sort of attention.
“Bitter Money” begins with a 15-year-old girl and her older cousin leaving Yunnan Province in southwestern China to find work in Huzhou. The quarter-hour or so that Wang devoted to their days-long journey on a crowded train is a film in its own right — a stolid pilgrimage into the future. The passengers seem to be in a state of suspended animation. Once in Huzhou, Wang finds other subjects at a workshop. In one sequence, he cuts from tailor to tailor, showing how the coats are made — but he is mainly observational. Wang does not flinch from recording a domestic quarrel in which the husband has to be restrained from attacking his wife. He devotes considerable camera time to the despair of an older, obviously intoxicated worker fingering a pair of scissors and vaguely harassing a female colleague as he delivers a rambling diatribe against their unseen boss.
Working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, under unpleasant conditions, harsh lighting and intense time pressure, Wang’s subjects are essentially free agents hired by small entrepreneurs to fulfill a particular quota. In his book “Adam Smith in Beijing,” the sociologist Giovanni Arrighi describes these “hyper-exploited” young migrants as the “backbone of China’s export industries.” Given the monotony and deprivation of their lives, their economic uncertainty and the constant talk of money, the movie cannot be anything other than an indictment of China’s so-called socialist market economy.
However local, “Bitter Money” is also universal. The spectacle of these men and women hunched over their sewing machines will not only resonate with those whose family histories include time working in a sweatshop, but anyone who reaps the benefit of inexpensive Chinese-manufactured clothing, which is to say, everyone.
“Bitter Money” ends with a contemplation of the migrants’ alienated labor made material — the workshop’s output, bundled in plastic and forlornly waiting in the rain to be shipped overseas. That these products are intended for export reflects back on the movie. In a recent interview, Wang noted that because he refuses to submit his films for official approval, none have ever been shown commercially in China.
Wang’s desire to wrest a story out of daily existence and to acknowledge the struggle of making a living makes him heir to the Italian neorealist filmmakers of the 1940s and ’50s, including Giuseppe De Santis. His 1949 film “Bitter Rice,” available for streaming on the new subscription Criterion channel, is a fascinating example of neorealist pulp. It also concerns migrant workers.
A story of the women, known as mondine, who harvest Italy’s rice crop, “Bitter Rice” begins like a documentary with a radio reporter outside the Turin train station, urgently describing the mondine’s annual migration to the rice paddies of the Po Valley. Their backbreaking work is amply acknowledged, but “Bitter Rice” is neorealism plus — a crime melodrama encompassing instances of theft, sabotage, rape, childbirth, references to abortion and multiple violent deaths, including one by suicide. It also features abundant pulchritude. When the movie opened in the United States in late 1950, The Los Angeles Times called it “something like a Hollywood women’s prison movie, only more so.”
Following previous Italian hits “Open City” and “The Bicycle Thief” into the World Theater, a Times Square movie house specializing in imported films, “Bitter Rice” ran for months. The main attraction was the movie’s statuesque, sultry star Silvana Mangano as a teenage rice harvester introduced executing a solo boogie-woogie. Impulsive and naive, she comes under the spell of a swaggering thief played by Vittorio Gassman, soon himself to achieve international recognition.
“Bitter Rice” is an early example of globalist cinema. De Santis was a leftist whose sweeping panoramic shots of the hardworking and at times singing masses suggest Soviet celebrations of collective labor. He was also a fan of American movies; the two-fisted fight scenes are pure Hollywood. The movie’s frank sexuality, however, struck Americans as distinctly European. “Passion toils and tumbles through it like the wrestlers in a gas-house free-for-all, and torments of carnal hunger are boldly and rawly exposed,” the New York Times critic Bosley Crowther wrote in his enthusiastic review.
This is undoubtedly why “Bitter Rice” — which, according to Time magazine, would gross nearly $8 million in the United States — was criticized by the American Legion as “a serious threat to Christian morality.” Linked by William Mooring, the film critic for the Catholic journal Tidings, to the international communist conspiracy, it was briefly banned in Albany, but also nominated for an Academy Award.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.