What is it about?
Films deemed too sensitive or politically unsuitable are either censored or completely banned in the People’s Republic of China. One such film is Behemoth (2015) by Zhao Liang, which depicts the environmental disaster of coal mining in Inner Mongolia. Yet, banned films are highly rated in the West, where they are promoted as ‘controversial’ and therefore receive a great deal of publicity. This article argues that Zhao’s film plays on this power dynamic by making a film ‘exotic’ for the Western market and simultaneously critiquing the ‘open-mindedness’ of the Western viewer who enjoys watching films that are ‘too much to handle’ for certain authorities. By invoking the poetic and literary tradition of Dante Alighieri, Zhao presents the capitalist exploitation of labour and the subsequent destruction of the natural environment not as a Chinese but rather as a universally human condition.
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Why is it important?
Behemoth uses an innovative approach to depict the destruction of Inner Mongolia’s landscape and the exploitation of China’s migrant workers. By presenting haunting images in the style of slow cinema, the film reorients the viewing gaze from the spectacular and the exotic towards the self-aware and the introspective. It holds a mirror up to all of humanity.
Perspectives
I hope this article brings new perspectives on Chinese documentary cinema and its relationship to the Western film market. Typically, ‘banned’ films are very much sought after at film festival circuits due to their promotional value. But this can also be a trap for the director who is conscious of this fact and inevitably tries to create works that are self-eroticising, creating stories that the West wants to hear. Being aware of this fact, we can look for other ways of presenting ‘uncomfortable truths’ that are not based on exoticisation and exploitation.
Zoran Lee Pecic
Roskilde Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Haunting China: Ecopoetics of Zhao Liang’s Behemoth, Asian Cinema, October 2020, Intellect,
DOI: 10.1386/ac_00026_1.
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